Maite's Art History

Gothic Painting

2008-06-11T00:13:00.000-07:00

Wall painting, largely developed during the former period disappeared with this style arrival. Gothic architecture introduced big wall so the space formerly devoted to painting was substituted by stained glasses. At the same time, the height of the vaults made impossible to paint them. Due to these reasons painting on wood flourished during this period, especially in altarpieces.

Altarpieces had an evolution during the period. At the beginning they consisted of just one piece but later on mobile lateral pieces were added. These made possible to close the altar. During the 14th century the most common is a rigid altarpiece with several parts. In this model, there is a base of smaller size than the rest of the woods, the bank or predella. The rest is organise horizontally in bodies and vertically in streets, separated by inter-streets. The technique used in these works is temple, in which egg or glue obtained from animal bones is used to prepare the colours. From the 15th century and on oil painting, which uses oil to link the colours and invented by Flemish painters became the most used.

In the evolution of Gothic painting there are four periods: Lineal Gothic or French Gothic (13th century), Italian Gothic or Trecento (14th century), International style (14th century) and Flemish style (15th century).

Lineal Gothic or French style.
It began in the 13th century and continued until mid 14th, living together with the Italian Gothic at its end. It is characterised by the importance given to the drawing lines, which are those limiting the colour masses. These colours are intense, being this intensity more important than the hues. In the subjects there is a trend to naïf naturalism, simple scenes, easy to be understood. It searched for a gentle art, related to the thinking way of the time. The main depictions appear in wall painting, wood painting and miniature.

Italian Gothic or Trecento.
It appeared in Italy in the 13th century and expanded all over Europe in the 14th. There is an interest for deepness that led to pay attention to classical perspective, to study the human body and importance is given to the light in relation to the colours. On the other hand, the development of Franciscan religiosity led to the depiction of the feeling, trying to move the spectator. Each work adopt an intellectual character. In the 13th century in Tuscany Christ is depicted in a very stylised way with his body curved and painted on a wood with cross shape in which the lateral parts are wider to paint other smaller characters. There are also elongated woods arranged as altarpieces with the image of the saint in bigger size in the centre while the rest of the images are organised in bands. In Siena and Florence there are others schools where the basis for the following Renaissance are settled.

The most important artist is Giotto. In Spain the Italian influence can be found. In Aragon the influential school was that of Siena while in Castile it was the Florentine.

International style.
With this style started the pictorial evolution of the 15th century even when its beginnings are at the end of the 14th, reaching to its peak at mid century, while Renaissance started to develop in Italy. This style appeared in Central Europe from the fusion of the forms of the lineal Gothic and the Italian Gothic. Its main characteristics are the importance given to the anecdote and the expressive, the stylization of the images, the recourse to the curved line in the abundant draperies and the movement, the trend to introduce apparently naturalistic details but with a symbolic character. All this is made with a detailed technique. This style had an important development in the courts of Berry and Burgundy, and with especial interest in the miniature, which is the basis for the Flemish style. In Spain this style had an important influence in Aragon, with schools in Valence, Catalonia and it was also developed in Castile.

Flemish style: Primitive Flemish painters.
It began at the end of the first quart of the 15th century and it is an evolution from the international style. The main characteristic is the use of oil to link the colours, which supposed the apparition of oil painting. With this colours are vivid, more brilliant, transparencies can be created and composite colours appear. Works acquired complexity and detail. Anything can be depicted, the same a human feature that a sinble plant. This style evolved during the period. The most representative authors were Jan Van Eyck and Roger Van der Weyden. In Spain this style was largely developed with works of great quality mainly in Catalonia but later on it expanded to Valence, Balears , Cordoba and Castile.

Gothic Sculpture

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Although Gothic followed Romanesque chronologically, there is a break in all Art orders and sculpture is not an exception. From the Romanesque hieratic sculpture evolved to the naturalism. Things are depicted as they are, not with a symbolic value. Gestures and attitudes became human and reflect the worries of any person.

This humanization and location in time and space can be seen even if with opposite signs in the two most representative images of Gothic sculpture. The Virgin with the Son appears as a happy and lovely mother who pays attention to her Child. It is easy to discover smiles in their faces. On the contrary, Christ appears in pain, as a normal man facing his death.

The gothic sculpture characters in that humanization process, abandoned vertical, symmetric and hieratic positions to adopt others more mannerist and with great sense of realism. The same as other artistic styles, gothic had an evolution from the first classicism of the 13th century where they pursue of the serene beauty of the idealised naturalism to a mannerism that can be seen in the stylisation and elongation of the images with bended gestures. This is characteristic in the 14th century. Finally, during the last period it was coincident with the beginnings of the Renaissance with aboundance of sculptures of kings, bourgeoisies and aristocrats.
During the classical period it continues with the monumental sculpture heir of the Romanesque, mainly in the façades and particularly in the jambs, archivolts and trumeaus.
In the façades the distribution changed: the tympanum continues being the place for Christ in majesty but now it is a more human person. Sometimes the Virgin occupies that central position. The last judgement almost disappear and in its place, in different bands, the Virgin or Christ life’s episodes are depicted. Jambs continue being the places for saints and the trumeau for Christ, the Virgin or any other saint. In the archivolts it is common to find natural elements such as plants and leaves or human depictions. The same rules are followed in the cloisters.
A new sculptoric field is that of the sepulchres, that can be of two kinds: linked to the wall, below an arch or exempt, as a funerary bed, separated from the wall, where the characters are depicted laying or praying. It is common to find this kind of sculptures in chapels inside the churches.
Wood gained importance as a sculpture matter, mainly for the chairs of the choirs, the altarpieces and pulpits.

Iconography
It depicts mainly religious subjects, being the most common:
· Christ life: all the Passion scenes, mainly in the Cross. He appears with the crown, the purity cloth, three nails because the two feet are together, abundant injuries. The body looks to have weight and falls down, transmitting an image of pain.
· Virgin: She acquired a leading role. She is depicted mainly with the Child, as a mother, young, pretty, idealised. She shows great humanity.
· Hagiographies: There are scenes of the lives of saints, with a special interest for martyrdoms.
· Fantastic animals: The new ones are the monsters used for the gargoyles.

Geography
In France the main works are those related with the great cathedrals’ portals, as are the cases of the Royal Portal in Chartres, the Golden Door in Amiens, Reims. In all of them the tympanums are important but the most significative images are those of the jambs, very human and showing communication one with another.

At the end of the Gothic there is an important sculptor: Claus Sluter, who worked for the Duke of Borgoña. He is the best representative of the anguish of the late middle Ages. One of his most famous works is that of the Champmol Cartuja where he realised the tomb of the duke mentioned above and other important works. All of them are famous due to their pathetic expressions.

In Germany an important work is that of Bamberg Cathedral, with the Portal of the Princess, and the portraits of the nobility in Nuremberg Cathedral.

In Italy Gothic sculpture is characterised by its classicism that never lost during the middle ages. Among the better-known artists is Nicola Pisano, who worked in Pisa’s Baptistery.

In Spain the sculpture received French influence. The best examples are the portals of the cathedrals. Leon’s portals are considered to be a good example of the gothic sculptural programmes. During 14th century sculpture began its decadence and there are regional differences.

Gothic Architecture

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Technically Gothic architecture led to the end of the innovations of the former period and assuming Byzantine influences. The cathedral is the main building in which the architect realised a complex and perfect structure, standing on pillars and covered with ribbed vaults, of great height and precise combination of supports to transmit all the strengths to the floor. This structure is clear, full of light, thanks to the use of the flying buttress that liberated the wall so that it was possible to open wide windows.

The buildings has two main axes: the longitudinal one leading to the altar, with the main nave and the aisles that continue around it forming an ambulatory that can be double, and the vertical underlined by the pillars. The repetition of supports increases the tension once approaching to the crossing, where the church expands in the transept. After that it is common to find a higher number of aisles.

The elevation of the church is similar to that of the pilgrimage Romanesque churches, with a first floor in which different naves communicate with arches and pillars and in which light coming from the sides enters indirectly in the main nave. The second floor is the triforium, with the corridor over the aisles overlooking the central nave and finally there is the clerestory, which proportions direct light to the nave, creating an illusionist effect.

Gothic architecture has three main characteristics: walls become transparent due to the number of windows covered normally with stained glasses. In relation to this, the building, apart from its function, pursues beauty in general. The building is a combination of supports and clear structure, with the elimination of the non essential mass.

But European world had changed: civil and human elements substituted the religious ones. Cities are more important than monasteries. Richness and power are concentrated in the cities and in some social groups such as the bourgeoisie, that soon became and Art costumer. Apart from churches a new typology of buildings appeared.

Cities where governed by an oligarchy who needed a place from where they could direct the destinies of their cities. Council houses were of paramount importance in this moment. There is a double typology. In the Netherlands where life was quiet, buildings are courtesan, elegant, full of windows and decoration but without any defensive element. On the other side, Italian buildings are stronger, with less windows and a dominance of the wall, even with crenelations at the top and a very high tower from which they could control all the area around to prevent any attack. This bear witness to the lack of security in one region full of independent republic that not always had a pacific relation.

Related to the new activities are the storeys, in which internal wide spaces are designed in order to contain products and be the place where exchange transactions were hold. This is the case of the lonjas .

In addition of these buildings, influential social sectors commanded palaces related to their status.
Gothic style developed all over Europe and we can distinguish a series of geographical particularities:

France

The distinctive characteristic of French cathedrals, and those in Germany and Belgium that were strongly influenced by them, is their height and their impression of verticality. They are compact, with slight or no projection of the transepts and subsidiary chapels. The west fronts have three portals surmounted by a rose window, and two large towers. The east end is polygonal with ambulatory and sometimes a chevette of radiating chapels. In the south of France, many of the major churches are without transepts and some are without aisles.

Britain

The distinctive characteristic of English cathedrals is their extreme length and their internal emphasis upon the horizontal. It is not unusual for every part of the building to have been built in a different century and in a different style, with no attempt at creating a stylistic unity. English cathedrals sprawl across their sites, with double transepts projecting strongly and Lady Chapels tacked on at a later date. In the west front the doors are not significant. The West window is very large and never a rose, which are reserved for the transept gables. The west front may have two towers or none. There is nearly always a tower at the crossing and it may be very large and surmounted by a spire. The distinctive English east end is square.
Italy

It uses polychrome decoration, both externally as marble veneer on the brick facade and also internally where the arches are often made of alternating black and white segments. The plan is usually regular and symmetrical and has few and widely spaced columns. The proportions are generally mathematically simple, based on the square, the arches are almost always equilateral. It may include mosaics in the lunettes over the doors. The facades have projecting open porches and ocular or wheel windows rather than roses, and do not usually have a tower. The crossing is usually surmounted by a dome. There is often a free-standing tower and baptistery. The windows are not as large as in northern Europe and, although stained glass windows are used, the decoration is fresco or mosaic.

Germany

It is characterised by huge towers and spires. The west front generally follows the French formula, but the towers are taller, and if complete, are surmounted by enormous openwork spires. The eastern end follows the French form. The distinctive character of the interior of German Gothic cathedrals is their breadth and openness. Cathedrals tend not to have strongly projecting transepts. There are also many hallenkirke without clerestory windows.

Spain

Spanish Gothic cathedrals are of spatial complexity. They are comparatively short and wide, and are often completely surrounded by chapels. Spanish Cathedrals are stylistically diverse. Influences on both decoration and form are Islamic architecture, and towards the end of the period, Renaissance details combined with the Gothic in a distinctive manner. The West front resembles a French west front. There are spires of German style. There are few pinnacles. There are often towers and domes of a great variety of shapes and structural invention rising above the roof.

Romanesque Painting

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Wall painting
The technique used is fresco. It was based on the preparation of the pigments diluted in water with withwash. These pigments were applied to the wall in which a layer of plaster have been given to prepare it. The drawing was done while this matter was humid so once it was dry it acquired strength and resistance.
The same as the sculpture, painting is integrated with architecture. It does not imitate nature but it follows a rational conceptualization. Due to this images are flat, elongated and without perspective. The characters appear in order, with different sizes depending on their hierarchy. Eyes and hands are disproportionate because they are the most expressive parts of these images.
Colours are intense and brilliant (red, yellow, orange, blue) and they are distributed in bands of great contrast among them. Black colour was used to limit the images.

There are not many examples of Romanesque painting even when probably every church was not completed until its walls were painted. In Spain there are two different currents: the Byzantine and the Mozarabic. The Byzantine reached Spain through Catalonia coming from Italy or the English miniaturist who worked in Sicily, while the Mozarabic was common in all the territories of Castile and Leon.
The iconography of the painting depends on the place it occupies. It is common to find the dome of the apse with the depiction of Christ Pantocrator or the Virgin. A good example of this are the churches of Taull. In San Climent the Pantocrator appears inside the mandorle, blessing, his left hand holding a book in which it is written Egon sum lux mundi, this is, I am the Light of the World, and the alpha and omega, first and last letter of the Greek alphabet in both sides. He is sitting on a line that represents the celestial orbit, with his feet standing on a small line depicting earth. It is very stylised, with long face, hands and feet. Colours are flat and are limited by black lines. The way of trying to add some deepness to the image is with black lines. Around him appear the depictions of the Four Evangelists and, at a lower level, the Virgin and Saint, each of them in a niche very irregular. The wall is painted in bands of different colours. In Santa Maria of Taull we find a similar distribution but the top part is reserved for the Virgin with her son and, around them, the Three Wise Men.
In Castile the most important example is the Royal Pantheon in San Isidoro. In this case even the location of the paintings change because there are the vaults of a building. There is a kind of horror vacuii and every single space is full of images. A majority of them are religious, as the Pantocrator and the Angels with the Shepherds. But apart from this, there are also laic images as those of the calendar, depicting people doing the normal agrarian activities of each month. In this case colours are a bit different, with a clear dominium of the red over the rest.
Other supports
Painting on wood was especially developed in Catalonia. It frequently appeared on the front of the altars, in a kind of small altarpieces. It used the technique of the temple. Its iconography is exactly the same as that of the wall painting and so are the colours too.
It existed a painting on paper or parchment. This was different in his thematic from the others. The target readers of books were literate people so they could read the Bible and did not need any simple explanation in paintings. In these books the depictions are more complicated or even courtesan subjects will appear. These books were elaborated in monasteries.

Romanesque Sculpture

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Characteristics

Romanesque sculpture has its antecedents in barbarian art, Byzantine sculpture, Greek-Latin legacy (hieratic, symbolic and supra-natural) and the late Roman sculpture at once with the paleo-christian sarcophagus, from where it took its iconography.

The works are subordinated to the architectonic frame. The places for sculptural decoration are the portal, and the capitals. Those spaces are the natural limit for monumental sculpture and relief and the depictions must accommodate to the frame.

Formally, it is disconnected from the real world. It is symbolic and allegoric, looking for the expression of the religious content. Images are intentionally deformed trying to impress emotionally; simple and stylised images, sometimes geometrical or even abstract; it refuses the depiction of the naked human body and all the images are covered by clothes; there is not a canon nor any proportion neither equilibrium between mass and weight; images are rigid, hieratic, full of solemnity and elongated to stress their spiritual character. Technically they appear to be primitive, with a certain archaism; there is not movement; composition and scenes are in the same plan, without forming groups. It lacks of volume and images are flat and symmetric, with a dominance of frontality . This plastic is directed to the mind, with a great intellectual charge, due its didactic aim.
Themes and iconography
It is inspired and determined by the church. There is a hierarchy of the subjects that can be seen in the spaces occupied by the images, with different visual relevance. The inspiration comes from the pre-Romanesque miniature and the Byzantine ivories that suggest models, attitudes and compositions. Themes are taken from the Old Testament or the hagiographies or saints biographies. These moral lessons were completed with allegories of the sins, vices and virtues, trying to imbue the plastic with ideas or concepts that impress the popular conscience.
The portal is the chosen place for the main scene: in the tympanum we can see the Pantocrator or Christ as a judge, involved in the mystical mandorla, surrounded by the four evangelist or their symbols (lion is Mark, the angel is Mathew, the ox is Luke and the eagle John). The Last Judgement is frequent and the twenty-four wise men of the Apocalypse may appear completing the scene.
Other subjects are the Virgin or the Christmon, a symbol depicting the Holy Trinity. In addition to this, the jambs are the place for elongated sculptures of saints or other motives while the archivolts are decorated with geometric motives or human figures adapted to the frame.
In addition to the big sculptural programmes of the doors and the capitals of the cloisters, there are exempt images in polychrome wood or ivory. There are two main depictions: Christ on the Cross or Maiestas Domini and the Virgin with the Child.
Christs are represented in the cross and they are characterized by their rigid hieratic gesture, their composition and their geometrical disposition, with four nails, very open eyes and serene attitude, far from any sufferance or pain.
The Virgin with the Child has the similar formal characteristics. It may appear as Theotocos (God’s mother with the Son, who adopts an adult’s gestures) or as a throne for God (Theotronos) or also as Kiriotissa (Virgin in the throne, rigid and with the son in her lap, not looking at her, of Byzantine influence).
In conclusion, Romanesque sculpture has an allegorical character and strong expression. The dominium of the didactic over any other aspect influences in its apparent technical simplicity and formal primitivism. The role of the church is determinant so it is also the mystic and religious content that separate this art expression from the worries about perfect beauty. The supernatural world is the expressive atmosphere of the Romanesque, far away from terrene and natural world. Hieratic and solemn images justify the expression of immutability of Christian faith. Technically Romanesque sculpture evolved towards a greater naturalism and dynamic composition so that the new expressivity will fit with the new social, economic and cultural context that appeared with the Gothic.

Romanesque Architecture

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Romanesque architecture presents a great regional variety determined by the traditions of each European territory it developed in. It was founded on the subtract of Roman antiquity, with which German countries influences were mixed. At the beginning there were different styles, known as pre-Romanesque but about the 11th century there is a certain unification of the style.
Basically, it is religious architecture, with dominance of the church in which we can find the two characteristics that gave solidity to the movement: monumentality, creating wide spaces and durability, doing something eternal, linked to the divininity.

Church
The plan of the building is Latin cross, with three or five naves, being the central one higher and wider than the lateral. The transversal nave is called transept and the intersection point is the crossing. In pilgrimage churches the apse tended to be surrounded by an ambulatory in which pilgrims could spend the night. In the façade it is normal to find high towers, the same as over the crossing. At the feet of the church is the nartex. The plan of the church may vary and be substituted by central plans.
The elevation of the building presents naves of different high, being the main one the central. When the central nave has two floors, the second one is called tribune and has a corridor overlooking the central nave. Over the crossing is common to find a tower, sometimes polygonal, called ciborium.
The foundations of the buildings tend to be solid and deep because the strong walls of the building demand it. Walls are thick and reinforced in the outside by buttresses. This need for supports made difficult to open windows. At the same time, the existence of such a wall demand a lot of decorative elements, such as pilasters, blind arches, Jaca’s taqueado, or modillions.

Cover systems evolved from the wood lintelled covers to stone made barrel vaults, that are divided by fajon arches. Where two barrel vaults cross transversally it appears a rib vault. Apses are covered with a quarter of sphere vaults. Domes standing of squinches or trumps can be used too.
Internal support system: weighty covers are sustained by the walls and strong pillars and columns. The classical Romanesque pillar has a central-squared-body to which different columns are linked complicating its section. In the outside there are buttressed corresponding with the internal pillars. The capitals are full of relieves, narrating Biblical passages.
The façades or portals are at the feet of the church and in both sides of the transept. They are normally limited by towers. These façades are coincident with the internal distribution of the building. It is common to be formed by several arches decorated, the same as the tympanum inside them.
The cloisters are characteristic of the monasteries. It is an squared courtyard with a covered gallery sustained by semicircular arches.
Romanesque architecture symbolised the house of God. There are elements linked to both, human and divine. In general, circular parts such as the axis or the vaults are considered more perfect because of their shape. The relation among apse, nave and tower represent the union of the holy and human worlds. The nave is an squared construction with four angles, symbol of the earth (four elements, four seasons, four cardinal points).
Apart from that, the Romanesque symbolism is related to the light too. The church has its head oriented toward the East, the place from where the sun shines. In the same way, the altar in the apse is Christ’s light that illuminates the humans to rescue them from the dark.

Other buildings
Other important Romanesque building was monastery. It was organised as an small celestial city and consisted of different dependencies: church, cloister, monks’/nuns’ houses, hospital, refectory or dinning room, capitulary room for meetings, scriptorium for working in manuscript copying, library.

