Arts Glossary
1st Person: narration in which the narrator’s voice is attributed to a character within the story, an observer, sometimes a significant actor. The narrating voice freely uses I or We to refer directly to the narrator’s perspective.
3rd Person: a narrating voice that tells story told from the point of view of a distant observer who plays no part in story events. The narration never uses I or We to refer directly to the perspective characters in the story.
Abstract: visual art that makes little or no effort to represent any recognizable subject and appeals to purely aesthetic sensibilities
Academic Art: art that follows explicit rules established by a tradition, institution, academy, or school. Sometimes dismissed by the avant-garde art world as overly cautious, derivative, or unoriginal.
Académie des Beaux-Artes: a national association of artists in France that organized training, articulated strict rules for “fine art,” and advanced or depressed careers by selecting and rejecting submitted works for annual shows (salons).
Actual texture: in visual art, the textures of the painting, sculpture, mosaic, or textile. E.g., in a painting, the grain of the canvas, the marks of brushwork in the paint, or embedded materials—string, sand, etc.
Aesthetic Art: art designed to appeal to or challenge subjective responses and tastes of an audience regarding beauty, ugliness, and the sublime. Aesthetic responses are often distinguished from “interested” reactions such as profit, morality, sensual gratification, etc.
Aesthetic: the dimension of an artistic experience that appeals to or challenges an audience’s sense of taste and experience of beauty, ugliness, the sublime, etc. A response distinct from “interested” concerns such as ideology, sexuality, social conflict or economics
Agon: a narrative’s central conflict driving the story’s mysteries and actions
Allegory: representation of an abstract concept as a symbol or person, often a personification of the idea
Alliteration: a figurative scheme in which multiple words in a series repeat initial sounds—usually consonants: e.g. “I hear Lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore” (W. B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” 1888).
Analogous Colors: closely related hues on the color wheel that create a harmonious effect
Anaphora: a figurative scheme that repeats the same word or phrase at the beginning of sentences or clauses: e.g. “I have a dream …” phrase repeated in Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech, (8/28/1963).
Antagonist: (or Villain) the competitor in a story’s agon (central conflict) who opposes the protagonist (or hero) and with whom we negatively identify and sympathize
Archetype: shared features and structures found in art, myth, folklore, literature, ritual, and dreams across all times and cultures
Art: a formal composition designed by human imagination to communicate content, meaning, and aesthetic experience (e.g. beauty) to a reflective audience
Asymmetrical balance: in visual art, an equilibrium achieved between unequal elements of weight and scale in a visual field or along off center vertical or horizontal axes: e.g. a large open space offset by a small but weighty form.
Attribute: a detail of appearance or associated possession that conventionally identifies a saint, deity, or other exalted personage in an iconography
Audience Context: the social, cultural, and historical perspective from which audiences respond to works of art, often clashing with the context of origin and requiring a bridge to close the gap.
Avant-garde: a general term referring to innovative, experimental artistic movements that challenge the conventions of the day
Background: in 3-dimensional space, the deep distance comprised of minimally visible figures and open, Negative Space
Balance: in visual art, the distribution of visual weight or placement of elements to produce a sense of equilibrium
Ballad Stanza: a traditional, widespread metrical pattern common in ballads, nursery rhymes, and popular verse in which 4-line stanzas that alternate between 4 and 3 foot iambic feet: ta-Da-ta-Da-ta-Da-ta-Da// ta-Da-ta-Da-ta-Da.
Ballad: a poem or song that tells a story. Traditionally, oral poetic genres compiled anonymously within folklore traditions for audiences with limited literary education
Baroque: the 17th Century artistic tradition that followed the Renaissance, characterized by gritty social realism, dramatic action, depth of characterization, closed compositions, and intense contrasts between light and shadow. More broadly, any art emulating the values of the Baroque
BCE: Before the Common/Current Era, an interculturally sensitive replacement for BC, or, Before Christ, the calendar watershed that has oriented dates in Europe since the 6th Century and, in the last century or so, around the world.
Blank Verse: in the English verse tradition, long poems without stanzas or rhyme schemes composed in Iambic Pentameter: line with 5 iambic feet: ta-Da-ta-Da-ta-Da-ta-Da-to-DA. Conventional in Elizabethan and Shakespearean drama and in long forms such as Milton’s Christian epic, Paradise Lost.
Blues: an African American folk song tradition that laments lost love or a hard way of life often due to the experience of social oppression. Traditionally broken into 4-line stanzas with repetition and variation of lines. E.g. “Oh, I asked her for water, oh, she brought me gasoline.//Oh, I asked her for water, oh, she brought me gasoline.//That’s the troublingest woman//That I ever seen” (Howlin’ Wolf, “I asked her for water” 1956).
