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the apogee of the visual arts in the Italian Renaissance. The High Renaissance period is usually taken to begin in the 1490s, with Leonardo's fresco of the Last Supper in Milan and the death of Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence, and to have ended in 1527 with the sacking of Rome by the troops of Charles V.

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a period of European art. Stylistically, Mannerism encompasses a variety of approaches reacting to the harmonious ideals and restrained naturalism of earlier artists. While Renaissance artists sought nature to find their style, the Mannerists looked first for a style and found a manner.

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an artistic style prevalent from the late 16th century to the early 18th century in Europe. Characterized by dynamic movement, overt emotion and self-confident rhetoric, Baroque Art emerged as an reaction against the intricate and formulaic Mannerist style.

This movement was encouraged by the Catholic Church, the most important patron of the arts at that time, as a return to tradition and spirituality.

One of the great periods of art history, Baroque Art was developed by Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, Gianlorenzo Bernini, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Vermeer.

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a French 19th century art movement which marked a momentous break from tradition in European painting. The Impressionists incorporated new scientific research into the physics of colour to achieve a more exact representation of colour and tone.

Impressionist art is a style in which the artist captures the image of an object as someone would see it if they just caught a glimpse of it. They paint the pictures with a lot of color and most of their pictures are outdoor scenes. The artists like to capture their images without detail but with bold colors. Some of the greatest impressionist artists were Edouard Manet, Camille Pissaro, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot and Pierre Auguste Renoir.

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a movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style's inherent limitations. Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light. The Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism. The major artists include Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

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broke from centuries of tradition in their painting by rejecting the single viewpoint. Instead they used an analytical system in which three-dimensional subjects were fragmented and redefined from several different points of view simultaneously.

Cubism is often divided into two phases - the Analytic phase (1907-12), and the Synthetic phase (1913 through the 1920s). The initial phase attempted to show objects as the mind, not the eye, perceives them. The Synthetic phase featured works that were composed of fewer and simpler forms, in brighter colours.

Major exponents of Cubism included Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, Francis Picabia, Jean Metzinger, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger.

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characterised by the deliberate departure from tradition and the use of innovative forms of expression that distinguish many styles in the arts and literature of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century. Modernism refers to this period's interest in new types of paints and other materials, in expressing feelings and ideas, in creating abstractions and fantasies, rather than representing what is real. This kind of art requires its audience to observe carefully in order to get some facts about the artist, his intentions, and his environment, before forming judgments about the work.

Vincent Willem van Gogh

(30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890)

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a Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far-reaching influence on 20th century art for its vivid colors and emotional impact.

Today, he is widely regarded as one of history's greatest painters and an important contributor to the foundations of modern art. He produced more than 2,000 artworks, consisting of around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches. Today many of his pieces are among the world's most recognizable and expensive works of art.

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the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials.

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a work of art (usually a panel painting) which is divided into three sections, or three carved panels which are hinged together and folded.

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any object with two flat plates attached at a hinge. Devices of this form were quite popular in the ancient world.

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any piece of artwork painted directly on a wall, ceiling or other large permanent surface.

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European music written during the Renaissance. The increasing reliance on the interval of the third as a consonance is one of the most pronounced features of early Renaissance European art music. Polyphony became increasingly elaborate with highly independent voices throughout the 14th century: the beginning of the 15th century showed simplification, with the voices often striving for smoothness. This was possible because of a greatly increased vocal range in music.

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a style of European classical music approximately extending from 1600 to 1750. Composers of the baroque era include Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Lully, Corelli, Monteverdi, Rameau and Purcell. The baroque period saw the development of functional tonality. During the period, composers and performers used more elaborate musical ornamentation, made changes in musical notation, and developed new instrumental playing techniques. Baroque music expanded the size, range, and complexity of instrumental performance, and also established opera as a musical genre.