Castles were the most important of civil constructions. They were essential in this period due to the lack of security of the moment. They were built in areas easy to defend and frequently in mountains from where it was easy to observe the surroundings. Walls were strong and there was a protective wall all around the circuit ending in crenelations at the top. Inside there were different dependencies organised around a courtyard. The residence of the lord of the castle was the homage tower.

A construction directly related to pilgrimage were bridges. They were built to make it easier to pilgrims to continue with their journey. Normally they were a bit elevated in the middle.

Geography

France

Romanesque appeared in France, around Cluny abbey. From there it expanded following the pilgrimage routes, mainly Santiago. It has several styles: in Provence they used domes and façades decorated with arches; in Auvergne they have long choir, and side aisles around the semicircular sanctuary forming an ambulatory in which radiating chapels were open. In Burgundy buildings were barrel-vaulted and with three aisles. In Normandy there are Lombard influences with groined vaults supported by flying buttresses and façades with two flanking towers.

Italy
Italian provinces developed a great diversity of architectural styles. Lombardy was known by its groined vaults of heavy proportions. In central Italy decorative elements were classical: Corinthian capitals, coloured marble, open arches, colonnades and galleries and façades with sculptures. In the South Romanesque combined with Byzantine and Arabic influences, using mosaics and interlaced pointed-arches.

It was common to find separate buildings: the cathedral, the campanile or bell tower and the baptistery in three separe buildings.

Germany
Churches were planned on large scale and they were very high. They had an apse at each end and there was frequent to find round or octagonal towers in them.

England
Before the 10th century churches were made of wood and stone buildings were of small proportions until the Norman style replaced the Saxon style in 11th century. Buildings are long and narrow, with heavy walls and piers, rectangular apses, double transepts and deeply recessed portals. The naves were covered with flat roofs, later replaces by vaults, and side aisles were covered with groined vaults.

Spain
The first Romanesque appeared in Catalonia, influenced by Lombardy and France. The rest of Spain received this style through the pilgrimage. Catalan churches present an exterior of ordered volumes, decorated with Lombard bands and blind arches and galleries. The inside is divided into three naves with a small narthex and the hear presents triple apse.
Santiago’s route was important for the expansion of Romanesque art. The pilgrimage churches had a plan with three to five aisles and a transept in which there were radial chapels. Inside there is a tribune and it has ambulatory. Sometimes buildings can be polygonal, influenced by the Temple who was inspired in Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre.
In Castile and Leon there is an important influence of pilgrimage routes and the churches are identified with the spirit of the Reconquist. Buildings are simple and small, in contrast with the Muslim architecture.

Islamic Architecture

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Islamic architecture took, synthesized and expanded the traditional methods of construction. This architecture is based on the use of poor materials locally found but that covered with decorative elements resulted in an effect or richness and monumentality.
Islamic architecture synthesized Byzantine, Christian, Copts and other elements. They lacked of a personal style so they took it from the different areas under their control. The main characteristics are:
· Buildings are not very high and they integrate with the surrounding landscape. Horizontality is dominant, the same as in their haimas.
· The most important building is the Mosque, that is at the same time, meeting and pray centre. In addition, they built palaces, mausoleums, medersas, and other buildings.

· Materials commonly used are brick and masonry, combined with wax, wood or, exceptionally, stone.
· There is not a big interest in building problems. Buildings tend to be cubic volumes covered with spheres and minarets and towers.
· The column and pillar continue being the main support, but due to the light covers, they do not need to be too strong, and tend to be slim.
· Vaults are of great variety: domes, ribbed vaults, gallonaded, pierced.
· From the Visigoths they took the horse-shoe arch that combined with the polylobulate, ogive horse-shoe. In addition, they have polychrome voussoirs.
· Especial taste for internal decoration, sometimes done in materials of poor quality. The subjects could be plants, animals, calligraphy or others, and colour had an important role. It is abstract frequently.
· In decoration human figure does not appear normally. Anyway, it was not forbidden by religion and there are examples of this, especially in non religious buildings.

The Mosque
It is the main building of Islamic art. It is the place for praying and has just a few needs. It is a wide space, free of impurities, sometimes even open, looking at La Mecca. Its structure consists of the following parts:
· Sahn or courtyard, opened and discovered, surrounded by arches or a wall and with a fountain or sabil in the middle.
· The minaret or tower to call to the community.
· The pay room or haran, perpendicular to the wall or quibla or wall in which the mihrab or holiest part of the builing is.
· The maxura or space near the mihrab reserved for the caliph.
· The mimbar or pulpit from which spiritual leaders read the Coran.
· The Iwan or vaulted rooms closing the courtyard around the Mosque in three sides.
There are several types of mosques with local characteristics. Materials can also vary due to the different regions and chronology because they continue being built even nowadays.

Other buildings are:

Madrassa or medersa: it was the Koran school. It was linked to a mosque and normally counted with several rooms were the students lived.

Caravanserai: it was a kind of hotel for both people and animals. There were on the commerce routes and were simple buildings, protected against the elements, which tended to have two floors: the bottom one for animals and products and the top one for people.

Fortress: they were common to protect cities. There were built in a stepped area easier to defend. They were surrounded by a wall and could have crenelletions at the top.

Palaces: they were luxurious residences. Their structure would vary depending on the area and the period in which they were built.

Houses: They were simple and they consisted of two different parts, a common one to receive visits and the private one. They were organised around courtyards.

Bridges: They were a public work but sometimes they were covered.

Other buildings: there was a quite wide variety but some of the most original are those used for keeping and containing water. Being a group of population coming from the dessert it is easy to understand the special care for such an important element.

Hispanic-muslin art
There are different manifestations, with several styles.
The first is the Caliph style, being its main building Cordoba’s mosque. It has all the parts of a mosque but the most important is the hypostyle room, with several naves divided by slim columns in which stand the double-coloured arches.

Almohad and Almoravid style: it is directly linked with the North of Africa. The main manifestation are towers as the Giralda and palaces such as the Aljaferia, in Saragossa.
Nazari style: the most characteristic building is the Alhambra palace. Organize around a series of courtyards, it appears as the perfect combination of architecture and nature. Decoration is extremely important and there is an especial trend to include water in the building.
Mudejar style: it was that of the Muslins living in Christian territory. They used the same structural elements with an important use of brick. Buildings could be churches, as in San Martin, in Teruel.

Roman Painting

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It is mainly wall painting on plaster. The best examples were found in Pompeii, where four different styles are distinguished and due to this they are known as Pompeian styles.

The First Style was largely an exploration of simulating marble of various colours and types on painted plaster. the wall was divided into three horizontal, painted zones crowned with a stucco cornice of dentils based upon the Doric order.

The Second Style in Roman wall painting emerged in the early first century B.C., during which time fresco artists imitated architectural forms purely by pictorial means. In place of stucco architectural details, they used flat plaster on which projection and recession were suggested entirely by shading and perspective; as the style progressed, forms grew more complex. There are visual ambiguities to tease the eye, painted masonry, pillars, and columns that cast shadows into the viewer's space, and more conventional trompe l'oeil devices. Objects of daily life are depicted in such a way as to seem real, with metal and glass vases on shelves, and tables appearing to project out from the wall. The intention of the owner was to create a kind of picture gallery, with the choice of subjects most likely based on the quality and renown of the original paintings.

The Third Style during Augustus' reign, rejected illusion in favour of surface ornamentation. Wall paintings from this period typically comprise a single monochrome background—such as red, black, or white—with elaborate architectural and vegetal details. Small figural and landscape scenes appear in the centre of the wall as a part of, not the dominant element in, the overall decorative scheme.

The Fourth Style in Roman wall painting, considered as a baroque reaction against the third is generally less disciplined than its predecessor. It revives large-scale narrative painting and panoramic vistas, while retaining the architectural details of the Third Style. The colours warm up once again, and they are used to advantage in the depiction of scenes drawn from mythology.

Among the technical characteristics we can signal the elaborate methods employed by wall painters, including the insertion of sheets of lead in the wall to prevent the capillary action of moisture from attacking the fresco, the preparation of as many as seven layers of plaster on the wall, and the use of marble powder in the top layers to produce a mirror like sheen on the surface. Preliminary drawings or light incisions on the prepared surface guided the artists in decorating the walls a fresco (on fresh plaster) with bold primary colours. Softer, pastel colours were often added a secco (on dry plaster) in a subsequent phase. Vitruvius informs us about the pigments used by the Roman artist. Black was drawn from the carbon created by burning brushwood or pine chips. Ochre was extracted from mines and served for yellow. Red was derived either from cinnabar, red ochre, or from heating white lead. Blue was made from mixing sand and copper, and then baking the mixture. The deepest shade of purple was by far the most precious colour, as it was usually obtained from sea whelks.

Mosaic was other example of Roman art directly related to painting. These works were common in the decoration of luxurious villas and the subject represented in each of them used to be related to the function to which the room was devoted. They were made of small pieces of coloured stones that could be regular or irregular. A good example is the Villa of Casale in Piazza Armerina.

Roman Sculpture

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The most original fields of Roman Sculpture are portrait and historical relief. Anyway, this was not an obstacle to be combined with Greek and Hellenistic influences.
Greek influence was noticeable at the end of the Republic (2nd- 1st centuries BC). The same as in architecture, the models influenced Roman artists. The admiration of the upper classes towards Hellenistic plastic and the fact that many Greek sculptors were working in Rome supported this influence. Greek plastic was considered as a model of beauty and copies proliferated. Thanks to it was possible to know classical artists’ work.
Roman Portrait
It is the most characteristic element of Roman sculpture, the distinctive one. For the Romans, sculpture depicts realism and the sculptor’s mission is not to depict just beauty but to reproduce nature, reality. In front of the abstraction of perfect characters, Romans preferred the depiction of real people, with their real features, even if there were not nice. Artists did not aim at showing their technical mastery but to honour the authorities. This explains the fact of the artists being anonymous.
Roman realism has its root in several points. The first of them is the fidelity pursued by the Etrurian in their funerary portraits and the tombs painting. This led them to realise masks of the dead people that were the model for future images. These busts were kept in the houses to be honoured. Other element is the practical sense of Romans that encouraged them to depict things as they are. The interest for bearing witness of the things that had happened pushed an interest for history and narration that imbued plastic arts. Finally, individual portrait was widely developed during Hellenism and this was a model for the Romans.

Characteristics
Romans cultivated all kind of portraits: bust, half body, full body, head, and any positions: standing, sitting, and equestrian. This last one was reserved for emperors. The portrayed characters are always people important in Roman society, mainly emperors, who could be depicted in different ways. The materials, disposition, folders of the clothes and other elements evidence Greek influence but what is original is the extraordinary realism of the portrayed people, maintaining their hard character or their expression in addition to the psychological elements. Until the 2nd century there were polychrome effect but them they changed for monochromic depictions and the eyes started having volume to depict the pupil.
Evolution
The development of Roman portraiture is characterized by a stylistic cycle that alternately emphasized realistic or idealizing elements. Each stage of Roman portraiture can be described as alternately "veristic" or "classicizing," as each imperial dynasty sought to emphasize certain aspects of representation in an effort to legitimize their authority or align themselves with revered predecessors. These stylistic stages played off of one another while pushing the medium toward future artistic innovations.
Republican period (until 1st century BC)
Portraits were made just to the neck. Giving emphasis to the head. After that they continued with the bust. They were made of bronze or stone and polychrome. A majority of the artists were Greek. Portrayed characters are seldom private or public, showing gravity and serenity. Faces are energetic, strong and determined, even when public portraits present a certain idealization to underline the virtues of the subject. The most highly valued traits included a devotion to public service and military powers, and so Republican citizens sought to project these ideals through their represe ntation in portraiture. Public officials commissioned portrait busts that reflected every wrinkle and imperfection of the skin, and heroic, full-length statues often composed of generic bodies onto which realistic, called "veristic” portrait heads were attached. The overall effect of this style gave Republican ideals physical form and presented an image that the sitter wanted to express.
Imperial period (2nd half of 3rd century)
Since Rome became an Empire sculpture suffered a transformation and so did portrait. Classical Greek idealism was more influential. Official portrait is idealized, trying to show the grandeur of the character, mainly divine, even without losing their own physical features or character expression. The prototype was established during August’s times. The emperor appeared as a god, his hair falling in an irregular way on his forehead, the face always shaved. With the Flavians and on (2nd century) realism appeared again, hair had more volume, they had beard and chiaroscuro effects were used. There are monumental portraits, with great variety: Thoracata, as emperor or victorious general (Augusto of Prima Porta), Togatae wearing as a civilian or with the classical toga; apotheosis, with a divinised image, almost naked and crowned with laurel; equestrian, riding a horse (Marco Aurelio).

During this period feminine portraits were common too, with especial attention given to hairstyles and a realistic depiction of women.

Depending on the dynasties we can find:
Augustan and Tiberian portrait tradition of classical and idealized features that carried a strong "family" resemblance. However, during the reign of the emperor Claudius (r. 41–54 A.D.), a shift in the political atmosphere favored a return to Republican standards and so also influenced artistic styles. Portraits of Claudius reflect his increasing age and strongly resemble veristic portraits of the Republic. This trend toward realism eventually led to the characteristic styles of the second imperial dynasty: the Flavians.
With the Flavians portraiture characterized by a return to a veristic representation that emphasized their military strengths. Portraits of Vespasian, the founder of the Flavian dynasty, similarly show him in an unidealized manner. During the Flavian era, sculptors also made remarkable advancements in technique that included a revolutionary use of the drill, and female portraiture of the period is renowned for its elaborate corkscrew hairstyles.

With Trajan the cycle continued with his portraits (r. 98–117 A.D.), who wanted to emphasize symbolic connections with Augustus and so adopted an ageless and somewhat idealized portrait type quite different from that of the Flavians. His successor Hadrian, however, went a step further and is noted as being the first emperor to adopt the Greek habit of wearing a beard. The textual interplay that was developed in the treatment of Flavian women's hairstyles was now more fully explored in male portraiture, and busts of the Hadrianic period are identified by a full head of curly hair as well as the presence of a beard.
The Antonines modeled their portraits after Hadrian, and emphasized (fictional) familial resemblances to him by having themselves portrayed as never-aging, bearded adults. Continued development in Roman portrait styles was spurred by the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus (r. 177–92 A.D.), whose portraits feature new levels of psychological expression that reflect changes not only in the emperors' physical state but their mental condition as well. These physical embodiments of personality and emotional expression later reach their fullest realization in the portraits of the Severan emperor Caracalla.
Caracalla is shown with a short, military beard and hairstyle that were stippled across the surface of the marble for a "buzz-cut" effect, also called "negative carving." He is also shown with an intense, almost insane facial expression, which evokes his strong military background and, according to some scholars, reflects his aggressive nature. This portrait type is credited as having a profound effect on imperial portraiture in the turbulent years to follow his reign, and many of the soldier-emperors of the third century sought to legitimize their rise to power by stylistically aligning themselves with Caracalla. As time went on, these stylized aspects became increasingly prominent, and soon a pronounced attention to geometry and emotional anxiety permeated imperial portrait sculptures, as evident in the bronze statue of Trebonianus Gallus. This increasing dependency on geometric symmetry and abstraction contributed to the highly distinctive portraiture utilized by the Tetrarchy.

Low Empire (mid 3rd century to 5th century)

During this period there was a reaction against classicism. Delicate volume disappeared, facial expression is intensified but simplicity is underlined, at once with hieratic gestures. All sense of proportion and taste for detail disappeared. Dehumanization, monumentality and schematization are the features of the period. The works appear to be archaic, aspect in which they linked to Bizantian models. The most important example is Constantine the Great.

Historical relief
It symbolised the aim of depicting Roman immortality. The last tradition of presenting the exploits of the warriors and the desire of depicting them in stone reached its last expression. It is propagandistic. It is present in several buildings, subordinated to architecture (columns, arches, and sarcophagus).
They used pictorial effects such as perspective to create effects of deepness. Characters are located in different plans and landscape elements are included. It developed mainly during the Empire. The most important examples are Ara Pacis made to honour Augusto and his family. Tito’s Arch it is definitely propagandistic; Traian Column with the whole surface covered as pursued by horror vacuii, deepness, perspective and landscape are present. Other field for relief sculpture were the sarcophagus, that could vary from simple medallions to full scenes associated with the buried character. Christians used a more simple model, with immortality symbols.

Roman Architecture

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General Characteristics
In opposition to the Greek, Roman space is something interior, in which the person can be. Buildings are closed. Beauty and sumptuous are mixed with practical. In addition, architects are engineers and urbanites too. This can be seen in the importance given to cities as the economic and political centre. The function of the urbanism is triple: solve the problems of the development of the cities (water supply, sewer system, transport, squares, defence); the psychological effect of impressing the rest of the world and, finally, to ease the colonization of the territories they dominated.

The solution given by urbanism is rational, quick and clear. They adopted the squared plan, with two axis that cut each other perpendicularly (cardum and decumanus) in which integration appears the foro or place where public buildings are concentrated. Its origin is the military camp and the hypodamic plan designed by the Greeks.

Romans used the semicircular arch and the vault to cover the spaces. This solution did not eliminate the lintel. In some cases they put the lintel over the arch, creating effects of great dynamism. The vault system is varied: rib, barrel, semi-spherical, quarter sphere, and others. It is especially important the use of the dome.

Romans assimilated Greek forms: they adopted the three orders even when in a more ornamental than functional way. Frequently they combined them in a superposition glued to the wall with decorative value. In addition, they created two new orders: the Tuscan that is similar to the Doric but without lines in the shaft, and the composite, that combines Ionic and Corinthian in the capital.

Materials are ashlar with different combinations, brick and mortar or concrete, a poor and cheep material formed by mixing different stones and sand. It was called Opus cementitium. This material allowed them to built colossal and strong constructions that were decorated with paintings, mosaics or by covering them with marble.

Typologies
Religious architecture: the temple. Religiosity was based on a complex mythology in which they combined their own goods with those of the countries they dominated. Besides, they practised a domestic religion, with familiar gods (manes and lares) to which they offered their respect. The model of temple follows the Greek plan with some differences: there is only a portico with columns in the façade where there is the only entrance to the temple. It tends to be pseudo perypteral, this is, columns are linked to the walls around the building. It has the triple Etruscan cella, completely closed by blind spaces between columns. The stairs around the temple are substituted by a high podium that is elongated in the façade with the stairs. Examples are Fortuna Viril and Maison Carrée.

They were also other kind of temples, with circular plan, similar to the Greek tholos, as Vesta’s Temple, but the main of these construction is Agripa’s Pantheon, devoted to all the gods.

Civilian architecture: Roman genius had its maximum expression in public buildings: basilicas, baths, theatres, amphitheatres, triumph arches. They tended to be located around the forum.
The basilica was an administrative and commercial building. It was a meeting space. The model was inherited from Greece. It has rectangular plan and consists of a central nave (with windows in the upper part to illuminate the interior) and two smaller at both sides, lower and narrower, separated by columns. The wall of the end is semicircular, creating an apse. The cover was barrel vault. Example: Majencio’s Basilica.

Baths are buildings created for hygiene and spare time. They are monumental with great variety of services: libraries, massage rooms, and the three main rooms: frigidarium for cold water, tepidarium for warm water and caldarium for hot water. Besides they were changing rooms called apodyterium. There are concrete buildings, covered in marble, of great proportions. They were covered with semi-spherical and ribbed vaults. Example: Caracalla’s Baths.

Entertainment buildings.

Theatre. It is similar to the Greek but the essential difference is that it was not carved on a hill, but artificially built, with the grades standing on a vault system. The orchestra was reduced to a semicircle because of the more reduced importance of the choir in Roman plays. The scene consisted of three lintelled bodies with rich decoration of columns and sculptures. Example: Merida, Marcelo.

Amphitheatre was a building created by the Romans. It is the result of the fusion of two theatres. It was designed for gladiators’ combats and spectacles with wild animals. It usually had circular or elliptical plan, surrounded by grades to ease the vision from any point. Below the sand there was a complex net of corridors with cages and different rooms for the service. The most important is the Coliseum.

Circus was designed for horse and carts races and also for athletic competitions. It is an adaptation of the Greek stadium. Its plan is long and it has a central element or spine, that divides the sand longitudinally. It was surrounded by grades. Example: Maximus.
Commemorative buildings: triumphal arches and columns. They were used to remember some exploit of their emperors or generals. They were located in the forum, in the crossings or in any other important place. They had propagandistic function.

Triumphal Arches. They have the shape of a city door but isolated from the rest of the wall. It can have one, two, three or more. Sometimes they can have squaren plan with four façades. They combine arch and lintel with a lot of decorative elements such as Corinthian columns and relives narrating the adventures of the person to whom they are devoted. A majority of them were built in stone or marble. Examples: Tito, Septimio Severo, Constantino.