Bourgeoisie: a French term for the middle class in a society dominated by an insular aristocracy which disdained the social stain of having to gain money through work or commerce. Among artists, Bourgeoisie tastes were derided on aesthetic grounds.
Byzantine Art: a style of Christian art developed in the Eastern Roman Empire after the 4th Century to represent Jesus and saints, usually the Virgin Mary, as icons to focus worship and prayer. Mosaics and frescoes in a stylized manner—flat, emotionless, timeless, placeless, focused on theological meaning.
Byzantine: art styled in the manner of Byzantine icons: depictions of Christ, the Virgin Mary, or saints in a stylized manner—flat, emotionless, timeless, placeless, focused on theological dogma. Common Byzantine media: mosaics, frescoes, paint on panel
Camera Obscura: a light capturing device which projects the reverse of an image through a pinhole on a rear surface. Since at least the 17th Century, artists have used camera obscuras to create images with precise accuracy.
Camera-eye narrative: narrative that itemizes image details to project a structured visual scene from a defined vantage point
Catalogue: a rhetorical figure that rhythmically lists examples of a category to build intensity and emphasis. Common in epic poetry and in free verse in the tradition of Walt Whitman
CE: Common/Current Era an interculturally sensitive replacement for AD, or, Anno Domini (Year of our Lord), the calendar watershed that has oriented dates in Europe since the 6th Century and, in the last century or so, around the world
Character: a participant in the actions and events of a story
Chiaroscuro: in Italian, “light/dark,” a style of art that powerfully contrasts light and dark effects. Associated with Baroque painting, but common in the art of the early 20th Century: e.g. German expressionism and film noir cinema.
Classic: A) an exemplar of excellence in a particular genre or tradition; B) an aesthetic that features clarity, order, balance, symmetry, reason, mathematical precision; C) the ancient tradition of art, literature, and philosophy from classical Greece and Rome
Classical: A) an aesthetic valuing clarity, order, balance, unity, symmetry, and dignity, usually honoring a cultural tradition associated with some golden age of the past. B) in the Euro-American tradition, a reference to the works, styles, and themes of Greek and Roman antiquity.
Classicism: often contrasted with “romantic” folk traditions, an aesthetic associated with a social elite and a venerated past, especially ancient Greece and Rome. Characterized by clarity, order, balance, symmetry, reason, mathematical precision
Classics: in the Euro-American tradition of education and scholarship, the study of the art, literature, and thought of ancient Greece and Rome (Latin)
Closed Composition: in visual art, a static composition of elements figures that contains the viewer’s eyes within the boundaries of a stable frame
Color: a visual subject’s quality or wavelength of light. Three primary colors—red, yellow, and blue—combine to form secondary hues: orange, green, purple. Complementary colors create enhanced aesthetic resonance when placed against each other. Components of color include Hue, Value, Saturation (intensity) and Temperature.
Color Palette: the range of colors selected to compose a painting’s design
Color Temperature: a sense of warmth or chill conveyed by sheer color. Warm colors: yellow, red, orange. Cool colors: violet, green, and blue.
Comedy: for Aristotle, a drama involving characters of lower social orders who amuse us with defects or ugliness but is not ultimately painful or destructive
Complementary colors: hues which create an enhanced aesthetic resonance when placed against its opposite on the color wheel: e.g. red with green, yellow with violet, etc.
Composition: in visual art, the arrangement of visual elements for expressive and aesthetic impact: unity, proximity, similarity, variety and harmony, emphasis, rhythm, balance, etc.
Compositional Line: (AKA Directional Line) lines, forms, and arrangements that organize a visual composition in vertical, horizontal, or diagonal directions
Conflict: a core source of energy and action in many narratives, fueled by a struggle between characters whose agendas oppose each other
Content: the material projected generated by art for the reader’s mind and imagination. Content can consist of an immediate Subject—e.g. a figure in a painting or a story in a narrative—and Signification, a secondary level of thematic meaning that opens up beyond the immediate subject of art or literature.
Context: the situation of a work of art in a cultural, historical, or personal setting which shapes media, materials, techniques, and meanings for the artist and also the audience
Context Gap: an uncomfortable clash in perspective between art’s context of origin and the context from which the audience experiences it
Context of Origin: the social, cultural, and historical milieu which influence artists’ contents, compositions and themes positively and/or negatively
Contour Line: the boundary line that defines a shape or form in a visual composition. A contour line can be directly drawn or achieved merely through contrast between the colors of the subject and the background.
