Art History: Baroque and Romanticism Quiz

Renaissance

• Period: 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries
• Key Artists: Leonardo Da Vinci, Giotto, Titian, Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo, Botticelli.
• Key Characteristics: New, creative approaches to painting, sculpture, and architecture, a revival of Antiquity, advances in science and technology, a style of art that elevated the human spirit and human achievements.

Key Information

• Artists: Leonardo Da Vinci, Giotto, Titian, Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Guercino, Velázquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gentileschi
• Concepts and Characteristics : Dynamic Movement, exaggerated lighting effects, strong contrasts of light and shadow, intense emotions, drama, vivid coloration, robust realism, drama, non-linear

Stages of the Renaissance

• Proto Renaissance: gradual development of naturalism, focus on Classical humanism, and anatomical beauty of classical sculpture, emphasis on perspective and technical aspects of painting.
• Early Renaissance: introduces a greater degree of naturalism, emphasis on observational drawing of the human figure, precise spatial presentation of figures, buildings, and landscapes, invention of perspective drawing.
• High Renaissance: highest peak of artistic achievement, saw the introduction of individual artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, artists were willing to sacrifice technical principles for a more beautiful and harmonious whole.

Overview

• Location/Time Period: Started in Florence, Italy, then to other Italian city-states such as Venice, Milan, Bologna, Ferrara, and Rome. Later spread to France, then throughout western and northern Europe during the 15th century.
• Cultural context: Rich cultural history, wealthy citizens supporting artists, intellectual and artistic revolution that was much different from the Dark Ages.
• Key Developments: Art, architecture, and science were closely linked. Artists used scientific principles like anatomy to create works like the Mona Lisa, and architects like Filippo Brunelleschi studied mathematics to design immense buildings with expansive domes. Art was characterized by realism and naturalism.

Architecture

• Revival of ancient Roman forms: columns, round arches, tunnel vaults, and domes.
• Harmony between human proportions and buildings: concern for proportion resulted in clear, easily understood space and mass.

Painting

• Infusing ideals of beauty back into art: Whether depicting religious figures or everyday citizens, High Renaissance artists' concerns were to present pieces of visual art that were symmetrical, and compositional perfection.
• Specific Examples: Sistine Chapel (Michelangelo), Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci) 
• Techniques: Sfumato (Leonardo da Vinci's technique of fine shading, creating a soft focus), use of various brushes to apply color, add fine detail, shading, and line (Michelangelo).  Results in more life-like pieces, a new body of compelling portraiture of ordinary people, vivid imitation of reality without lines or borders.

Sculpture

• Celebrated and exalted the anatomy of the human form in a way that had not been seen before in art.

The Birth of Venus

• Artist: Botticelli
• Medium: Tempera on canvas
• Characteristics: painted on canvas using a technique unusual for the time, use of diluted egg yolk, transparency, pictorial quality of a fresco.

The Creation of Adam

• Artist: Michelangelo
• Medium: Ceiling plaster

Baroque

• Period: Late 16th and early 17th centuries.
• Key Artists: Caravaggio, Guercino, Velázquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gentileschi
• Key Characteristics: Dynamic Movement, exaggerated lighting effects, strong contrasts of light and shadow, intense emotions, drama, vivid coloration, robust realism, non-linear.

Other aspects of interest

• Painting: Naturalism, realism
• Architecture: Focused on grandeur, movement, and drama through complex forms and bold ornamentation, sometimes replicating Renaissance architectural elements but making them grander
• Sculpture: Used spiraling figures into space, and moved beyond depictions of religious scenes to encompass depictions of historical epics.
• Methodology: Artists frequently experimented with unconventional techniques and materials.

Romanticism

• Period: 1780-1830
• Emphasis: on emotions, individualism, celebration of nature, the supernatural, and the subconscious.
• Key Artists: Francisco Goya, Eugene Delacroix, Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable, Henry Fuseli, Theodore Gericault, J.M.W. Turner.

Realism

• Period: 1850s-Early 1900's
• Key Artists: Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, Jean-François Millet, Honoré Daumier, Winslow Homer.
• Key Elements: Subject matter of peasant and working class life, depicted the life of the city streets, cafes, and popular entertainments; accuracy of detail to depict reality, opposite of abstraction.

Impressionism

• Period: 1860-1886
• Key Artists: Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Édouard Degas, Camille Pissarro.
• Key elements: capture the immediate impression of a particular moment; unfinished, sketchy feeling; use of modern life as subject matter (dance halls, sailboat regattas) rather than historical/mythological events; painting outside in the open air (plein air).

Post-Impressionism

• Period: 1880s
• Key Artists: Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat
• Key aspects: rejected Impressionism's concern with spontaneous and naturalistic rendering of light and color; favored emphasis on symbolic content, formal order, and structure; color often independent from form and composition as an expression of emotion and aesthetics.

Fauvism

• Period: (no specific dates are given)
• Key Artists: Henri Matisse
• Key characteristics: Use of intense color, line, and brushwork; bold sense of surface design; flat composition; separation of color from its descriptive purpose; important precursor of Cubism and Expressionism

Cubism

• Period: (no specific dates are given)
• Key Artists: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque
• Key aspects: Rejected the concept that art should copy nature; moved away from traditional techniques and perspectives; created radically fragmented objects; used geometric forms; multiple vantage points.

Surrealism

• Period: (no specific dates are given)
• Key Artists: Salvador Dalí,
• Key aspects: Showcased works of art that defied reason, rejecting the rationalist mindset; inspired by theories of psychoanalysis and the power of imagination. Depicted revelations from dreams and everyday life with historical accuracy.

Pop Art

• Period (no specific dates given)
• Key Artists: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein
• Key aspects: Used everyday, mundane objects from consumerism and mass media; challenge consumerism and mass media; a shift from the direction of modernism.

Postmodernism

• Period: 1950 to present
• Key aspects: Reaction against Modernism, skepticism, suspicion of reason, radical epistemological doubt challenging the notion of universal truths; emphasis on the individual experience, irony, complexity of contradictory layers of meaning.

Test your knowledge of Baroque and Romanticism in art history with this comprehensive quiz. Explore key features, notable artists, and significant artworks from these influential movements. Match artworks with their creators and identify defining characteristics to showcase your understanding.