Commemorative columns were of Roman invention and their finality is the same of that of the triumphal arches. Their shaft is covered with historical relieves distributed helicoidally. At the top they have the sculpture of the emperor honoured in them. Examples: Trajano, Marco Aurelio.

Funerary architecture:

Tombs. There were two funerary practises in Rome: inhumation and incineration. In the last case it was common to dig galleries and in the walls there were spaces for putting the urns. In the case of important families or citizens they had especial buildings in form of temples, towers, pyramids or circles. Example: Adrian’s Mausoleum.

Public works: bridges, aqueducts, reservoirs, and paved roads. There are military and commercial works, necessary for the dominium of the empire. There were an instrument for romanization and an example of their genius.

Domestic architecture:

The house. Popular house had different typologies. The buildings of the cities had several floors and they were called insulae. Rich families had domus in the city or villae in the countryside. These two types were quite similar in room distribution, with a courtyard or atrium; around it there were the rooms or cubiculi and the dinning room or tablinium. At the end there was normally a garden. With the time it was modified, the courtyard was surrounded by columns and it was open at the top and it had a central pond for containing the rain. Apart from these in some cases there were palaces that were conceit as real cities to serve the emperor.

Greek Sculpture

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General characteristics
The roots of this sculpture are oriental and present a clear Egyptian influence. But, with the time, Greek developed their own sculpture, based on the depiction of human body. Their worry was the depiction of beauty, expression, movement and volume.
The chronology signals and evolution with three periods: Archaic until 5th century BC, Classical, 5th and 4th centuries BC and Hellenistic from the end of 4th century BC to the Roman conquer in 1st century BC.

The ideals appear in the depiction of human body as the reincarnation of physical beauty and spiritual equilibrium. Beauty comes from the measure and proportion and from this evolved the idea of canon. Naked human body becomes the thematic axis of Greek sculpture.
Artists look for the expression, understood as the exteriorization of the feelings. In this spiritual and physical dimension mix together. But it is an idealised expression where quietness and serenity, added to perfect equilibrium, are the basis of that physical and spiritual beauty. Only during the Hellenism real feelings appear with less idealization.
Greek artists tend to depict movement. They began by adapting the images to the architectonical frame to create single images or groups in which different characters are related in a dynamic way. Movement reinforced expressive values.
Artists were worried about volume depiction. They quickly abandoned the Egyptian look at the front to conceit the sculpture to be seen from any point of view. Thanks to this flat depictions were left apart but for the walls and pediments.
Materials used are: limestone during the archaic period, and bronze. During the classicism white marble was preferred. Many Greek works we have knowledge of reach to our times through Roman copies in marble of bronze originals.

Archaic period (7th- 6th BC)
The most representative creations are the Kuros (young athletes naked) and the Kore (dressed woman, probably priest). There is a certain unity of style. In general, images are rigid, looking at the front. The kuroi are monumental, with the arms glued to the body in symmetric compositions. Hair is disposed in a geometric way, eyes are almond-shaped, articulations are rigid and they try to smile. They tried to depict with naturalism the anatomy even when they tend to geometry. Worried about life, artists followed an evolution towards naturalism.
Korai were votive sculptures made of terracotta or stone that were left in tombs as a sacrifice. They are of small size (at least compared to the Kuroi) and their body is quite a flat piece of marble, a bit smaller at the belly and with a bit of volume in the breast. The character of block is more evident than in the kuroi. They are not expressive and there is a tendency towards ecstatic idealization. Their hair is rigid, following the Egyptian stile, with different levels. They were the traditional peplum, with very few folders and pretty symmetric. Their aspect is rigid, mainly in the case of those wearing the Dorian peplum, while the Ionic is more asymmetric and dynamic, with abundant folders. Geometry is a mark of identity.

Transition to the Classicism. The way towards perfection.
Sculpture received its impulse from the relief. Around 500 BC the pediments of Egina and Olympia were done. They are samples of composed sculptures, where the images are accommodated to the architectonical frame. They are an example of the evolution towards naturalist forms, with moderate depiction of feelings. Images adopt natural attitudes, but they still being rigid, clashing with the first notes of movement. This major flexibility is completed with a bigger thematic variety.
Apart from the pediments mentioned, other good examples of this period are the Ludovisi throne, where the clothes permit the visualization of the feminine body, and the bronze of the Delphi’s Cart Rider, an ecstatic image with very expressive face, eyes that appear to be natural and polychrome in order to offer a more naturalistic image.

Classical plenitude. (5th -4th BC).
It is the golden age of Greek art, with the prototypes of classical beauty. It is Pericle’s century, a period of economic and political expansion. The ideal of beauty does not have just a physical dimension but a deep spiritual dimension too. Proportion and equilibrium are the basis for the Athenians citizenship that reaches a zenith with the triumph of the democracy.
Miron: He was the author of the Discobolous in which he expressed his interest in the depiction of human characters in movement. The composition is ambitious and multiplies points of view. Anatomic study is correct, with well worked muscles but the expression of the head does not belong to the moment of maximum effort depicted.
Polyclitus (theorist of human anatomy). His main worries were body proportions and the influence of the masses in the attitudes. In his work he theorised about the canon or rule. For him beauty stands in the harmony of the body. His work Doriforus, presents an idealised anatomy and the canon is 1/7, this is, the head is the seventh part of the body. Geometry influences in the depiction of some parts of the body, using perfect segments. The face is divided into three parts: forehead, nose and mouth. Everything is measured. The head is a perfect sphere to which hair is adapted. It is a depiction of perfection and rationality. Composition is asymmetric, with contraposto or a foot advance to demonstrate physical and spiritual equilibrium. This dynamism allowed the multiplication of points of view. Other work is Diadumenos.
Phidias (Creator of the prototypes that depict the ideal of classical beauty, the sculptor of Gods). His work is linked to Pericles and Athens. He directed the works of the Parthenon and the decoration of its walls, its metopes, triglyphs and the sculpture of Athenea Parthenos. He was reputed by the serene beauty of the faces, the flexibility and transparency of the clothes and the combination of equilibrium and life. His images are grandiose, with exquisite proportions. The relieves of the Parthenon are his best work due to the wise composition and the beauty and grandiosity of the attitudes. The technique of the wet clothes allowed him to depict the anatomy of the characters and accentuates the effect of the light on the surfaces.

Late Classicism (mid 4th century BC).
After the plenitude of the classicism there is a trend towards baroque sculptural forms, stylising the canons and losing the tighten orthodoxy of the complete equilibrium, harmony and proportion. This phenomenon is parallel to the historical moment of Greek history. The crisis of the democracy and the Peloponnesus Wars announced the dramatic expression that sculpture shows during this period. Realism can be seen in the proliferation of portrait. There is an intention of expressing human feelings. Religious subjects are treated as daily depictions, with more scepticism. Although classical idealism continues, sculptors tend to look for new forms or prototypes of ideal beauty. The main artists of the period are Praxitele, Scopas and Lyssipos.

Lyssipos with his work Apoxiomeno created a new canon of male beauty, longer and slimmer than Polyclitus. The head is now 1/8 of the body, with longer legs and less volume of the head. The subject is also different because it is not the triumphant athlete neither the moment of maximum tension, but the moment after the competition, nothing heroic, when the athlete is cleaning himself. It created a new spatial dimension at elongating the arms. It does not look at the front and the sculpture can be seen from any point of view.

Skopas represents the crisis of Phidias serenity. His images move with violence. The main are the Menade and Mausolo.

Praxitele in his works created human characters full of grace and without the majesty and seriousness of former periods. His images have the impression of being dreamers. The artist uses praxitelic bend to make the images indolent, with a body that curves. In the faces he used the sfumato, polishing the marble, especially around the eyes. These good transmit melancholic states of the soul, full of nostalgic feelings. Main works: Hermes of Olympia, Venus of Arles.

Hellenism (4th-1st BC)
It is a period of great chronological and geographical wideness where Greek tradition influenced the culture of other territories that were part of Alexandre’s empire. Classical tradition and oriental influences are mixed to create and express, through the art, a new conception of the life. They continue with the technical knowledge of classicism to which they add a deep realism. Disequilibrium is preferred to serene attitudes, drama to relaxed faces, and ugliness to classical beauty. Baroque work dominate, full of intense movement and tension.
Subjects are not the traditional (Gods, athletes, heroes). Artists look for inspiration in the life around themselves. The treatment is realistic and with deep psychology in the portrait, direct and sincere, without idealization. It is an attempt to individualise the portrayed person. Love Goddess is an important character of inspiration, but she appears in a great variety of attitudes. Daily characters and gestures are frequent. Old people, ugliness, imperfection, childhood, subjects before considered not important enough to be depicted now are the centre of sculpture. Relief reaches to depict the perspective of the backgrounds to create the illusion of deep sceneries. The unity of style of the former period is lost and there are several schools in Pergamun, Rhode, and Alexandria.
Rhode: Colossus, Samotracia’s Victory, Laoconte and his sons, Farnesio Bull.
Pergamun: Gale dying, Gigantomaquie.
Alexandria: The Nile.

Greek Architecture

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Basic ideas
Greeks liked to create proportioned and equilibrated buildings. It is an architecture to be seen, not to enter in. Due to this the sculptural values and volumes are taken into account, as if the building was a sculpture. For the Greek artist beauty is proportion and measure, just the opposite to the architecture of some other old empires that developed a colossal architecture. Greek architecture has a human dimension, to honour their Gods, and it is just anti-colossal.

The way in which the polis were organised did not ease the development of a palace architecture but it paved the way for other buildings, both civilian and religious: theatres, sanctuaries, gymnasiums in which they combined the ideal of beauty with practical solutions according to city life.

The basic Greek building and the materialization of the aesthetic ideals is the temple, which is conceit as God’s residence, not as a place for praying. Due to this the inside lacks of importance while the exterior is carefully worked.

Urbanism had an important development. In Mileto the architect Hipodamo put into practice, for the first time, his orthogonal plan, with straight and uniform rooms, that would be the basis of modern urbanism in our times.

Building systems
Greek architecture is lintelled (this is, they use straight line in the superior part of doors and windows and in the covers). Horizontal and vertical lines, combined, offer the impression of serenity and equilibrium they aimed at achieving.

The column is the characteristic element, and its treatment defines the three architectonical orders (Doric, Ionic and Corinthian). The concept of order is the relation between the different parts of the building. Doric is the simplest style, with his column without basis, the shaft with lines ending in sharp edges and a simple capital, just with some mouldings. The tablature is divided in metopes and triglyphs. Ionic order is a bit higher and more stylised, with basis, column in which the shaft has lines but ending in blunt edges and the capital with volutes. The tablature is not divided vertically, but horizontally, with three bands. Corinthian is the most decorated. It is similar to the Ionic in the basis and the shaft but the capital is a kind of basket with acanthus leaves and small volutes. The tablature is similar to the Ionic.

The constructive materials were stone (limestone) and, during the classical period, white marble from the Penteliko. The stones of the walls are isodomus, this is, perfectly cut and ordered, without any kind of mortar. The buildings were polychrome.

Resources
Looking for visual harmony, Greek recoursed to several technical resources to correct the optical deformations a building produces when been seeing from the distance. Some of the measures taken were: the tablature and the estilobatus (last stair) are curved to the top in the middle; columns are curved to the middle, to eliminate the impression of fall, the entasis is the enlargement of the column in the middle, to avoid the impression of concavity. Columns in the sides are bigger than the rest so that from the distance all appear to be equal. The distance between columns is different too. All these imperfections made possible to see the building as perfect from the outside.

Greek temple

Its origins are in the pre-Hellenic megaron, which was built in wood. The structure is of a rectangular plan, with longitudinal axis. There are also temples with circular plan and centralised axis that are known as tholos.

The internal division consists of three rooms: the first one or porch, open to the outside is the pronao, the second one or main room is the nao or cella, where the chapel of the God and its gigantic sculpture were; the last room is the opistodomo, and its function was to keep the treasure of the temple.

Temples are located in isolated areas with holy character. The cult was celebrated in the outside, in front of the main temple. It was built on top a series of stairs or crepis to make it easier to be seen and separate from the humidity of the floor. The façade is the main part in which the orders are developed.

Typology of the temple
The classification is made taking into account the disposition and number of columns. Depending on the disposition, temples can be: antae when they have pillars in the lateral walls; when the building has columns in one of the façades is called prostyle, when the columns appear in frontal and back façades it is called amphiprostyle and when the building is surrounded by columns it is known as peristyle . When instead of a line of columns around this is double we are in front of a dipter temple. Finally, the circular temple is monpter because it has one line of columns.

The second classification depends on the number of columns in the main façade and the temple can be tetrastile with four columns, hexastile with six and octastile with eight.

In some areas, as in the case of Athens, the religious buildings are concentrated in a holy place that is known as the Acropolis.

Greek theatre
The plays had a chorus of up to fifty people, for whom the orchestra or first line of sites was. The centre was called skene and it was a circular space. The theatres were originally built on a very large scale to accommodate the large number of people on stage, as well as the large number of people in the audience, up to fourteen thousand. Mathematics played a large role in the construction of these theatres, as their designers had to able to create acoustics in them such that the actors' voices could be heard throughout the theatre, including the very top row of seats. Other element was the paraskenia or wall behind the scene and behind it was the proskenion that separated the audience from the stage. In this area there were rooms for material and other elements of the theatre.

Other buildings
They were related to civil life:
· The propylon or porch, forming the entrance to temple sanctuaries (the best-surviving example is the one of the Acropolis of Athens
· The fountain house, a building where women filled their vases with water from a public fountain;
· The stoa, a long narrow hall with an open colonnade on one side, which was used to house rows of shops in the agoras (commercial centres) of Greek towns
· The palestra or a gymnasium, the social centre for male citizens. These peripterally enclosed space open to the sky were used for athletic contests and exercise.
· Greek towns also needed at least one bouleterion or council chamber, a large public building which served as a court house and as a meeting place for the town council.

Last Trends in Architecture

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Since mid 20th century Architecture has experience great change. In one hand, the increasing interest in urban planning not only involves the construction of the building themselves, but it also asked for its inclusion in an area and in consonance with deep studies of their physical, social and economic impact. On the other hand, the development of new and revolutionary materials has made possible the creation of some buildings that in a recent past would have been unthinkable.

Innovative Architecture

It combines the imagination of the architects and engineers with the aesthetic impact of materials such as reinforced concrete. Structural solutions are revolutionary and, in addition to use industrial materials they created sophisticates spaces through the distribution of light and the use of materials not frequent in architecture, underlining their tactile qualities. The pioneer of this architecture would be Alvar Aalto. Other architects working in this way are Eero Saarinen, Nervi, Utzon or Kahn. Their sign of identity is the use of industrial material to solve difficult structural problems.

International Style

This style has its roots in the works of the Bauhaus and it developed in the US thanks to the influence of Mies van der Rohe and his disciples. This style is well suited to large metropolitan apartment and office towers. These building proved to have a commercial potential and were extremely efficient for large-scale construction in which the module could be repeated indefinitely. Inner spaces became standardized, predictable, and profitable and exterior reflected the monotony of the interiors. The blank glass box became ubiquitous. Even when these buildings are considered examples of an austere classicism, they are also considered coldly impersonal. Architects working in this style are Stirling, Kenzo Tange, or Philip Johnson.

Post-modern Architecture

Between about 1965 and 1980 architects and critics began to espouse tendencies resulting in a style that is not cohesive but that has a distinct set of principles. Postmodernists value individuality, intimacy, complexity and occasionally even humour. Some architects, such as Venturi, defended an architecture that can produce any kind of buildings, being them equally filling stations or fast-food restaurants. Some works have references to old style and can use vivid colours. Other architects of this movement are Graves, Meier, Jahn or Moore.

High-Tech and Deconstructivism

The High-Tech style came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s through the work of the architects Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano and Norman Foster. Its origins lie in the 19th century when new industrial techniques and materials, previously used on engineering projects such as bridges, began to be applied to architecture. High-Tech buildings are typically constructed of steel and glass, make innovative use of technology and are often likened in appearance to the machines because of the tendency to draw attention to, rather than conceal, structural and functional elements.

Postmodernism is not the major strand in the most recent avant-garde architecture. An entirely different approach is represented by the style or idiom known as High-Tech, in which expressive use is made of the constructional and operational aspects of a building, with features such as supporting members or heating pipes fully exposed to view.

Deconstructivism is the term used to characterize buildings in which elements such as fractured forms or warped planes undermine conventional notions of stability and harmony. The works of Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid can be considered good examples of this style.

Monumentality and New Techniques in Sculpture.

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Until mid 20th century a majority of the three dimensional works were mere objects. The sole monuments were those commanded by the fascism, with a promotional aim. After that, the creation of big sculptures began with the organization of competitions to create works for deter purposes. A majority of the creations that were done were abstract. It looked that the projects of the Constructivism were going to be the models of the new production, at least because they represent a kind of monumental works. At the same time the development of techniques or the invention of new technologies made it possible to give duration and monumentality to what had been ephemeral or temporary in the construction of the pioneers.

A significant author at these levels is Calder. After receiving a first public commission in 1952 he acquired a fame that enabled him to inscribe in space even larger and loftier designs that could be produced only by industrial methods.

Henry Moore

The British Henry Moore was one of the first contemporary sculptors to encounter the possibility of projecting his imagination into public space. He had encountered archaic art that freed him from subjection to the model from nature; then the influence of Arp and Picasso steered him towards a more abstract expression that sought less to reproduce than to create organic forms justified solely by their presence and expression by their vitality the growth he discovered in the natural elements he began to collect: bones, pebbles, tree-stumps, seashells. There products of nature inspired his direct carving.

Other of his ways of proceeding revealed asymmetry to him as a dynamic principle. He was led to experiment with the mass with a hole pierced through it, from which he would renew the relation between sculpture and surrounding space. He was not unaware of the possibilities of abstraction, but most of his works preserved a biomorphic character. He achieved this osmosis between human representation and the understanding of organic forms essentially in the reclining or recumbent figure, which he preferred as a subject above all others and which gave him the pretext for his most daring construction.

When Moore took the step to monumentality, he developed a landscape sculpture in an especially close relationship with nature, in that he executed each of his pieces on a particular site. Large-sized works led him to prefer bronze, this is, modelling. Moore’s works offered a sensual experience: direct, tactile, but also spiritual in referring to another consciousness of life and its development. With him, representation of movement disappears in the expression of forms preserving the imprint of the demands of growth and the scars of time.

Chillida

Other of the new possibilities of construction in space of the 20th century included assemblage and iron. The two converged in the works of artists such as Picasso and Julio Gonzalez. One of the best representatives of iron sculpture is Eduardo Chillida.

This architect of formation did several sojourns to Paris where he entered in contact wit modern art. He turned away from figurative representations and began working with iron at the mid of the century. For him iron offered the approach to and confrontation of space by a way of a dynamic force in which the ductility of the material and the strong purpose that shapes it are combined.

Working in wrought, then welded iron turned him away from the concept of mass by offering him new relations between construction and space: his assemblages embarked on the conquest of the air. His first works were inspired by the form or the craftsman’s and peasant’s articles of ordinary use, but he transported them poetically into empty space, attaching them by a single fixed point to the ground or the pedestal, from which they radiated in manifold directions. Combining space, clawing the wind, he defied the laws of static. He recognised the demands and possibilities of metal, which was a rendered supple and malleable by its passage through fire, but which also retained the marks of the blows that shaped it, or of the force that twisted it. This physical presence of work of which the finished piece kept the imprint and which made it possible to measure in imagination the time and effect of the process of elaboration would assume great importance in contemporary creation.

Working with tubes or bars, Chillida found that they divided up space. The core of matter was replaced by emptiness; the mass by air; but air was all the more meaningful in that Chillida developed his forms by following their growth. Creation is a combat with and against matter, a confrontation with the elements: fire and water.

Chillida’s forms abandon verticality to develop like knotted and forceful calligraphy. Refusing to let himself be guided by the technical know-how he had rapidly acquired in 1956 turned to a thicker material which he twisted or unwound, but which kept in its fold the violence that bent it to the sculptors will. After that Chillida attempted other materials such as wood, which allowed him to work on a larger scale. He was to carry over this experience with metal into alabaster and granite, compact materials which react to light, that light which steel and later Cor-Ten steel (rusted steel) would led him to prefer in more serene architectural compositions where the impact of gesture vanished in the continuity of spirals, drawing the spectator inward to the hollowed-out centre of the heart. These knots of metal opened onto the mystery of the infinite and the void. Chillida became a builder of the invisible.

