Visual arts: painting, sculpture, etc.
The visual arts questions ask you to identify style, period, medium, and technique from a described work, and to use formal-analysis vocabulary precisely.
Formal analysis
Elements include line, shape, form, value, color (hue, value, intensity), texture, and space. Principles include balance (symmetrical or asymmetrical), emphasis or focal point, contrast, rhythm, scale and proportion, and unity. Linear perspective organizes space around a vanishing point; atmospheric perspective fades distant forms; foreshortening compresses a figure that recedes into depth.
Technique vocabulary
Chiaroscuro models light and shadow; sfumato softens edges into haze; tenebrism is Caravaggio's dramatic darkness; impasto is thickly applied paint. Buon fresco is painted into wet plaster, so it cannot describe an oil panel. In sculpture, contrapposto shifts weight onto one leg, producing an S-curve; relief may be low or high; lost-wax casting produces bronze.
Period markers
Egyptian composite view and registers; Greek progression from Archaic kouros stiffness to Classical contrapposto to Hellenistic drama (Laocoön); Byzantine gold grounds and flattened icons; Early Renaissance (Masaccio, Botticelli); High Renaissance (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael); Northern Renaissance oil technique (van Eyck); Mannerism (El Greco's elongation); Baroque (Bernini, Rembrandt, Velázquez); Neoclassical (David); Romantic (Delacroix, Turner); Realism (Courbet); Impressionism (Monet, visible brushwork, plein air); Post-Impressionism (Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat's pointillism); Cubism (Picasso, Braque); Surrealism (Dalí, Magritte); Abstract Expressionism (Pollock, Rothko); Pop (Warhol).
Worked example
A described marble nude stands with weight on the right leg, the left leg relaxed and bent, hips and shoulders tilted in opposite directions. Candidates may call this realism because the pose looks natural. The specific term is contrapposto, and it signals Classical Greek work; an Archaic kouros stands rigidly frontal with weight on both feet.
Traps
- Impressionism versus Post-Impressionism: both show visible strokes, but Post-Impressionists add structure or expressive color.
- Assigning fresco to panel paintings, or oil to Byzantine icons.
- Confusing tenebrism with sfumato.
- Treating Dada's anti-art provocation as identical to Surrealism's dream imagery.