PAU History of Art (Cantabria) cheat sheet
PAU History of Art (Cantabria) · Keep the key ideas within reach.
Ancient and Classical Art (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman)
Mesopotamian ziggurat: stepped mud-brick platform with temple at summit; White Temple of Uruk and Ur ziggurat establish the type; votive figures (Tell Asmar) show wide-eyed frontality and clasped hands.
Egyptian canon of proportion: standing figure on an 18-square grid, seated on 14; head in profile, eye and shoulders frontal, hips and legs in profile - the composite view.
Egyptian chronology markers: Old Kingdom (Great Pyramids, Giza; Khafre, Menkaure), Middle Kingdom (rock-cut tombs, Beni Hasan), New Kingdom (Karnak, Luxor, Abu Simbel, Amarna period under Akhenaten).
Amarna style under Akhenaten: elongated skull, swollen belly, fluid curves, informal intimacy - a deliberate break from the Memphis canon, reversed after Tutankhamun.
Greek Archaic: kouros (nude male, left foot forward, Archaic smile) and kore (clothed female); black-figure then red-figure vase painting (Exekias, Euphronios).
Greek Severe/Classical: contrapposto introduced (Kritios Boy); Polykleitos' Doryphoros embodies the canon of proportion and chiastic balance; Parthenon (Iktinos and Kallikrates, Phidias sculpture) uses entasis and optical refinements.
Hellenistic markers: dramatic torsion, pathos, deep drilling (Laocoön, Pergamon Altar, Nike of Samothrace, Barberini Faun); contrast with Classical restraint.
Roman engineering and typology: arch, vault, and concrete (opus caementicium) enable the Colosseum, Pantheon (oculus, 43.3 m span), and baths; Tuscan and Composite orders supplement Greek orders.
Roman portraiture: veristic Republican heads (imagines maiorum) versus imperial idealization (Augustus of Prima Porta with cuirass program); narrative relief on Ara Pacis and Trajan's Column.
Medieval Art (Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic)
Early Christian: catacomb frescoes and sarcophagi use abbreviated symbols (ichthys, good shepherd, orans); basilica plan (nave, aisles, apse, transept) adapted from Roman civic halls.
Byzantine: central-domed cross-in-square plan (Hagia Sophia, S. Vitale); gold-ground mosaics; hierarchical frontality; Pantocrator in the apse, Theotokos with Child.
Iconoclasm (726–843) interrupted figural imagery; post-iconoclastic revival restores images with strict typology; iconostasis screens develop later.
Romanesque: thick masonry walls, small windows, barrel and groin vaults, tribune, ambulatory with radiating chapels for pilgrim traffic; tympanum sculpture (Autun, Moissac, Vézelay) with Last Judgment iconography.
Romanesque sculpture: historiated capitals, elongated figures, shallow relief tied to architectural frame; pilgrimage roads (Via Tolosana, Camino de Santiago) spread the style.
Gothic structural system: pointed arch, rib vault, flying buttress, pinnacle - load transferred outward, permitting tall clerestories and stained glass (Chartres, Reims, Amiens).
Gothic phases: Early Gothic (Suger's Saint-Denis, 1140s), High Gothic (Chartres 1194 rebuild), Rayonnant (Sainte-Chapelle, tracery webs), Flamboyant (flame-like ogee tracery).
Sculpture and painting: jamb figures become more naturalistic and columnar (Reims Visitation); Giotto's Arena Chapel breaks Byzantine flatness with mass, gesture, and shallow stage space.
International Gothic: elongated elegant figures, rich courtly detail, gold grounds (Limbourg Brothers' Très Riches Heures, Gentile da Fabriano).
Renaissance and Mannerism
Linear perspective: Brunelleschi's demonstration, Alberti's De pictura (1435) codifies the vanishing point and picture plane as window; Masaccio's Trinity applies it.
Quattrocento Florentine markers: classical orders, centralized plans (Santo Spirito), anatomical naturalism, chiaroscuro modeling (Masaccio), and patronage by guilds and Medici.
High Renaissance synthesis (c. 1490–1520): balance, pyramidal composition, sfumato and terribilità in Leonardo and Michelangelo; Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura harmonizes philosophy and theology.
Venetian colorito versus Florentine disegno: Titian and Giorgione build form with glazes and colore; oil on canvas permits luminosity and later impasto.
Northern Renaissance: van Eyck's oil technique and convex-mirror realism; Dürer's engravings merge Italian proportion theory with German detail; Bosch's moralizing phantasmagoria.
Mannerism (c. 1520–1600): figura serpentinata, elongated proportions, acid or artificial color, spatial ambiguity, and virtuoso display - Pontormo, Parmigianino, Bronzino, El Greco.
Council of Trent (1563) decrees on images: clarity, decorum, and didactic legibility - a bridge from Mannerism toward Baroque religious painting.
Architectural theory: Vitruvius rediscovered; Alberti, Serlio, Palladio systematize orders and villa typology; Vignola's Regola delli cinque ordini (1562) codifies the five orders.
Baroque and Rococo
Baroque defining traits: dynamic diagonals, dramatic tenebrism, theatrical light, emotional immediacy, and total integration of architecture, sculpture, and painting (bel composto).