Oteiza

Having unsuccessfully tried to get into architecture school in Madrid, he began training in the visual arts. He travelled to South America, where he was during the Civil War. He came back in 1948 and tried to develop a kind of organisation of artists but with little success. In 1950 he was commissioned to make the sculptures that would form the religious iconography of the Aranzazu’s sanctuary. The project consisted of a Piety and the frieze of the Apostles, 14 hollowed-out figures, with a great expressive force and rhythmic arrangement, in a complex which combined architecture and the visual arts.

In 1950 he began an experimental phase in his sculpture in which the presence of matter and mass as formal elements was reduced and the artist sought out active empty spaces charged with energy. This desire for experimentation applied to his sculptural work. He aimed at liberating empty spaces by merging double and triple low-density units, at the same time developing the progressive emptying of his figurative sculptures.

He developed his idea of emptying sculpture to the point of defining emptiness as the space of spiritual relief, the protection of the incomplete man, convinced that all empty space aesthetically de-occupied is spiritually receptive. He presented the de-occupation of the sphere and cube. This experimental search was to culminate in his “empty boxes” and “metaphysical boxes”. In this process he managed to activate empty and receptive spaces, provided with an eternal and metaphysical essence. With the completion of the Experimental Process, Oteiza considered that his sculptural experimentation had concluded.

Other Modern Art Movements

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Pop Art
It is a passive conception of the social reality. It does not express the creativity of the popular classes but their non-creativity. The origin of the movement is in Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who are considered as Neo-Dadaists. Painting becomes again something that evokes. The mere fact of taking a real object and to put it in the painting is an instinctive manipulation of reality. Given that it is a urban art the images end capsized in the painting, unite to the matter or giving a phantom appearance.

These artists, the same as the Dadaists before, take elements from the reality and incorporate them to the work of art. We can find glued elements or photos mix with the painting. The language is that of the publicity, very easy to understand. One of the most famous representatives of the movement is Warhol, to whom we can add Rosenquists, with his elements taken of daily life; Tom Wesselman, who incorporates other elements so that we can find ourselves in front of installations; Roy Lichtenstein, who portrays the world as in a comic; Claes Oldenburg, who makes enormous sculptures of daily use objects; Christo, famous because his wrappings of buildings or natural elements and his installations.

Op Art
Optical Art was born in the 1950’s. It is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing. Op art is a perceptual experience related to how vision functions. It is a dynamic visual art, stemming from a discordant figure-ground relationship that causes the two planes to be in a tense and contradictory juxtaposition. Op Art is created in two primary ways. The first, and best known method, is the creation of effects through the use of pattern and line. Often these paintings are black and white, or otherwise grisaille.

The works are based on the repetition of some elements, mainly lineal, or simple geometric forms and through the colour give to them the appearance of having a third dimension or of being in movement. One of the most famous artist related to this movement is Vasarely.

Kinetic Art
Kinetic art is art that contains moving parts or depends on motion for its effect. The moving parts are generally powered by wind, a motor or the observer. The term kinetic sculpture refers to a class of art made primarily from the late 1950s through 1960s. Kinetic art was first recorded by the sculptors Gabo and Pevsner.
The American Alexander Calder invented the mobile, consisting of a delicately balanced wire armature from which sculptural elements are suspended. In common with other types of kinetic art, kinetic sculptures have parts that move or that are in motion. The motion of the work can be provided in many ways: mechanically through electricity, steam or clockwork; by utilizing natural phenomena such as wind or wave power; or by relying on the spectator to provide the motion, by doing something such as cranking a handle. Kinetic art encompasses a wide variety of overlapping techniques and styles.

Graffiti
It began in the 1970’s. It is a type of deliberate marking on property that can take the form of pictures, drawings, words or any decorations inscribed on any surface outside walls and sidewalks. Even if graffiti have always existed, young New Yorkers belonging to the black and Puerto Rican communities started adopting tags (signatures made with aerosol sprays).

The first modern identified tagged in New York was Taki, a Greek-American artist. At the same time, the graphs also made their appearance. These were real urban frescoes painted with spray-paint. Futura 2000, Dust and Pink were recognised although their celebrity was limited to the hip-hop culture. Basquiat and Haring started to work in the street and the subway but their work was renowned and reputed. They won instant critical acclaim and attracted the attention of influential art dealers.

The difference between tagging and graffiti is not clear but some say that while tagging is gang-motivated and meant as vandalism or viewed as too vulgar or controversial to have public value, graffiti can be viewed as creative expression, whether charged with political meaning or not.

Land Art
It is an art movement which emerged in America in the late 1960 and early 1970s, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked. Sculptures are not placed in the landscape; rather the landscape is the very means of their creation. The works frequently exist in the open, located well away from civilization, left to change and erosion under natural conditions. Many of the first works, created in the deserts of Nevada, New Mexico, Utah or Arizona were ephemeral in nature and now only exist as video recordings or photographic documents.

Artist belonging to this group are De Maria, Heizer and Goldsworthy.

Arte Povera
The term 'Arte Povera' was introduced by the Italian art critic and curator, Germano Celant, in 1967. His pioneering texts and a series of key exhibitions provided a collective identity for a number of young Italian artists based in Turin, Milan, Genoa and Rome. They were working in radically new ways, breaking with the past and entering a challenging dialogue with trends in Europe and America. As the Italian miracle of the post-war years collapsed into a chaos of economic and political instability, Arte Povera erupted from within a network of urban cultural activity. Arte Povera described a process of open-ended experimentation. In the wake of the iconoclastic artistic innovations of Italian precursors Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, artists were able to begin from a zero point, working outside formal limitations. Arte Povera therefore denotes not an impoverished art, but an art made without restraints, a laboratory situation in which a theoretical basis was rejected in favour of a complete openness towards materials and processes.
The artists associated with Arte Povera worked in many different ways. They painted, sculpted, took photographs and made performances and installations, creating works of immense physical presence as well as small-scale, ephemeral gestures. They employed materials both ancient and modern, man-made and 'raw', revealing the elemental forces locked within them as well as the fields of energy that surround us. Members of this group are Anselmo, Pistoletto and Metz

Minimalism
Minimal Art emerged as a movement in the 1950s and continued through the Sixties and Seventies. It is a term used to describe paintings and sculpture that thrive on simplicity in both content and form, and seek to remove any sign of personal expressivity. The aim of Minimalism is to allow the viewer to experience the work more intensely without the distractions of composition, theme and so on.
There are examples of the Minimalist theory being exercised as early as the 18th century when Goethe constructed an Altar of Good Fortune made simply of a stone sphere and cube. But the 20th century sees the movement come into its own. From the 1920s artists such as Malevich and Duchamp produced works in the Minimalist vein but the movement is known chiefly by its American exponents such as Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Ellsworth Kelly and Donald Judd who reacted against Abstract Expressionism in their stark canvases, sculptures and installations.
Minimal Art is related to a number of other movements such as Conceptual Art in the way the finished work exists merely to convey a theory, Pop Art in their shared fascination with the impersonal and Land Art in the construction of simple shapes. Minimal Art proved highly successful and has been enormously influential on the development of art in the 20th century. Representative artists are Frank Stella and Ellsword Kelly .

Abstract Avant-Garde after 1945

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There are several different movements that share their not representative depiction in the works of art. Among them there are Abstract Expressionism, Informalism, Art Brut, CoBrA and Lyrical Abstraction.

Abstract Expressionism
It developed between the 1940’s and the early 1960’s. It was an American post WWII movement. After seeing the images and photographs of the war, the artists decide to explore colour and shape. These works of American artists were a kind of competition with the Europeans who translated to the USA as refugees during and after the war. The artist combine the emotional intensity and self-expression of the Expressionist with the anti-figurative images of other Avant-Garde movements. It can be divided in two groups: Action Painting and Colour Field and Hard-Edge. The movements found some parallel in other European movements.

Action Painting is a term that was used by the first time to describe Jackson Pollock work. This artist, the same as Franz Kline or Willem de Kooning used their psyche as the driving force for their works. The canvas was seen as an arena and painting was irrational, instinctive and impulsive.

Colour Field and Hard-Edge are two formal trends in American abstraction in the early 60’s. Colour Field consists of large coloured areas, without signs or forms that the eye can catch. Colour was used without any perspective, producing a sensation of impressive size. The shades of colour were diluted into the canvas. On the other hand, Hard-Edge described some works in which colourful atmospheres were emphasised. The works have clearly defined outlines and edges and the precision clarify the compositions. Representative of this movement are Rothko, Barnet Newman, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Kenneth Nolan.

Informalism
After WWII some painters contemplated geometric abstraction as a load and the cold intellectualism, out of touch with the reality of poverty and despair. Spontaneity and authenticity were more meaningful to the new generation of artist. From this reaction was born a new painting style fully abstract that was the result of the artist’s emotional and physical engagement. The term was coined to classify the work of Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, Jean Fautier and Alberto Burri.

The informalists were not interested in having a total control over the processes of artistic work but in emphasizing spontaneity, irrationality and freedom of form. They sought out rebellious tools and paints, capable of producing things accidental and unexpected. He aimed at escaping from the prison of traditional art.

Art Brut
This style was created by Dubuffet at the beginning of 1945 out of the official culture. He focused in the art of the insane. It is inspired in the art production of a insane asylum. Dubuffet created the Collection de l´Art Brut, containing works of these non professional artists. In Dubuffet’s word Art Brut was “those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses- where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere- are, because of these very facts, more precious than the production of professions. After a certain familiarity with these flourishing of an exalted feverishness, live so fully and so intensely by their authors, we can not avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade”.

CoBrA
It was a post WWII European Avant-Garde movement. The name comes from the three home cities: Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, which are respectively the head, body and tail of the cobra snake. The group was founded by Asger Jorn, Alechinsky and Karel Appel among others.

When Europe was devastated these artists wanted to unite their forces and react to the inhumanity of a civilization based on reason and science. The group has a political and social dimension based on a criticism of the Cold War society. In the group met old members of the Amalgamation Dutch group, the Danish Host and the Belgian Revolutionary Surrealist. Their values are nonconformity and spontaneity. Their inspiration were children drawings, the alienated and folk art, motifs from Nordic mythology, Marxism. They rejected erudite art and all official art events. They aimed at expressing a combination of the Surrealstic unconscious with the romantic forces of nature by using an abstract language. They were distinguish by painting with brilliant colour, violent brushwork and distorted human figures.

Lyrical Abstraction
It is a French style of abstract painting that developed between 1945 and 1960. It is very close to the Art Informel and to the Abstract Expressionism. It was created by the painter Georges Mathie who wanted to separate cold geometric abastraction from a hot organic and lyrical form of abstraction. Hans Hartung is one of the members of this group. For him painting means streaking, hatching and brushing until the canvas is throughly invaded. He did, disguised and erased an image until all that was left were the deletions.

Figurative Avant-Garde after 1945

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The New Objectivity and Magic Realism have their beginnings in an exhibition hold in 1925. Their common characteristic is the representation of domestic indoors or scenes of every day life expressed in an unreal dimension.

The first representatives of the New Objectivity trend to imitate ancient German models but they depicted people and things with a cold and striking precision. They tried to take some elements of the expressionist too, depicting greed, lust, rage, brutality, spinelessness and cowardice, this is, what they understood as the portrait of a person.

Authors belonging to this New Objectivity are Max Beckman, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Edward Hopper or Balthus. Beckman, Dix and Grosz are more linked to the German expressionism, while the others created very personal works. Hopper painted a urban world, full of silence, in an space unreal and metaphysical that created in the spectator an impression of the subject being far from them. His compositions are geometrical, with sophisticated lights, always cold and artificial, and with simplified details. The scene is always almost desert, with few images what underlines the impression of loneliness.

The images of the French Balthus create a cold and sombre atmosphere. He was influenced by the realists and his portraits show a gesture of great reflection and concentration. He frequently depicted familiar scenes or images in which very young girl are presents. These girls were considered to be the only pure characters but there is something provocative in them. With the time he evolved to a more simple depiction.

The Magic Realism has two different aspects, the social and the socialist realism. By Social Realism we understand art works which chronicle the everyday conditions of the working classes and are critical of the social environment that causes these conditions. This style was broadly accepted during the years following the 1929 crisis in the USA. Among the representatives of this group are Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, both of them muralists.

In Paris, after the end of WWII many artists of left-wing focused on depicting the dramatic conditions of the working-class lives, their social plight, but workers, builders, men and women, capable of building a better world. Some members of this group were Picasso, Leger, Buffet and Gruber.

Social Realism is not very different from Socialist Realism. The main difference relies on the fact that Socialist Realism tends to advertise revolution and it is linked to the adherence to party doctrine.

Hyper Realism is other trend of the same period and it has a good representative in the Spanish Antonio Lopez, with urban views that may appear as photography given the accuracy to the model.

In more recent times other artists have developed a realistic approach to art, this can be the case of Lucian Freud, and amazing portraitist, or Fernando Botero, with a very particular aesthetic, painting fat images through which he represents the reality of his Colombia or makes strong critics against any kind of violence, denouncing injustices all over the world and presenting art as a compromise and a weapon for fighting in favour of people.

Avant-Garde Sculpture (II)

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The decisive step towards modern sculpture consisted of the addition of combination and construction to previous methods of sculpting and modelling. The use of sheet iron and wires was connected with it, in particular after Picasso’s first works. Picasso did not invent iron sculptures, although it may be true that there is a Spanish tradition behind them. The Spaniard Pablo Gargallo, who shared a studio with Picasso in Barcelona and followed him to Paris was already cutting figures and masks out of sheet copper. Given the contemporary general interest in tribal art, he may have linked the Spanish tradition with observation of hammered and chased African metalwork. Later Gargallo made it his own speciality.

Julio Gonzalez did great progress with his sculpture probably when Picasso asked for his expert knowledge of smithing and welding to execute his projects. Gonzalez works established the new art form of iron sculpture. Owing to the material and the technique, the volume of a figure was reproduced by rods reaching into and surrounding space, by surfaces and rounded walls. This involved that inner penetration of figure and space that Gonzalez made the principle of his sculpture. The representations became, if not exactly abstract, at least figurative spatial diagrams.

Calder was the artist who produced the most delicate wire sculpture. This mechanical engineer, who learnt to paint in New York, settled in Paris where he invented the toy like party mobile wire figures more suited to him. He put into practice the futuristic programme of sculpture made mobile with the help of hand- or motor-driven apparatuses.

Giacometti was one of the main sculptors of the avant-garde. He emerged as with a new vision of sculpture which could have imitations, but no successors. During his formation he knew Rodin’s work, and when he went to Paris he entered in contact with all the previous avant-garde sculpture attempts, from ethnic works to those of the most important artists of the moment (Matisse, Picasso, Brancusi). He entered in contact with the surrealist and due to this his sculptures live because of their significant plastic formulation and the endless possible ways of interpreting them. His work in the thirties acquired the disturbing dimension which characterizes the Surrealism.

From 1935 to 1945 Giacometti sought to reproduce the outward appearance of figures and head as we see them in reality: in the distance, in space, as a part of a much larger field of vision. He strove to introduce perspective into sculpture, at first making use of the methods employed by painters, such as a decrease in size and vaguer definition as the distance increases, large bases to set the figures off. He made many studies of passers-by in the street and after models in the studio and he transferred the shorthand stile of his drawings to sculpture. He discovered that making distant figures smaller was an unsatisfactory way of recreating reality. He found that the more accurate way of depicting people was their extreme elongation and slimness. His images are armatures of iron rods and plaster. His work sometimes remembers the finish used by Rodin in Caen’s Bourgeoisies.

Avant-Garde Sculpture (I)

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While Rodin was still being the most famous sculptor of the moment, a number of progressive younger artists were calling his art in question. The academic and official style was firmly founded in middle-class taste and Rodin’s works belonged to it but, at the same time, his pathos style and the literary nature of his bronzes were making a way for other principles. Rodin influenced with two elements: first, his treatment of the torso and second, his victory over symbolism. In addition to this, some critics added the importance of Egyptian sculpture. An example of the mix of these influences is The Mediterranean, by Maillol, that can be considered pure sculpture.

One of the things that led modern sculptors to break with the rules of the Western art tradition was the discovery that the images of the primitive people in the colonial empires of Oceania and Africa were not merely exotic curiosities, examples of naïf art or barbaric fetishes, but creative works with the same consideration as the classical models. These products were known in Europe since mid 19th century.

The first European artists to study Oceanian an African objects as works of art were not sculptors but painters: Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Kirchner. They adopted these models in both their paintings and their sculpture works, with images with short legs, thick thighs, long torso and big heads. Some artist adapted the models while others just imitated them. Examples of both trends are Modigliani and Brancusi respectively.

Modigliani created heads of women inspired by an elegant refinement of African and Buddhist art were in a style very much his own. Cut from ashlar stones stolen in public building, they should all be regarded as sculptured fragments of architecture. His production included pillar-like heads, kneeling caryatids and standing nude women.

Brancusi did not manage to make so personal an adaptation. Since he did not want to imitate certain African figures too openly, he split them into fragments. In some way he tried to adapt primitive modernity to the modernity of the technical era.

Cubism
Picasso did his personal approach to sculpture from the Cubist language. His idea was to hold view of each element from different angles of the surface parts with regard to each other as a last manifestation of Rodin’s impressionism. It served to intensify the multiple broken gleams of light on the bronze.

In the case of Picasso works of sculpture, the term that should be used is construction. For the themes a new category has to be defined, for nothing here is represented as corresponds to tradition, such as a human figure or an animal or an allegory of them or even a still life. Other characteristic is that this sculpture has no base and can neither stand nor lie, but hangs on the wall and in this sense it is more like a picture than a relief. The origin of these sculpture may be the papier collés used by Picasso who one day decided to substitute the material by lead and wires. Picasso could have collaborated with Julio Gonzalez when beginning with these works.

These sculptures extend into our real space, for they let the eye penetrate into what is in reality the invisible space of the object (the first sculpture Picasso did was a guitar). For these works Picasso was inspired in African art. He took from this, apart from the idea the assemblage of concave and convex shapes. The objects represented are not useful but they are the plastic representation of them.

Futurism
The artists of this movement dealt with came to modern sculpture by way of academicism and Rodin. They found their inspiration in their knowledge of archaic and non-European sculpture, together with the added stimulus of modern painting spearheaded from Paris.

Futurist sculpture had a different origin. It is the manifesto of a total break with the past. The creation of forms was preceded by theories and principles. This art was seen as matter whose emanations of energy and flashes of movement would be swept up into the surrounding atmosphere.

The characteristics of the movement are evident in Umberto Boccioni, with his Development of a Bottle in Space and Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. For him movement could be as beautiful as any manifestation of classical art. His figures are influenced by Rodin, Gaudi and Cubism. Its representation of movement in space marks no advance on the breakdown of movement in the chrono-photographs. He kept to the traditional concept in which the volume of a body is a modelled mass, more or less closed.

More influential than the works were the ideas for a sculpture of the future which Boccioni set in their manifesto. Some ideas are: Sculpture needs to find new sources of emotion, not copy the academicism. The objects will be given life through their extension into space tangible, systematic and plastic. Sculpture will be produced by the systematized vibrations of light and the interpenetration of planes. Transparent planes of glass or celluloid, sheets of metal, wire, electric lights inside and out, will go to indicate the planes, trends, tones and halftones of a new reality. Colouring can step up the emotional force of the images. The materials do not need to be the traditional, but the artist can mix as many as he wants in each sculpture, if with it can gain movement.

Other authors related to this movement are Duchamp-Villon, Brancusi, who has a very personal sculpture and Archipenko. Brancusi can not be held responsible for the Art Deco style, but he is for the pseudo-mythical and quasi-mystical trimming in which his works have been wrapped. Archipenko stands out as the highest of the higher sculptors. He is famous because of his sculpto-paintings.

Dadaism
Marcel Duchamp was a middling painter with an ingenious turn of mind that has made him one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. After the first experiments of Cubism and Futurism, he took the front fork of a bicycle with its wheel, set it upside down on a studio stool and signed this object construction with his name as a work of art. This new concept of art was promptly taken over by individual artists in other countries.

The artists of the Dada movement in Germany (Arp, Ernst, Schwitters) and later of French Surrealism produced relief pictures. The use of unartistic materials and unpainterly strong colours forms apart of their art of dispute. The same as classical freezes were painted in bright colours, they coloured their creations. Aiming at creating a work of art as a harmonious whole, assemblages and relieves of outstanding beauty were constantly produced in spite of their intention to shock.

