Art History from Antiquity to the Modern Age: Styles, Works, Authors and Contexts
This domain runs from Egypt to Neoclassicism: styles, canonical works, authors and the political or religious context that produced them. The exam rewards diagnostic precision - technique, iconography, formal language, date - over loose style labels.
The chronological spine
- Egypt (c. 3000–30 BC): frontal law, hieratic scale, 18-square canonical grid, tomb painting in tempera on dry plaster.
- Greece: Archaic kouros (rigid, frontal, archaic smile) → Classical contrapposto, Polykleitos' Doryphoros and his canon of seven heads; Parthenon (447–432 BC, Iktinos and Kallikrates, sculpture by Phidias); Doric/Ionic/Corinthian orders; Hellenistic pathos (Laocoön).
- Rome: arch, vault and opus caementicium; Pantheon (c. 118–125 AD, 43.3 m dome, 8.9 m oculus); Colosseum; Ara Pacis processional relief; Pompeian wall-painting styles.
- Romanesque (11th–12th c.): semicircular arch, barrel vault, thick walls, small windows, sculpture as the "Bible of the illiterate"; Pantocràtor de Sant Climent de Taüll (c. 1123, anonymous, now MNAC).
- Gothic: pointed arch, rib vault, flying buttress, stained glass; Chartres; in Mallorca La Seu begun 1229 under Jaume I, the Llotja by Guillem Sagrera (1420s), Castell de Bellver (1300–1311).
- Renaissance: Brunelleschi's Florence dome (1436); Alberti's De pictura (1435) codifies linear perspective; Leonardo's sfumato; Michelangelo's terribilità.
- Baroque: Caravaggio's tenebrism, Bernini's theatricality, Rubens, Velázquez's Las Meninas (1656).
- Neoclassicism: Winckelmann's ideal, David's Oath of the Horatii (1784), Canova.
Worked example
An anonymous panel: gold ground, Christ in majesty inside an almond mandorla, Alpha and Omega, the four evangelist symbols, absolute frontality, no depth. Reasoning order: (1) technique - mural painting transferred to canvas; (2) iconography - Maiestas Domini with tetramorph; (3) formal language - flat, symbolic scale, no modelling; (4) conclusion - Romanesque apse (Taüll, c. 1123). If the drapery gained weight and the background an architectural interior, you would move to Giotto and the Proto-Renaissance.
Traps that cost marks
- Labelling every gold ground "Byzantine".
- Confusing barrel vault (Romanesque) with rib vault (Gothic).
- Dating La Seu to the 14th century: begun 1229, consecrated 1601.
- Listing style labels without function or patron - who paid, for what space, before which audience.