DSST Western World Art cheat sheet

Period c. 1400-1600 in Italy, spreading north later; revival of classical antiquity plus new naturalism and linear perspective.

Linear (one-point) perspective: parallel lines converge at a vanishing point on a horizon line; Brunelleschi demonstrated it, Masaccio applied it in the Brancacci Chapel fresco The Tribute Money.

Contrapposto: weight shifted onto one leg so hips and shoulders tilt in opposition; used for relaxed, lifelike stance (Donatello's David, Michelangelo's David).

Sfumato: smoky, imperceptible blending of tones and edges (Leonardo's Mona Lisa); chiaroscuro: strong light-dark contrast for volume.

High Renaissance balance and centrality: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael working c. 1490-1520; Raphael's School of Athens places Plato and Aristotle at the vanishing point.

Northern Renaissance: Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece and Arnolfini Portrait use oil glazes for jewel-like detail; Albrecht Dürer fuses German printmaking with Italian proportion theory.

Architecture: Filippo Brunelleschi's Florence Cathedral dome (double shell, herringbone brick, no centering) and S. Lorenzo's classical orders and modular proportions.

Mannerism follows c. 1520-1580: elongated figures, acidic color, unstable compositions (Parmigianino's Madonna of the Long Neck, Pontormo's Deposition).

Patronage rule: Medici in Florence, papacy in Rome (Julius II, Leo X); contracts specified subject, materials, and deadline, so works answer specific patrons.

Period c. 1600-1750; hallmarks are dramatic diagonals, theatrical light, emotional immediacy, and rich surface texture.

Tenebrism: extreme dark ground with raking spotlight, named for Caravaggio (Calling of Saint Matthew); followers called Caravaggisti (Artemisia Gentileschi, Orazio Gentileschi).

Bernini's sculpture treats marble as flesh and fabric: David's torsion, Apollo and Daphne's transformation, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in a lit architectural niche.

Architecture and total environment: Bernini's colonnade and baldachin at St. Peter's; Borromini's undulating facades (San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane).

Flemish Baroque: Rubens's energetic large-scale figure compositions and van Dyck's aristocratic portraiture; Dutch Baroque: Rembrandt's tonal light and late impasto, Vermeer's cool daylight interiors.

French Baroque is restrained and academic: Poussin's classical, planar history painting versus Rubens's colorist, dynamic model in the era's 'Poussinistes vs. Rubensistes' debate.

Spanish Baroque: Velázquez's Las Meninas layers portrait, mirror, and viewer; Zurbarán and Murillo serve church commissions.

Ceiling illusionism: quadratura painting with di sotto in su perspective (Pozzo's Sant'Ignazio, Gaulli's Gesù ceiling) makes flat vaults appear open.

Still life and genre rise as independent genres in the Netherlands, ranked below history painting in academic hierarchy but commercially dominant.

Mid-19th century France, c. 1840-1870s: depict contemporary life and ordinary labor without idealization or mythological disguise.

Gustave Courbet coined the label with his 1855 Pavilion of Realism; works such as The Stone Breakers and A Burial at Ornans show unheroic scale and plain fact.

Jean-François Millet's Gleaners and Angelus render peasant labor with dignity and monumentality; Barbizon School paints directly from nature outdoors.

Honoré Daumier satirizes politics and law courts through lithography; his caricatural line makes social critique the subject.

Édouard Manet bridges Realism and Impressionism: Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe quote Old Masters while asserting flatness and modern subjects.

Realism responds to industrialization, photography's rise (c. 1839), and 1848 revolutions; print media and illustrated press spread images widely.

American Realism: Winslow Homer (marine and rural scenes), Thomas Eakins (anatomy, rowing and surgical subjects), and the Ashcan School's city scenes later.

Russian Realism: the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki) exhibit traveling shows of socially engaged genre painting (Repin, Kramskoi).

Later naturalism and Social Realism extend the mode: Millet-to-Courbet lineage leads to 20th-century social critique, but Realism as a movement is specifically 19th-century France.

Prehistoric: cave painting (Lascaux, Altamira) uses mineral pigments and animal imagery; Venus figurines emphasize fertility; Stonehenge is a megalithic post-and-lintel structure.

Ancient Egypt: canonical proportion grid, frontal shoulders with profile head, hierarchical scale; Old Kingdom pyramids and New Kingdom temples with hypostyle halls.

Greek art sequence: Archaic kouros stiffness, Classical contrapposto and ideal proportion (Polykleitos's canon), Hellenistic drama (Laocoön, Pergamon altar).

Roman art borrows Greek forms but excels in engineering and portraiture: concrete vaults (Pantheon dome), aqueducts, veristic busts, historical relief (Trajan's Column).

Medieval: Byzantine gold-ground mosaics and centralized domes (Hagia Sophia, Ravenna); Romanesque thick walls and barrel vaults; Gothic pointed arch, rib vault, flying buttress, stained glass.

Rococo (c. 1700-1770): pastel colors, asymmetry, playful erotic and domestic themes (Fragonard, Boucher); Neoclassicism answers it with severe outlines and antique subjects (David, Canova).

19th-century sequence: Romanticism (emotion, sublime nature: Friedrich, Turner, Delacroix) → Realism → Impressionism (broken color, plein air) → Post-Impressionism (Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat).

20th-century break: Cubism's multiple viewpoints (Picasso, Braque), Fauvism's arbitrary color, Dada's anti-art, Surrealism's dream imagery, Abstract Expressionism's large-scale gesture.