(LEA) Art Gallery

Art Gallery

AP Art Gallery

This review has been designed to help you narrow down the most important works of art covered in this Module. It is NOT meant be a replacement for reading the text, but to serve as a supplement. You are responsible for keeping up with the reading in your text as well as provided supplemental readings/websites.

The Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was a period of scientific and intellectual awakening. The Enlightenment met the church head on, tackling previously avoided issues. People began to question anything.

Four Areas Where Significant Change Occurred Were:

  1. Religious: Questioning of Catholic beliefs and Protestantism led to tolerance for new ideas.
  2. Intellectual: Free intellectual inquiry resulted from widespread opposition to religious intolerance. The French revolution led to 'age of reason'. Educational institutions free of religious allegiance also spread.
  3. Economic: Industrial revolution, move away from agrarian fiefdoms led to an increasingly wealthy, independent and educated middle class.
  4. Political: Nation-states emerged, ruled by kings and parliaments. Parties and factions who have legitimate differences of opinion.

Characteristics of Rococo Art and Architecture

  • Decoration based on arabesques, shells, elaborate curves.
  • Asymmetrical compositions.
  • Pastel colors.
  • Light-hearted rather than weighty subject matter.
  • Aristocratic men and women in idyllic surroundings.

Social, Scientific, Intellectual and Emotional Changes: Late 18th to Early 19th Centuries

  • Imperialist expansionism
  • Industrial revolution
  • Growth of urbanism and capitalism; rise of the aristocracy
  • Enlightenment thinking: an emphasis on reason and science
  • Rousseau and the age of sensibility: an emphasis on spontaneity and naturalism
  • New models of the human being
  • Two political revolutions: American and French
  • Defeat of the aristocracy and rise of the middle class

Artistic Responses to these Changes: Changes in the Subject and Techniques of Art

  • Art responds to the new patron (the aristocracy): a change in subject matter and a change in style (rococo)
  • Use of new materials: affects architecture in terms of scale, form, and building types
  • New interest in the relative value of past historical periods leads to:
    • Use of style to communicate values (revivalism)
    • Deliberate attempt to use art to communicate moral and political messages: a second change in style (neo-classicism)
    • Sense of instability in the social environment: a third change in style (romanticism)

Review the Later Europe and Americas I works in the Art Gallery presentation below.

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