BSEH SS Fine Arts flashcards

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

Chiaroscuro

Italian for light-dark; the use of strong contrasts between illuminated and shadowed areas to model form and create dramatic depth, as in Caravaggio's tenebrism.

Contrapposto

A pose in which the weight rests on one leg, tilting the hips and shoulders in opposing directions to create a natural, relaxed balance in sculpture and painting.

Sfumato

Leonardo da Vinci's technique of very gradual tonal transitions that blur edges and outlines, producing a smoky softness such as in the Mona Lisa.

Analytic Cubism

The 1907 to 1912 phase of Cubism in which Picasso and Braque fractured objects into near-monochrome facets viewed from multiple angles at once.

Sarnath Lion Capital

Mauryan polished sandstone capital of Ashoka with four addorsed lions on an abacus of wheels and animals; it was adopted as India's national emblem.

Gandhara school

Kushan-era school of northwest India using grey schist and stucco, blending Hellenistic drapery and wavy hair with Buddhist iconography such as the uṣṇīṣa.

Mathura school

Early Buddhist sculptural school using spotted red sandstone, characterised by rounded indigenous forms, shaved heads and a simple halo on Buddha images.

Ajanta murals

Buddhist cave paintings from the Satavahana and Gupta periods, made on lime plaster with natural pigments, including the Bodhisattva Padmapani figure.

Dancing Girl

Small Indus Valley bronze figurine from Mohenjo-daro, made by lost-wax casting, showing a stylised female figure with bangles and a tilted head.

Hamzanama

Large illustrated manuscript commissioned by Akbar on cloth, narrating the adventures of Hamza; it marks the formation of the Mughal workshop style.

Ustad Mansur

Jahangir's court painter celebrated for naturalistic studies of birds and animals, including the dodo and the Siberian crane, rendered with scientific precision.

Ragamala painting

A set of Indian paintings personifying musical modes, each ragini given fixed iconography such as Todi with a vina or an ascetic in a landscape.

Basohli school

Early Pahari painting style of the Punjab hills using bold flat colour, large expressive eyes and beetle-wing inlay for jewellery and highlights.

Bharat Mata

Abanindranath Tagore's 1905 painting depicting India as a four-armed goddess holding food, cloth, learning and spiritual objects, an icon of the Swadeshi movement.

Progressive Artists' Group

Bombay group founded in 1947 by Souza, Raza, Husain, Ara, Bakre and Gade, promoting modernism and individual expression; it dissolved in 1956.

Amrita Sher-Gil

Hungarian-Indian painter who combined post-impressionist colour with rural Punjabi subjects, producing works such as Hill Men and Village Scene before her early death.

Kala Bhavana

Santiniketan art school shaped by Rabindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose, emphasising contextual modernism, mural work and indigenous materials.

Bindu

The central point or seed motif in S. H. Raza's geometric abstractions, derived from tantric diagrams and used as a focus of concentration and energy.

Complementary colours

Pairs of hues opposite each other on the colour wheel, such as red and green, which mix to grey and create maximum visual contrast when placed side by side.

Asymmetrical balance

A composition in which unequal forms on either side of an axis carry equal visual weight through size, value, colour intensity or placement.

Negative space

The area around and between the subject of a composition; it shapes the positive form and contributes to figure-ground reading.

Value scale

A graded strip from black to white used to identify and match tones; low-key works cluster in dark values and high-key works in light values.

Cross-hatching

A drawing technique that builds value by layering sets of parallel lines in intersecting directions, denser in shadow areas and sparser in highlights.

Fresco buono

Painting with pigment on wet lime plaster so the colour carbonates into the wall and becomes permanent; secco instead applies paint to dry plaster.

Fat over lean

An oil painting rule requiring each successive layer to contain more oil medium than the one beneath, preventing cracking as the lower layer dries.

Wet-on-wet

A watercolour method applying paint to damp paper or wet paint, producing soft bleeding edges and blended transitions rather than hard boundaries.

Kerning

The adjustment of space between an individual pair of letters in typography, distinct from tracking, which adjusts spacing across a whole word or line.

CMYK

A subtractive colour model using cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks, standard for print production, in contrast to additive RGB used on screens.

Kalamkari

Indian resist-dyed cotton textile from Andhra Pradesh, drawn with a bamboo pen and natural dyes, often depicting temple and narrative scenes.

Madhubani painting

Mithila region folk painting on walls and paper, using double outlines, dense pattern fill and natural pigments, with themes of nature and mythology.

Grisaille underpainting

A monochrome value study in grey or brown laid down before transparent colour glazes, establishing the light and shade structure of a painting.

Gesso

A chalk and glue ground applied to canvas or panel to seal the surface and provide a slightly absorbent, bright base for paint adhesion.