Constructivism
Tatlin created the link between Picasso and the Russian constructivism. They gave the western artistic revolution a new direction influenced equally by icons and Russian folk art, and the combination of cosmic speculations and radical living revolution. Tatlin took a radical step from representational to non-representational sculpture. The bits of wood, metal and glass that he assembled represent nothing; they are material forms in space. Some of his works needed the walls as a support but others were suspended in space by curved metal rods or wires spanning the corner of the room. He called them counter-reliefs or wounter-corner-reliefs.

Other artists involved in this movement are Gabo and Pevsner. Gabo used materials that gave the impression of transparency, particularly in his busts. Pevsner reproduced Picasso’s cubists painting of female nudes as transparent relief constructions, using curved celluloid surfaces.

Surrealism

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It was an artistic movement that brought together artists, thinkers and researchers. They were involved in a hunt of sense of expression of the unconscious. They were searching for the definition of a new aesthetic, new humankind, and new social order. Their forerunners were the Italian Metaphysical painters, mainly Giorgio de Chirico, and they also received the influence of the Symbolism and Dadaism.

It came into being after the French poet Andre Breton 1 published Manifeste du Surrealisme. Breton suggested that rational thought was repressive to the powers of creativity and imagination and thus inimical to artistic expression. He admired Freud and its concept of the subconscious. It is closely related to some forms of abstract art.

At the end of World War I Tristan Tzara, leader of the Dada, wanted to attack society through scandal.He believed that society that creates the monstrosity of war do not deserve art so he decided to create an anti-art, full of ugliness instead of beauty. Tzara wanted to offend the new industrial commercial world of the bourgeoisie. His victims did not feel insulted. They saw this art as a reaction against old art. The result was the opposite to its original one because anti-art became art.

One group of artists did not follow Tzara´s ideas. The Surrealist movement gained momentum after the Dadá. It was led by Breton. The artists researched and studied the work of Freud and Jung. Some of the artists expressed themselves in the abstract tradition while others used the symbolic tradition. The two forms of expression formed two distinct trends: automatism and veristic surrealism.

Automatists
Artists interpreted it as referring to a suppression of consciousness in favour of the subconscious. They were more focused on feeling and less analytical. They understood Automatism as the automatic way in which the images of the subconscious reach the conscience. They believed that images should not be burdened with meaning. They saw the academic discipline of art as intolerant of the free expression of feeling. They felt form which had dominated the history of art, was a culprit in that intolerance. They believed abstractionism was the only way to bring to life the images of the subconscious. Coming from the Dada tradition, these artists linked scandal, insult and irreverence toward the elite’s freedom. They continued to believe that lack of form was a way to rebel against them.

Veristic Surrealists
They interpreted automatism to mean allowing the images of the subconscious to surface undisturbed so that their meaning could be deciphered through analysis. They wanted to faithfully represent these images as a link between the abstract spiritual realities and the real forms of the material world. To them the object stood as a metaphor for an inner reality. Through metaphor the concrete world could be understood, not only by looking at the objects, but also by looking into them. They saw academic discipline and form as the means to represent the images of the subconscious with veracity. The images would easily dissolve into the unknown. They hoped to find a way to follow the images of the subconscious until the conscience could understand their meaning. The language of the subconscious is the image. The consciousness had to learn to decode that language so it could translate it into its own language of words. Later they branched out into three other groups.

In the works of surrealist we find the legacy of Bosch, Brueguel, William Blake and the symbolic painters of the 19th century, in addition to the perennial questioning of philosophy, the search of psychology and the spirit of mysticism. It is a work based on the desire to permit the forces that created the world to illuminate our vision. They must allow us to consciously develop our human potential.

Characteristics
It was highly influenced by the psychoanalysis: images are as confusing and startling as those of dreams and can have a realistic, though irrational style, precisely describing dreamlike fantasies.
Sometimes they invented spontaneous techniques, modelled upon the psychotherapeutic procedure of free association as a means to eliminate conscious control in order to express the working of the unconscious mind, such as exquisite corpse.
Artists
Some of the representatives of this movement are: Marx Ernst, Frida Kahlo, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Oscar Dominguez.

Techniques
Surrealism has the same lack of prejudice of Dadaism both in the use of photographic procedures and object production out of their normal use. Traditional techniques were used, because those can be appropriate for depicting imaginations

Max Ernst
He reached to the deepest critic of the form as a depiction and the style as something unitary. He used any technique that would be useful for transmitting his ideas. He used collage and frottage. His work is frequently a pile of rubbish of bourgeois culture.

Joan Miro
He used symbolic keys to depict the unconscious. His principle is not the organic world. His world is simple, clear. His mythology is easy, transparent. His painting is unstressed, freely chromatic, without equilibrium among signs and colours .

Hans Arp
He was previously involved in the Dadaism. He depicted organic forms, both in painting and sculpture. He used geometric shapes, orthogonal images and continuously curve forms, concave and convex.

Yves Tanguy
He invented the anti-Nature with never ending landscapes, planet like settings, lack of light and sun and remains of organic life such as bones, mummified fruits, fossils and shells.

Salvador Dali
His view is full of sexual connotations and his works are highly rhetorical, with a mix of lubricous and holy. He overcame cynically the bolshevism. He represent an ambiguous mix of reaction and anarchy. His compositions are very complicated.

Rene Magritte
He is the artist who worked in a deepest way the lack of logic of the image. He invented the anti-history. He discovered the non-sense of the normal. He created with great detail and realism images of ambiguous significance that could have a double sense.

Expansion
Other artist contributed to the expansion of the Surrealism, equally in Europe and in the United States. Soon it appeared as a way of eluding the reality of the problems through ambiguity and paradox. The movement gained prestige with the adhesion of artists such as Picasso. The analytical cubism, discomposing the objects did a similar work as that of the Surrealism.

Dadaism

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It is a post World War I cultural movement that appeared in visual arts, Literature (mainly poetry), Theatre and Graphic design. It was a protest against the barbarism of the War. Dadaists believed War was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both: Art and everyday society.
Dadaist works are characterized by its deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art. It influenced on later movements including Surrealism.

According to its proponents, Dadá was not art, it was anti-Art. For everything that art stood for, Dadá was to represent the opposite. Dadça supposed that where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dadá ignored them. If art is to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strives to have no meaning. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dadá offends.

Interpretation of Dadá is dependent entirely on the viewer.This movement was highly influential in Modern Art. It became a commentary on art and the world, thus becoming art itself.

The artists had become disillusioned by Art, Art History and History in general. Many of them were veterans of World War I. They had grown cynical of humanity after seeing what men were capable of doing to each other on the battlefields of Europe. Members of the movement were: Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Marx Ernst, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters.

They became attracted to a nihilistic view of the world. They thought that nothing mankind had achieved was worthwhile, not even Art. They created an Art in which chance and randomness formed the basis of creation. The basis of Dadá is nonsense. With the order of the world destroyed by World War I, Dadáa was a way to express the confusion that was felt by many people as their own world was turned upside down.

They took normal objects but they put them in such a way that they were completely useless.These objects received the name of `ready made´. In paintings they tend to glue objects to the images, making of everything a kind of machine, something mechanic, no human.

Metaphysical Painting

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This Italian Avant-Garde art movement was born in Ferrara in 1917 with Carlo Carrá and Giorgio de Chirico. The word metaphysical is core to the poetic of the movement. They depicted a dreamlike imagery with figures and objects seemingly frozen in time. The artists accepted the representation of the visible world in a traditional perspective space.

There is something strange in their works: unusual arrangements of human beings and dummy-like models; objects in strange, illogicl contexts; unreal lights and colours; unnatural static of still figures. They were opposed to Futurism and they had more than a new way of painting a new way of seeing things.

The logic of their works was different: deserted squares; silent, rigidly rendered buildings, colonnades and shadows, trains pasing away in the distance; clocks and statues. There is never any precise hint in the paintings about the place or moment of the scene. The scenes are full of eventless, tome of silence, imminence and enigma. All that generated a new reality which goes beyond the meaning of the things presented by creating a sense of expectation and mistery and bonded with the unconscious mind.

This movement may appear as a reaction against Cubism and Futurism. It may seem strange that many of the achievements of 20th century Italian art came during the rise of Fascism, and Metaphysical painting is not an exception. It settled the premises of Surrealism.
The main members of this movement were Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrá, Giorgio Morandi, Italo Savino, Luigi Filippo Tibertelly, Ardengo Soffici.

Russian Avant-Garde

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There are three main movements, belonging all of them to the same period of time: Constructivism, Suprematism and Rayonism. The three of them had connection with other movements of the time as Cubism, Neo-Plasticism and Bauhaus. Other of their common characteristics is the depiction of abstract form or figurative but with a great influence of Cubism.

Constructivism
Constructivism was first created in 1913 when the sculptor Tatlin discovered the works of Braque and Picasso in Paris. Back in Russia he began producing assemblages but abandoning any precise subject of themes. The Constructivist art refers to the optimistic, non-representational relief construction, sculpture, kinetics and painting. The artists did not believe in abstract ideas, rather they tried to link art with concrete and tangible ideas. Their depicted art was mostly three dimensional, and they also portrayed art that could be connected to their proletarian believes. Artists belonging to this movement are: Rodchenko, Tatlin, Gabo, Pevsner, El Lissitzky, Malevich.

Suprematism
Suprematism is considered the first systematic school of purely abstract pictorial composition in the modern movement, based on geometric figures and was the expression of the supremacy of pure sensation in creative art. The movement was founded by Malevich in Moscow, parallel to Constructivism. The project was above all the brainchild of the painter and theoretician. According to him, to liberate art from the ballast of the representational world. The work of the painter no longer involved representing and creating chromatic harmonies or formal compositions, but rather attaining the limits of painting. It consisted of geometrical shapes flatly painted on the pure canvas surface. The pictorial space had to be emptied of all symbolic content and all content signifying form. It had to be decongested and cleared so as to show a new reality where thought was of prime importance.

Rayonism
Rayonism represents one of the first steps toward the development of abstract art in Russia and was founded by Larionov and Goncharova. The style was a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism and Orphism and it is also known as Cubo-Futurism. They turned their back on all manner of technical formulation and all kinds of erudite cultural references. They produced works made up of diagonal beams of colour. Blocky Cubist shapes are closely packed in a dynamic Futurist rhythm across a surface also marked by a series of sharp diagonals. Some paintings featured one predominant colour. Next, these compositions were worked out in an autonomous way: only the rhythms and harmonies then guided the painter in his attept to make the dynamic radiation of the colours perceptible.

Neo-Plasticism

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This avant-garde movement founded by Theo van Doesburg in the Netherlands was essentially a painting and sculpture movement, even when it had some architectonical examples too. The basic aim of the movement was to try to produce pure form and colour, completely devoid of realism and the artist’s emotion.

Neo-plastic style is characterized by a reversion to the basic fundamentals of art: colour, form, level, and line. Artists used mostly straight horizontal and vertical lines and black, white, grey and primary colours.

The Neo-Plasticism ended in 1919 when van Doesburg founded a new alliance called `Abstraction-Creation´. The Neo-Plasticism was very influential in the development of the Bauhaus and the International Style. The most famous artist of the movement was Piet Mondrian.

The tenets of Neo-Plasticism are the following:
· Coloration must be in the primary colours of red, blue and yellow or the no colours of black, grey and white.
· Surfaces must rectangular planes or prisms
· Aesthetic balance must be achieved and this is done through the use of opposition
· Compositional elements must be straight line or rectangular areas
· Symmetry is to be avoided
· Balance and rhythm are enhanced by relationships of proportion and location.

Mondrian began his career as a figurative painter but in 1911 he met the Cubists in Paris and changed his mind about the construction of the work of art. After that he developed his poetry of the primary values or structural of the vision: line, plan, colour. He travelled to London and to New York where his style was marked by the fraction and the visual animation in the plan of his pictorial space.

In Mondrian’s opinion Cubism is rational but not enough because it did not reach to the last consequences. He thought that nothing can be known without feeling it but to know the real essence of things it is needed to make a deep thinking in which the mind works alone. Given that the human mind is equal for every person, the mental process should begin in some common notions, this is, on the elements of the line, the plane and the basic colours.

All his paintings between 1920 and 1940 are similar: a net of coordinates that forms squares of different dimension and contains the basic colour with a dominance of the white (light) and the almost present black (lack of light). Each of them depends on a different perceptive sensation (and consequently sensitive and emotive). Any experience of reality, does matter how different it will be, must lead to reveal the constant structure of the consciousness.

His painting can be included in a perfect urbanism: the city aims at having a living space for a society whose acts should be rational, ethical and aesthetic. His work had a great influence on architecture, not only in the architectonical shapes but in the value of vital functionality of the spaces, the plans and anything that defines and distributes it, and the project in itself. This is why although his painting may appear to be cold Mondrian was, after Cezanne, the highest, most conscious and most civical conscience of modern art.

Futurism

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The Italian Futurism is the first art movement that can be considered an avant-garde movement. They introduced with their art an ideological interest that affected deeply culture and even social costumes, when denies all the past, substituting it by stylistic and technical experimentation. It officially began with Marinetti’s manifesto in 1909 and was signed too by Balla, Carra, Boccioni, Russolo and Soffici.

The avant-garde movements are a phenomenon typical of non well developed countries in which the movement appears as a rebellion in front of the official culture, normally moderate, and they align in the side of progressive political movements. Even being intentionally revolutionary, their effort is more polemic. In the futurist manifest they mention the destruction of historical city and museums and they appeared in favour of the new city, imagined as a machine in movement. Their revolution is the industrial or technological revolution, this is, a bourgeois revolution. In the new civilization the machines, the intellectual-artists represent the genius.

The futurists define themselves as anti-romantic, and they want to follow their own moods so works are highly emotive. They exalt science and technique but they want them to be poetic and lyric. They assure they are socialist, but they are not interested in working class fights and they consider the intellectuals of avant-garde as the aristocracy of the future. When they have to choose in politics they prefer the nationalism. The movement lasted until the end of WW1 but it was dissolved after it.

The characteristics of the movement were their interest in an art forged out of the beauty of speed and a glorification of war. The physical movement, as long as speed is concerned, is the cohesive factor that allows the fusion of object and space and, finally, the elimination of the basic dualism of the traditional culture. The unit of the real should not be produce in the thoughts but in sensations, in an emotive way. The artist must underline dynamism to make it more emotive.

Cubism

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1907 is taken as the date in which Cubism was born, when Picasso and Braque met each other. `Les Demoiselles d’Avignon´ is the painting considered to be the precursor of the movement. After that, Picasso forgot any kind of artistic depiction different from the cubism. The name was given to the movement after the words of the critic Louis Vauxcelles who said that the forms were `strange cubic forms´.

Cubism is not something theoretical, but a discovery. Its characteristics are the following:
-Plans are independent and autonomous: smaller ones break big volumes. Lines around break the images and when the lines themselves are broken the image remains a kaleidoscope.
-Perspective is multiple: each plan is autonomous. The angles multiply and in this way we can see the object from different points of view, all together.
-Light and shade disappear: this is a consequence of the dissolution of the volume.
-Local colour: Colour is not important. It is applied through small brushstrokes and it is valid for any object.

-Geometrization: Compositions are full of geometrical shapes. Any natural depiction is represented through cylinder, cone, sphere, or cubes. Cezanne had pioneered this idea.
-Philosophical basis: the work of some philosophers as Bergson is essential to understand this movement. He said that a person has in his brain a lot of information about an object and the experience is the basis for intellectuality. Cubist painters apply this concept: they do not want to represent reality, but the ideas they have about that reality.
The main representatives of the movement are: Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris. In a different level Robert and Sonia Delaunay and Leger did Cubist works too.

There are three different periods in Cubism: analytic, hermetic and synthetic, that developed in that order.

-Analytic Cubism: Artists investigated nature to distort and deform it. All the works are a collection of different plans completely impossible to understand.

-Hermetic Cubism: Artists aimed at making their works easier to be understood, so that they included some elements that would be identified such as musical instruments. During this period some realist elements appeared too, as printing characters, numbers, newspaper pieces, or labels. They wanted to transmit the idea of a combination of different materials by imitating wood or marble.

-Synthetic Cubism: Collages are included in the works as a sculptural antecedent. They do not imitate things, but they glue them to the canvas. These works are known with the name `papier collé´. Braque was the first using this technique through which he aimed at linking art and life. It offers the possibility of having a real reference. Painting is revised and new ways are opened for the artists. Now they are not limited to painting but they built in some way. This technique paved the way for the third dimension and for the sculpture.

These collages would be influential on the Dadaist work, where the `ready-made´ produced by Duchamp are the heirs of them. Cubism influenced in some other movements and artists too. Leger produced works in which colour had a bigger importance while Sonia and Robert Delaunay produced works with simple shapes of harmonic colours, developing an style known as orphism, full of curve forms and lyrism.

Expressionism

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In general the name Expressionism is used to refer to the German art of the early 20th century, but this is a European phenomenon. The France based group developed the Fauvism while the German branch paved the way for Der Blaue Reiter.

The name tends to reflect their opposition to the Impressionism. The Expressionism is a movement from the inside to the outside. Its attitude can be even aggressive. Anyway, the movement has something in common with the Impressionism: both movements are realistic and ask for the full compromise of the artists in the matter of the reality. The expressionist are involved in their society, they do not escape from it.

The first German Expressionism was born in 1905 with the movement known as Die Brüke that is related to the national figurative tradition. The artists understood the world as a deep existential condition of the human being: the desire of having the reality and the anguish of being possessed by the reality.

Die Brücke is a solid artists’ community with a written programme. Members of the group are Kirchner, Nolde, Schiele, Klimt, Kokoschka. The German situation of the time was obscure, with different artistic influences. Die Brücke proposed the union of the revolutionary element to fight against the Impressionism. The characteristics of the movement are: it is a realism that creates reality; they begin from nothing, just from the artist ideas; the matter influences on the artist; the subjects reflect daily life (streets, people in the cafes); the works are a bit rude.

In their opinion technique is not something that can be invented, it is just work. It is important the dominance of graphics, especially xylography, in which the carving can be violent and the result is sometimes irregular. In the same way, the painting is dense, full of colour, with stains and lack of hues; it is more important the process than the result. The artist works directly on the image and chooses the colours depending on their mood. Deformations are common and they are sometimes aggressive. They find their inspiration in the work of primitive cultures. They do not have a concept of beauty, for them it changes to be ugliness, deformity: it is the poetry of the awful.

Expressionist artists renounce to be bourgeois and criticise this social group. In their opinion, existence is self-creation and they oppose to the industrial work that creates a dehumanized society. They are obsessed with the subject of sex because the relation of men and women is the basis of the society and society deforms, is perverse, is negative, alienates.

Die Brücke was dissolved in 1913 when the group Der Blaue Reiter started its investigation with a less compromised attitude. Members of this group are Beckmann, Dix, Grosz, Marc, Macke, Kandinsky, Klee. They do not have a defined programme. And their orientation is more spiritual. Their objective is to coordinate international exhibitions to foster their polemic writings.

The ideas of the artists of this group are not revolutionary but it is anti-classicist. They are influenced by Matisse, oriental art and even music. Symbols are limited to common objects while the aesthetic communication is dominant. Characteristics of the movement are: importance of the colour and its significance; primitivism; improvisation; inclusion of different lines and shapes: curves, zigzags, stain; art is understood as communication.

Fauvism

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The group of the fauves is not homogeneous and lacks of a defined programme, but for their opposition to the Art Nouveau decoration and the formal consistence of the Symbolism. Members of this group are Matisse, Marquet, Dufy, Derain, Braque, and Vlaminck. They were nor afraid of their lack of popularity or the scandal, they did not follow a political flag and their social polemic was implicit in their poetry.

Even if they conceived the art as a vital impulse, they started depicting some subjects in a critic way. Far from Cezanne’s synthesis there was just one possibility: to solve the dualism between the feeling –the colour –and the construction –the plastic form, the volume, the space –putting special strength on the colour.

Their main objective is the pursue of colour with a plastic-constructive aim, as a structural element of the vision. Some of them dissolved the image, following Van Gogh or Signac tend to make evident the additive process, the structure of the image and they use spare brushstrokes, evident, distributed with a certain order and rhythm that give sense to the mater, the colour and the material construction of the image.

The group appeared in France between 1903 and 1907. Their style is vigorous, far from any academic principal. Their characteristics are: lyric and expressive character expressed through the colour; attempt to conciliate real and interior world; they look for the essential and simple; among the subjects there are landscapes, fluvial scenes and lyric scenes with an important weight of imagination; they represent reality in a subjective way; they emphasize the colour with pure colours, saturated, mainly flat, underlined by the line of the contours and without any reference to the subject or the image; formal synthesis; elimination of spatial perspective; suppression of the definition of forms based on the chiaroscuro; references to exotic and primitive cultures; they created pictorial spaces based on decorative motives taken from wall papers or crafts’ pieces.