Contrapposto: a mimetic technique characteristic of Classical Greek sculpture which emulates the muscular exertions and unequal distribution of weight that characterize the way that human beings actually stand
Convention: an established, expected scheme of subject matters, techniques, styles, or themes which guides artists in composing works that viewers in a given context will understand
Conventional: an aspect of art which is expected and understood by the audience in a particular tradition
Couplet: a verse stanza of 2 lines, often ending in a rhyme
Courtly Love: a Medieval poetic tradition deriving from Arab verse and 12th Century French troubadours in which a poetic voice proclaims a spiritually exalted, chaste love for an unattainable beloved, often the wife of the lover’s liege lord (feudal master). A conception of transcendent sexual love that remains influential in modern culture and its arts.
Cubism: a technique which analyzes the visual subject, deconstructing it into fragmented, often geometrical forms that are reassembled into a densely interwoven composition. A muted, narrow color palette focuses the eye on forms and composition that obscure the subject, depicted from several viewpoints at once.
Cultural Aesthetic: (noun) a particular set of values regarding art, taste, and the subjective experience of beauty, ugliness, the sublime, etc. A culture, a school of artists, an individual artist, or an audience can be said to have an aesthetic.
Cuneiform: developed first for accounting, a Mesopotamian form of writing that incised marks on small clay tablets which developed into the world’s first known form of recorded literature
Depth of Field: in photography, the technique of adjusting the lenses to achieve clear focus on the foreground, the middle distance, the deep distance, or all distances at once (Infinity)
Descriptive Color: color schemes selected to accurately match the “naturalistic” hues of the visual subject as we might see it “in reality”
Diction: the choice of words which express content with rhetorical and thematic effect
Didactic: a quality of art that instructs its audience on information, ways of life, or social, moral, religious, or political principles
Discursive Narration: narration that drenches story in a flood of authorial commentary: telling rather than showing
Drama: A) a direct presentation of a story through performance, e.g. actors on stage or screen, dancers in a ballet, etc. B) A driving narrative force in which conflicts raise suspense and lead to a powerful or spectacular climax
Drama (in Narrative): a driving narrative force in which conflicts raise suspense and lead to a powerful or spectacular climax
Dramatic Irony: an ironic contrast between what a character within a story knows and what the audience has already learned. E.g. a horror story in which the audience knows that a monster is creeping up behind the unsuspecting victim.
Dramatic Monologue: a text, usually a poem, that consists solely of the comments of a story character. Despite a complete lack of exposition, action, dialogue, or authorial commentary, readers can intuit the story and ironically suggested authorial judgments.
Dramatized Narrative: narration that describes actions and events and allows the audience to make its own assessments: showing rather than telling
En Plein Aire: the practice of beginning and completing a painting on site, thus sacrificing the finished detail of a long studio process to capture the immediate impression of the scene. A hallmark of Impressionist technique.
Entoptic Imagery: visual images that arise, not from seeing external objects, but from “anywhere within the eye itself and the cortex of the brain” (Lewis-Williams, 2002, p. 126).
Epic: an extended, mythic narrative celebrating the trials and triumphs of heroes exemplifying a culture’s treasured values and orienting its origins
Epiphany: a moment of profound, transformative discovery, often a turning point or resolution of a narrative. A device consciously used by James Joyce in his fiction.
Etching: a print technique in which a design is created by applying acid to a plate, the hollow spaces of the design inked, and the design pressed onto paper
Ethos: the dimension of Greek art and thought which inquired into the character of a participant in a story
Euro-American: a broad, loosely fused term for the mainstream perspective, rooted in European cultures, which dominates, sometimes oppressively, indigenous cultures and sub-cultures in the Americas and globally
Exposition: the explanatory portion of a narrative, usually located near the beginning, which establishes the context of the story world and what readers need to know about the backgrounds of the characters
Expression: content in visual art that projects the artist’s inner vision outward, often distorting the subject in “unrealistic” ways
Expressionism: a style in art in which naturalism is replaced by exaggerated images to express intense, subjective emotion. Inspired by van Gogh, Gaugin, and Munch, the expressionist movement in painting was centered in Germany from about 1880 to 1905. Expressionism dominated early German cinema and Hollywood film noir in the 1930s.
Expressive: a dimension of visual art that projects the artist’s inner vision outward, often distorting the subject in “unrealistic” ways
Eyeline: an implied line defined by the direction stretching from the gaze of a figure in the scene
Falling Action: (or Dénouement) in narrative, the low-tension scenes in which story issues resolve themselves after the crisis of the plot’s climax
Farce: a comic genre that uses class conflict, mistaken identities and buffoonish behavior to satirize the follies of members of distinct social castes. Aristocratic characters are often portrayed as self-important, priggish fools whose hyper-moral hypocrisy leads to mockery and failure.
Figurative Language: language that departs from conventional norms in its patterns (Scheme) or meaning (Trope) to achieve a maximum rhetorical effect.
Figure of Speech: a form of expression in which language departs from conventional norms in its patterns (Scheme) or meaning (Trope) for maximum rhetorical effect.
