You are here: Home > Uncategorized > Baroque And Renaissance Art Characteristics

Baroque And Renaissance Art Characteristics

Posted in Uncategorized | April 3rd, 2011

How to tell the difference between art periods?

I have a quiz coming up and the teacher will show 23 slides of paintings, pottery, architecture, etc. I have to write down what period each work of art is from. Can anyone help me by giving me some defining characteristics of the art periods? Like Prehistoric – wall paintings with hunted animals and things, Ancient Egyptian – pyramids and hieroglyphs, Greek – people in god-like perfect form, Roman – columns and people are more realistic, Renaissance – Biblical scenes, right? Byzantine – stained glass, halos, and the babies’ faces look like adults’. Baroque – a darker picture with a light source representing activity from a point, usually on the side. Impressionism – landscape-type things and I think they are more blotchy, and Surrealism – some real things in crazy aspects. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Any more to add? Please! Thank you!

From the classic painting art, moving into impressionism and beyond things changed. Before paintings depicted the exact, but as photography came along, the painter seemed to be unable to compete. In impressionism, they took their next step. They focused on color over line and instead painted their impression of what they were observing, with a clear focus on the effects of light, delicate but visible brush strokes and neutrality towards the subject.
Post-impressionists bended these rules a bit as they made the brush strokes heavier, kept the bright colors but sometimes put them where they did not quite belong and changed angles and geometry of the subject.
As these rules were further bend, neutrality was abandoned, with color and motive in instead being used to achieve a certain effect of the viewer. A focus on the line diminished further,this led the way for expressionism and modern art (which may not even have a subject, as the shapes and colors alone are created to achieve a certain feeling or effect).