Their influences come from different movements: the impressionist theory of colour, chromatic joy, daily life subjects, landscapes, interiors, portraits and still-lives. From the Post-impressionism they took the division in zones, the plenitude of colour, Gauguin’s decorative sense, Van Gogh’s vivid nature. From the German Expressionism they assumed the pure and vigorous colour, the lack of modelling, the strong and direct line, the dynamic sensuality and the subjective interpretation of the artist. From exotic cultures they took the richness of colour and formal references.

Organicism and architecture in the 50s

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We know as organic architecture all the architectonical manifestations that aim at adequate and ally to the nitre. This idea can be found long ago in History but the master in the formulation of its principles was Frank Lloyd Wright.

Organicist architecture is defined by the sense of the interior as a reality; the free plan as flexible and a way of allowing the continuity of atmospheres; the unity between interior and exterior; the use of natural materials; the house as a place for shelter.

With Wright the Rationalism begins to be forgotten and new ways for architecture are opened. This American born architect travelled to Tokyo where he was fascinated by the Japanese architecture. Other of the influences that can be noticed in his work is that of Maya temples of Yucatan. Due to these varied influenced we can say that Wright had a cosmopolitan formation.

His beginnings are associated to the Chicago School but soon he started developing his own style, in which we can distinguish different periods. One of these is that of Prairie Houses, a first attempt to put into practice his idea of Organic architecture. These simple structures consist of functional spaces, light and integrated with nature, at the same time that they are isolated enough as to guarantee the intimacy of their inhabitants. The houses are frequently built in different levels, and always a bit separated from the floor, as in Japanese architecture. One of the most famous houses is the Robbie House.

He continued developing public and private buildings where he continued applying his building philosophy. One of the most representative of his works is the Falling Water House, in Pennsylvania. With this house Wright managed to integrate completely nature and architecture. The different terraces offer the possibility of building in different levels and glass dissolve the walls so interior and exterior and in permanent relation. He used different kind of materials, with an important role of stone that combine with glass and concrete.

In other project Wright experimented with curve forms, as in the New York Guggenheim Museum. He wanted the museum to have well lighted spaces with controlled light that was not reflected in the surfaces. At the same time, he designed the building to offer a possibility of walking up on a ramp in a continuous way, without any braking element for the exhibition of the works of art.

After Wright the word that can define architecture is diversity. One of the most representative architects of the 50s is the Finnish Alvar Aalto. His works are imbued by rationalist spirit but he mixed it with popular tradition and local materials, mainly wood, so common in his native region. His buildings are warm and thought to be appropriate for human beings and the dimension of human body, something in which Wright influence can be noticed. Aalto’s mature work embodies a unique functionalist/expressionist and human style, successfully applied to libraries, civic centres, churches, and housing.

Although Aalto borrowed from the International Style, he utilized texture, colour and structure in creative new ways. He refined the generic examples of modern architecture that existed in most of Europe. His designs were particularly significant because of their response to site, material and form.

Rationalism

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The movement known as Rationalism gathered the most important personalities of 20th century’s architecture. Their work and their theory are individual but they have in common the simplicity of the forms because each form belongs to a function.

They use highly industrialised materials, especially concrete. It is a cheap material, easy to adapt, incombustible, non-corrosive and that offers the possibility of building the skeleton, leaving the plan free. In addition to this, it permits the pre-manufacture in series. It can be combined with other materials such as still, glass or brick.

The wall is not a support any longer, and it is reduced to a light skin for closing, with a huge number of windows that allow light and air entering inside the building. The supports are pillars with different sections, made of still and concrete. The covers, in general, are lintels standing on the support and forming with them the skeleton, giving to the construction a light and non-weighty aspect of great constructive audacity.

The decorative elements disappear in favour of the straight and nude form. There is a worry about proportion, simplicity and asymmetry. The internal space is based of the free plan with interior walls that curve and move freely, adapting to the different functions. In the exterior the projecting, the free low level and the terrace in horizontal define the new image.

There is a great interest about urbanism because they aim at accommodating people to the new leaving standards and organise their groups, proposing new formulas as the garden-city o the industrial city. The most representative buildings are social houses, skyscrapers, industrial buildings, administrative constructions, theatres, concert halls and stadiums.

There are close links between Rationalism and other Art movements such as the Bauhaus. This link can be seen in Mies van der Rohe, linked to the German movement and one of the best representatives of Rational architecture. His work was revolutionary from the very beginning, when he started designing an office building in Berlin (1919). After that he designed houses and in 1929 he built the German Pavilion for Barcelona’s Universal Exhibition. In this building he demonstrated the right use of modern materials, with clear volumes and the wall as a curtain instead of the traditional wall. He emigrated to the US where he built numerous skyscrapers that look to be enormous glass boxes, in which it can be seen the devotion of the architect for the purity of the forms.

Le Corbusier was born in Switzerland even if a majority of his work was developed in France. He learnt the use of concrete and soon he began with the series production. He also designed cities for a concrete number of inhabitants (about three million). In 1926 he made one of his most representative works Ville Savoye, that consists of a concrete structure of Mediterranean inspiration in which his five points of architecture appear: use of “pilotis”, a kind of pillar to sustain the structure and separate it from the floor, not cutting the space; free façade; garden-terrace, thanks to the flat roofs; multiplication of windows: continuous windows with metallic sticks; free plan because now it is not the support of the wall. He theorised but it was not an utopian because his projects were realised, as in the case of the Unité d´Habitation at Marseille, where he built houses for working class families.

At the end of his career he modified his Rationalism and was closer to the Organicism as in the case of one of his master works: Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp.

Architecture and Avant-garde

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The 20th century bore witness to the creation of the avant-garde movements. Even when these developed mainly in plastic arts, some of them had an influence in architecture, as is the case of De Stijl or Neoplasticism and the Russian Constructivism. Both movements were contemporary of the other big artistic movement of the time, the Bauhaus.
Largely associated with three important figures -- the painters Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, and the architect and furniture-maker Gerrit Rietveld -- De Stijl (or “the style”) was perhaps first developed in Mondrian’s post-Cubist paintings, which consist largely of broken horizontal and vertical lines. These works evolved into more spare geometric compositions of orthogonal elements, which are rendered in primary colors set against a white field. In 1917, Rietveld created the canonical “Red/Blue Chair” and projected the Neo-Plastic aesthetic into three dimensions. Van Doesburg taught, for a time, at the Bauhaus, enabling him to widen the De Stijl circle to artists as the Russian El Lissitzky under whose influence, Van Doesberg began “to project, as axonometric drawings, a series of hypothetical architectural constructs, each comprising an asymmetrical cluster of articulated planar elements suspended in space about a volumetric center.”
The characteristics of this architecture were established by van Doesburg: the form does not imitate any other style; especial attention is given to plastic elements, in addition to function, mass, surface, time, space, light, colour and material; it is an economic and functional architecture; it does not have any form following fixed styles and the building is not monumental, but a form open to the space through windows; the ground-plan is essential but in this the walls are not closed even if they support punctually the building; it is an open architecture in which space and time are considered; it is anti-cubic and surfaces follow a centrifugal trend at the same time that symmetry and repetition are eliminated; there is not a clear front in the building and colour is included as a plastic value but, in general, it is a non decorate architecture that aims to be a synthesis of the Neo-Plasticism
The universalizing tendency of the De Stijl soon gave way to the broader, more objective concerns of the Modern movement. For example, while Rietveld’s famous Schroder House of 1924 in Utrecht -- with movable walls and partitions assuring a dynamic, as opposed to static, sense of space -- exemplified the Neo-Plastic ideal of objects floating in space, he began to embrace a more technical architectural position. The project of De Stijl became, through necessity and evolution, a broader trajectory dedicated to social concerns and conditions. The desire to create architecture for the people through means of production, rather than an architecture simply guided by aesthetic concerns, became a rallying cry of a broader European Modernism.

Russian Constructivism was a movement that was active from 1913 to the 1940s. It was a movement created by the Russian avant-garde, but quickly spread to the rest of the continent. Constructivist art is committed to complete abstraction with a devotion to modernity, where themes are often geometric, experimental and rarely emotional. Objective forms carrying universal meaning were far more suitable to the movement than subjective or individualistic forms. Constructivist themes are also quite minimal, where the artwork is broken down to its most basic elements. New media was often used in the creation of works, which helped to create a style of art that was orderly. An art of order was desirable at the time because it was just after WWI that the movement arose, which suggested a need for understanding, unity and peace. Famous artists of the Constructivist movement include Vladimir Tatlin, Kasimir Malevich, Alexandra Exter, Robert Adams, and El Lissitzky.
Tatlin's most famous piece remains his "Monument to the Third International" (1919-20, Moscow), a 22-ft-high (6.7-m) iron frame on which rested a revolving cylinder, cube, and cone, all made of glass which was originally designed for massive scale. After the 1917 Revolution, Tatlin (considered the father of Russian Constructivism) worked for the new Soviet Education Commissariate which used artists and art to educate the public. During this period, he developed an officially authorized art form which utilized 'real materials in real space'. His project for a Monument of the Third International marked his first foray into architecture and became a symbol for Russian avant-garde architecture and International Modernism.

Bauhaus

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It was founded by Walter Gropius in Germany as an experimental pedagogic centre in which they aimed at uniting architecture and design. It started its decadence in the 30s but it was highly influential in other countries to which its members emigrated.

Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architectured modern design. The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design and typography.
The school existed in three German cities (Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and Berlin from 1932 to 1933), under three different architect-directors: Gropius from 1919 to 1927, Meyer from 1927 to 1930 and Mies van der Rohe from 1930 to 1933, when the school was closed by the Nazi regime. The changes of venue and leadership resulted in a constant shifting of focus, technique, instructors, and politics.

The foundation of Bauhaus occurred at a time of political and cultural upheaval in Germany. Defeat in World War I, the fall of the Germany monarchy and the abolition of censorship under the new, liberal Weimar Republic allowed an upsurge of radical experimentation in all the arts, previously suppressed by the old regime. Many Germans of left-wing views were influenced by the cultural experimentation that followed the Russian Revolution, such as constructivism. Such influences can be overstated: Gropius himself did not share these radical views, and said that Bauhaus was entirely unpolitical. Just as important was the influence of the 19th century English designer William Morris, who had argued that art should meet the needs of society and that there should be no distinction between form and function.. Thus the Bauhaus style, also known as the International Style, was marked by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design.

The most important influence on Bauhaus was however modernism, a cultural movement whose origins lay as far back as the 1880s, and which had already made its presence felt in Germany before the World War, despite the prevailing conservatism. The design innovations commonly associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus - the radically simplified forms, the rationality and functionality, and the idea that mass-production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit - were already partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded.
Gropious designed the Bauhaus building at Dessau, the most emblematic construction of the movement.The first important work made by Gropius was the Fagus factory in 1911. It was conceit as a beautiful combination of iron and glass, but its main work is the Bauhaus building in which teachers and students collaborated. The plan of the Bauhaus building is formed by three sections that expand freely and multiply the points of view. The walls are of concrete and glass.
There are a number of characteristics to the Bauhaus/International Style of architecture: 1) It shuns ornamentation and favours functionality 2) Uses asymmetry and regularity versus symmetry 3) It grasps architecture in terms of space versus mass.

Bauhaus architecture was concerned with the social aspects of design and with the creation of a new form of social housing for workers. This may be just another one of the reasons it was embraced in the newly evolving cities, at a time when socialist ideas were so prevalent. This style of architecture came about (in part) because of new engineering developments that allowed the walls to be built around steel or iron frames. This meant that walls no longer had to support the structure, but only enveloped it – from the outside.

Perhaps no trend within Modern architecture so neatly captures the imagination as the almost mythic status of the Bauhaus. Emerging in Dessau, Germany, during the shocking aftermath of World War I, the famed institution was conceived as a reformation of applied arts education. The principle was simple: to reject the salon arts of the haute-bourgeoisie in favour of a craft tradition in order to erase the class distinctions between artist and craftsman. Yet this was not a rejection of the modernizing impulses of the rapidly industrializing, urbanizing German state (one that was facing an increasingly dire socio-economic predicament). Instead, as developed by Bauhaus director Walter Gropius, the applied arts were to be taught in a workshop-based design education, with a reconciliation of craft design and industrial production.
Under the tutelage of pioneering Modernists, including Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, and Theo Van Doesberg, the Bauhaus students produced work inspired by a stripped-down, functional aesthetic, one obviously influenced by Russian Constructivism. Their approach rejected the classical notion of composition through contrasting materials and forms -- instead, it sought to bring out aesthetic properties inherent in the materials themselves, as revealed through their disjunction and arrangement in space. Indeed, from Herbert Bayer’s sans-serif typography to Gropius’s seminal Bauhaus building of 1926, there emerged an objective sensibility that championed elements devoid of ornamentation and excessive detail. The objective approach led to an embrace of a serialized industrial production process that was applied to any variety of craft making, from the assembly of chairs to the weaving of tapestries.

Modernism, Art Nouveau, Modern Style

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19th century architecture moved inside a deep contradiction: all the movements aimed at finding their own architectonical language, appropriate for the time but, at the same time, with the best building techniques according to the new times. In this context Modernism was born.

Modernism is an attempt to finding a modern style, accurate for a new century everybody was waiting for enthusiastically. They wanted it to have not links with the past and based on the new material. This style was not only international, but it also expanded to all the art and design spheres, creating a decorative environment, controlled by the architects. It covered from the houses to the metro stations, from furniture to interior decoration, even the clothes of the proprietors. This style received different names depending on the region: Modernism in Spain, Art Nouveau in France, Modern Style in Britain, Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionsstil in Austria.

In Britain the ugliness of the designs, the monotony of production in chain and the fear of alienation provoked a movement conducted by William Morris who tried to recover the quality of design and crafts production and Modernism was its direct heir. The same ideas expanded in other places of the continent.

Among the first manifestations of the style are the works of the Belgian Victor Horta, who applied the new conceptions in his Tassel House (1892). Here he developed a new concept of architecture based on the rational use of iron but without renouncing to treat it in an expressive and decorative way with cures and lineal rhythms very refined that gave to the columns, girders and handrails flower shape.

From Belgium, and thanks to the fast diffusion of printed press, it expanded all over Europe, finding in Catalonia one of the most important regions due to the enthusiastic baking of industrial bourgeoisie. There appeared one of the most important and original architects of the movement, Gaudí (1852-1926), whose architecture, highly plastic, almost sculptural, looks to be made of natural forms. Gaudi also realised the decoration of the buildings, trying to keep coherence between exterior and interior. Other architects of the period in Spain are Domènec I Montaner and Puig I Cadafalch. In Barcelona the Modernism reached to all the cultural aspects, with painters such as Rusiñol, Ramón Casas, Nonell.

The new style affected basically architecture and decorative arts, but it also influenced on all the others. Its theory expanded with the illustrated magazines, speeches, exhibitions that were useful to expand the knowledge of technical advances. In this way there were established the basis of the style to which each country added its own particularities. For instance, while in Belgium, France and Spain curves and flowers are essential elements of the style, in Britain, Scotland or Germany it is geometrical. In all the cases it was a reaction against the eclecticism and its inspiration was nature and symbolist painting.

In decorative arts it aimed at offering quality against the vulgarity of massive industrial production. In this aspect followed the British Arts and Crafts movement, fostered by William Morris. In the continent it was not against chain production, but it tried to link art and industry to offer beautiful products that could be bought by almost every body, even when the design in an artisan way made them inaccessible for a majority of the population, but very appropriate for the rich industrial and financial bourgeoisie.

In architecture they looked for flexibility of the line and sinuosity with decorative finality; they used coloured materials and moulding stone; bars, balconies and supports were made in forged iron. The new materials offered to the architect complete creative freedom. They assumed not only the structural and building process but also the decorative and furnishing, making of them real designers.

Interiors were organised as a surface of sinuous and sensual lines, with a naturalistic tendency. There were harmonic wholes created with freedom and fantasy. They looked for the pleasure of the integration of beauty and welfare. Nature was translated to the interior, making it flexible, instable and light.

Materials were of great variety: iron, mosaic, wood. Sinuous lines were elongated on walls and floors, in a kind of vegetal metaphor. The work is organic, extracted from nature; the use of flower elements with decorative purpose created an smart atmosphere. The main centres of production were France, Belgium, Germany and Austria. Among the authors we can mention Victor Horta, the pioneer, Van de Velde and Otto Wagner in Wien.

In Britain, In Glasgow, Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh also developed a rectilinear version of art nouveau, which he employed in numerous buildings and their furnishings. In the Glasgow School of Art, completed in two phases (eastern section 1897-1899, western section 1906-1909), he used contemporary materials in an elegant, angular style. The simple shapes of the brick and stone exterior clearly indicate the division of space within the building, while large expanses of glass provide a strong visual connection between the interior spaces and the outside world. Window mullions (dividers between panes of glass), doors, and fences use ironwork in an elegant linear or geometric manner. This seemingly simple design offers a strong contrast to the ornate architecture based on past styles that was typical of the time.

In Belgium Art nouveau architecture, in Brussels, flourished in the work of Belgian designers Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde. As did Mackintosh in Glasgow, these Belgian designers sought to create a new style, free from the historical references of prevailing traditions. They utilized standard wrought iron and cast-iron technology, but employed it to create distinctly new forms. In the Hôtel Tassel in Brussels (1892-1893), Horta not only revealed the structural column that supports the second floor, but transformed its cast-iron form into a plantlike stem that terminates in a burst of intertwined tendrils as it connects with other structural elements.

In France designer Hector Guimard designed entrances for the Metro stations in Paris (1898-1901) using simple metal and glass forms decorated with curvilinear wrought iron. These are especially memorable examples of art nouveau's delightfully curving naturalistic forms.

Art nouveau took hold in a number of German-speaking cities, the most prominent of which were Munich, Darmstadt, and Weimar in Germany, and Vienna in Austria. Known as Jugendstil (German for “youth style”), art nouveau was promoted in Munich through periodicals such as Die Jugend (The Youth).

Stylistic trends in Vienna took a significantly different direction. Led by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, young artists and architects formed a group called the Wiener Sezession, or Vienna Secession, in protest against the entrenched conservatism of the art establishment in Vienna. As did their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, Secession designers rejected historical styles; but in Vienna they expressed this through an increasing simplification of form. Rather than embracing the writhing organic forms of Endell or Obrist in Munich, Viennese artists moved towards the restrained geometric designs exemplified by the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Contemporary Architecture: The New Materials

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19th century architecture had its highest examples in greenhouses and exhibition pavilions, among them that of London of 1851, built by Paxton. The structures of iron and glass developed a taste that derived from the first Romanticism. They wanted to exalt the virtues of progress. The resistant elements of forged iron produced in series and of easy assemblage allowed to built higher buildings and to elongate the central naves in an almost unlimited way, with regular modules.

The Century of Industrialization

The 19th century bear witness to a new society and a new industrial culture and it needed an answer to the new needs. In this century different trends crossed, with a certain degree of confusion. The period is marked by the confrontation between the architectonic tradition and the new techniques, materials, and needs created by the Industrial Revolution. This provoked the apparition of the two styles that developed along the century: historicism and iron architecture.

The 19th Century Architecture

The use of new materials and new building techniques, adapted to new needs of the new society is characteristic of this moment. At the beginning Neo-Classical forms were common in the main European cities, in a bourgeois aim at remembering the glories and virtues of the Classical time. The Romanticism led the architects to revive the Gothic or Islamic forms. This style is known as Historicism or revival of different historical styles. Its development was deterrent for the evolution of the architecture and decorative arts. It was born in opposition to the official art of the academies and under the influence of the romanticism. It aimed at recovering the genuine roots of the nationalities, present during the medieval period, and to distance from the Italian influence.

The architects used the new building techniques allowed by the use of iron and other materials. It is a moment of high impulse for great public buildings, the renaissance of several old styles: Greek, Classical, Romanesque, Gothic, and the interest for exotic styles such as the Moorish, Hindi, and Chinese.

The Architecture of Iron and Glass

But the contemporary architecture really comes up with the needs due to the expansion of the cities that were created by the Industrial Revolution. The railway contributed to the city expanding out of its boundaries and spreading on the surroundings. This contributed to change the image of the cities and the countryside with the station, bridges, viaducts, which ended by becoming part and parcel of the landscape. This kind of building, essentially practical, adopted the new materials such as iron and glass that, with their infinite possibilities paved the way for the following architectonical revolution.

At the end of the 18th century the first structures in iron were created, a fact that underlined the importance of the engineer labour, collaborating or even substituting the architect.

