Arts & Art History - Valparaiso

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: the Terracotta Army at Xi'an, China. These are full-scale pottery models of some seven thousand warriors, the army of emperor Shi Huangdi who ruled in the 3rd century BC. The collection is considered by many to be the eighth wonder of the world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 color and finish.

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.

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

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

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
French enamelist and goldsmith, considered the greatest of his day. He was an important figure during the transition from late Romanesque to early Gothic style.

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 Chambers Biographical Dictionary
His extant frescoes in the Church of Our Saviour of the Transfiguration at Novgorod (from 1378) are some of the finest examples of Russian medieval art, fusing Byzantine and Russian influences and inspiring a new generation of artists around Novgorod.