NZ Scholarship Art History flashcards

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

Formal analysis

Close reading of visual elements such as line, shape, colour, tone, texture, scale, composition and spatial construction, used to explain how an artwork generates meaning rather than merely to describe it.

Chiaroscuro

Italian term for the strong modelling of form through contrasting light and dark tones. It creates volume and drama, and is distinguished from mere shading by deliberate tonal structure.

Tenebrism

Extreme chiaroscuro in which figures emerge from near-total darkness, associated with Caravaggio and his followers. The technique intensifies narrative drama and psychological focus.

Sfumato

Leonardo's technique of soft, smoky tonal transitions that blur contours, producing atmospheric depth and ambiguous expression. It is a hallmark of High Renaissance handling of paint.

Contrapposto

A pose in which weight rests on one leg, tilting hips and shoulders in opposing directions. Revived in the Renaissance from classical sculpture, it produces naturalistic balance and implied movement.

Linear perspective

A geometric system using a vanishing point and orthogonals to construct illusionistic depth on a flat surface. Developed in fifteenth-century Florence and later treated as a convention, not a truth.

Impasto

Paint applied thickly so that brush or palette-knife marks stand proud of the surface. It foregrounds the material facture of painting, notably in Rembrandt and later in Impressionism.

Facture

The characteristic handling of materials by an artist, including brushwork, surface texture and finish. Facture is evidence of workshop practice and of an artist's deliberate stylistic choices.

Iconography

The identification and interpretation of subject matter through conventional signs, attributes and symbols, such as a saint's emblem or a vanitas skull. It depends on knowledge of textual and visual tradition.

Panofsky's three levels

Pre-iconographic description, iconographic analysis of subject, and iconological interpretation of cultural meaning. The model separates description from interpretation and exposes assumptions at each stage.

Patronage

The commissioning relationship between patron and artist, shaping subject, scale, medium and deadline. Contracts and correspondence are key primary evidence for contextual interpretation of works.

Vanitas

A still-life type using skulls, candles, hourglasses and flowers to signal the transience of life. It links material display to moral reflection and is common in Dutch seventeenth-century painting.

History painting

The academic genre depicting narrative subjects from scripture, myth or history, ranked above portraiture, landscape and still life. Its prestige rested on moral seriousness and intellectual ambition.

The Salon

The official French state exhibition, juried and central to artistic careers from the eighteenth century. Its exclusions and hierarchies provoked Realist and Impressionist challenges to academic authority.

Avant-garde

Artists positioning their work ahead of, or against, mainstream taste and institutions. The term implies a critical, often adversarial relation to the market and academy.

Modernism

A broad tendency from the mid-nineteenth century emphasising medium specificity, formal innovation and rupture with tradition. Its narratives of progress have been criticised as selective and Eurocentric.

Readymade

Duchamp's term for an ordinary manufactured object designated as art. It attacks authorship, craft and aesthetic judgement, shifting meaning to context and the artist's act of selection.

Abstract Expressionism

A post-1945 American movement combining large scale, gestural or colour-field painting and existential rhetoric. Its promotion involved Cold War cultural politics and museums such as MoMA.

Pop art

Art drawing on advertising, comics and mass-produced commodities, using repetition and screen-printing. It blurs distinctions between high culture and commercial imagery.

Minimalism

Sculpture and installation reducing form to simple geometric volumes and industrial materials. It emphasises the viewer's bodily encounter with the object in real space rather than illusion.

Whakairo

Māori carving in wood, bone or stone, governed by conventions of design and by protocols of knowledge transmission. Patterns encode whakapapa, mana and relationships between people and ancestors.

Kōwhaiwhai

Māori painted rafter and panel patterns, typically curvilinear motifs in red, black and white. They articulate the interior of meeting houses and carry genealogical and tribal meaning.

Raranga

Māori weaving, including fine cloaks and baskets made from harakeke and other fibres. Technique, pattern and material carry identity and status, and knowledge is held within iwi.

Tā moko

Māori customary skin marking inscribed with chisels, distinct from tattoo. It records identity, rank and whakapapa, and its colonisation and revival are central to art-historical debate.

Mana and tapu

Complementary Māori concepts of spiritual power, prestige and sacred restriction. They govern the making, handling and display of significant artworks and objects.

Whakapapa

Genealogical connection linking people to ancestors, land and other beings. It structures Māori art through pattern, narrative and the protocols governing who may make or view works.

Colonial collecting

The acquisition of Indigenous objects by settlers, museums and expeditions, often by coercion or unequal exchange. Provenance research and repatriation claims now contest these holdings.

Primitivism critique

Scholarship exposing how European modernists appropriated non-Western forms while ignoring their meanings. It interrogates exhibitions and texts that framed colonised cultures as timeless or anonymous.

Orientalism

Edward Said's concept describing Western representation of the 'East' as exotic, static and inferior. It provides a framework for analysing power in nineteenth-century visual culture.

The gaze

A concept describing how viewing positions encode power, notably gendered looking. It is used to analyse the objectification or agency of depicted figures and the implied spectator.

Provenance

The documented history of an object's ownership and location. Provenance establishes authenticity and exposes spoliation, looting or colonial removal, making it essential evidence in art history.

Periodisation critique

Interrogation of labels such as Renaissance or Baroque as retrospective constructions. It asks whose chronology and values are naturalised and what such categories exclude.