Art History Resource Guide

Italian sculptor and architect, b. Naples. He was the dominant figure of the Italian baroque.

Flemish-born painter. The pioneer in the Dutch school of free, broad brushwork, he painted directly on to the canvas to create portraits that are spontaneous and full of life.

From A Biographical Dictionary of Artists
Born Claude Gellée in the village of Chamagne in Lorraine, the French painter known as Claude Lorrain can be considered as the greatest landscapist of the 17th century.

Dutch painter and etcher. As a young man, he was apprenticed to masters in Leiden and in Amsterdam. His early paintings show his interest in the ‘spotlight effects’ of light and shadow that were to dominate his later paintings.

Neapolitan artist with a predilection for a dark palette and for fiery battle scenes and violent subject matter.

Flemish painter, regarded as the greatest exponent of the Baroque: appointed (1609) painter to Archduke Albert of Austria, who gave him many commissions, artistic and diplomatic.

Spanish painter. One of the outstanding artists of the 17th century, he was court painter to Philip IV in Madrid, where he produced many portraits of the royal family.

Dutch painter who came from Delft. His response to the transient beauty of light and colored surfaces, and his impeccable sense of design, place him among the greatest of all European artists.

Decorative style in the visual arts, interior design, and architecture that flourished from 1890 to 1910.

Term for that general field of applied design in which hand fabrication is dominant. The term was coined in England in the late 19th cent.

A style characterized by expressive, flamboyant, and dynamic design. It flourished in Europe between 1600 and 1750.

Name applied, at first in a joking spirit, to a period of European culture and a style of furniture, decoration, and art originating in Germany early in the 19th cent.

A term that, when applied generally, means clearness, elegance, symmetry, and repose produced by attention to traditional forms.

16th-century reformation that arose largely in answer to the Protestant Reformation; sometimes called the Catholic Reformation.

Group of American landscape painters, working from 1825 to 1875. The 19th-century romantic movements of England, Germany, and France were introduced to the United States by such writers as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.

Opposition to the religious use of images. Veneration of pictures and statues symbolizing sacred figures, Christian doctrine.

Movement in painting that originated in France in the 1860s and had enormous influence in European and North American painting in the late 19th century. The Impressionists wanted to depict real life, to paint straight from nature, and to capture the changing effects of light.

Used with reference to Italian painting in the 16th century and represents a distinct phase between the art of the High Renaissance and the rise of baroque.

In art, the term describes the attempt to imitate the appearance of the everyday world without the intervention of preconceived ideas or conventions

Movement in art, architecture, and design in Europe and North America about 1750-1850, characterized by a revival of classical Greek and Roman styles.

Broad term covering various developments in French painting that developed out of Impressionism in the period from about 1880 to about 1905. Some of these developments built on the achievements of Impressionism, but others were reactions against its concentration on surface appearances, seeking to reintroduce a concern with emotional and symbolic values.

Group of British painters (1848-53); Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and Holman Hunt - at this time young students at the Royal Academy - were the leading figures among the seven founders.

Religious and political movement in 16th-century Europe to reform the Roman Catholic Church, which led to the establishment of the Protestant churches.

From Bloomsbury Guide to Art
An 18th-century style, principally associated with the decorative arts, deriving its name from the French, rocaille, meaning 'rock-work'.

Term loosely applied to literary and artistic movements of the late 18th and 19th cent.

A pictorial representation of inanimate objects. The term derives from the 17th-century Dutch still-leven, meaning a motionless natural object or objects.