| Art of the 1900s composed of distorted or unrecognizable forms of persons, places, or things as imagined by the artist | Abstract Art |
| American art movement of the 1940s and 1950s that emphasized color, the physical properties of paint, and the way that paint interacts with the canvas, especially dramatically large canvasses | Abstract expressionism |
| Study of beauty and the psychological responses to it, especially the branch of philosophy dealing with art and all its creative sources, effects, and forms | Aesthetics |
| Dense translucent marblelike stone often used for carving | Alabaster |
| Drawing done in transparent watercolors | Aquarelle |
| Arabic for an elaborate, decorative design of intertwined flowers or foliage | Arabesque |
| Metal or wire framework constructed by the sculptor for use as a support for clay and other plastic material in the modeling process | Armature |
| Popular style of design of the 1920s and 1930s characterized by geometric shapes—it derives its name from the 1925 exhibition in Paris, Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes | Art Deco |
| French term literally meaning “new art” for a style of art featuring curvilinear lines and swirling motifs and nicknamed “whiplash,” “tapeworm,” and “cigarette-smoke style” | Art Nouveau |
| Early 20th-century group that used motifs such as garbage cans and other images of the seamier side of everyday American life | Ashcan School |
| French term for an artist’s studio or workshop | Atelier |
| French term for creators of new ideas, especially used for artistic and literary advances | Avant garde |
| Group, or school, of French landscape artists of the 1830s named for a village in France | Barbizon school |
| Term from the Portuguese barroco for “an irregular shaped pearl” designating a style in art and architecture from about 1600 to 1750 marked by elaborate ornamentation | Baroque |
| French term for any work in which the figures project slightly from the surface in which they are cut or shaped | Bas-relief |
| French term for fine arts | Beaux arts |
| Unconventional, nonconforming person, especially an artist, writer, or intellectual | Bohemian** |
| Piece of sculpture portraying the head, shoulders, and upper chest of a person | Bust |
| Greek manner of painting that was the dominant style in 13th-century Italy | Byzantine art |
| Carving in relief on certain gems | Cameo |
| Latin term for the device Vermeer was thought to have used consisting of a dark chamber with a lens through which an inverted image is projected upon a screen | Camera obscura |
| Woven cloth used as a medium for a painting | Canvas |
| Drawing that distorts a subject’s distinctive features for a grotesque or humorous effect | Caricature |
| Italian city famous for the white marble quarried by Michelangelo | Carrara |
| Method of shaping an object, as a bronze or plaster reproduction of a statue modeled in clay, by pouring a liquid into a mold and allowing it to harden | Casting |
| French term for a masterpiece, especially a work of art | Chef d’oeuvre |
| Italian term for “clear and dark” designating the balanced use of light and shadow in a picture | Chiaroscuro |
| French term for the lost-wax process (short for moulage à cire perdue, literally meaning “mold on lost wax”) | Cire perdue |
| Art work made by pasting small pieces of varying materials onto a surface | Collage |
| Early 20th-century realistic style of art that is the opposite of abstract art | Concrete art |
| Person who preserves, reconditions, and restores works of art | Conservator |
| Style of painting and sculpture developed in Paris in the early 20th century and characterized by the reduction of subjects into geometric structures | Cubism |
| Person in charge of a museum or library | Curator |
| Movement in painting, sculpture, and literature that defied convention and stressed absurdity and was named by French poet Tristan Tzara from the French word for “hobbyhorse” | Dada (Dadaism) |
| Dutch term meaning “the Style,” designating an abstract art movement characterized by rectangular forms and the use of primary colors—it takes its name from that of a journal founded in 1917 by Piet Mondrian and Theodore van Doesburg | De Stijl |
| Two-paneled altarpiece | Diptych (Pronunciation: 'dip-(")tik) |
| Statue of a discus thrower | Discobolus |
| Tour guide and lecturer, as at a museum | Docent |
| Tripod, or 3-legged stand, that holds an artist’s canvas as he or she paints | Easel |
| Picture or statue of Christ wearing a crown of thorns | Ecce homo |
| Type of paint that covers pottery | Enamel |
| Process of making a print from a metal plate on which a design with a small chisel has been made—see etching | Engraving |
| Process of creating a design on metal with a needle, placing the plate in acid, inking the plate, and then producing the design on paper— | Etching |
