Introduction to Art History

Basic Terms and Concepts

What is “art history”?

• “art” + “history” = “art history”• The study of art in its cultural environment,

including its:– economic realities– historical events– social dynamics– religious and spiritual organizations– technological advancements

• By its nature, art history is interdisciplinary.

Three Primary Types of Art

• Painting• Sculpture• Architecture• But also: print-making, textiles, pottery,

decorative art, mixed-media, found art, “Happenings,” performance art, conceptual art, Earth art, and Other art

Art = Form + Content

• In the most basic way art can be thought of as having two parts:– its form and– its content.

• Form relates to the “formal” aspects of art or how the art is made.

• Content relates to the subject of the art.

Formal Elements of Painting

• composition• material• technique• line• color• texture• perspective• foreshortening• proportion• scale

Formal Elements of Sculpture

• material• technique (additive or subtractive; cast

or carved)• mass• volume (in-the-round or relief; if relief,

high relief or bas-relief [another name for low relief])

• texture

Formal Elements of Architecture

• material

• mass

• plan

• elevation

• section (lateral or longitudinal)

• cutaway

Composition

• Composition means the relationship of the parts of a painting, sculpture, or work of architecture.

• Artists consider composition when they structure the relationships of colors, lines, shapes, and masses in their art.

• Artists generally try to make the composition of their works pleasing by balancing the aforementioned relations.

• Other times, artists will use composition to be expressive in some way, for example making some aspect of their art unbalanced or asymmetrical.

• Raphael’s School of Athens is an example of a well-composed painting.

• Q1: Can you see ways that Raphael composes his painting?

• See ArtLex for more on composition.

Material

• Material is the substance from which a work of art is made.

• Material can be the pigment of a fresco, the bronze of a statue, or the sandstone of a pyramid.

• Other examples of materials are: paper, clay, metal, plastic, glass.

• Conceptual Art sometimes is a material-less art.

“Bring out the nature of the materials, let their nature intimately into your scheme […] Reveal the nature of the wood, plaster, brick or stone in your designs; they are all by nature friendly and beautiful.” - Frank Lloyd Wright, architect, 20th c. American

Technique

• From the Greek word techne meaning “skill.”

• Technique is any method of working with material to create an art object.

• Often implied is the sense that techniques are carefully studied, exacting, or traditional, but this is not necessarily the case.

• Examples of technique are hatching, engraving, exquisite corpse, repousse, encaustic, additive, subtractive, et al.

“Progressive ideas are just a machine for ruining art. I believe in the old idea of technique. I believe you need it if you're going to have magic and genius and masterpieces. No one would question the value of technique in any other field. No one would say that a tennis player would be better if only he could stop hitting the ball.” - John Currin, contemporary painter, American

Line

• An element of art which refers to the continuous mark made on some surface by a moving point.

• Types of lines include: vertical, horizontal, perpendicular, diagonal, straight or ruled, curved, angular, bent, thin, thick, wide, interrupted (dotted, dashed, broken), blurred or fuzzy, controlled, freehand, parallel, hatching, meandering, and spiraling.

• Lines define space and may create an outline or contour, as style called “linear.”

• It may be two-dimensional, three-dimensional (as with a wire), or suggested or implied.

• See School of Athens (marked) for an example of “implied” lines.

“Art, like morality, consists in drawing a line somewhere.” - G.K. Chesterton, 19th c.

author, English

Color• Color is the event of wavelengths of light hitting an object and and

those wavelengths reflecting back into your eyes.• Color is also an element of art with three properties: hue, intensity, and

value:– Hue is the name of the color, like red, blue, or yellow.– Intensity is the purity and strength of the color, also sometimes called

“saturation.”– Value is the degree of lightness or darkness of a color.

• On a color wheel, colors are divided into groups called primary, secondary, tertiary or intermediate, analogous, and complementary or opposite (i.e., red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple), and also warm and cool colors.

• For more information on color theory, visit any of the following sites:– “Chalkboard” on color theory– Worqx.com on color theory

Texture

• Texture is an element of art pertaining to the surface quality or “feel” of the work of art.

• Texture can be described as smooth, rough, soft, etc. Some textures are real and others are simulated.

• Textures that can be felt are ones that the fingers can actually touch, however, in paintings drapery and clothing often have a texture that can only be seen, as it is simulated.

• Q1: Think of as many terms to describe textures as you can, and write them down.

• Q2: What textures do you see below?

Perspective• Perspective is the technique that artists use to project the illusion of

three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional surface.

• Perspective helps to create a sense of depth–a sense of receding space.

