An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, the term is also often used in the entertainment business, especially in a business context, for musicians and other performers. "Artiste" is a variant used in English in this context, but this use has become rare. Use of the term "artist" to describe writers is valid, but less common, and mostly restricted to contexts like used in criticism.
Mannerism is a style in European art that emerged in the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520, spreading by about 1530 and lasting until about the end of the 16th century in Italy, when the Baroque style largely replaced it. Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century.
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important American artists.
Apelles of Kos was a renowned painter of ancient Greece. Pliny the Elder, to whom much of modern scholars' knowledge of this artist is owed, rated him superior to preceding and subsequent artists. He dated Apelles to the 112th Olympiad, possibly because he had produced a portrait of Alexander the Great.
A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal. A landscape includes the physical elements of geophysically defined landforms such as (ice-capped) mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of land use, buildings, and structures, and transitory elements such as lighting and weather conditions. Combining both their physical origins and the cultural overlay of human presence, often created over millennia, landscapes reflect a living synthesis of people and place that is vital to local and national identity.
A hierarchy of genres is any formalization which ranks different genres in an art form in terms of their prestige and cultural value.
Moses is a sculpture by the Italian High Renaissance artist Michelangelo, housed in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. Commissioned in 1505 by Pope Julius II for his tomb, it depicts the biblical figure Moses with horns on his head, based on a description in chapter 34 of Exodus in the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible used at that time.
John Gibson was a Welsh Neoclassical sculptor who studied in Rome under Canova. He excelled chiefly in bas-relief, notably the two life-size works The Hours Leading the Horses of the Sun and Phaethon driving the Chariot of the Sun, but was also proficient in monumental and portrait statuary. He is famous for his statues of Sir Robert Peel, William Huskisson and Queen Victoria. Gibson was elected a Royal Academician in 1836, and left the contents of his studio to the Royal Academy, where many of his marbles and casts are currently on display.
Since ancient times, Greeks, Etruscans and Celts have inhabited the south, centre and north of the Italian peninsula respectively. The very numerous rock drawings in Valcamonica are as old as 8,000 BC, and there are rich remains of Etruscan art from thousands of tombs, as well as rich remains from the Greek colonies at Paestum, Agrigento and elsewhere. Ancient Rome finally emerged as the dominant Italian and European power. The Roman remains in Italy are of extraordinary richness, from the grand Imperial monuments of Rome itself to the survival of exceptionally preserved ordinary buildings in Pompeii and neighbouring sites. Following the fall of the Roman Empire, in the Middle Ages Italy, especially the north, remained an important centre, not only of the Carolingian art and Ottonian art of the Holy Roman Emperors, but for the Byzantine art of Ravenna and other sites.
The Art of the United Kingdom refers to all forms of visual art in or associated with the United Kingdom since the formation of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707 and encompasses English art, Scottish art, Welsh art and Irish art, and forms part of Western art history. During the 18th century, Britain began to reclaim the leading place England had previously played in European art during the Middle Ages, being especially strong in portraiture and landscape art.
A halo is a crown of light rays, circle or disk of light that surrounds a person in art. It has been used in the iconography of many religions to indicate holy or sacred figures, and has at various periods also been used in images of rulers and heroes. In the religious art of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism among other religions, sacred persons may be depicted with a halo in the form of a circular glow, or flames in Asian art, around the head or around the whole body—this last one is often called a mandorla. Halos may be shown as almost any colour or combination of colours, but are most often depicted as golden, yellow or white when representing light or red when representing flames.
Cubo-Futurism was an art movement, developed within Russian Futurism, that arose in early 20th century Russian Empire, defined by its amalgamation of the artistic elements found in Italian Futurism and French Analytical Cubism. Cubo-Futurism was the main school of painting and sculpture practiced by the Russian Futurists. In 1913, the term ‘Cubo-Futurism’ first came to describe works from members of the poetry group ‘Hylaeans’, as they moved away from poetic Symbolism towards Futurism and zaum, the experimental “visual and sound poetry of Kruchenykh and Khlebninkov”. Later in the same year the concept and style of ‘Cubo-Futurism’ became synonymous with the works of artists within Ukrainian and Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde circles as they interrogated non-representational art through the fragmentation and displacement of traditional forms, lines, viewpoints, colours, and textures within their pieces. The impact of Cubo-Futurism was then felt within performance art societies, with Cubo-Futurist painters and poets collaborating on theatre, cinema, and ballet pieces that aimed to break theatre conventions through the use of nonsensical zaum poetry, emphasis on improvisation, and the encouragement of audience participation.
Portrait Painting is a genre in painting, where the intent is to represent a specific human subject. The term 'portrait painting' can also describe the actual painted portrait. Portraitists may create their work by commission, for public and private persons, or they may be inspired by admiration or affection for the subject. Portraits often serve as important state and family records, as well as remembrances.
The nude, as a form of visual art that focuses on the unclothed human figure, is an enduring tradition in Western art. It was a preoccupation of Ancient Greek art, and after a semi-dormant period in the Middle Ages returned to a central position with the Renaissance. Unclothed figures often also play a part in other types of art, such as history painting, including allegorical and religious art, portraiture, or the decorative arts. From prehistory to the earliest civilizations, nude female figures are generally understood to be symbols of fertility or well-being.
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and airbrushes, can be used.
An artistic canon of body proportions, in the sphere of visual arts, is a formally codified set of criteria deemed mandatory for a particular artistic style of figurative art. The word canon was first used for this type of rule in Classical Greece, where it set a reference standard for body proportions, so as to produce a harmoniously formed figure appropriate to depict gods or kings. Other art styles have similar rules that apply particularly to the representation of royal or divine personalities.
The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts also involve aspects of visual arts as well as arts of other types. Also included within the visual arts are the applied arts such as industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, interior design and decorative art.
Desolation is a sculpture made by Josep Llimona 1907 which is part of the collection of the National Art Museum of Catalonia in Barcelona.
The historical evolution of the nude in art runs parallel to the history of art in general, except for small particularities derived from the different acceptance of nudity by the various societies and cultures that have succeeded each other in the world over time. The nude is an artistic genre that consists of the representation in various artistic media of the naked human body. It is considered one of the academic classifications of works of art. Nudity in art has generally reflected the social standards for aesthetics and morality of the era in which the work was made. Many cultures tolerate nudity in art to a greater extent than nudity in real life, with different parameters for what is acceptable: for example, even in a museum where nude works are displayed, nudity of the visitor is generally not acceptable. As a genre, the nude is a complex subject to approach because of its many variants, both formal, aesthetic and iconographic, and some art historians consider it the most important subject in the history of Western art.
