Art History Textbook

About Art History Textbook

Art is a highly diverse range of human activities engaged in creating visual, auditory, or performed artifacts— artworks—that express the author's imaginative or technical skill, and are intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power.

The oldest documented forms of art are visual arts, which include images or objects in fields like painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, and other visual media. Architecture is often included as one of the visual arts; however, like the decorative arts, it involves the creation of objects where the practical considerations of use are essential, in a way that they usually are not in another visual art, like a painting. 

Art may be characterized in terms of mimesis (its representation of reality), expression, communication of emotion, or other qualities. Though the definition of what constitutes art is disputed and has changed over time, general descriptions center on the idea of imaginative or technical skill stemming from human agency and creation. When it comes to visually identifying a work of art, there is no single set of values or aesthetic traits. A Baroque painting will not necessarily share much with a contemporary performance piece, but they are both considered art.

Despite the seemingly indefinable nature of art, there have always existed certain formal guidelines for its aesthetic judgment and analysis. Formalism is a concept in art theory in which an artwork's artistic value is determined solely by its form, or how it is made. Formalism evaluates works on a purely visual level, considering medium and compositional elements as opposed to any reference to realism, context, or content. 

Art is often examined through the interaction of the principles and elements of art. The principles of art include movement, unity, harmony, variety, balance, contrast, proportion and pattern. The elements include texture, form, space, shape, color, value and line. The various interactions between the elements and principles of art help artists to organize sensorially pleasing works of art while also giving viewers a framework within which to analyze and discuss aesthetic ideas.


Table Of Content :

1 Thinking and Talking About Art
2 Prehistoric Art
3 Art of the Ancient Near East
4 Ancient Egyptian Art
5 Art of the Aegean Civilizations
6 Ancient Greece
7 The Etruscans
8 The Romans
9 The Byzantines
10 Islamic Art
11 Art of South and Southeast Asia Before 1200 CE
12 Chinese and Korean Art Before 1279 CE
13 Japan Before 1333 CE
14 Native-American Art Before 1300 CE
15 Africa Before 1800 CE
16 Early Medieval Europe
17 Romanesque Art
18 Gothic Art
19 The Italian Renaissance
20 The Northern Renaissance
21 The Baroque Period
22 South and Southeast Asia After 1200 CE
23 China and Korea After 1279 CE
24 Japan After 1333 CE
25 The Americas After 1300 CE
26 Oceania
27 Africa in the Modern Period
28 European and American Art in the 18th and 19th Centuries
29 Europe and America from 1900-1950 CE
30 Global Art Since 1950 CE



The eBooks app features allows the user to :

Custom Fonts
Custom Text Size
Themes / Day mode / Night mode
Text Highlighting
List / Edit / Delete Highlights
Handle Internal and External Links
Portrait / Landscape
Reading Time Left / Pages left
In-App Dictionary
Media Overlays (Sync text rendering with audio playback)
TTS - Text to Speech Support
Book Search
Add Notes to a Highlight
Last Read Position Listener
Horizontal reading
Distraction Free Reading



Credits :

Boundless (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0))

FolioReader, Heberti Almeida (CodeToArt Technology)

Cover by Designed by new7ducks / Freepik

Pustaka Dewi, www.pustakadewi.com