Artistic techniques, materials, terminology and formal analysis
This domain is where candidates lose easy marks: questions asking you to name a technique, define a term, or analyse form are short but strictly marked. Precision of vocabulary is the whole point.
Painting
- Supports and binders: buon fresco (pigment on wet lime, chemically fixed, painted in giornate) versus fresco secco; tempera (pigment in egg yolk on gessoed panel); oil (pigment in drying oil, slow drying, allows glazes, impasto and corrections); gouache and watercolour; acrylic.
- Layers: ground or priming, underdrawing, underpainting, glaze (transparent, darkening), scumble, varnish.
Graphic processes
Relief (woodcut, linocut) - the non-image is cut away; intaglio (engraving with burin, etching with acid, drypoint) - ink held in incised lines under high pressure; planographic (lithography - grease on stone); screenprint. Each leaves a recognisable line: the burin's swelling taper, the etched line's irregular bite.
Sculpture and architecture
Carving is subtractive (stone, wood); modelling is additive (clay, wax); casting is reproductive, and lost-wax destroys its mould in the process. Relief types: alto, mezzo, basso, schiacciato. Architecture: post-and-lintel, arch, vault (barrel, groin, rib), dome on pendentives, cantilever, shell.
Formal-analysis vocabulary
Composition (axis, symmetry, focal point, framing), line (contour versus modelled edge), mass and volume, space (illusionistic, atmospheric, shallow), colour (hue, value, saturation, warm/cool, complementary contrast, local versus tonal), light (direction, chiaroscuro, tenebrism, sfumato), texture (facture, brushwork), scale, proportion, rhythm.
Worked example: a method you can apply to any work
- Identify: title, author, date, medium, support, technique, dimensions, original location. For the Ghent Altarpiece (van Eyck, completed 1432): oil on panel, polyptych, Saint Bavo, Ghent.
- Describe the making: oil dries slowly, so it can be applied in translucent glazes over a light ground - depth of tone impossible in tempera.
- Link technique to effect: the glazes explain the jewelled saturation and the fine differentiation of velvet, metal and flesh; they also explain why old varnish and later cleaning change what we see.
- Interpret: the technique serves a theological programme, but the exam rewards the causal chain, not the adjective.
Traps
- Calling every wall painting a fresco.
- Confusing etching (acid) with engraving (a tool).
- Using chiaroscuro for a hard outline, or tenebrism for any shaded background.
- Describing what is depicted when asked to analyse form.
- Omitting medium and technique when the question says 'comment on the work' - a guaranteed loss.