Art glossary
Terms that help you read an artwork
Short explanations without academic weight, linked to works where each idea can be seen rather than merely memorised.
- Attribution
- The process of identifying an artwork’s maker, date, and origin through documents, technique, and expert study. See examples →
- Avant-garde
- Art that deliberately breaks with established rules to invent a new visual language. See examples →
- Baroque
- Seventeenth-century art marked by dramatic light, movement, contrast, and emotional intensity. See examples →
- Composition
- The arrangement of figures, lines, shapes, and empty space that directs the viewer’s eye. See examples →
- Contrapposto
- A standing pose in which weight rests on one leg, creating a counter-rhythm between hips and shoulders. See examples →
- Curator
- A specialist who researches artworks and shapes them into an exhibition or interpretive route. See examples →
- Fresco
- Painting with water-based pigment on fresh wet plaster. See examples →
- Genre
- A stable subject category such as portrait, landscape, still life, history painting, or everyday scene. See examples →
- Impasto
- Paint applied thickly enough for brush or knife marks to remain visible. See examples →
- Impressionism
- Painting of changing light, open colour, visible brushwork, and modern life. See examples →
- Installation
- Art that organises objects, sound, light, and space into one viewer experience. See examples →
- Medium
- The material and process used to make a work, such as oil, tempera, marble, print, or photography. See examples →
- Modernism
- A broad group of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century movements that rethought form, material, and representation. See examples →
- Performance art
- Art made through action, with body, time, presence, and audience relations as its materials. See examples →
- Perspective
- A system for creating depth on a flat surface through lines, scale, colour, and atmosphere. See examples →
- Post-Impressionism
- Diverse paths after Impressionism, including Cézanne’s structure, Van Gogh’s colour, and Gauguin’s symbolism. See examples →
- Provenance
- The documented history of an artwork’s ownership and movement over time. See examples →
- Renaissance
- The culture of rebirth that joined classical learning with observation, humanism, and perspective. See examples →
- Sfumato
- The soft blending of contours and tones, closely associated with Leonardo da Vinci. See examples →
- Symbolism
- Art in which visible images point toward dreams, myths, ideas, or inner states. See examples →
- Texture
- The actual or suggested character of a surface: smooth, rough, layered, or visibly brushed. See examples →
- Triptych
- An artwork formed from three related panels intended to be read together. See examples →
- Value
- The relative lightness or darkness of a colour or tone. See examples →
- Chiaroscuro
- The modelling of volume and drama through contrasts and transitions of light and shadow. See examples →