Aragón PAU Cultural and Artistic Movements flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Ziggurat

Stepped mud-brick Mesopotamian platform with external staircases and a shrine on top, symbolising a cosmic mountain that connects the earthly city to the divine realm.

Contrapposto

Classical Greek pose in which weight rests on one leg, tilting hips and shoulders in opposing directions to create a natural, balanced S-curve through the body.

Veristic portraiture

Roman Republican portrait style emphasising age, wrinkles and individual features rather than idealisation, used to convey gravitas, ancestry and civic virtue.

Egyptian proportional canon

Fixed grid system for figure drawing, dividing the standing body into eighteen squares, with frontal shoulders, profile head and legs combined in a single view.

Flying buttress

External arched support carrying the thrust of a Gothic vault to a pier, allowing thinner walls, taller naves and large stained-glass windows.

Mihrab and qibla

In Islamic architecture, the niche marking the qibla wall that indicates the direction of prayer toward Mecca; it orients the whole hypostyle prayer hall.

Mudéjar

Iberian style blending Islamic techniques such as brickwork, glazed tile and carved wooden ceilings with Christian building types, prominent in Aragón and Teruel.

Tetramorph

Four Evangelist symbols derived from Ezekiel and Revelation: Matthew as angel, Mark as lion, Luke as ox and John as eagle, common in Romanesque tympana.

Linear perspective

Renaissance system using a vanishing point and orthogonals to construct convincing three-dimensional space on a flat surface, codified by Alberti and Brunelleschi.

Tenebrism

Baroque lighting technique of dramatic contrasts between deep shadow and a single strong light source, used by Caravaggio to heighten emotional and narrative intensity.

Figura serpentinata

Mannerist spiral, twisting pose that encourages viewing from multiple angles and expresses grace and instability rather than classical balance.

Plateresque

Spanish Renaissance decorative mode resembling silversmith work, with dense, delicate surface ornament applied to facades and portals, especially in the 16th century.

Sublime

Romantic aesthetic category of awe and terror before vast or overwhelming nature, central to Friedrich and Turner and theorised by Burke and Kant.

Pointillism

Post-Impressionist technique of applying small dots of pure colour that blend optically at a distance, developed by Seurat and Signac from colour theory.

Realism

Mid-19th-century movement depicting unidealised contemporary life and labour, associated with Courbet, Millet and Daumier and opposed to academic idealisation.

Goya's Disasters of War

Series of etchings by the Aragonese painter Francisco de Goya depicting the brutality of the Peninsular War with unsparing realism and no glorification of conflict.

Analytical Cubism

Early Cubist phase using monochrome, faceted planes and multiple viewpoints to dissect form, making objects look fragmented and nearly abstract.

Readymade

Duchamp's term for an ordinary manufactured object designated as art by the artist's choice, challenging authorship, craft and the definition of the artwork.

Automatism

Surrealist technique of drawing or writing without conscious control, intended to access the unconscious; used by Masson and early Miró.

Bauhaus

German school founded by Gropius in 1919 that united craft, design and architecture under geometric principles and functionalist teaching until its closure in 1933.

Action painting

Abstract Expressionist approach in which paint is dripped, poured or flung onto the canvas, making the physical act of painting the subject, as in Pollock.

Appropriation

Postmodern practice of taking existing images or objects and recontextualising them, questioning originality, authorship and the mass media, as in Warhol and Sherman.

Conceptual art

Practice in which the idea or proposition, not the crafted object, constitutes the artwork; language, documentation and instructions often replace traditional media.

Arte Povera

Italian movement using humble, everyday materials such as earth, cloth and twigs to challenge industrial and gallery conventions and to reconnect art with lived experience.

Cathedral of Jaca

Aragonese Romanesque cathedral with a three-aisled nave, a crypt and a sculpted tympanum, key to the spread of Romanesque along the Camino de Santiago.

Teruel Mudéjar towers

UNESCO-listed brick towers such as San Martín and El Salvador, decorated with glazed ceramic and geometric patterns in the Aragonese Mudéjar tradition.

Basilica del Pilar

Zaragoza's Baroque basilica on the Ebro, rebuilt from the 17th century with domes by Ventura Rodríguez and frescoes by Goya, a core Aragonese heritage site.

Bien de Interés Cultural

Spanish legal category for protected heritage of outstanding value, regulated by the 1985 national heritage law and Aragonese law, controlling interventions and export.

Panofsky's three levels

Method distinguishing pre-iconographic description, iconographic identification of subjects and symbols, and iconological interpretation of cultural meaning in a work.

Formal analysis

Systematic description of a work's visual elements: medium, composition, line, colour, light, texture, scale and spatial construction, before interpretation.

Iconographic attribute

Conventional object identifying a figure, such as Peter's keys, Lawrence's gridiron or Justice's scales; attributes resolve ambiguous subjects in images.

Infrared reflectography

Imaging technique that penetrates paint layers to reveal underdrawing and revisions, supporting attribution, workshop analysis and condition study.