The former function of the wall, which formerly sustained the building, was exerted by the iron structure. Glass, industrially elaborated, allowed increasing the light of the building because it can cover enormous spaces eliminating walls in the new constructions, solving in this way the problem of the lightening of interiors, at the same time that electricity allowed the creation of buildings of great height doted with elevators and solved problems of ventilation. The internal and external communications of the building was possible thanks to these new materials.

The new building techniques and the pre-elaborated elements made in series allowed the massive construction of public buildings: galleries, greenhouse-train stations, libraries, markets; and private buildings: stores, factories. The constructive monopoly of Church, aristocracy and Crown was broken. As a result, free, lighten and functional spaces were designed, perfectly adapted to the needs of the industrial society.

All these possibilities were observed in the Crystal Palace designed by Paxton for the London Universal Exhibition of 1851. This was an enormous building that was built in a record time and at good price because it used pre-fabricated elements. It was essentially a gigantic greenhouse that allowed the creation of a wide and clear space perfectly adapted to its purpose.

Other building built with the same materials was the Eiffel Tower, designed by Eiffel for the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889. Similar to Paxton project is that of the Crystal Palace of the Madrid Retiro Park, work of Velázquez Bosco. These new materials were also used in the Atocha station in Madrid.

Chicago School

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At the turn of the 20th centuy it appeared in Chicago a group of architects who developed an architectonical style that is known as the Chicago School or Commercial style. They promoted new technologies of steel-frame construction and developed a spatial aesthetic that became very influential. It is contemporary of the European Modernism.

Some of the distinguish features of the Chicago School are the use of steel-frame buildings with masonry cladding (terra cotta), allowing large plate-glass window areas and the use of limited amounts of exterior ornament. Sometimes they used elements of neoclassical architecture for their skyscrapers. In many of them classical columns can be found. The scheme of the buildings is normally: a first floor functions as the base, middle storeis with little ornamental detail, that act as the shaft of the column, and the last floor that represent the capital, with more ornamental detail and ended with a cornice.

The Chicago window is a creation of this school. It is a three-part window consisting of a large fixed centre panel flanked by two smaller double-hung sash windows. The arrangement of windows on the façade typically created a grid pattern, with some projecting out from the façade forming bay windows. These windows combine the need for light-gathering and the need for natural ventilation; the single central pane was usually fixed, while the two surrounding panes were operable.
Some architects of this school are Louis Sullivan, Richardson, Adler. Other architects who collaborated with them or worked in a similar style were Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe.
Examples of this architectural style are Chicago’s Auditorium Building, Carson Company Building, Reliance Building.

Impressionist Sculpture

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In sculpture the artists used nature to help them to create a new sort of liveliness. They tried to reflect the impression of the reality and the temporariness of these impressions. The most genius artist of the impressionistic sculpture is Auguste Rodin. His work has an irregular surface on which sunlight causes glittering. These sparkles of sunlight give the sculpture a new kind of liveliness.
This optic effect was not only what Rodin was after. With these methods of sculpture he tried to reflect the growing-process of a sculpture. Like painters build their work out of colour and light spots, he build his sculptures out of clay and bronze. By making the growing-process visible for the people, he also brought the aspect of temporariness into his work.
We can see the very beginnings of Rodin’s attention to energetic poses in his first major work, The Age of Bronze, which initially appears staged and static, but upon closer inspection is instead brimming with vitality and vigor.
Rodin’s commitment to integrating a sense of action in the poses of his figures carried on through the 1880’s, and he eventually revisited and added upon the legacy of his St. John the Baptist Preaching in a work entitled Nude Honoré de Balzac with Folded Arms. Right away, we can see the similarity between the two figures’ postures: the dynamic lower body; the strong, forceful advance of the legs; and the exaggerated forward stride all contribute to an overall impression of spontaneity in both poses. This ‘movement,’ this ‘conquering advance’ that Rodin’s sculpture had impressed upon its viewers was thus the artist’s way of imbuing a powerful impression through a dynamic pose without being as overt as he was in illustrating it previously - ‘suggesting’ rather than boldly indicating.
Rodin would further develop and build upon the impressions made through his figures’ dynamic poses by branching out of true academic subject matter and giving himself the freedom to create even more fluid and dynamic poses for his figures. No longer would Rodin be constrained by classical, academic themes; his ensuing work on Balzac would mark a changed focus for more modern subjects. Ultimately, due to his increasing concentration on the dynamic poses of his figures, Rodin eventually freed himself from the need for a subject altogether. Subsequently, Rodin would concentrate mainly on experimenting with the forceful poses of partial and fragmented figures. Thus, by developing dynamic poses which captured the spontaneous essence of what he wished to portray, as well as liberating his work from the limitations of an academic subject or specific theme, Rodin can not only be seen as an Impressionist, but also as the father of modern sculpture.

Camille Claudel discovered her passion for sculpture when she was very young. She worked under the aegis of Boucher until he departed for Italy in 1883, and was trusted to Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). She soon became not only his assistant but also his muse and lover.
The two artists inspired each other and Camille studied the nude figure thanks to Rodin, a rare opportunity for a woman of that time period. Their passionate and tormented relatioship ended in 1893, while Rodin's work was celebrated and Camille ignored. In an attempt to establish her own reputation, Camille secluded herself to work intensely, but her efforts remained vain; poor, rejected, her work censored, Camille's genius was never fully acknowledged, thus resulting in the decline of her career and mental state. Isolated and paranoid, Camille was committed to an asylum in 1913, at Ville-Evrard, and transferred one year later to an asylum in Montdevergues (near Avignon), where she remained until her death in October 1943.
While Camille destroyed a lot of her work shortly before her transfer to the asylum, the artistic legacy she left proves her genius. Camille reveals a profound understanding of anatomical features, using mainly plaster, marble, bronze and even onyx. Her work shows elegance and mastery, and becomes particularly original at the turn of the 20th century, with the influence of Japanism and Art Nouveau.

Post-Impressionism

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Post-Impressionism is an Art style that developed in France after Impressionism, as a rejection of this style inherent limitations. In Post-Impressionism are included several late 19th century painters, among them Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. A majority of them began their carrier as painters in the impressionist style but then they abandoned it in search for a more personal way of expression. These painters did not have enough with the mere depiction of nature in which Impressionism was based. They preferred a more ambitious expression, even without denying the pure and brilliant impressionist colour and its freedom from traditional subjects and techniques. The work of these post-impressionist artists was the basis for several contemporary trends in painting.

General characteristics:
-Interest in building the shape, the drawing and the expression of the objects and human images.
-Conciliation among the volume (it had been dematterialised by the Impressionism) and the pure aestetic taste (Cezanne)
-Conception of the painting as a whole of geometrical shapes (Cezanne)
-Use of colours that create contrast to distinguish plans and shapes.
-Pictorical effect based on structures, both spatial and chromatic.
-Use of pure colours with enormous emotive weight (Van Gogh) or modulate (Gauguin).
-Full of imagination creations bases on curved brushstrokes that try to express the anguiss and interior insanity (Van Gogh).
-Interest in the exotic (Gauguin) or in the life of the out-of-class (Toulouse-Lautrec).
-Creation of simplified and static compositions, seeking for the harmony of the chromatic masses limited by well defined profiles (Gauguin).

Influences
-From the impressionist the taste for colours in Cezanne.
-From Rubens, the neoimpressionist and the japanese cards the rich chromatism and the curves of the shapes used by van Gogh.
-From the exotic cultures of Oceania the primitivism of Gauguin.

Gauguin

He started painting with Pissarro. He left the comfortability of his life and family to live first in Paris, then in Bretagne and finally in Tahití. His painting is characterised by the use of strong tonalities, with alive and many times arbitrary colours that he distributed in big plans limited by curve lined rhytms. He had two main subjects: the exotism of Tahiti and the primitivism of Bretagne. His work was a reference for the symbolist and his sense of colour was influential on fauves and expressionists. He renounced to the perspective, supresed modeling and sades and identified the sensation of flatness, the same as in Japanese paintings.

Cezanne

His painting recovered the volume thanks to the geometry, drawning and the definition of the shapes by using building brushstrokes. He managed to do all this without renouncing to the intensity of the colours by using contrast and coloured shades.
In his paintings there is an special interest on the foreground and he realized small distortions as a result of the use of multiple points of view, as in the case of his still-lives. His painting was the basis for the cubism and influenced in Matisse colours. He painted series as those of the Cards Players and Sainte Victorie Mountain.

Van Gogh

He was stablished in Arles enthusiasted with the light of Provenza and he painted images and landscapes with curved and mobile formes, similar to the flames of his internal fire. He was a pasitonated of the colour as the vehicle for expressin the frequent depressions and anguishes he suffered from. His brushstroke is very characteristic, sinuous, cursive and with a lot of matter. The colours are sometimes aggressive, with unfrequent contrats –yellow over orange-. He openned the way for the expressionism of the 20th century. Works: Self-portraits, Stary Night, Sun Flowers, Doctor Gadget.

Toulouse-Lautrec

He reflected the atmosphere of the night salons, full of dancers, singers and prostitutes who became his models. In his technique drawing is essential, to capsize movement in an ironic and caricaturesque way. He was the impulsor of wall-papers. Works: Moulin Rouge.

Impressionism

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Introduction
Capitalist growth and industrialisation provoked an unprecedented change that affected Europe radically. The continuous changes affected Art too: communications are faster, photography makes possible to see things that the human eye could not appreciate. During the 19th century artists were known in the Salons or Exhibitions and the decision about of the admission of artists depended on a jury. In 1863 the Refuses´ Salon was organised, taking part on it some painters formerly not accepted, such as Manet.

Impressionism
It was born as an evolution of the French landscape school of the late 19th century. It is an answer to the new society and philosophy. Bourgeoisie has its own traditions and its way of entertaining and this is going to be one of the subjects of the Impressionism. Cities are the place where lazy pedestrians walk around, even during the night, with its traditional population such as cabaret singers, dancers, cafes. It is an attractive world from which the impressionists extracted their subjects. Impressionists’ paintings reflect the taste for landscape, boats, Sunday meetings.

These painters gathered together around the figure of Manet, refused in the official salons. In front of the new language they defended the free brushstroke, separated into primary colours that must be mix in the eye. People reacted against this art but they counted with the backing of two emergent forces: art critics and marchands.

The style has a precedent in the landscapes of the Barbizon School and the last French realism of Corot and Millet. In addition to this, they were influences by the colour and composition of the Spanish Golden Century. Japanese stamps in fashion at the time, added a new vision of the space and the use of flat colours. Finally, photography was also influential.

The result is a cosy, light painting, normally of landscape, full of light and colour, with short brushstrokes that sometimes allow us to see the canvas. There are not big images because they are made under private commandment. They are far of any social compromise.

Technique and formal characteristics
-They use oil on canvas, even when sometimes they can use pastel on paper.
-New subjects: they recover non important subjects, with an especial interest in landscape, both rural and urban; they want to capsize the fugacity. There are real landscapes, independently attractive or ugly. There are also non important things, as free time, dances, and pubs. They renounce to important subject, with message.
-New valuation of colour. Colour does not exist, neither shape. The only real thing for the impressionist artist is the relation air-light. In this way the light is the real subject of the painting and this is why they repeat it during different hours or seasons. The quality and amount of light is what offers one or another configuration of the object. This is why they painted at open air and they used a fast way of painting to catch the changing effects. Paintings are luminous and light.
-Colour is directly related to light. They use light colours, lively and pure that they apply directly on the canvas, one on the other, so the mix is made in the spectator’s eye. With this resource they gain in chromatic vivacity. Shades are not dark any longer and are reduced to spaces coloured with complementary colours, because in this way the main colour is intensified.
-Free, short and fast brushstroke. It is a need for catching better the atmospheric effects. They do not like to modify the things and they prefer to use big and matter-abundant stains. Line disappears and the brushstrokes and colour are the dominant values.
-The traditional model with graduating colours and light does not exist. As the time goes on the shapes will be dissolved into luminous and chromatic impacts.
-Open air painting. It is marked by the subjects but more by the intention of finding a way of correcting the too mechanic composition of the studio.
-New valuation of the illusionist space. They are not interested on deepness and the traditional conception of the painting as a window disappears. They want it to be alive, a piece of nature, so they escape from perspective and traditional composition. In many paintings the location of the elements, cutting characters and objects, is a photographic effect.

Impressionist painters.
Manet renounced to the academic tradition. He presented in the Refuges Salon Dejeneur sur l´herbre, offering a vision of the light and composition his contemporaries were not prepared to see. The sensation of volume is not given with the chiaroscuro and the images are not located in a certain atmosphere but mixed with it. Other works are Olimpia and The Bar of the Folies Bergere.

Monet is the most poetic of the impressionist, with a fluid conception of nature. One of his first objectives is the immediate visual sensation. This is why he chose aquatic elements, underlining the effects of light on the water. He was worried about light variations depending on the time, what led him to paint the same image at different hours: Rouen Cathedral. His painting Impression, soleil levant was used by a critic to refer to the work of these artists and the movement was named after it.

Renoir is a revolutionary and an artist of strong tradition. He used strong tonalities, red, and yellow and capsized the wavy movement of light on leaves and water. He preferred human motives, mainly women, to express beauty. Work: The Moulin de la Galette.

Signac was influenced by the divisionism and studied carefully the effects of light achieving a great colour. He painted mainly landscapes.

Degas is more an impressionist of the form than of the colour. In many of his paintings the light is substituted but that of candles. The tender clothes of the dances capsized the fugacity of the light. He considered that form has a value in itself and keeps its volume. He represented human images, mainly Dancers.

Seurat tried to represent reality with a rigorous and scientific technique. He began the divisionism or pointillism. He represented the luminous vibration with the application of small dots that compose the unity of the image once perceived by the eye. This is the procedure use in his Dimanche Afternoon a la Grande Jatte.

Goya

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He worked just after the labe Baroque period. The two trends that dominated his contradictions were the reaction against the previous conception of art and the desire for a new form of expression.

He started his formation in Zaragoza but at the age of 17 he went to Madrid where his style was influenced by Tiepolo and Mengs, the Venetian painters working there at that moment. He travelled to Italy when he learnt fresco painting and when he came back he was commanded the sketches for the vault of the Pilar. Once in Madrid he started draft designs for tapestry, firstly with works about fishing and hunting scenes, of French influence, but most frequently about folk life and countryside. He recognised the influence of Velasquez and Rembrandt and nature.

In 1780 he was elected a member of the San Fernando Academy, submiting “The Crucified”, following the academic rules. In 1785 he was appointed Official Painter to the Court . In 1792 he went completely deaf and the gaiety of his work disappeared, the colours became darker, the brushwork losser and more expressive. Apart from painting for the court he also painted for himself. He did not care for royalty who tried to please and pose for him and he exposed their weaknesses on canvas, shoving their true characters.

His portraist reveal an insight into the enchantment of women and children. Some of these are like a last farewell to the joys of life for soon Goya retired into the isolation of his Quinta del Sordo. Meanwhile the Napoleonic Wars came and went. The frightful horrors suffered by the Spanish people filled Goya with such bitterness that he turned the full power of his art into an attack on the insase behaviour of his fellow creatures.

Between 1810 and 1814 he produced his famous series of etchings –The Disasters of War –and the paintings related to the war. These two works show an extraordinarily powerful and expressive use of colour. Goya concentrated on achieving that was irrelevant. They represent a revolutionary advance in the whole conception of the range and purpose of painting. War was depicted as futile and inglorious and for the first time there were no heroes, only killers and killed.

During the latter part of his life, before moving to France, Goya covered the walls of his Quinta with the balck paintings, the last and most weird and extrovert of his production. In many ways he personified the spirit of Spain, where the power and beauty of death seemed brood in the air.

He produced four series of etchings: the Caprichos, the Disasters of War, the Tauromachia and Disparates. All of them belong to moments of different crisis. In general they tend to be critic with the society of his time, what in some cases alerted the Inquisition. These works gave him the opportunity of producing in complete freedom, without the sevitude of commissioned work.

He died in Bordeaux in 1828.

Realism

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General characteristics.

During the second half of the 19th century important changes took place in the world of Art. Romanticism had opened the doors towards a free painting, open to new subject. The social changes derived from the Industrial Revolution, at once with the political revolutions, powerfully influenced on the artist, who questioned their paper in this world of transformations. The fight between academicism and rupture marked the whole century, specially the use of colour, texture and light.

Realist painting did not invent anything in formal aspects. Its significance is on the subjects chosen and in the way in which those are treated. Politically it is the century of the bourgeois revolutions. The rich bourgeoisie who controlled the politic did the same with the artistic taste through the salons, in which the artists should exhibit their work in order to be known.

Realism ask for the zenith of reality, the importance of daily subjects treated in an objective way, without idealization, in front of the colossal subjects of the past –religion, mythology, allegory, history -. In this sense the Romanticism had paved the way at insisting on the landscape, without myths, and in the popular. The amazing about the realist relies on the subjects, the way of confronting the reality, because the technique is the traditional. They did not idealise the images and people appear in their normal activities.

Realist painters

Courbet
He considered that the function of the painting was to reproduce the reality as it is, free of any philosophical, moral, political or religious prejudice. Some of his works are A Burial at Ornans and The Painter’s Workshop.

Daumier
He realised engravings and lithography and caricatures that criticize the hypocrisy of Louis Phillip’s monarchy. In oil painting he used an energetic brushstroke that gives the impression of draft. His subjects reflected the compromise and solidarity with humble classes as the Third Class Wagon or The Launderette.

Millet
He was the first painter in whose workers are the main protagonists of the work, but always resigned and patient, as in Angelus and Scatterer.

Landscape painting
The most important artists are Corot and the members of the Barbizon School. They tend to copy on the canvas the reality of French landscape. Corot experienced nature as it is, no as he can imagine it. He capsized the instant, the fleeing light, the changing atmosphere. Some of his works are Chartre Cathedral and Mantes Bridge.

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Itwas a group of English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848 by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rosseti and Willian Holman Hunt. The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on academic teaching of art. Hence the name "Pre-Raphaelite". They wanted to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art.

Romanticism

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This style was born during the crisis of the Ancient Regime that provoked a loss of faith in Reason. As a reaction, a new sensibility came up. It was characterised by over valuating feelings, passion, intuition, imagination and individual. Romanticism is a way of feeling.

Characteristics of romantic painting:
It refuses the Neo-Classical conventions and its rigid rules. It supposed a moment of technical and aesthetic innovation of great consequences for the future:
-It uses different techniques: oil painting, watercolours, engraving and lithography.
-Texture is valued per se and rough surfaces combine with more subtle shapes. Brushstrokes are free, alive and full of expression.

-Line disappears in front of colour. The suggestive potentiality of colour is recovered, freeing from too defined limits.
-Light is very important and its gradations give to the work and effective and theatre effect.
-Compositions tend to be dynamic, full of curve lines and dramatic gestures, even when some artists prefer quieter geometrical schemes.

-Subjects are varied, ranging from the exotic of the memory of a glorious pass –including from Greece to the Middle Ages –to history depictions. Gothic is the most important style, and its architecture, legends and historical moments are frequently depicted.
The exotic is evident in the wide geography that includes the North of Africa and the wild new America. East is discovered, it offers the light and colour at once with new subjects. Fantasy and, above all, drama with an obsessive taste for death, night and remains, combined with monsters and non-normal creatures.
Other discovery of the Romanticism is Nature and landscape. Fantastic, imaginative, of studio, remembered landscapes are depicted. Atmospheric effects such as fog are highly valued.
The cult to individualism is reivindicated. Artists prefer their freedom to the collectivist. This is why just a few artists, as Delacroix, are compromised with their time.
This individuality results in a new relation client-artist. They are equal, they exchange items. The artist is not the craftsman any longer. Sometimes artists create teams but without renouncing to their own individuality.

French Romanticism
Gericault is an artist who acted as a bridge between the Neo-Classical formation and a romantic approach to the work. In his short life he produced quite varied works of a wide range of subjects.

Delacroix is famous for his colour and sensuality. The North African painting influenced him. His work is of high compromise with History, and he represented moments of the revolutions of his times.

British Romanticism
Britain contributed to the painting of Romantic landscape with Constable and Turner.
Constable’s landscapes are authentic and realistic. They are full of colour stains and he is worried about capsizing the effects of light and atmospheric changes through a quick and precise technique.

Turner expressed his worries about colour and light, which he used in a revolutionary way by depicting the ways of expansion of this through the atmosphere: midst, steam, and smoke.

German Romanticism
The most important artist is Caspar David Friedrich. He depicted landscapes to which he gave a mystic, religious appearance. People are only an insignificant element in front of the greatness of landscape.