Caravaggio's tenebrism and naturalistic sacred figures; followers (Caravaggisti) spread the model across Italy, Utrecht, and Spain.
Bernini: Cornaro Chapel's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa combines sculpture, architecture, painting, and hidden light; Saint Peter's baldachin and colonnade shape urban space.
Italian and Flemish ceilings: quadratura illusionism (Pozzo's Sant'Ignazio) and Rubens' energetic allegorical cycles; Van Dyck's court portraiture.
Dutch Golden Age: genre, still life, and landscape as moralized subjects; Rembrandt's chiaroscuro and late impasto; Vermeer's camera-like light and cool palette.
Spanish Baroque: naturalism plus Counter-Reformation fervor - Velázquez's Las Meninas (painter, mirror, viewer) and Zurbarán's monastic still lifes.
Rococo (c. 1715–1770): asymmetry (rocaille), pastel palette, gallant fêtes galantes (Watteau), light-hearted mythological and interior decoration (Boucher, Fragonard, Tiepolo ceilings).
Architectural contrast: Baroque uses colossal orders, curved façades, and dramatic axes (Versailles); Rococo uses delicate stucco, mirrors, and intimate scale (Amalienburg, Sanssouci).
19th-Century Art (Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism)
Neoclassicism: Winckelmann's ideal, clear contour, archaeological accuracy, moralizing subject matter; David's Oath of the Horatii and Ingres' linear refinement.
Romanticism: sublime landscape, emotional color, individual genius, and historical/nationalist themes - Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, Friedrich's Rückenfigur.
Realism (c. 1840–1870): Courbet's 'show me an angel and I will paint one'; everyday labor, unidealized bodies, large-format genre (Burial at Ornans, Stone Breakers); Millet and Daumier.
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848): truth to nature, medievalizing detail, literary subjects (Millais, Rossetti, Hunt).
Impressionism (1874 first exhibition): plein-air painting, broken color, visible brushwork, cropped compositions influenced by photography and Japanese prints; Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Morisot, Degas.
Post-Impressionism: divergent structural and expressive paths - Seurat's pointillism, Cézanne's constructive brushstroke, Van Gogh's expressive impasto, Gauguin's synthetism and cloisonnism.
Academic and Salon system: the jury, the Prix de Rome, and the Salon des Refusés (1863) define the institutional battleground for avant-garde rejection.
Photography and lithography reshape reportage and printmaking; the camera's cropping and immediacy influence painting's framing choices.
20th-Century and Contemporary Art (Avant-Gardes to the Present)
Fauvism (1905): non-naturalistic saturated color and loose facture (Matisse, Derain); color as autonomous expressive structure.
Cubism: Picasso and Braque dissolve single-point perspective; Analytic phase (1909–12) fragments form in monochrome, Synthetic phase (1912–14) builds with collage and papier collé.
Futurism (1909 manifesto): speed, technology, and simultaneity - Balla's dynamism, Boccioni's unique forms of continuity in space.
Dada (Zurich, 1916): anti-art, readymades (Duchamp's Fountain, 1917), photomontage, and chance procedures as critique of bourgeois rationality.
Surrealism (1924 Breton manifesto): automatism and dream imagery; Dalí's paranoiac-critical method versus Miró's biomorphic automatism.
Abstraction trajectories: Kandinsky's non-objective painting, Mondrian's De Stijl grid, Russian Constructivism (Tatlin, Rodchenko), and Abstract Expressionism (Pollock's drip, Rothko's color fields).
Postwar movements: Pop Art's appropriation of mass media (Warhol, Lichtenstein), Minimalism's industrial seriality (Judd, Andre), Conceptual Art's primacy of idea over object (Kosuth, Weiner).
Postmodern and contemporary: appropriation, institutional critique, identity politics, installation and performance, relational and digital practices; biennials and the market as framing institutions.
Art Historical Method: Formal Analysis, Iconography, Terminology, Contextual Interpretation
Formal analysis vocabulary: line, shape, form, value, color (hue, saturation, value), texture, space, mass, volume, scale, proportion, composition, balance, rhythm, emphasis, unity/variety.
Formal analysis procedure: describe what is visible without interpretation, then relate formal choices to effect; separate description from inference.
Iconography (Panofsky's three levels): pre-iconographic description, iconographic identification of subject, and iconological interpretation of cultural meaning.
Iconographic attributes identify figures: keys for Peter, wheel for Catherine, lily for purity, skull for vanitas, dog for fidelity, scales for justice.
Terminology precision: contrapposto, chiaroscuro, sfumato, tenebrism, impasto, foreshortening, quadratura, trompe-l'œil, relief (bas-relief/haut-relief), and medium-specific terms (fresco, tempera, oil, etching, lithography).
Contextual interpretation: commission, patronage, function, audience, display site, and period conventions shape meaning; a work's original setting often determines its iconographic program.
Connoisseurship and attribution rely on handling, facture, and documentary evidence; provenance and technical analysis (X-radiography, infrared reflectography) supplement visual judgment.
Historiographic awareness: Vasari's biographical model, Winckelmann's stylistic cycles, Wölfflin's formal polarities (linear/painterly, closed/open), Riegl's Kunstwollen, and social-art-history critique of the canon.
Comparative method: place works in a typological series (e.g., crucifixion iconography across centuries) to isolate what is conventional versus innovative.