Rococo

      Rococo was a decorative 18th century European style, which was the last expression of the baroque movement. It pushed to the extreme the principles of illusion and theatricality, an effect attained by dense ornament, asymmetry, fluid curves, and the use of white and pastel colors combined with gilding, drawing the eye in all directions. The style of Rococo was mainly architecture but also influenced painting, sculpture, literature, music, and theatre. Some famous Rococo artsists consist of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Henrietta Johnston, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, François Lemoyne, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Thomas Gainsborough, Jean-Baptiste Pater, and many more.






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Johannes Vermeer

      Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. There are 38 pieces of art attributed to him. There are a lot of sharp edges in his paintings and there is a nice contrast of dark and light colors in all of his paintings. All of the artwork I took a close look at had people in it. All of those people are extremely life like with great facial expressions.

Vermeer art

Vermeer art

Jan Van Eyck

     Jan van Eyck was an Early Netherlandish painter who lived  in Bruges. He is often considered one of the founders of Early Netherlandish painting and one of the most significant representatives of Northern Renaissance art. The materials he used were oil paints.  Van Eyck has painted many religious commissions and portraits of Burgundian courtiers, local nobles, churchmen, and merchants. After looking at this painting closely, I can obviously tell that this painting is of a couple. The woman is pregnant and they probabaly want the child because the man is holding the woman’s hand which symbolizes his care for her. 

Giotto

      Giotto was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic or Proto-Renaissance period. The painting that I viewed had a weird form of perspective. The angels at the top particularly stood out for me. Some were pointed almost completely down. I’ve never seen that angle used in anything before. Some were also pointed up. I have seen something like that before. One person also had his arms completely spread out which seemed strange to me. I can’t figure out why.

Gargoyles and Grotesques

             A gargoyle is a decorative sculpture that diverts water away from buildings. A grotesque is a very ugly, or comically distorted, creature or image.

Gargoyles 

Grotesques

Early Medeival Celtic Designs

Byzantines and Mosaics

Byzantine Art

          The Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, was the continuation of the Roman Empire in the East during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinople. Byzantine art that is still in good shape today is mostly religious. They followed traditional models that translate church theology into artistic terms. Mosaics were the main media, and figurative sculpture very rare except for small carved ivories. A mosaic is a piece of art or image made from the formation of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials. Most mosaics are made of small, flat, rough square, pieces of stone or glass of different colors. This is known as tesserae.