Art in Ancient Civilizations
Art Vocabulary
Art Techniques
Who's This Artist?
Color This!
100
This is a type of art created by early humans before the development of writing. It often includes cave paintings, sculptures, and other artistic expressions.
What is Prehistoric Art?
100
This is a form or visual communication and language. It's a visual language that expresses or applies human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture.
What is Art?
100
This technique uses parallel lines to create shading or tonal effects. The closer the lines are together, the darker the area becomes.
What is hatching?
100
This artist is not only known for his dramatic and expressive artwork, but is also known to be a scientist, engineer, and inventor during the High Renaissance period. He is also widely considered as the "father" of the High Renaissance period due to his exemplary works such as "The Last Supper", "The Virgin of the Rocks", and the "Mona Lisa".
Who is Leonardo da Vinci?
100
This is the range of light or dark values within a work of art. It is represented from lightest to darkest.
Any color can be used with this range, not just black and white.
What is Value Scale?
200
This stature is one of the most popular examples of prehistoric art, particularly from the Paleolithic age. It is speculated to be associate with an ancient goddess of fertility and child bearing.
What is the "Venus of Willendorf"?
200
This is the how of a work of art. It is the general structure and overall organization of a work, and is also (sometimes) synonymous with shape in describing three-dimensional works.
What is form?
200
This is a technique where subtle grading of value creates the illusion of rounded three-dimensional shapes in (two-dimensional) space.
It is also called "modeling".
What is chiaroscuro?
200
This artist is known as one of the best-known yet tragic figures in the history of art. He is considered to be one of the greatest Post-impressionists, only second to Rembrandt va Rijn, as his tortured yet eccentric paintings is a staple of what happens when a mad-man has artistic talent.
He is also known for cutting off a part of his ear and for the painting "The Starry Night".
Who is Vincent Van Gogh?
200
This is a large difference in color where only the "high" ends of the value scale are displayed.
There are no middle grays, only black and white, and it creates a loss of detail in the image(s).
What is high contrast?
300
This concept was used as a basis for Grecian art during the Classical Era. It signifies the representation of forms according to a concept of an accepted standard of beauty or perfection.
What is idealism?
300
This is the study of themes and symbols--figures and images that, when deciphered, reveal the underlying meaning of a work of art. It is most notable in pieces that depict religious or mythological figures.
What is Iconography?
300
This art technique is a synthetic method of applying small dots of unmixed pigment to a canvas. The dots are intended to "mixed" by the eye when viewed.
What is pointillism?
300
This artist is known for creating stunning and bizarre paintings, giving birth and popularity to the artistic movement known as surrealism and optical illusions. His painting, "The Persistence of Memory", is a textbook example of surrealism due to its dreamlike imagery being enhanced by his trompe l'oeil technique.
Who is Salvador Dalí?
300
This is the exaggeration or emphasis of light areas in a composition, areas where values are very light in contrast to other areas of the composition, and/or representing patches of bright light.
What is highlighting?
400
This sculpture is a classic example of the use of "idealism" in Grecian art. It is also one of the key pieces that created the "Weight-Shift Principle/Contrapposto" technique.
What is Polykleitos' "Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer)"?
400
These 7 aspects of art make up what is known as "visual elements". They are characteristics of what we can see in life and in art.
What is "Line, Shape, Value, Color, Texture, Space, and Time and Motion"?
400
This is a late-19th-century style of art that is characterized by the attempt to capture the fleeting effects of light by painting in short strokes of pure color.
What is Impressionism?
400
This artist is considered to be the "father of abstract art". He was speculated to have synesthesia, a neurological condition in which the stimulation of one sense involuntarily triggers experiences in another sense. When he heard music, he literally saw colors and vice versa.
It led him to create experimental pieces such as "Sketch I for Composition VI", which became foundation pieces of abstract art. He was also one of the founders of "Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)".
Who is Wassily Kandinsky?
400
This is a color scheme that combines 2 or more colors that lie adjacent to one another on the color wheel.
It is a color scheme that is aesthetically pleasing and creates a sense of harmony/a calming effect.
What is Analogous Colors?
500
The Greeks stressed perfection and beauty (i.e. idealism) in their works of art. The Romans', and by extension the Roman Empire, stressed a style portrayed accuracy and the truthful look of a subject. What is that style called?
What is realism?
500
This was a 20th-century German Expressionist movement that focused on the contrasts between, and the combinations of, abstract form and pure color.
What is "Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)"?
500
This technique is where light and dark values are heightened with a high value contrast. Highlights move rapidly to deep shadow, unlike the gradual shifting of values seen in chiaroscuro.
It is also called an "exaggerated chiaroscuro".
What is Tenebrism?
500
This artist has used a variety of mediums, but is mostly known for their life-sized paper cut-outs that is used to retell the brutal history of race relations in the United States.
One such example is their piece "Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On)", which recounts some grisly events of the history of slavery in the United States.
Who is Kara Walker?
500
This is a color of an object when seen under flat white light with no adjustment from forms of shadow or colors of light or secondary light sources.
It is the color that it (exactly) appears as in neutral light (without shadows or reflections), and the color that we typically associate with the natural appearance of things.
What is Local Color?
600
This is a style of painting that is achieved by using a 3-stage kiln-firing process. It was commonly used for vase painting during the Archaic period of the Greeks, as it gave vases a reddish background with dark figures over-top.
What is black-figure painting?
600
This is a design that is mainly used in architecture. It is made up of four converging arcs that are similar in appearance to a flower with four petals.
What is quatrefoil?
600
This is a technique emphasizes the physical aspect of painting that becomes the aspect of the finished artwork. It is where paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed, or smeared onto the canvas, rather than carefully applied.
What is action painting?
600
This artist is known for his "Color Field" paintings, which are paintings that feature irregular rectangles of color layered on brushy backgrounds. They are most commonly associated with the American abstract expressionism movement.
His pieces, "Number 22" and "Black on Grey" are two of his most notable pieces.
Who is Mark Rothko?
(MARK ROTHKO, "Number 22" (1949). Oil on canvas, 117" x 1071/2)
600
This term is applied with color is created when an artist captures or simulates the visual effects of different lighting conditions and their effect on the objects we, the viewer, are looking at.
It is a foundation that is used in impressionist art pieces.
What is Optical Color?