Film noir: Dark cinema: a term coined by 1960s French film critics for films with dark themes and black and white film effects that strongly contrasted light and shadow. Characteristic of German Expressionism (1910s and 20s), Hollywood crime films (1930s and 1940s) and French post-war cinema (1940s and 50s).
Finger Fluting: a technique of composing forms and figures by drawing fingertips through soft stone or thin layers of clay on cave walls
Flashback: a temporal jump in which the narration shifts from one sequential event in a story to an earlier moment
Foreground: in 3-dimensional space, the nearer zone of vision, often a Positive Space containing figures of primary interest
Foreshortening: an illusion of depth created by contrasting the sizes of objects on the basis of how near or far they are from the eye of the viewer. E.g. a human figure in the foreground will be larger than a tall building in the distance.
Form (visual element): in visual art, a three-dimensional shape or object with height, width, and depth
Form: the elements, patterns, techniques, styles and structures that comprise the composition without regard to subjects, meanings, or values
Formal: in visual art, the elements that comprise the composition irrespective of any subject or signification: line, color, form and shape, value, texture, space, and movement
Formal Analysis: an exploration of artistic compositions that avoids questions of meaning and context and focuses on the components of the composition. In poetry, an emphasis on meter and rhyme. In Narrative, an emphasis on plot structure and point of view. In visual art, an emphasis on line, color, texture, and composition.
Formal Elements: in visual art, the elements that comprise the composition irrespective of any representation of a visual subject: line, color, form and shape, value, texture, space, and movement
Formal: in visual art, the elements that comprise the composition irrespective of any subject or signification: line, color, form and shape, value, texture, space, and movement
Free Verse: (in French, vers libre) poetry that achieves verbal rhythms through repetitive, often parallel figures of speech, Tropes and Schemes. Free verse does not establish set patterns of meter or rhyme. Ckmk
Fresco: a painting medium in which pigments are applied to wet, freshly applied plaster, which acts as a binding medium as it dries
Function: the intended role which a work of art was designed to play and its influence on that work’s form
Genre: a particular type of composition marked by expected, conventional features: e.g. Japanese haiku, Chinese landscape painting, Renaissance sonnet.
Genre painting: paintings that depict domestic scenes and elements of daily life, associated with 17th-century Dutch artists who were commissioned by house-proud patrons. Disdained by 18th and 19th Century academic artists as a lesser form.
Geometric form: in visual art, a form suggesting human artifice in precise, smooth lines, shapes, and forms such as triangles, rectangles, pyramids or cylinders
Glaze: in oil paintings, a glassy surface effect achieved by layering thinly pigmented coats over deeper hues
Haiku: a Japanese poetical genre in which 17 syllables deftly evoke a poignant, often seasonal nature scene that shifts with a cutting word into a thematic reflection on life
Harmony: a correspondence between unlike elements that contributes to overall unity
Hero’s Journey: an immensely widespread narrative template in which a protagonist is called from ordinary life to an adventure in a challenging or dangerous realm and returns bearing a treasure of some kind
Heroic Couplets: an English verse form associated with 18th Century translations of classical epics. It accommodates long, flowing passages with rhymed pairs of lines that avoid breaking down into stanzas. The meter is iambic pentameter.
History Painting: a composition which portrays a moment from a historical event, often selected to honor a classical past and support contemporary authorities. Seen by 18th and 19th Century academic artists as an exalted theme for art.
Hue: a specific color, often achieved by mixing primary colors in paint or in the colored elements of a mosaic
Humanism: A) a 14th Century shift in European culture from a narrow, exclusive focus on scripture and Church interests to a broader interest in cultural traditions, especially those of classical Egypt, Greece and Persia. B) a perspective that values and focuses on the capacities of human beings for knowledge, wisdom, and creativity.
Hyperbole: a figurative scheme that makes a point by asserting an obvious exaggeration. E.g. I must have jogged a million miles this month.
Iambic Meter: an English pattern of Meter in which each line contains 10 syllables with a rising beat: ta-Da -a-Da-ta-Da-ta-Da-ta-Da.
Iambic Pentameter: an English pattern of Meter in which each line contains 10 syllables with a rising beat: ta-Da -a-Da-ta-Da-ta-Da-ta-Da.
Icon: A) an image which signifies specific religious content for devotion and ritual. B) a Christian image of Jesus, Mary, or the saints which in the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions focuses worship and prayer. C) a Byzantine genre of Christian mosaics and paintings.