| Artistic style in which traditional ideas of naturalism and realism are forsaken to focus on intensely felt human emotions and exaggerated imagery | Expressionism |
| Early 20th-century movement marked by the use of bold, often distorted forms and vivid colors, named from the French for “wild beast” | Fauvism |
| Painting technique in which thick, pasty paint is applied by the digits of the hand lines | Finger painting |
| Art originating among the common people of a region and including everyday items completed by those untrained and unschooled in art | Folk art |
| Large water color painting in wet plaster or the art of making such a painting | Fresco |
| Display room in a museum or a room used as a photographer’s studio | Gallery |
| French term for a realistic style of art illustrating scenes of everyday life | Genre |
| Gold leaf applied to surfaces and then burnished | Gilding (gilt) |
| Glassy coating applied to earthenware pottery | Glaze |
| French term for a method of painting on paper with opaque watercolors | Gouache |
| Art of Greece before the Roman conquest | Hellenic art |
| First group of American artists to develop a characteristic style of landscape painting, named after a New York river and active from about 1825 until about 1875 | Hudson River School |
| Particular shade or tint of a given color | Hue |
| Italian term meaning “paste” designating a painting in which the paint is applied thickly on the canvas | Impasto |
| Style of painting developed in France in the 1870s characterized chiefly by short brush strokes of bright colors to represent the effect of light on objects | Impressionism |
| Design carved below the surface on certain gems | Intaglio |
| High-temperature oven used to glaze pottery | Kiln |
| Uncomplimentary term for works of art considered to be ostentatious or in poor taste | Kitsch |
| Drawing or painting of scenery | Landscape |
| Cave discovered in 1940 in France whose prehistoric art dated at about 17,000 years old was considered the most significant until the discovery of the Chauvet Cave | Lascaux Cave |
| Technique for casting bronze known in French as cire perdue | Lost-wax process |
| Italian for “my lady” identifying a work of art depicting the Virgin Mary | Madonna |
| 16th-century European style of art characterized by idealized figures and distortion of realistic proportions | Mannerism |
| Rock formed from limestone by heat and pressure and used in buildings, monuments, and sculptures | Marble |
| Small detailed portrait of a person or landscape that developed from the medieval art of illuminated manuscripts | Miniature |
| Simple style of art using basic elements and primary colors | Minimal art |
| Three-dimensional sculpture featuring several objects suspended at different levels so that they move in the wind | Mobile |
| Composition or design made by overlapping or superimposing a variety of other pictures or designs on a surface—similar to collage | Montage |
| Picture or pattern made in a wall or floor by inlaying small bits of variously colored material in mortar | Mosaic |
| French term for the process of making a mold or cast, especially with plaster of Paris | Moulage |
| Large painting executed directly on a wall or ceiling | Mural |
| Building used to preserve and exhibit objects that are artistic, historical, or scientific | Museum |
| Close adherence to depicting subjects as realistically and accurately as possible in art | Naturalism |
| French term for still life | Nature morte |
| French term for a small object of artistic value | Objet d’art |
| Natural mineral composed of iron oxide mixed with clay and sand, ground to a fine powder and used as red, brown, or yellow pigments by cave painters | Ochre (ocher) |
| Lifetime output of an artist | Oeuvre |
| Style of abstract painting that utilizes geometric patterns or figures to create various effects such as the illusion of movement | Op (art) |
| Japanese art of folding paper to form flowers, animals, and other decorative shapes | Origami |
| Any of various alloys resembling gold and used to decorate architectural features and other objects, especially cast bronze used to decorate furniture | Ormolu |
| Thin board on which colors are placed and mixed | Palette |
| French term for a collage formed by pasting layers of objects onto a canvas | Papier collé |
| French term for a mixture of paper and glue that is easily molded into various shapes when wet | Papier mâché |
| Drawing made with a chalklike crayon consisting of a dry paste of ground pigments mixed with gum | Pastel |
| Painting that portrays rural life, especially in an idealized manner | Pastoral |
| Stand holding a sculpture, especially a bust | Pedestal |
| Curved support shaped like an inverted triangle and used to support a dome over a square space | Pendentive |
