A technological device of immense consequence for the modern experience was invented shortly before the mid- 19th century: the camera, with its attendant art of photography. From the time Frenchman Louis-Jacques-mandé Daguerre (1789–1851) and Briton William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) announced the first practical photographic processes in 1839, people have celebrated photography’s ability to make […]
Read More »Carving and Casting Sculptural technique falls into two basic categories, subtractive and additive. Carving is a subtractive technique. The final form is a reduction of the original mass of a block of stone, a piece of wood, or another material. Wood statues were once tree trunks, and stone statues began as blocks pried from mountains. […]
Read More »Foreshortening Artists also represent single figures in space in varying ways. When the Flemish artist Peter PaulrubenS (1577–1640) painted Lion Hunt (fig. 1), he used foreshortening for all the hunters and animals—that is, he represented their bodies at angles to the picture plane. When in life one views a figure at an angle, the body appears […]
Read More »Color Light reveals all colors. Light in the world of the painter and other artists differs from natural light. Natural light, or sunlight, is whole or additive light. As the sum of all the wavelengths composing the visible spectrum, it may be disassembled or fragmented into the individual colors of the spectral band. The painter’s […]
Read More »As in all fields of study, art history has its own specialized vocabulary consisting of hundreds of words, but certain basic terms are indispensable for describing artworks and buildings of any time and place. They make up the essential vocabulary of formal analysis, the visual analysis of artistic form. definitions and discussions of the most […]
Read More »Who Made It? If Ben Shahn had not signed his painting of Sacco and Vanzetti, an art historian could still assign, or attribute, the work to him based on knowledge of the artist’s personal style. Although signing (and dating) works is quite common (but by no means universal) today, in the history of art countless […]
Read More »Another major concern of art historians is, of course, subject matter. Some artworks, such as modern abstract paintings (Fig 1) , have no subject, understanding of the work. Art historians traditionally separate pictorial subjects into various categories, such as religious, historical, mythological, genre (daily life), portraiture, landscape (a depiction of a place), still life (an […]
Read More »Defining artistic style is one of the key elements of art historical inquiry, although the analysis of artworks solely in terms of style no longer dominates the field the way it once did. Art historians speak of several different kinds of artistic styles. Period style refers to the characteristic artistic manner of a specific time, usually […]
Read More »Art historians study the visual and tangible objects humans make and the structures humans build. Beginning with the earliest Greco-Roman art critics on, scholars have studied objects their makers consciously manufactured as “art” and to which the artists assigned formal titles. But today’s art historians also study a multitude of objects their creators and owners […]
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What is art history? Except when referring to the modern academic discipline, people do not often juxtapose the words art and history. They tend to think of history as the record and interpretation of past human actions, particularly social and political actions. In contrast, most think of art, quite correctly, as part of the present—as […]
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Unveiling the Mysteries of the Zam Zam Well: History, Significance, and Controversies
Vijay Ratna Kumar J | March 27, 2023