Nature, Landscape, and the Environment
This art movement, associated with painters like Thomas Cole, often celebrated dramatic American landscapes as symbols of national identity.
What is the Hudson River School?
Renaissance artists developed this mathematical system to create the illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface.
What is linear perspective?
This map projection became popular with sailors because it preserves directions for navigation.
What is the Mercator projection?
Public dissections in the early modern period often took place in these educational spaces.
What are anatomy theaters?
This French criminologist developed a system of body measurements for identifying repeat offenders.
Who is Alphonse Bertillon?
Although marketed as pristine wilderness, many famous American landscapes already contained roads, hotels, and tourist infrastructure.
What is a national park or tourist landscape?
In many Renaissance paintings, all orthogonal lines converge toward this single location.
What is the vanishing point?
Critics of Mercator maps note that they greatly exaggerate the size of places near these regions.
What are the poles?
These wax anatomical models allowed students to study internal organs without dissecting a real corpse.
What are Anatomical Venuses?
Modern facial recognition systems rely on the same basic principle as anthropometry: measuring unique physical what?
What are bodily features?
This literary and artistic concept describes nature as powerful enough to inspire both fear and admiration.
What is the sublime?
This idealized city scene is often used in art history courses to explain Renaissance perspective.
What is the Ideal City?
The Gall-Peters projection attempts to correct distortions by accurately representing this geographical feature.
What is relative area?
The audiences for anatomy theaters often included not only medical professionals but also these curious members of society.
Who are members of the public or non-specialist spectators?
Art historians use this term to describe the relationship between a viewer and the object being viewed.
What is the gaze?
Rather than documenting one specific pollution source, Edward Burtynsky often photographs landscapes transformed by this human activity.
What is industrialization?
Perspective is particularly effective at depicting streets, buildings, and interiors because these spaces are highly what?
What are geometric or measurable?
Maps do not simply record reality; they also reflect choices about power, knowledge, and this process.
What is representation?
This pseudoscience claimed a person's character could be determined from bumps and shapes on the skull.
What is phrenology?
This 1981 work by Lorraine O'Grady challenges viewers to think critically about who has the power to look.
What is Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face?
A scholar compares a national park advertisement, an environmental documentary, and a landscape painting to study how each shapes ideas about nature.
What is ecocriticism?
Scholars often argue that perspective tells us more about systems of representation than about this human experience.
What is vision itself?
This philosopher's emphasis on reason and measurement influenced modern approaches to mapping space.
Who is René Descartes?
Anatomical illustrations frequently borrowed poses from this field, demonstrating the overlap of art and science.
What is fine art?
In The Normalizing Machine, participants become both observers and this other role within the artwork.
What are the observed (or the judged)?