Neo-Classical Painting

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Out of all the arts during the Neo-Classical period, painting was the one in which it was more difficult to reach to an aesthetic of the style. One of the reasons for that is the lack of antique models, because just a few of them appeared in the excavations. Vase decoration and low-relieves were almost the only references at the artists’ hand.

The characteristics of the movement are:
-Renounce to the colourist effects and the composition of the Baroque for realising a painting based on symmetry and reason
-The perfection of the shapes of ancient sculpture were combined with the values of Rafael’s painting.
-The result is a cold work, without deepness, consciously distant, that remains the ancient relieves.
-Painting was eclectic, eliminating any superfluous detail to underline the importance of the subject.
-It was aimed at regenerate society by showing the citizens’ virtues that were explained and depicted through subjects based on classical literature.

Among the most important authors there are Jacques Louis David and Ingres.

David depicted the Neo-Classical aesthetic in works such as The Oath of the Horatii, or Emperor Napoleon Crowning Josephine. He created a precise space in which the main characters are located on the foreground. The drowning is dominant. There is a lack of ornamentation. The light is cold and archaeological details complete what defines the Neo-Classical taste. The subjects of the paintings refer to heroic gests from which it is possible to extract a moral conclusion, even when they did not need to be necessarily ancient.

All in all, Neo-Classical style was inspired in the mythology, and sometimes it even copied it, what explains the abundance of historical and mythological subjects. There is a proliferation of naked at the Greek style and the pose is grandiloquent and cold, largely though and influenced by the Academy. It is an art full of rules, where drowning is important while colour is considered as of secondary importance. Normally it escape from the movement and, when this appears, it looks to be frozen or be stable and predictable.

Neo-Classical Sculpture

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There were two authors who dominated the Neo-Classical sculpture: the Italian Antonio Canova and the Danish Bertel Thorvaldsen.

Canova dominated with his artistic personality the European art of his time. He renewed the classical art in Italy. He was formed in Venice and developed his mastery in Rome. Nobody as him was able of working the marble. He was the sculptor of enormous tombs, such as that of Napoleon, following the Antique tradition. He also was the artist depicting heroic Roman gods and light nymphs. One of his most famous works is that of Cupid and Psyche, group in which love awakes a sleeping Psyche who was under the effect of a magic perfume. This work is an anthem to love at the same time that a reminder of Psyche legend, that refers to the immortal soul of the platonic myth. Without scarifying the rules of the Academy, Canova built a pyramid of mixed bodies, animated by a play of members that move with the light. The transparency of white marble adds poetry to a largely meditated group.

Thorvaldsen was the Nordic sculptor closest to Canova. After his formation at Copenhagen he moved to Rome. He stressed the severe component of a kind of primitive sculpture, which is full of a neo-Greek solemnity facing the Hellenistic interpretation made by Canova. The models of the 5th century come to life again in works such as Jason, Ganimede or the Alexandre’s Freeze. His images are frequently naked, showing internal peace and with a confident gesture.

Neo-classical Architecture

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The neo-classicism was born thanks to a series of circumstances. It is the moment of rediscovery of the Classical Antiquity. In addition to this, the state created the academies to convert the classicism into rule. Last, but not least, the Baroque forms were exhausted.

The Neo-classical architecture is going to recover the styles of the Antiquity. Its moment of maximum splendour reached at the beginning of the 19th century and the art is becoming full of more and more superficial forms.

Neo-classical architecture is characterised by:
· Size can be colossal, with a special taste for pomposity and decorated with rich materials.
· The evolution covers all the Ancient styles, beginning with Greek, Rome, Paleo-christianism and Renaissance.
· The classical trends are present in architects who prefer the measured form to the felt one and use a language of stereo-metrical basic forms, with cubes, spheres, cylinders and pyramids. All the volumes are massive.
· The most used order is the Doric, with fluted shaft; the column recovers it old importance and the pediments appear everywhere.
· From Rome they take the conception of space, with special interest in domes. The interior of the buildings tends to have a very ordered plan while in the exterior big volumes are dominant.
· They prefer to copy than to innovate and the buildings must give the sensation of order and authority that the monarchy aimed at transmitting.
· The new thing is the adaptation of the Greek temple to the Christian religion.

Famous architects are Soufflot in France and Wren in England.

Spain
During the second half of the 18th century there is a special effort to depurate and simplify the architectonical shapes. This job was directed by the academies, being the most important that of San Fernando.
The most important authors are:
· Ventura Rodriguez: he worked with a marked eclecticism.
· Sabatini: classicist forms consolidated with him.
· Juan de Villanueva: He is the only Spanish architect related to the architecture of the reason. Among other works he realised the Prado Museum, in which he combined the use of stone and brick, concealing the classical monumentality, the modernity of his time and the functionality of his work. His style continued during the first half of the 19th century.

Spanish Baroque Painting

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The seventeenth century is in all respects the golden age of Spanish painting. Italian influence was largely rejected in favor of Mannerist formulas and a severe and noble style which used chiaroscuro not for the sake of a theatrical aestheticism, but to create a more urgent sense of drama. Though undoubtedly Baroque, this was a profoundly realistic art, preferring a broad visual synthesis, with a predominance of pictorial over tactile values, to the analytical approach of the sixteenth-century primitivists. Interest in the faithful reproduction of materials encouraged virtuosity. Artists grew more fastidious in their choice of colors and more intimately concerned with tonal values. Light served not only to lend brightness to external forms but acquired a transcendental function. Spatial values became more subtle and more numerous; tonal gradation gained in importance and the conventional mode of observation gradually gave way to one so penetrating that no other age or style has been able to equal it in truthfulness. It was, in fact, the great Spanish masters who guided European painting along the paths of naturalistic realism.

The new art remained faithful to the themes of the preceding century: pictures of religious subjects continued to predominate, but the patronage extended by the Hapsburgs to the more famous artists resulted in the execution of numerous royal portraits, as well as paintings of historical events and scenes from private and court life. In the best work of this period a superb elegance of gesture and a psychological profundity are combined with a splendid harmony of tones and colors. It is a style that strikes a perfect balance between the graphic and the pictorial, between the representation of detail and a suggestion of the imperfections of human vision. The principal schools of this period were those of Seville and Madrid, the latter enjoying the patronage of the court. Initially, there were other important schools at Valencia, which maintained contact with Italy, and at Toledo, a training center for painters who later worked elsewhere.

Tenebrism
In the transition between the 16th and 17th centuries there was a spate of tenebrism that produced some of the most characteristic works of the golden age of Spanish painting. (Tenebrism is a term describing predominantly dark tonality in a painting. It derives from the Italian 'tenebroso', meaning obscure, and is applied mainly to the 17th century followers of Caravaggio in Italy and elsewhere.)

The first painter to abandon Mannerism for the new realistic style was Francisco Ribalta (1555-1628), a Catalan who, after receiving his early training in Toledo, spent the years of his maturity in Valencia. It is not known whether Ribalta was acquainted with the work of Caravaggio or whether he arrived independently at results parallel to those achieved by the Italian Tenebrists. At all events, his style is remarkable for its virile naturalism. The brushwork is increasingly bold and free, so different from the polished smoothness of the previous age. Ribalta sought expressiveness as well as beauty and accentuated the sculptural modeling of his forms by contrasting light and shade.

It is with José de Ribera, however, that Tenebrism really triumphs. Ribera (1591-1652) was trained in Valencia, but in about 1616 he moved to Italy, settling in Naples. A clever draftsman and a master of composition, his numerous paintings are more varied than the legends concerning him might lead one to suppose. In his better work the dominant colors, browns and reds, contrast with cruel lighting, which sometimes appears to do violence to the forms.

Velazquez
The culmination of Spanish seventeenth-century painting, and one of the climaxes of world art in general, is reached in the work of Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599-1660), an artist whose mastery of space and light was admirably served by an impeccable technique. Born in Seville, he received his first lessons from the daring Francisco de Herrera the Elder, but soon became apprenticed to Pacheco, with whom he worked for five years, eventually marrying his daughter. In his writings Pacheco recalls how Velázquez was always extremely exacting in his technique and eager to work directly from life, preferring figure studies and genre scenes. Even the earliest works of the master are characterized by relatively dense impasto, objectivity of vision, restraint in the use of color, mainly ochers and browns, and simplicity and naturalness of conception.

The art of Velázquez developed irresistibly in the direction of ever greater synthesis. He painted the reflection of light in forms and colors rather than the forms and colors themselves; his drawing, such is its perfection, appears to illuminate his figures and details from within. This precision of outline, this subtle blending of tones and colors, this intervention of atmosphere between the eye and its object do as much to define the style of the artist as his simple and profound respect for everything in nature. A free and comprehensive vision of all the elements of reality, men, things, landscape, and, not least, the spirit, blazes forth in one of the masterpieces of his middle period.

The painter's interest in portraying light was not the result of a preoccupation with technique, an attitude foreign to the aesthetics and even the optics of the seventeenth century, but developed out of a profound, inner religiosity, which had always been part of the Spanish tradition and was now to find new and vigorous expression.

School of Seville
Born in 1598 in Estremadura, Francisco de Zurbarán received his training in Seville with the painter Diaz de Villanueva. In spite of his wholehearted adherence to the Andalusian school, he remained Estremaduran by temperament, superimposing a natural asceticism and a certain rustic simplicity on southern grace and elegance. Although completely faithful to his own emotions, in his naturalism and intense chiaroscuro Zurbarán clung to a certain archaism that made him the most restrained and purest of the artists of the Spanish Baroque. Shortly afterward he signed a contract to paint series of compositions for several of the monastic orders of Seville who were his most important patrons. Another important series was painted for the Jeronymites of the monastery of Guadalupe (1638-1639). Here the mood varies from a vein of realism to visions of miracles and scenes of contemplation in which the mysticism of the great Estremaduran artist has mingled with his colors. Zurbarán was also a master of simple themes, solitary figures, static and somewhat tense, saints with their eyes raised to heaven, and genre paintings in which everyday objects are clothed in mystery, as in the still life of 1633.

In Spanish painting, and within the Andalusian school to which he also belonged, Murillo represents the height of elegance and delicacy, and, it must be added, the greatest surrender to popular sentiment. His art was always at the service of his theme, and the theme, in turn, was relived with fervor. In the fervor, however, profundity was often ignored in favor of more brilliant, but aesthetically less satisfying qualities. Murillo was as sensitive to feminine beauty and the beauty of children as to the subtleties of color and tonal gradation made possible by the advanced technique of the Baroque. Lyrical rather than dramatic, Murillo was by no means unaware of the prevalence of social unrest, reflected in literature in the picaresque novel, and his whole approach to religious painting was based on a realistic point of view.

Spanish Baroque Sculpture.

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While in Italy and France the big baroque sculpture is developed following Bernini, using marble and bronze, with a wide range of subjects from mythology and allegory, in Spain the most common is the sculpture in polychrome wood, exclusively religious, that is, completely, to the service of the counter-Reform piteous sensibility. The images of Christ, the Virgin and Saints, especially Spanish, are dominant as subjects. In addition to this, the artists were able of depict feelings in the images: pain, anguish, death, and ecstasy.

Sculptors tend to approach reality to the religious fact depicted to provoke the emotion of the person who assists to the Easter parades. In them the saint appear as alive characters, near to their daily routine. This influence of the religious multiplies the demand for religious images. The popular piety of the comrades originates the Parade Paso (from the Latin passus=sufferance). The Easter parades became the maximum expression of popular faith. The altarpieces are decorated with freestanding images that can be used for the parades.

The pessimism and the attitude of a society in crisis limit the development of funerary sculpture.

The desire of depicting reality multiplies the effects. Firstly, images are polychrome, putting apart the stuffed or use of gold, in order to create more realistic images with plain colours in the clothes, and even wearing them with real clothes, in the case of the “images to dress”, that have only carved the head, hands and feet. This interest reach to use natural hair, nails, teeth or even eyes and glass eyes and tears, animal skin to depict open injuries. It is the peak of the hyper realistic baroque theatrical effects.

At the beginning Spanish sculpture did not follow the dynamism and theatrality of the Italian models and was directly linked to the Renaissance and Mannerism, with the only advance of the naturalism. From mid 17th century and on, in the Court and in Andalusia it started the Berninian baroque that was fully incorporated at the end of the century.

There are two main sculpture regions in Spain. Both schools are hyper realistic:
-Castile, with Valladolid, where Gregorio Fernandez worked.
Images are injured, with pain or emotion always in surface; realism is violent, of dramatic gestures. Fernandez abandoned the golden effect to change them by plain colours.

-Andalusia, centred in Seville, with Juan Martínez Montañés, and in Granade with Alonso Cano and Pedro de Mena.
It is quiet, calm, looking for the correct beauty without forgetting the spiritual content. It is the classicist realism that drove to the mystic exaltation. They maintained largely the use of gold.

In the 18th century the Levantine group appeared, in Elche but mainly in Murcia, with Francisco Salzillo, the author who closes the baroque sculpture and opens the taste for the classicism.

Baroque Architecture in Spain

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Baroque period in Spain is known as the Golden Century due to the splendour experienced by culture in this moment in which there was a general crisis in politics, society and economy. During the Baroque there is an evolution of the tastes and fashions that can be divided into three big periods:

· First period (mid 17th century): the beginnings. The influence of Herrera (Escorial) and the transition to the new models coming from Italy.
· Second period (last third of the 17th century and first of the 18th): plenitude. Churriguera brothers, Ribera, Tomé, Figueroa developed a decorative language; architecture becomes more dynamic.
· Third period (rest of the 18th century): continuity and change. Rococo style, with evident French and Italian influences developed thanks to the change of dynasty.

General characteristics.
Herrerian models lasted due to the great influence of the Escorial. The architecture of palaces is homogeneous. The kind called Austrian has towers on the sides of the façade, cover with chapitel and roof of slate (pizarra). There were severe buildings from the outside even when the inside was very comfortable.

The structures of the churches are very simple, with encamonades domes and Jesuitical plan (a nave and chapels in the buttresses), with austere decoration. The interiors are filled with golden altarpieces that are becoming more complicate with the time.

From mid 18th century the Italian influence is limited. In the outside the facades are conceived as the altarpieces. This style is more decorative and lasts until the first decade of the 18th century, under the direction of the courtesan architects who work for the Bourbons.

Worry about urbanism, with the development of major squares (Valladolid, Madrid, Salamanca). They tend to be rectangular, with porticos and balconies.

Architects of each period are:
-First half of 17th century:
·Juan Gomez de Mora: Madrid Square, Madrid Council House.
· Alonso de Carbonell: Palace of the Buen Retiro
-Mid 17th century:
· Alonso Cano: Granada’s cathedral
-Transition to 18th century:
· Churriguera: Altarpiece of Saint Esteban of Salamanca, Salamanca’s Square
· Pedro de Ribera: Façade of the Hospice in Madrid
· Narciso Tomé: Toledo’s cathedral transparent
· Sabatini: Aranjuez Palace · Juvara: Madrid’s Royal Palace.

Baroque Painting

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The main quality of baroque painting is its link to reality. This is conditioned by the persuasive interest of the Catholic Church, the advertising and political interest of the absolute monarchies and the valuation the protestant bourgeoisie made of the individual and daily activity. This link is also the result of an stylistic evolution: when at the end of 16th century the artists are aware of the purely aesthetic and counter naturalism of the Mannerism, they resource to the new, choosing that refused by the Mannerism: reality and nature.

Due to the variety of nationalities and different schools there are just a few common characteristics:

Realism. Models are found in nature, without idealisation, even reaching to naturalism. The worries about of the psychological state, the feelings, is on line with the naturalistic depiction of reality.

Dominance of colour over drawing. The big masters use stains to define the shapes, as in the case of Velazquez and Rembrant. Things are painted as they are seen in the reality, with colour stains and light, loosing details and with imprecise contours.

Continuous deepness. Rigorous lineal perspective is abandoned and to obtain the sensation of deepness the resources used are convergent lines, series of scorzos , an enormous foreground, a dark foreground, plays of lights and shades, plasmation of atmospheric effects.

Hegemony of light. Leonardo’s sfumato is abandoned to pass to plans of light and shades where the shapes are defined with great precision. The baroque is the art of depicting pictorially the light and, consequently, the shade plays a role unknown until the moment, especially during the firs tenebrous experiments. In the baroque the shape is subordinated to the light and, sometimes, the shapes may disappear due to the feebleness of intensity of the light reflects.

Freedom of composition. Asymmetric and non tectonic compositions are dominant. The instinctive trend to put the main image in the centre and to paint to halves on the canvas (symmetry) is lost. Similarly, horizontal and vertical lines combinations are abandoned (tectonic composition). The artists prefer disequilibrium or something that suggests that the scene continues further than the limits of the frame. This non tectonic composition is achieved through diagonal lines that substitute the pyramidal compositions of the former century. Sometimes broken shapes are used to indicate that not everything ends on the canvas.

Worry to depict movement. Baroque painting is the painting of the life and this can not be represented under static forms. Turmoil is put before quietness. Images are instable and scorzos and waves multiply. Sometimes that movement does not exist and the excess of calm is due to the desire of filling the image of religious transcendence.

Techniques. The importance of the colour and the desire of showing it in all his splendour forces the authors to forget about the temple and oil painting and canvas are generalised, being sometimes of big proportions. Fresco continues being used to decorate walls and vaults.

Subjects. The variety of schools results in a wide range of subjects. Religious paintings are common, as the depictions of the Virgin (Immaculate, Piety), evangelical stories, charity, sacraments (mainly Penitence and Eucharist), series about saints’ lives and their religious experiences and images of death (vanitas). This repertoire is basic in Spanish painting. Nudes are forbidden in religious images, and they are limited to the allegories and mythologies. Pagan stories are common in France and Flanders. Dutch painters prefer group portrait and landscape with all its varieties: daily life images very realistic, interiors, sea-views, naval battles. Architecture can become a subject in itself, the same as still-life. In conclusion, the subject variety does not imply national specialization.

Although the great development of baroque painting all over Europe is evident, Italy is again the place where the first innovations take place. There are three great currents: Classicism represented by Carraci, where the tension between naturalist realism and idealised classicism is constant. The second current is the decorative painting, that continues producing frescoes, appropriated for ceilings and vaults, with amazing celestial perspective that break the ceilings and connect sky and land. Finally, the naturalist tenebrism represented by Caravaggio, the real revolutionary of baroque painting. This author has a radical and breaking use of light that becomes a key element in the work.

Baroque sculpture

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It is one of the most popular arts. The clients are church and nobility, the same as during the Renaissance. Sculpture is the vehicle to express different religious believes and it can also be a way of showing and advertising power. Many works are located in public places such as squares and fountains.

Baroque images multiply the points of view from which they can be seen. In general, they tend to open structures, with complicated lines, being the diagonal the most commonly used. Artists demonstrate interest for the effects of light and in order to achieve this aim they give different treatment to the surfaces or even resource to breaking the wall in order to get the light they want for a deter effect.

Materials suffer a change too. Even when white marble continues being the most commonly extended, there are several works in which different materials are combined. Anything can be used in order to achieve spectacle. Gestures are grandiloquent and characters are depicted with human treatment. Even mythological and religious images are full of humanity and passions.

Technically, volumes are perfectly organised as to offer the desired effect. Other characteristics are: taste for tension and drama, that leads the authors to represent only moments of maximum tension. In addition to this, they include violent contrast of light and shadows.

Related to the typology, it is very varied, including relieves, portraits, equestrian portraits, allegories, mythological stories, religious, fountains, pantheons and, in the case of Spain, Easter sculptures.

There are regional differences, being the Italian Bernini the most reputed sculptor of the Baroque period. This artist was formed as a sculptor in his father workshop where he entered in contact with Michelangelo’s work and the collections of Greek-Hellenistic sculpture. He worked in Rome, under the patronage of different popes. His style evolved from the tormented images of the Mannerism to images in which he capsized the physical movement as a result of the action he was depicting. It is a style of great dynamism and dramatic intensity of great technical perfection. He produced all the possible subjects, ranging from the mythological to the religious, passing by the portrait, the allegory or the funeral monument. As an urbanist he also projected and produced ornamental fountains in Roman squares. Examples of his works are: Apollo and Daphne, David, Ludovica Albertoni, Sainte Therese Ecstasy, Fountain of the Four Rivers, Tomb of Urbano VII.

In France, there are two reputed authors. Girardon worked with a quite classical conception. He produced fountains, as Apollo Tended by Nymphs, and Pantheons, such as that of Richelieu. Puget made an impassioned work in which he expressed physical vigour and emotional intensity, as in Milon of Crotona.