Iconography: A conventional system of significations that associate details of appearance with particular religious figures
Ideal Form: Classical Greek art: composition of a figure’s features according to principles of balance and proportion to realize the ideal human body
Illusionism: the conviction that a painting or sculpture’s most important task is to imitate the appearance of nature as naturalistically as possible
Imagery: in poetry or narrative, verbal depictions of scenes or objects that evoke vivid sense experiences for the imagination
Imagism: in poetry, a style that emphasizes concrete images that create imaginary sensations of vision or sound, usually in Free Verse, and avoids flamboyant language and abstract ideas
Imagiste: a poet or style of poetry that emphasizes concrete images that create imaginary sensations of vision or sound, usually in Free Verse, and avoids flamboyant language and abstract ideas
Imitative depiction: representation that attempts to emulate the appearance of the visual subject
Impasto: the application of oil paint, often with a palette knife, to produce thickly textured masses of color
Impression: content for a work of art that seeks to capture, not the “real thing,” but rather one’s subjective experience of the subject
Impressionism: a late 19th Century dissident movement among French artists that challenged the conventions of academic art. Impressionists painted quickly, outside in the plein air, seeking to capture with a few deft strokes the colors, lighting and atmosphere of the scene—their subjective impression rather than the “real thing.”
Impressionist: a technique of representation that seeks to capture, not the “real thing,” but rather one’s subjective experience of the subject
In Media Res: Latin for In the middle of things. Epics in the Greek tradition conventionally began with an invocation to the divine Muse, or inspiring goddess and then jumped into the action well along in the narrative, thus requiring flashbacks to explain earlier events.
Irony: an often wryly humorous, indirect mode of communication that asks the reader to compare what is said with some known or signified reference. Frequently used to puncture false pretentions, especially of the social elite. E.g. a standup comedian who relies on the audience to draw on what it knows about a celebrity to get the joke.
Landscape: a visual composition that represents outdoor scenery that may or may not include human structures. Often an exercise in perspective and depth of field, with receding zones: foreground, middle distance, and deep distance.
Line: in visual art, a 2-dimensional path through space including length but not width or depth. Line may be straight or curved, directly drawn or implied, e.g. lines of sight, suggested lines of movement, etc.
Linear perspective: the illusion of depth in a 2-dimensional image (e.g. a painting) in which contour or architectural lines angle toward a vanishing point
Lines of Sight: Implied lines of perception emerging from the eyelines of characters within a work of art. Subtle techniques by which artists organize viewers’ experience of a painting or photograph.
Lyric: a relatively short poem which expresses the deep reflections and poignant emotions of the poetic voice. Origin: the portion of ancient Greek dramas sung to the accompaniment of a lyre (harp).
Media: the methods and materials from which the work is forged, e.g. oil paint, mosaic, metric verse, prose narrative
Medium: the methods and materials from which the work is forged, e.g. oil paint, mosaic, metric verse, prose narrative
Metaphor: a trope which denotes a “non-literal” thing, idea, or action to characterize a “real” term. E.g. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” (William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 1599).
Metaphysical Poets: Dr. Samuel Johnson’s disparaging 18th century term for poets of the previous century—John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Abraham Cowley—who aggressively used figurative language and tropes to startle readers’ sense of meaning. Johnson complained that “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions. … Though [readers] sometimes admire, they are seldom pleased (Lives of the Poets” 1779). In the 20th Century, Metaphysical poets became much more highly valued in a literary community which valued exactly these forms of expression.
Meter: a disciplined pattern of sound units throughout the lines of a poem. In English verse, meter is found in the number and a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line.
Metrical Foot: a repeated metrical unit of stressed and unstressed syllables that comprise a line of verse. The most common English foot is the iamb, e.g. in Ballad Stanza: ta-Da-ta-Da-ta-Da-ta-Da//ta-Da-ta-Da-ta-Da.
Middle Ground: (or middle distance): in 3-dimensional space, a moderately distant visual zone in which figures are partially visible
Mimesis (mimetic): a function of art in which technique imitates nature as closely as possible. Often contrasted with stylized techniques
Mimesis: a representational technique in visual art that strives to imitate as closely as possible the appearance of the “real thing”
Mimetic: art that strives to imitate as closely as possible the appearance of the “real thing”
Modern: a style in the arts associated with the early 20th Century that emphasized formal design and the surface of the medium over any represented or narrated subject
Monochromatic: a restrictive color palette which features only a very few closely related colors
Monomyth: a single core narrative form that drives and shapes multiple story genres in all times and cultures. Campbell’s formula: “the universal mythic formula of the adventure of the hero” (1968, p. 21).
Mosaic: a wall or floor design composed of 1,000s of chunks of colored clay, stone, or glass (tesserae). Popular in the Greco‐Roman world and in Byzantine art.
Movement: in visual art, a component of a composition that implies or gives the sensation of activity or action and appear dynamic instead of static (article).
Museum Function: the assumption that paintings and sculptures are intended to be displayed for public reflective viewing by people who seek beauty, ideas, and interesting experiments in vision
Myth: organically rooted in a culture’s heritage, a connected web of narratives, rituals, and art that illuminate origins, shape beliefs, map the world, and guide members of the culture in proper values, behavior and navigation of the environment
Narration: the “voice” which conveys a story to its audience: a dictating voice, a cinematic camera, a dramatic painting, etc.
