Madrid PAU History of Art (Historia del Arte) cheat sheet
Madrid PAU History of Art (Historia del Arte) · Keep the key ideas within reach.
Ancient and Classical Art: Near East, Greece and Rome
Doric/Ionic/Corinthian orders must be described by capital, base and frieze, not just by 'style'.
Parthenon optical corrections: entasis, curved stylobate, thicker corner columns.
Polykleitos: contrapposto plus head-based canon; Roman copies of lost bronze originals.
Roman revolution = arch + vault + opus caementicium, enabling the Pantheon's 43 m dome.
Hellenistic markers: torsion, pathos, viewer invasion, multi-figure groups.
Medieval Art: Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic and Islamic
Early Christian basilica = atrium, narthex, nave, aisles, apse, transept, timber roof.
Hagia Sophia: pendentives carry the dome; 532-537, Anthemius and Isidore.
Pilgrimage plan: ambulatory plus radiating chapels for relic circulation.
Gothic system: pointed arch + rib vault + flying buttress = glazed walls.
Mosque vocabulary: qibla, mihrab, minbar, minaret, maqsura, muqarnas.
Renaissance and Mannerism
Brunelleschi dome 1420-1436: double shell, herringbone brick, no centring.
Alberti 1435 codifies one-point perspective as painting's 'window'.
Leonardo sfumato vs chiaroscuro: soft tonal modelling, not hard light-dark contrast.
Mannerism markers: figura serpentinata, elongation, acid colour, ambiguous space.
Venetian colorito vs Florentine disegno structures the Cinquecento comparison.
Baroque and Rococo
Tenebrism = darkness with a single raking light source; Caravaggio's signature device.
Bernini's bel composto: architecture + sculpture + painting + real light as one theatre.
Borromini: geometric plans, undulating facades, Sant'Ivo and San Carlo.
Poussinistes defend disegno; rubenistes defend colour - the French Academy split.
Rococo: asymmetry, rocaille, pastel, fete galante, private aristocratic interiors.
Nineteenth-Century Art: Neoclassicism to Post-Impressionism
Neoclassicism: firm contour, moral example, antique sources - David and Canova.
Romanticism: sublime, colour, individual drama - Gericault, Delacroix, Turner, Friedrich.
Realism: Courbet's 1855 Pavilion, ordinary subjects at history-painting scale.
Impressionism named after Monet's 1872 canvas, shown in 1874 at Nadar's studio.
Post-Impressionism: Cezanne's structure, Van Gogh's colour, Gauguin's synthetism, Seurat's dots.
Twentieth-Century Art: Avant-Gardes and Later Movements
Fauvism 1905: colour autonomous from local tone; Salon d'Automne label.
Cubism: analytic facets 1908-1911, synthetic collage and papier colle 1912-1914.
Dada (Zurich 1916) attacks art itself; Surrealism (1924) explores the unconscious.
Guernica 1937: monochrome, Cubist space, victims only, anti-war meaning.
Modern architecture: Le Corbusier's five points, Mies, Wright; Pop and Conceptual after 1945.
Spanish and Andalusian Art: Al-Andalus, the Golden Age and Modernity
Mezquita: hypostyle hall, reused columns, double-tier horseshoe arches
Al-Hakam II mihrab with Byzantine mosaics; aniconic decoration
Alhambra: muqarnas, stucco, water and the Court of the Lions
Mudejar = Islamic techniques for Christian patrons, not Islamic art
Velázquez: Seville naturalism to Madrid court complexity
Goya's phases; Picasso, Gris, Dalí and Miró as modern continuity
Art Historical Method: Formal Analysis, Iconography, Technique, Context and Terminology
Formal elements: line, color, space, composition, light, viewpoint
Describe, then analyze; avoid unexplained evaluative words
Panofsky's three levels: pre-iconographic, iconographic, iconological
Technique constrains style: fresco, tempera, oil, mosaic, print
Context: patron, function, original location, audience
Use precise terms such as contrapposto, tenebrism, pendentive, muqarnas