| Italian term for the appearance of lines that come into view in a painting with the passage of time as the oil becomes transparent and usually referring to a mark left by a painter’s alteration | Pentimento |
| Technique of representing 3-dimensional objects on a plane surface so that they appear in painting as they do in nature | Perspective |
| Painting or sculpture that portrays the Virgin Mary mourning over the dead body of Christ | Pietà |
| Calcined gypsum that is mixed with water and used for making molds and sculptures because it sets quickly | Plaster of Paris |
| French term for a style of painting done outdoors, as did the impressionists in the 19th century | Plein-air |
| Postimpressionist method of using small dots of paint to create colors | Pointillism |
| Art of the late 1950s and ‘60s depicting with irony such objects as soup cans | Pop art |
| Painting of a person | Portrait |
| Style of late 19th-century artists who revolted against the objective naturalism of impressionism, placing emphasis on the artist’s subjective viewpoint | Postimpressionism |
| Early 20th-century style or school of architecture most closely identified with Frank Lloyd Wright, a style that emphasized horizontal lines in response to the flatness of the Midwestern landscape | Prairie Style (School) |
| Initials for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of 7 young English painters and poets who united in London in 1848 in order to protest the current formal academic art | PRB |
| Red, yellow, and blue colors from which all other spectrum colors can be mixed | Primary colors |
| Art style having a simple, unschooled approach to painting | Primitivism |
| Art and technique of making prints, especially by engraving, etching, or woodcut | Printmaking |
| Picture of a person drawn so that only one side of the face or body shows | Profile |
| American art movement of the 1930s in which artists focused on individual differences of a particular area of the country | Regionalism |
| Museum staff member who records the description of each object received | Registrar |
| Sculpture attached to a flat background | Relief |
| Monogram Rembrandt used to sign his early works (from Rembrantus Harmensis Leydensis) | RHL |
| Italian term for the 15th century used to denote the Renaissance and especially the Italian Renaissance style of art | Quattrocento |
| Depiction of things as they really are | Realism |
| French term for the process of making sculpture by hammering thin sheets of metal over a wooden form | Repoussé |
| 18th-century style of art and architecture that evolved from the baroque and is characterized by elaborate ornamentation and gracefulness—it derives its name from the French word rocaillefor “shellwork” or “pebblework” | Rococo |
| Style of art in Europe from about 1820 to 1900 characterized as emotional, imaginative, and picturesque | Romantic(ism) |
| Art of creating 3-dimensional forms by carving wood, chiseling stone, molding clay, etc. | Sculpture |
| Orange, green, and purple colors produced by mixing 2 of the primary colors | Secondary colors |
| Italian term for a style of painting in which different tones fade into one another, a Leonardo da Vinci technique that blended colors so that harsh outlines were blurred | Sfumato |
| Picture consisting of a black shape like a shadow against a light background | Silhouette |
| Hasty drawing made as a preliminary study of a painting | Sketch |
| Large stationary abstract sculpture | Stabile |
| Drawing or painting of inanimate objects, such as a bowl of fruit | Still life |
| 20th-century literary and artistic movement that stresses the significance of the unconscious and juxtaposes seemingly unrelated objects | Surrealism |
| Italian term for a painting process using egg-based pigments to produce a dull finish | Tempera |
| Italian term for hard, brownish-red unglazed earthenware | Terra cotta |
| Cubes of colored glass, cut stone, or tile that are placed together to form a mosaic | Tesserae |
| Three-dimensional sculptures made by trimming trees or shrubs into the shapes of animals and other objects | Topiary |
| Three-paneled painting | Triptych |
| French term, literally meaning “a trick of the eye,” used to describe a type of painting that creates a strong illusion or visual deception | Trompe l’oeil |
| Point in a drawing or painting at which parallel lines appear to converge in the distance | Vanishing point |
| Italian term for an artist specializing in realistic scenes, or vedute, especially cityscapes | Vedutista |
| More common name of the armless statue found on the island of Melos in 1820 and often called the “Aphrodite of Melos” | Venus de Milo |
| Thin, transparent layer of paint, usually watercolor, applied with even, sweeping movements of the brush | Wash |
| Pigment or coloring matter ground with a water-soluble binder, such as gum arabic | Watercolor |