PAU History of Art (Cantabria) flashcards

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

Ziggurat

Stepped mud-brick platform topped by a shrine, as at Ur and Uruk; it materialized Mesopotamian cosmology by raising the deity's dwelling above the profane city.

Egyptian composite view

Convention combining frontal shoulders and eye with profile head and legs, so each part appears in its most legible aspect; the figure is also gridded to canonical proportions.

Kouros

Archaic Greek nude standing male youth, left foot advanced, arms at sides, with braided hair and Archaic smile; used as votive and grave marker before the contrapposto breakthrough.

Contrapposto

Weight shifted onto one leg so hips and shoulders tilt in opposing directions; it produces a natural S-curve and was codified in Classical Greek sculpture.

Veristic portraiture

Roman Republican portrait mode emphasizing age, wrinkles, and scars to convey gravitas and ancestral virtue, in contrast to idealized imperial likenesses.

Opus caementicium

Roman concrete of lime mortar and aggregate, laid with timber formwork; it enabled vaults, domes such as the Pantheon, and monumental structures without massive stone cutting.

Basilica plan

Longitudinal hall with central nave, side aisles, and apse, adapted from Roman civic architecture for Christian worship and later the model for Romanesque and Gothic churches.

Gold-ground mosaic

Byzantine technique setting tesserae on gold glass ground to create unearthly light; figures appear floating in sacred space rather than in a depicted setting.

Iconoclasm

Byzantine policy (726–843) banning figural religious images; it destroyed or covered many mosaics and ended with the restoration of images and fixed iconographic types.

Historiated capital

Romanesque capital carved with a narrative or symbolic scene rather than abstract ornament, often placed where monks or pilgrims would read its moral message.

Flying buttress

External arched support carrying thrust from a high vault to a pier; combined with pointed arches and rib vaults it allowed Gothic churches to reach unprecedented height.

Rayonnant Gothic

French Gothic phase (c. 1240–1350) emphasizing skeletal structure and radiating tracery over mass, exemplified by the Sainte-Chapelle's glass walls.

Linear perspective

Geometric construction using a vanishing point and horizon line to create consistent spatial recession; codified by Alberti and first demonstrated by Brunelleschi.

Sfumato

Leonardo's technique of imperceptibly blended tonal transitions, softening contours and edges to produce atmospheric depth and psychological ambiguity.

Figura serpentinata

Mannerist S-curve or spiraling pose that makes the figure appear to twist in space, valued for grace and virtuosity rather than naturalistic balance.

Disegno versus colorito

Renaissance debate opposing Florentine drawing and design as the basis of art to Venetian color and painterly handling as the source of visual truth.

Tenebrism

Caravaggesque use of near-total darkness pierced by a single strong light source, creating dramatic modeling and theatrical focus on the sacred event.

Quadratura

Baroque ceiling technique painting fictive architecture in steep perspective, dissolving the real vault into an illusionistic opening to the sky.

Fête galante

Rococo genre showing elegant figures at courtship and leisure in parkland settings; Watteau established it and it became central to French academic categories.

Rocaille

Asymmetric shell-and-scroll ornament of the Rococo, applied to stucco, furniture, and interior surfaces to create restless, delicate movement.

Rückenfigur

Figure seen from behind contemplating the view, used by Friedrich to make the spectator share the subject's experience of the sublime landscape.

Pointillism

Seurat's method of applying small dots of unmixed color that blend optically at a distance, intended to give Impressionism a scientific and systematic basis.

Cloisonnism

Post-Impressionist style using flat areas of color bounded by dark outlines, derived from stained glass and Japanese prints and used by Gauguin and Bernard.

Salon des Refusés

1863 exhibition of works rejected by the official Salon jury, authorized by Napoleon III; it exposed academic gatekeeping and legitimized avant-garde alternatives.

Readymade

Duchamp's term for an ordinary manufactured object presented as art with minimal alteration, questioning authorship, craft, and the institution's authority to define art.

Analytic Cubism

Picasso and Braque's phase (c. 1909–1912) fracturing objects into faceted planes in a shallow monochrome space, undermining single-point perspective and stable form.

Synthetic Cubism

Later Cubist phase building images from collage, papier collé, and flat sign-like shapes, shifting from analysis of form to construction with everyday materials.

Paranoiac-critical method

Dalí's technique of cultivating delusional associations to generate double images and irrational scenes, claiming the method as a systematic route to the unconscious.

Kunstwollen

Riegl's concept of an era's collective artistic will, explaining stylistic change as internal to a culture's aims rather than as progress or decline.

Iconology

Panofsky's third interpretive level, reading a work's subject matter against cultural, intellectual, and social context to recover its deeper meaning.

Provenance

Documented history of ownership of an object; it supports attribution, establishes legal title, and reveals collecting practices and the market's role in canon formation.

Wölfflin's polarities

Pairs of formal tendencies - linear versus painterly, closed versus open, multiplicity versus unity - used to describe stylistic shifts without value judgment.