Narrative Voice: in literature, the patterns of technique, style, and perspective that comprise the narrating text
Narrative: a telling of a story using some medium: prose, poetry, cinema, painting, etc.
Narrator: the identity to whom we attribute a narrating voice and the point of view from which the story is told and understood. Note, single narratives can be told by multiple narrators: e.g. Emily Brontë (1847) Wuthering Heights; Wilkie Collins (1868) The Moonstone.
Negative Space: a sector of a visual composition that seems empty, devoid of clearly defined and weighted visual subjects
Neo-classical: a style of art that emulates a former classical age, generally emphasizing conventional rules, mathematical precision, and reason over passion.
Neo-classicism: art that seeks to recover the values and techniques of a classical past, generally emphasizing conventional rules, mathematical precision, and reason over passion. Dominant in Europe during the 18th and early 19th Centuries.
Oils: a paint medium that suspends and fixes pigment in a base of linseed or other oil. Oil paint dries slowly and can be worked, reworked, and applied in layers and glazes of varying levels of saturation, permitting the buildup of subtle, complex visual effects.
Organic Form: in visual art, an irregular form such as a cloud or rocky terrain that suggests natural origin distinct from human artifice
Open composition: in visual art, a dynamic composition that invites viewers eyes to carry beyond the boundaries of an open framework
Origin Story: a mythic tale which provides a framework for comprehending the development of some aspect of the heavens, the world, or human ways of living
Palette: a particular array of colors strategically selected for an individual composition to achieve an emotional, thematic, or aesthetic effect. A term derived from an artist’s decision about the colors to add to a palette for a particular session.
Paradox: a trope in which two terms in a statement seem contradictory but suggest an elusive point: e.g.: “the child is father of the man (William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up, 1802).
Parallelism: a figurative scheme which arranges phrases, clauses or sentences with the same syntactic or thematic forms.
Parietal art: markings, designs, and figures inscribed on the surfaces of caves or rock formations
Pathos: the Greek term for emotion. In ancient Greek art, the emulation of human emotion and experience within the appearance of human figures
Persona: the voice, identity, and point of view to which we attribute a literary text. In ancient Greek, the mask worn by actors on stage.
Personification: a trope which speaks of an abstract concept as if it is a person. E.g. “Because I could not stop for Death—He kindly stopped for me” (Emily Dickinson)
Perspective: in visual art, the illusion of 3-dimensional forms and spaces in 2-dimensional compositions by aligning and scaling forms to suggest depth and distance. Sometimes likened to seeing through a window
Petrarchan Sonnet: (Italian sonnet) a 14-line poem arranged in 3 stanzas that rhyme abab/abab/cdcdcd. The 1st 2 stanzas develop a theme or problem. A thematic turn between lines 8 and 9 leads to a resolution of the theme in the final stanza.
Picture Pane: the 2-dimensional visual space that comprises the surface of a painting, photograph, or mosaic. In post-Renaissance art, a painting was conceived as a plane of glass, a window that looked out on the world.
Picture Pane: the virtual window glass through which the 2-dimensional surface of a painting’s Medium—fresco, canvas, panel—”looks out” into a projected space
Playin’ de dozens: a competitive activity in traditional African American culture in which contestants exchange ritual insults and outlandish tales to earn by their wit and originality the delight and appreciation of the on looking audience. A cultural precursor to modern rap and hip hop competitions.
Plot: a meaningful sequencing of story events that builds suspense through conflict and rising tension culminating in a climactic resolution
Point of View: the viewpoint of a work of art’s content imposed on an audience by its structure and composition. In Narrative, the perspective of the narration. In a painting or photograph, the angle and scale from which the subject is depicted.
Pointillist: a painting technique developed by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac that composed an image and defined contours and forms out of thousands of tiny dots of paint
Polychromatic: a color palette with a noticeably wide range of Hue and Value
Porcelain: a ceramic body which is fired to a high heat and usually decorated with colors and covered with a glossy, waterproof glaze
Portrait: in visual art, a composition that represents a human subject as an individual, meticulously capturing physical or psychological likenesses
Positive Space: a sector of a visual composition that is filled with the weight and substance of elements of color, line, or form
Post-impressionism: a loose term for the generation of artists who followed the Impressionists and carried their techniques forward into Expression
Primary colors: hues that emerge without being mixed with others: Red, Yellow, Blue
Protagonist: (or Hero) the rival in a story’s agon (central conflict) with whom we positively identify and sympathize
Quatrain : a verse stanza of 4 lines
Radial balance: in visual composition, an equilibrium achieved by arranging elements in a visual field so they seem to radiate around a central element
Realism: an attitude of disillusioned skepticism which in art strives to represent reality as it is, questioning cultural myths and ideologies and including uncomfortable subjects that conventional art tends to overlook
Realist: A) an artist or writer who cultivated an attitude of disillusionment that probes darker aspects of life which punctures the delusions of conventional assumption. B) member of a 19th Century school of painting that respectfully but soberly depicted the lives of ordinary people in a spare, restrained style that relies on accuracy and detail to indicate unpleasant truths.
