Elements & Principles
Actual, three-dimensional shape, though it is often used to describe the illusion of three-dimensionality, as well. Like shape, this can be geometric or organic.
Form
A way of naturalistically representing the human body with the weight on one leg, affecting the torso.
Contrapposto
A monotheistic religion that emerged with the Israelites in the Eastern Mediterranean (Southern Levant) within the context of the Mesopotamian river valley civilizations
Judaism
Meaning "old stone age"
Paleolithic
A set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art
Aesthetics
the feeling of a surface, real or represented. This might refer to the roughness or smoothness of actual objects and art media, or to the illusion of these properties.
Texture
In drawing or painting, a way of representing a long object head-on so that it looks compressed.
Foreshortening
Among the founders of the world's major religions, this figure was the only teacher who did not claim to be other than an ordinary human being.
The Buddha
Historians distinguish this period by the transition from people living as hunter-gatherers to the development of farming and the domestication of animals.
Neolithic
Freedom from representational qualities in art
Abstraction
A very formal type of balance consisting of a mirroring of portions of an image.
Symmetry
The modulation or transition from light to dark in a pictorial piece of art.
Chiaroscuro
This religious term means "surrender" and its central idea is a surrendering to the will of God. Its central article of faith is that "There is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger".
Islam
A recent system of historical dating that replaces the Christian reference
Common Era and Before Common Era
Visual and Contextual, Tradition and Change, Audience Response, and Thematic Connection
Types of Analysis
When an image or object is repeated throughout a work of art, or a part of a work.
Pattern, repetition, and rhythm
A way of recreating the three-dimensional world on a 2d surface
Linear Perspective
A belief based on the son of a carpenter who was a Jew and a champion of the underdog. He rebelled against the occupying Roman government in what was then Palestine. His followers travelled great distances and spread his message.
Christianity
The visual images and symbols used in a work of art or the study or interpretation of these
Iconography
Consists of interacting, communicative elements of design, representation, and presentation within a work of art. It includes subject matter: visible imagery that may be formal depictions, representative depictions, and/or symbolic, spiritual, historical, mythological supernatural, and/or propagandistic.
Content
The relationship of parts of a body or form to one another and of the parts to the whole, for example, the size of the head of a figure in relation to the entire body.
Proportion
Forms in the distance represented with less clarity than the forms in the foreground
Atmospheric Perspective
Neither monotheistic nor is it polytheistic. The emphasis on the universal spirit allows for the existence of a pantheon of divinities while remaining devoted to a particular god.
Hinduism
The term spanning Mongolia, mainland China, Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and North and South Korea.
East Asia
One of a series of superimposed bands or friezes in a pictorial narrative, or the particular levels on which motifs are placed.
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