Early Europe and Colonial Americas: every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
41 flashcard terms for AP Art History Unit 3, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 21-question quiz — free, no account needed.
CED Unit 3: Late Antique through Baroque and colonial Latin America, c. 200–1750 CE — art shaped by Christianity, Islam in Spain, and empire.
Catacomb of Priscilla
Rome, c. 200–400 CE. Early Christian burial tunnels with frescoes like the Good Shepherd and orant figures adapting Roman styles to new faith.
Santa Sabina
Rome, c. 422–432 CE. Early Christian basilica: timber roof, nave with clerestory, spolia columns — the Roman law-court plan converted to worship.
Basilica Plan
Longitudinal church format with nave, side aisles, apse, and clerestory, adapted from Roman civic halls for congregational worship.
Hagia Sophia
Constantinople, 532–537. Anthemius and Isidorus's domed church for Justinian; pendentives carry a dome ringed by windows so it seems to float.
Pendentive
Curved triangular surface transitioning from a square base to a round dome — the structural key to Hagia Sophia.
San Vitale
Ravenna, c. 526–547. Centrally planned Byzantine church with mosaics of Justinian and Theodora flanking the apse, fusing imperial and sacred authority.
Icon
A sacred image of Christ, the Virgin, or saints used in Byzantine devotion — venerated as a window to the holy, and attacked during Iconoclasm.
Iconoclasm
The Byzantine controversy (8th–9th c.) over religious images, in which icons were destroyed as idolatrous before veneration was restored.
Virgin (Theotokos) and Child Enthroned Icon
Mount Sinai, 6th–7th c. Encaustic icon layering Mary, warrior saints, and angels in increasingly abstract heavenly zones.
Merovingian Looped Fibulae
Mid-6th c. Silver-gilt garment pins with garnets and animal interlace — portable status objects of migratory early medieval elites.
Lindisfarne Gospels
c. 700, England. Illuminated manuscript merging Christian imagery with Hiberno-Saxon interlace, as in its dazzling carpet pages.
Great Mosque of Córdoba
Begun 785–786, Spain. Umayyad hypostyle mosque with double horseshoe arches of alternating stone and brick; later a cathedral was inserted.
Mihrab
The niche in a mosque's qibla wall marking the direction of Mecca; Córdoba's is framed by gold mosaic and a horseshoe arch.
Bayeux Tapestry
c. 1066–1080. A 70-meter embroidered wool-on-linen narrative of the Norman conquest of England — Romanesque continuous storytelling, technically embroidery.
Sainte-Foy, Conques
c. 1050–1130, France. Romanesque pilgrimage church with radiating chapels and a Last Judgment tympanum warning arriving pilgrims.
Reliquary of Sainte-Foy
9th c. onward. Gold and jeweled statue containing the child-martyr's skull; pilgrims' gifts of gems accreted over centuries.
Romanesque
c. 1050–1200 style of stone-vaulted, round-arched, thick-walled churches on pilgrimage routes, with revived monumental sculpture on portals.
Style born at Saint-Denis c. 1140: pointed arches, ribbed vaults, flying buttresses, and vast stained glass dissolving walls into colored light.
Chartres Cathedral
Begun 1145, rebuilt after 1194 fire. High Gothic pilgrimage cathedral of the Virgin's tunic relic, famed for sculpture-filled portals and blue glass.
Flying Buttress
External arched support transferring vault thrust over the aisles to outer piers, freeing Gothic walls for stained glass.
Röttgen Pietà
Germany, c. 1300–1325. Painted wood devotional statue of Mary holding the twisted, emaciated dead Christ — deliberately harrowing for private meditation.
Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel
Padua, c. 1303. Giotto's fresco cycle of Mary and Christ, including the Lamentation; weighty, emotive figures anticipate the Renaissance.
Giotto
Florentine painter (d. 1337) who replaced Byzantine flatness with modeled, grounded figures expressing believable human grief.
Golden Haggadah
Spain, c. 1320. Illuminated Hebrew manuscript for Passover with gold-ground Exodus scenes in French Gothic style — Jewish patronage of Christian-trained artists.
Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece)
Robert Campin workshop, c. 1427–1432. Oil triptych placing the Annunciation in a Flemish home, dense with hidden symbolism; donors peer in from a wing.
Oil Paint
Slow-drying medium perfected in 15th-century Flanders allowing glazes, minute detail, and luminous color, as in the Arnolfini Portrait.
Arnolfini Portrait
Jan van Eyck, 1434. Oil portrait of a couple in a chamber whose mirror, dog, and shoes invite symbolic readings; signed 'Jan van Eyck was here.'
Linear Perspective
Brunelleschi's geometric system where orthogonals converge to a vanishing point — the Renaissance tool for constructing believable space.
David (Donatello)
c. 1440–1460. First freestanding nude bronze since antiquity: a sensual adolescent victor made for the Medici courtyard.
Birth of Venus
Botticelli, c. 1484–1486. Tempera on canvas; the goddess borne ashore on a shell revives pagan myth through Neoplatonic lenses for Medici circles.
Sistine Chapel Ceiling
Michelangelo, 1508–1512. Fresco cycle of Genesis with prophets and sibyls; the Last Judgment added on the altar wall 1536–1541.
School of Athens
Raphael, 1509–1511. Vatican fresco gathering ancient philosophers under Roman vaults — perspective, balance, and the High Renaissance synthesis.
Venetian Renaissance
16th-century Venice favored colorito (color and oil glazes) over Florentine disegno, as in Titian's reclining Venus of Urbino (1538).
Baroque
c. 1600–1750 style of drama, movement, and emotional appeal, powered by the Counter-Reformation and absolutist courts.
Calling of Saint Matthew
Caravaggio, c. 1597–1601. Tenebrist canvas where a beam of light singles out Matthew in a dim tavern — sacred drama in gritty contemporary dress.
Bernini, 1647–1652, Cornaro Chapel. Marble, gilt bronze rays, and hidden light stage the saint's vision as multimedia theater.
Las Meninas
Velázquez, 1656. The painter, the infanta, and mirrored monarchs entangle viewer and subject — a meditation on painting and status at the Spanish court.
Screen with the Siege of Belgrade and Hunting Scene
Mexico, c. 1697–1701. Biombo folding screen mixing European battle prints, Asian screen format, and enconchado shell inlay — colonial global fusion.
Casta Painting
18th-century New Spain genre depicting racially mixed families in labeled hierarchies, e.g. Cabrera's Spaniard and Indian Produce a Mestizo (1763).
Frontispiece of the Codex Mendoza
c. 1541–1542, Mexico. Aztec artist's ink-and-color map of Tenochtitlan's founding, made with Spanish annotation for Charles V — indigenous conventions under colonial patronage.