Renaissance Model: the conventional values and expectations of painting that derived from the Renaissance tradition: a conception of painting as a window on the world projecting visual space with foreshortening, linear perspective, and accurate mimesis
Representation: a function of visual art which seeks to emulate a visual subject that viewers will recognize from a theoretical “real world.” Opposite: abstract or non-figurative art
Representational: the quality of visual art which seeks to imitate the look of a subject that viewers will recognize from a theoretical “real world”
Representational Art: visual art which seeks to imitate the look of a subject that viewers will recognize from a theoretical “real world.” Opposite: abstract or non-figurative art
Rhyme: a pattern of repeated sounds, usually the final syllable in the ends of verse lines
Rhyme Scheme: within a poem, a repeated pattern of sounds that end lines, defining stanzaic boundaries and shaping a poem’s themes. Designated for analysis by letters: e.g. a-b-a-b, in which a-lines and b-lines end in rhyming words.
Rhythm: an artistic effect generally achieved by repetition of forms. In figurative language, patterns of Scheme which repeat sounds or ideas. In poetry, patterns that arise from repeated elements such as rhyme and meter. In visual art, a sense of movement arising from repeated elements in the composition
Rhythmos: in classical Greek art, the artistic emulation of the patterns of motion in the body during the performance of an action
Romantic: committed to the late 18th and 19th Century reaction against Neo-Classical reason which sought to liberate the individual human imagination and embrace its passions, dreams, and irrational visions as sources of wisdom.
Romanticism: A) a reaction against Neo-Classical Reason that seeks to liberate the individual human imagination and embrace its passions, dreams, and irrational visions as sources of wisdom. B) as an aesthetic, a rejection of strict artistic rules and convention in favor of organic form and innovation. C) often, advocacy for folk traditions that have been despised by classical elites
Satire: a narrative or drama that ironically imitates a well-known model with caricatures and distortions that point up the humorous or dark sides of the original
Saturation (color): a color’s brightness or dullness due to the intensity of the pigment
Scan: to analyze the Rhyme and Meter of a poem
Scheme: repeated patterns of expression that enhance the rhetorical effect of the text: e.g. alliteration, anaphora, catalogue, parallelism
Secondary Colors: hues formed by mixing other hues—e.g. red + yellow = orange
Sestet: a verse stanza of 6 lines
Sfumato (smoke): in painting, a subtle form of brushwork that blends tones, colors, and forms so that they seem to melt into each other. Leonardo characterized his technique as one “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke.”
Shakespearian sonnet: (English sonnet) a 14-line poem arranged in 4 stanzas that rhyme abab/cdcd/efef/gg. The 1st 3 stanzas develop a theme or problem. A thematic turn between lines 12 and 13 sets up a powerfully compact couplet that packs the force of a punch line.
Shape: in visual art, a two-dimensional figure with a more or less defined border displaying only height and width
Sightlines: in visual art, arrangements of elements that lead the viewer’s eyes in a controlled direction. Often suggested by the eye lines of figures in the composition
Sign: a visual or textual representation that is understood within a context to stand for some other thing or meaning
Signification: a secondary level of thematic meaning that opens up beyond the immediate subject of art or literature. E.g. the keys held by the figure of St. Peter in a Christian icon signify Christ’s promise that Peter would hold the keys to heaven and earth (Matthew 6.19).
Simile: a trope that explicitly compares a “literal” with a “figurative” term, usually indicating the comparison with like or as: e.g. “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (William Wordsworth, “Daffodils” (1807).
Sonnet: a 14-line lyric poem that explores a theme in stanzas with a thematic turn either between lines 8 and 9 (Petrarchan/Italian Sonnet) or between lines 12 and 13 (Shakespearian/English Sonnet).
Spiritual, The: a dimension of the arts which evokes a mysterious human inwardness that yearns to transcend life & death and connect with forces of creation
Spondee: a metrical foot pairing stressed syllables: e.g. JACK SPRATT … Spondees are generally exceptions to the dominant metrical pattern and serve to slow the rhythm for emphasis.
Stanza: a division of the poem rather like a prose paragraph. Stanzas are labelled according to their number of lines and are often, but not always, defined by rhyme schemes.