• Artists achieve perspective in several different ways: (1) by making objects in the foreground larger than those in the background; (2) by making objects at the bottom of the composition larger than those at the top; (3) by using lighter colors and fuzzier edges to suggest the distant objects and space; (4) by using mathematical or linear perspective, where the recession is directed towards a vanishing point.

• Read “Chalkboard”’s resource on linear perspective.

Piero della Francesca, Ideal City, Urbino, 1470 CE

Foreshortening

• Foreshortening is way of representing an object so that it conveys the illusion of depth–so that the object appears to be thrust forward or back into space.

• Foreshortening succeeds particularly well when the near and far parts of the object contrast greatly.

Andrea Mantegna, The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, c. 1490 CE

Proportion

• Proportion is a principle of design referring to the comparative, proper, or harmonious relationship of one part to another or to the whole with respect to size, quantity, or degree.

• If one figure appears larger than another in a composition, it is thought of to be out of proportion and, thereby, given emphasis.

• Consider Leonardo da Vinci’s Study of Proportions (right).

Scale• As an art history term, scale refers to

the size of the art object at hand or the size of the objects represented in a particular art object.

• Scale can also have to do with the size of a building as compared with the people who inhabit that space.

• Artists often use scale to suggest relationships between figures and landscape, figures and other figures, and/or sometimes a figure’s importance.

• Q1: What is noteworthy about the size of the figure in this stele? Why is his scale so large as compared with the other smaller ones?

Stele of Naramsin, King of Akkad, c. 2250 BCE

Mass

• Mass refers to the effect and degree of bulk, density, and weight of matter in space; the area occupied by a form, such as a building or sculpture.

• As opposed to plane and area, mass is three-dimensional.

Henri Moore, Reclining Nude,20th c. sculptor, English

Plan

• A plan is section view from exactly overhead at 90 degrees. It’s not a “bird’s-eye” view, which is looking down at an angle smaller than 90 degrees.

• This is the plan of the Villa Capra, better known as the “Villa Rotunda”, by Adnrea Palladio, a 16th c. Venetian architect.

Elevation

• An elevation is, literally, the elevated view of the building from the exterior.

• Notice that nothing is “sectioned” or “cutaway”; the building is intact as viewed from its ground level to its uppermost point, in this case, a lantern with finial.

• This is an elevation of the façade of St. Paul’s cathedral (built in the late 17th c. CE) in London.

Section

• A section shows you a slice of building. Imagine taking a cake, cutting it, and seeing its layers of cake and frosting inside, when you do so, you are seeing a “section.”

• Here you see two sections of the Roman Pantheon, built in 125 CE by the Emperor Hadrian.

longitudinal section lateral section

Cutaway

• This is a cutaway view of the White House, Washington, D.C.

• In a cutaway you can see both exterior and interior details of a building, thereby better understanding their relationship.

Writing About Art

Writing about art has its own challenges and you can study these at a number of websites devoted to writing about art.

• Click here to see a list of resources available on writing about art.

Websites About Art

If you’re smart, you’ll bookmark these web sites and have them at the ready while you work in and out of class.

• Chris Witcombe’s web site - Dr. Witcombe hosts the singularly best resource for art history on the Internet. This would be my first stop if I were looking for an image or additional resources.

• ArtLex - ArtLex is a hyperlinked dictionary of art terms, and it includes abundant examples to illustrate the meanings of terms.

• Artchive - Mark Harden’s Artchive is an image resource arranged alphabetically by artist, as well as by school and/or era.

• Olga’s Gallery - Like Harden’s Artchive. (Don’t ask me about the name.)

• Timeline of Art History (Met) - Self-explanatory

• HyperHistory - A hyperlinked world history.

• Humanities Web - Humanities Web “shows the interconnections, the web, the links, between history, the arts, and culture - and how each plays off and influences the others.”

The Content of Art

• Content is the subject matter of the art.• Content is also the style of the art, which, however, is a by-product of

its formal elements.• Style changes over time, but some familiar examples include:

– Gothic, as in Gothic cathedrals– Impressionism, as in French Impressionism– Realism– Romanticism– Baroque & Rococo– Mannerism– Classical, and so on

• So, style is a function of both the content and the form of the work, as well as the artist’s or era’s own unique character as engendered in the art.

Subject Matter

• Examples of subject matter include:– landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes– figure representation, as in the “reclined female nude” or

“standing male nude”– still lifes– genre paintings– mythological representations, as in the goddess Athena or

the Buddha– Biblical subject matter, as in the Annunciation or a visual

representation of the David and Goliath story– abstract subject matter