Category: Art Dictionary

Albert Einstein: Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was born in Germany and was a Jewish philosopher and author, who is widely regarded as one of the most influential and best known scientists and intellectuals of all time. In 1933, he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and lived and worked there until his death. Einstein is probably familiar to most people for his mathematical equation about the nature of energy, E = MC2.

Zoomorphic: motifs based on animal forms.

Ziggurat: ancient Babylonian and Assyrian pyramid-shaped construction. See: Assyrian Art (c.1500-612 BCE).

Yellow Book: influential quarterly magazine published from 1894, of which Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98) was art editor.

Yamato-e: the School of Japanese painting from the 10th to the 15th century that preserved the native traditions.

Xylography: Early form of wood engraving, first seen in China in the 1st century CE. Xylography is the oldest known engraving technique.

Word Art: Includes any text-based word painting, sculpture or graphic art. Exponents include Barbara Kruger (b.1945), Christopher Wool (b.1955) and On Kawara (1932-2014).

Wood Carving: Reached its apogee in Late Gothic Germany, at the hands of master wood-carvers like Veit Stoss (1450-1533) and Tilman Riemenschneider (1460-1531).

Woodblock: Print produced from a design on a wooden block. See also Woodcut prints.

Watercolour Painting: Uses a water-soluble painting medium. Watercolours are usually applied with brushes, but several other tools may also employed. The most common painting techniques are known as wet-on-dry and wet-on-wet, plus the dry brush techniques dry-on-dry and dry-on-wet. Watercolours can be removed while still wet, by blotting. When watercolour are made thicker, opaque and mixed with white, it is generally referred to as gouache. Thomas Girtin and JMW Turner were two great pioneers of the art form.

Visual art: A broad category of artistic disciplines, encompassing the fine arts, some of the applied arts and certain modern art forms.

Viking Art: Norse art mainly embraces portable metalwork and carvings.

Video Art: Contemporary form pioneered by artists like Andy Warhol (1928-87) and Bill Viola (b.1951). Can be either stand-alone or combined with other media in an installation.

Victorian Art: British architecture, arts and crafts produced during the reign of Queen Victoria (c.1840-1900).

Vanitas Painting: Still Life paintings, popular in 17rh century Holland, which contain objects as reminders of the impermanence of temporal life and of mortality.

Vanishing point: point at which the receding parallel lines in a painting appear to meet; see Linear perspective.

Ukiyo-e (woodblock prints): Japanese, meaning “pictures of the floating world”. Genre painting, and later Woodblock prints, whose subjects were actors, domestic scenes, and courtesans.

Trompe l’oeil: painting that “deceives the eye”; type of illusionistic painting characterized by its very precise naturalism.

Triptych: picture or carving in three parts; a form of polyptych common for altarpieces.

Tribal Art: Also called Primitive Native Art, it embraces the traditional art of tribal societies in the Americas, Africa, India, the South Pacific, and Australasia.

Trecento: Italian for the 14th century. Traditionally refers to Italian fine art (1300-1400).

Tondo: circular picture or relief.

Terracotta (Latin: “baked earth”): hard, fired hut unglazed, brownish-red clay used for pottery, and building. See: Terracotta Sculpture.

Tenebrism: style of 17th-century painting associated with Caravaggio making much use of strong Chiaroscuro.

Tempera: a method of painting in which pigments are combined with an emulsion of water and egg yolks or whole eggs (plus sometimes glue or milk). Widely used in Italian art in the 14th and 15th centuries, both for panel painting and fresco, was then superceded by oil paint.

Tapestry: wall hanging of silk or wool with a nonrepeating pattern or narrative design woven in by hand, during manufacture. For details and history, see: Tapestry Art.

Support: Canvas, paper, panel, wall, etc on which a painting or drawing is executed.

Stone Sculpture: Includes carvings from metamorphic, sedementary and igneous rocks.

Stoneware: hard pottery made from clay plus a fusible stone (usually feldspar) and fired at 1200-1400°C so that the stone is vitrified.

Stippling: a drawing technique which employs many small dots or flecks to construct the image, or shading.

Still Life painting: one of the major genres of Western art, it describes a type of painting featuring inanimate everyday objects. There are four types: (1) flower pieces, (2) breakfast or banquet pieces, (3) animal pieces, (4) Symbolic Still Lifes.

Stencil art: An image created by applying ink or paint through a cut-out surface.

Statue: Freestanding sculpture; life-size, representational art.

Stained Glass Art: Attained its apogee during the era of Gothic Architecture.

Stabile: A style of 20th century sculpture consisting of a stationary object, fixed to a base of some description. Contrasts with a mobile, the free-hanging sculptural invention of American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976), stabiles were also created by Calder.

Skyscraper: a type of high-rise building design pioneered by American architects in the Chicago School of Architecture (c.1880-1910).

Sketching: Typically a sketch is a rapidly executed or casual portrayal of a subject, in pencil, charcoal, pen and ink or other portable medium, often produced as a preliminary work in preparation for something more detailed.

Site-specific art: Any work of art (typically murals, or sculpture) created for a specific place, which cannot be separated or exhibited outside its intended environment.

Silverpoint: A drawing method using a piece of metal, usually silver wire, drawn on a ground prepared with Chinese white, sometimes with pigment added.

Sgraffito: A term meaning scratched; in painting, one colour is laid over another, and scratched with a tool so that the underlying colour is revealed.

Sfumato: a painting technique developed by Leonardo da Vinci, in which transitions from light to dark are so gradual they are almost imperceptible; sfumato blurs lines and creates a soft-focus effect.

Self-Portraiture: Self-portraits were created as early as the Amarna Period (c.1365 BCE) in Ancient Egypt, although the genre wasn’t properly exploited until the time of Albrecht Durer in late 15th century Germany. Since then, other important pioneers of self-portrait painting have included Rembrandt, Vincent Van Gogh and Egon Schiele.

Seascape: painting or drawing of the sea and shipping.