Stele: a slab, usually of stone, that marks a grave or boundary and commemorates the authority, victories, and achievement of a ruler or a regime
Still life: a genre of painting, drawing, or photograph arranging inanimate objects such as fruit, flowers, pottery or furniture, usually in an interior scene
Story: a connected series of events and actions that play out in a world projected by a narration
Story World: the narrative “reality” of time, place, character, and event in which a story plays out
Style: a consistent pattern of choices regarding form and technique that comprise an identity for an artistic tradition, movement, or individual vision
Stylized: a representational technique that depicts the idea of a visual subject through simplified, exaggerated, or conventional forms rather than through meticulous mimesis
Stylized Art: art that represents the idea of a visual subject through simplified, exaggerated, or conventional forms rather than through meticulous mimesis. Examples: animation, cartoons, caricatures, traditional figures in many cultures
Subject: the immediate content projected by a work of art: e.g. a figure depicted in a painting or a story event in a narrative
Sublime: an aesthetic effect in art in which the viewer or reader experiences awe, even fear in a representation that (safely!) carries the imagination into danger, terror, darkness, solitude, or infinity.
Suggested Movement: in visual art, the suggestion of movement in the frame based on the viewer’s knowledge. E.g. a viewer looking at a painting of a car chase will expect the cars to be moving.
Symmetrical Balance: in visual art, an equilibrium achieved by aligning elements of similar weight and scale in a visual field on both sides of an implied central vertical or horizontal axis
Tempera: a paint medium that fixes pigment in egg yolk to produce vivid effects. Popular in Europe before the development of oil paint, tempera dries quickly, compelling the painter to work rapidly and limiting the possible effects.
Texture: in visual art, the illusion of surface feel either of A) the represented object (e.g. textures of clothing) or B) of the artifact’s media (e.g. canvas weave, brushstrokes, daubs of paint)
The Spiritual: a dimension of the arts which evokes a mysterious human inwardness that yearns to transcend life & death and connect with forces of creation
Theme: a pattern of thought, value, and reflection which signifies meaning beyond the specifics of the content in a work of art
Torah: Hebrew scriptures are divided into three sections, Torah, (books of the law), Nevi’im, (books of the prophets) and Ketuvim (books of wisdom). Torah, later known to Greek and Latin scholars as the Pentateuch, consists of the first 5 books of both Hebrew scripture and the Christian Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
Torch Song: derived from the phrase to carry a torch for someone, a song lamenting the pain of lost love. Often a ballad which dramatizes the despair of a woman in thrall to a no-good man, though the gender roles can be reversed. The lamenting lover suffers from infidelity, neglect, or even violence.
Totem: a sacred symbol or spirit animal that invokes a ritual or religious tradition and may be associated with a family, clan, or tribe
Tragedy: according to Aristotle, a drama which inspires pity and fear when a hero we care about comes to a bitter end that grows out of a tragic flaw (hamartia)
Tragic Flaw: the fault of character in an otherwise worthy hero which triggers a chain of events ending in the character’s doom
Tragic Hero: a protagonist who comes to a grievous end because of a tragic flaw which leads logically and inexorably through the events of a plot
Troche: in English meter, a falling, 2-syllable foot in which the stressed note comes first: TA-da.
Trope: a figure of speech that plays on meaning so that the implied message differs from the ordinary sense of the expression. E.g. hyperbole, irony, metaphor, paradox, personification, simile.
Turn: in a Sonnet, a thematic shift, often a contrast, between the themes of the earlier and closing stanzas
Unity: the “wholeness” of composition, parts working together creating one total picture – a seamless composition
Unity: the degree to which elements in a work of art come together in an integrated whole
Unreliable Narrator: a narrative voice that gives evidence of being unstable, untrustworthy, either because of intentional misrepresentations, mental instability, or ordinary subjective bias
Value: the degree of lightness or darkness of a composition’s colors or texture
Vanishing point: in visual composition, a distant point at which lines converge, suggesting depth and a horizon. E.g. twin lines of a railroad track converging to create the illusion of distance
Veduta (View): common in the Italian Renaissance, an interior portrait scene with a window in the back wall opening onto a landscape in the distance
Verbal irony: a suggestion of sense that exceeds or deviates from the plain sense of a literary expression. E.g. when Dr. Martin Luther King envisions freedom in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, and “every hill and molehill of Mississippi,” he ironically lists without explanation places deeply steeped in Southern racism (I have a Dream Speech, 8/28/1963).
Virtual Space: in 2-dimensional visual art (paintings, photographs) the illusion of depth and distance projected “into” the image from the picture pane.
Visual Subject: in visual art, the figure or scene conveyed by the composition, e.g. a land-scape, an individual in a portrait, a dramatic scene, a person in a portrait
Vital Questions: Three core elements of the arts which we can always use to focus our readings: context, content, form
Visual Composition: the arrangement of visual elements for expressive and aesthetic impact