Essential Art History Terms and Concepts

Essential Art History Terms

• Atmospheric perspective: A technique of rendering depth or distance in painting by modifying the tone, hue, and distinctness of objects receding from the picture plane, especially by reducing local colors and contrasts to a uniform light bluish-gray.
• Continuous narrative: A type of narrative that illustrates multiple scenes within a single frame without dividers.
• Attribute: In art, an object or animal associated with a particular personage.
• Memento mori: An object serving as a warning or reminder of death, such as a skull.
• Trompe l'oeil: A visual illusion in art used to trick the eye into perceiving a painted detail as a three-dimensional object.

Technical and Stylistic Concepts

• Quadrature: The process of constructing a square with an area equal to that of a circle or another figure bounded by a curve.
• Di sotto in su: Extreme foreshortening of figures painted on a ceiling to create the illusion that they are suspended in the air above the viewer.
• Quadro riportato: Italian for "carried picture"; used to describe gold-framed easel paintings or framed paintings seen in normal perspective painted into a fresco.
• Chiaroscuro: The treatment of light and shade in drawing and painting.
• Sfumato: The technique of allowing tones and colors to shade gradually into one another, producing softened outlines or hazy forms.

Baroque and Historical Context

• Tenebrism: From the Italian tenebroso ("dark, gloomy, mysterious"), also known as dramatic illumination.
• Caravaggisti: Stylistic followers of the 16th-century Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio.
• Genre painting: A style depicting scenes from ordinary life, especially domestic situations, associated with 17th-century Dutch and Flemish artists.
• Protestant Reformation: A schism in Western Christianity initiated by Martin Luther and continued by Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin, and other reformers in 16th-century Europe.
• Counter-Reformation: Also called the Catholic Reformation or Catholic Revival; a period of Catholic resurgence in response to the Protestant Reformation, beginning with the Council of Trent and ending at the close of the Thirty Years' War.
• Council of Trent: The 19th ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, held between 1545 and 1563. Prompted by the Protestant Reformation, it is considered the embodiment of the Counter-Reformation.