Introduction to Art: Early & Medieval

Stage of prehistory and early history when copper and bronze (an alloy of tin and copper) became the first metals worked extensively and used for tools and weapons.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Bronze Age art of the Cyclades, an island group of the central Aegean.

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
(c. 8th-4th centuries BC) Art of the people of Etruria. Characteristic achievements are the wall frescoes-painted in two-dimensional style-and realistic terra-cotta portraits found in tombs. Bronze reliefs and sculptures are also common.

Works of art produced in the Aegean basin, a center of artistic activity from very early times.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Art of the ancient civilizations that grew up in the area around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, now in Iraq. Mesopotamian art was largely used to glorify powerful dynasties, and often reflected the belief that kingship and the divine were closely interlocked.

The origins of Roman art are a complex mix of native and imported styles and concepts that ultimately coalesced into what we now view as the art created by the Romans.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
One of the great archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century was made by accident in the spring of 1974. Peasants from the village of Xiyang in Lintong, Shaanxi Province, in the People’s Republic of china, were engaged in digging a well and discovered pottery figures and tiles.

Style in the visual arts and architecture that originated in the 4th–5th centuries in Byzantium (capital of the Eastern Roman Empire; renamed Constantinople in 330; now Istanbul).

The architecture of the Byzantine Empire at its outset was essentially that of the Late Roman Empire from which it emerged in the early fourth century CE.

One of the world's major religions, it predominates in Europe and the Americas, where it has been a powerful historical force and cultural influence, but it also claims adherents in virtually every country of the world.

[Gr.,=Holy Wisdom] or Santa Sophia, Turkish Aya Sofia, originally a Christian church at Constantinople (now Istanbul), later a mosque, and now converted into a museum.

Opposition to the religious use of images. Veneration of pictures and statues symbolizing sacred figures, Christian doctrine, and biblical events was an early feature of Christian worship.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Greek painter, the most celebrated in antiquity but now known only through descriptions of his works. He is thought to have studied under Ephorus of Ephesus and under Pamphilus of Amphipolis at Sicyon.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Greek sculptor, one of the greatest sculptors of ancient Greece.

A Greek late Classical sculptor from Athens, Praxiteles was the foremost representative of the Attic School in the middle years of the 4th century BC.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
one of the most celebrated Greek painters of Rhodes and Athens. Apelles is said to have been the first to recognize the talents of Protogenes, then 50 years old and known only as a painter of decorations for ships.

A painting (more rarely a sculpture) placed on, behind, or above an altar in a Christian church.

From The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of British Art
A hanging that presents a continuous narrative of the events leading up to and including the Battle of Hastings in 1066. It is a unique historical document, for while similar hangings are known to have existed, no comparable examples have survived.

Style that succeeded Romanesque as the most popular force in European art and prevailed in most countries, particularly in northern Europe, from the middle of the 12th century to the 16th century, when it gave way to Renaissance influence.

The study and interpretation of figural representations, either individual or symbolic, religious or secular.

From The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Art and Artists
The decoration of manuscripts, one of the most common forms of medieval visual art; because of its monastic origins, usually of religious texts.

From The Bloomsbury Guide to Art
Term applied to the Spanish Christians under Moorish rule, and the distinctive art and architecture they produced.

From The Bloomsbury Guide to Art
Art historical term for the art and architecture of Western Europe between the end of the Carolingian Renaissance in the 10th century and the rise of Gothic in the 12th.

Painter, born in Vicchio, Tuscany, NW Italy. His most important frescoes are in the Florentine convent of S Marco (St Mark), which is now a museum.

From A Biographical Dictionary of Artists
Michael Astrapas and Eutychios were Byzantine painters active in Macedonia and Serbia. Their autographed work is in the Peribleptos church at Ohrid (1295), Bogorodica Ieviěka at Prizren (1306), St George at Staro Nagoričino (1313 - 18), and Sveti Nikita at Čučer.

Italian art theorist, architect, author, and diplomat. Alberti is often regarded as the embodiment of the Uomo Universale, but the range and quality of his activities are not typical of his own or any other age.

Both his subject matter and his free and painterly brushwork, which contrasts sharply with the jewel-like brilliance of the Eyckian tradition, set him apart from the mainstream of Flemish art.

The Florentine artist Filippo Brunelleschi was architect, engineer, and sculptor. More than any other individual, he established the forms and demonstrated the preoccupations of Italian Renaissance architecture.

Pietro Cavallini was a Roman painter; his name is associated with those of Cimabue and Giotto in the movement towards greatly increased naturalism in painting which took place in the latter part of the 13th and the first part of the 14th centuries.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Florentine painter, whose real name was Cenni di Pepo or Peppi. The works with which his name is associated constitute a transition in painting from the strictly formalized Byzantine style, hitherto prevalent in Italy, to the freer expression of the 14th cent.

Florentine painter. His most important works include frescoes depicting the lives of St Stephen and St John the Baptist (1452-66; Prato Cathedral), which in their use of perspective and grouping of figures show the influence of Masaccio.

Italian painter. He is the foremost Italian painter of the Florentine Renaissance in the early 15th cent. Masaccio's original name was Tommaso Guidi.

From A Biographical Dictionary of Artists
Nicholas of Verdun is not the earliest medieval artist who can be established historically, either by signed surviving work or documents; but he is the first whose development as an artistic personality can be traced through early, mature, and late work.

Descended from a patrician family of Augsburg, the German artist Martin Schongauer was best known in his lifetime as a painter, but his influence and his posthumous fame stem from his copper engravings.

From A Biographical Dictionary of Artists
Theophanes the Greek was a Byzantine painter active in Russia. Probably born in Constantinople, he decorated about 40 churches there and in Russia, whither he emigrated in the 1370s.

Flemish painter, who gained in his lifetime a Europe-wide reputation. One of the first painters to use oil paint effectively, he is noted for his meticulous detail and his brilliance of colour and finish.

From A Biographical Dictionary of Artists
A pupil of Master ES, Israhel van Meckenem the Younger was a goldsmith and prolific engraver active in Bocholt and Cleve in Westphalia. More than 600 plates bear his initials or signature, and as the first of the large-scale producers of prints he appears to have used factory methods.

The German painter Michael Wolgemut was born in Nuremberg where he was the master of Albrecht Dürer from 1486 to 1490.