AP Art History case studies
AP Art History · Put your knowledge to work in context.
AP Art History is a College Board Advanced Placement course and exam equivalent to a two-semester college introductory art history course. It is designed for high school students who want college-level credit or placement and for independent learners building a foundation in visual and contextual analysis. The AP Art History case studies are 5 cases and about 2,358 words.
1Two Vessels, One Chronology Problem
A museum in Vienna is rehanging a case on the European Upper Paleolithic. Curator A wants to label a carved mammoth-ivory figurine (a female figure with exaggerated proportions, about 11 cm tall, found in a German cave in 2008) as 'the oldest known sculpture of the human form.' Curator B argues that a painted bison on a French cave wall, radiocarbon-dated from charcoal to roughly 17,000 years ago, is a safer anchor for the case's opening label.
479 words, about 2 min2Reading a Roman Portrait Without Its Inscription
A regional museum owns a marble portrait head, slightly over life-size, with deep drilled pupils, a short cropped beard, and hair rendered as flat incised locks rather than carved volume. The inscription on its lost pedestal is gone.
467 words, about 2 min3Attributing a Colonial-Andean Painting Workshop
A 17th-century oil on canvas from Cusco shows the Virgin crowned by the Trinity, with gold-leaf brocade applied over the paint, a triangular halo of rays, and a border of painted flowers. The canvas is unlined and has three joined panels.
444 words, about 2 min4Earthwork Conservation: Intervention or Integrity
A 1970s American earthwork consists of a spiral stone jetty extending into a salt lake. Lake levels have risen, submerging portions of the spiral for part of each year; salt has begun to crystallize on the stones, and visitation has eroded the access path.
480 words, about 2 min5Whose Story: Labeling a Contested Contemporary Work
A contemporary museum is installing a 2015 multi-channel video work by an artist from a Pacific island nation. The piece intercuts archival colonial-era photographs with footage of a local dance troupe performing a ceremony that outsiders have historically been forbidden to see.
488 words, about 2 min