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a movement evolved from the formats, genres and musical ideas established in earlier periods that went further in the name of expression and syncretism of different art-forms with music. Romantic music attempted to increase emotional expression and power to describe deeper truths or human feelings, while preserving the formal structures from the classical period or creating new forms that were deemed better suited to the new subject matter. The subject matter in the new music was now not only purely abstract, but also frequently drawn from other art-form sources. The main musicians include Brahms, Puccini, Verdi, and Wagner.

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi

(March 4, 1678 – July 28, 1741)

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an Italian Baroque composer, priest, and virtuoso violinist, born in Venice. Vivaldi is recognized as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his influence during his lifetime was widespread over Europe. Vivaldi is known mainly for composing instrumental concertos, especially for the violin, as well as sacred choral works and over 40 operas. His best known work is a series of violin concertos known as The Four Seasons.

Wilhelm Richard Wagner

(22 May 1813  – 13 February 1883)

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a German composer, conductor, theatre director and essayist, primarily known for his operas (or music dramas). Wagner's compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex texture, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs. His most famous works include Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs), Tannhauser, Lohengrin, and Die Valkure (The Valkyrie). He also composed the music drama Tristan und Isolde.

 Wagner transformed operatic thought through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"). This would achieve the synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts. Wagner had other influences as well. He pioneered advances in musical language. His Tristan und Isolde is sometimes described as marking the start of modern music.

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi

(10 October 1813 – 27 January 1901)

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an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century. Transcending the boundaries of the genre, some of his themes have long since taken root in popular culture - such as "La donna è mobile" from Rigoletto, "Va, pensiero" from Nabucco, "Libiamo ne' lieti calici" from La traviata and the "Grand March" from Aida. His many famous operas include Otello, La traviata, Falstaff, Aida, and Rigolett.

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an extended piece in three or more movements for symphony orchestra.

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a music piece played as opposed to a cantata, a piece sung.

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a method of instrumentation used to perform a musical composition and consisting of four parts.

Sync sound

or synchronized sound recording

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sound recorded at the time of the filming of movies.

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stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s.

Durante degli Alighieri

or Dante

(June 1265 – September 14, 1321)

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an Italian poet of the Middle Ages. His Divine Comedy, originally called Commedia and later called Divina by Boccaccio, is often considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature.

Charles Baudelaire

(April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867)

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a Symbolist and Modernist French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. Baudelaire is one of the major innovators in French literature. His reputation rests primarily on the extraordinary poetry collection Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), which dealt with erotic, aesthetic, and social themes in ways that appalled many of his middle-class readers, and he was accused of obscenity and blasphemy. His Petits poèmes en prose (1868) was an important and innovative experiment in prose poetry.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

(28 August 1749  – 22 March 1832)

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a German writer and polymath. Goethe is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. Goethe's works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long poem of modern European literature. Goethe's other well-known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Goethe was one of the key figures of German literature and the movement of Weimar Classicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The author of the scientific text Theory of Colours, his influential ideas on plant and animal morphology and homology were extended and developed by 19th century naturalists.

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the first of a pair of stanzas of alternating form on which the structure of a given poem is based. A strophe is also a stanza containing irregular lines.

Richard Nathaniel Wright

(September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960)

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an American author of powerful, sometimes controversial novels, short stories and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes. His work helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century. His main works are Native Son, Uncle Tom's Children, Black Boy, and The Outsider.

Joseph Conrad

(3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924)

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a Polish-born English novelist. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties. He wrote stories and novels, predominantly with a nautical or seaboard setting, that depict trials of the human spirit by the demands of duty and honour.

Conrad was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, he is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors. His major works include Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Typhoon.

Ralph Waldo Ellison

(March 1, 1914 – April 16, 1994)

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a novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986).

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky

(11 November, 1821 – 9 February, 1881)

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a Russian writer and essayist, best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.

Dostoyevsky's literary works explored human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. He is considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism. Dostoyevsky is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.

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a written, fictional, prose narrative longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel.