Art History | Austin Artists Market

Samurai Art

Samurai Art can be represented by posters, paintings, prints, figurines, or even samples of calligraphy related to the Samurai culture. Posters are probably the most popular and affordable articles of the modern world, but some of them can be from the old times and may not worth a fortune but still be more substantial collector’s …

Medici Villas

The Medici family had a suite of fourteen villas near Florence, of which the most important were situated in Careggi, Castello, Fiesole, and Poggio a Caiano; in the sixteenth century, the family also acquired a villa in Rome. The Villa Careggi, in what is now a northern suburb of Florence, is the creation of Cosimo …

Gothic Art

To define Gothic art is a complex undertaking, so diverse is the geographical and chronological reality that it covers, from the mid 12th c. to the Renaissance. It was precisely at the Renaissance that the term appeared, to express the disdain felt in those times for forms considered as barbarous as the Goths to whom …

Classical Greek Pottery

Most ancient Greek pottery forms were made primarily for local use and are found almost exclusively near where they were produced. Local coarse wares, used primarily in the household, are ubiquitous. A few fine wares, such as Corinthian and Attic, were widely distributed in the Mediterranean at different times and are exceptions. The Etruscans, in …

Classical Greek Sculpture

Awareness of Classical Greek sculpture (ca. 480–330 B.C.) was for many centuries based upon ancient literary texts describing works of art and statues produced during the Roman Empire that were identified as copies or originals of ancient Greek sculpture. Direct knowledge of Classical sculpture based upon examples found in Greece only began in the late …

11 Most Famous Fakes in Art History

Art forgery has been around since, well, art. The ancient Romans crafted thousands of copies of Greek sculptures; ancient China is noted for its wide variety of forgeries, and modern art has seen more than its share of falsified work. Some forgeries are innocent enough, usually created by students copying a master, but others were …

A Brief History Of Watercolor

The oldest painting medium Chemically watercolors are pigments made from ground minerals and dyed inert powder, held together generally with gum arabic made from the acacia tree. Watercolors capture luminosity and offer a range equal to and often exceeding that of other mediums. Watercolor is transparent yet can be made opaque, either for accent or …

What is Flemish Art?

Painting, graphic art, and sculpture produced in an area similar in size to that of modern Belgium and Luxembourg, formerly known as the Southern Netherlands. Flemish art assumed a major role in the history of European art during the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. The largest county in the Southern Netherlands was Flanders and the term Flanders may be used to refer to the whole of the Southern Netherlands, just as Holland has often given its name to the whole of the Northern Netherlands.

Tempera Painting

Tempera was the most used technique from the 12th or early 13th century until the 15th, when it began to give way to oils. It is type of painting medium used to bind pigments. Etymology for tempera is from latin word temperare “to mix colors, temper, or regulate”. Tempera, also known as egg tempera, is a permanent fast drying painting medium consisting of colored pigment mixed with a water-soluble binder medium (usually a glutinous material such as egg yolk or some other size).

Art criticism – Subjectivity and Objectivity

To criticize a work of art is to make a judgment of its overall merit or demerit and to support that judgment by reference to features it possesses. This activity is of great antiquity; we find Aristotle, for example, relating the excellence of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to the excellence of its plot construction. Criticism became …