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a Gothic, Catholic cathedral which is widely considered one of the finest examples of French Gothic architecture in Europe, and the naturalism of its sculptures and stained glass are in contrast with earlier Romanesque architecture. Notre Dame de Paris was also among the first buildings in the world to use the flying buttress.

The Palace of Versailles

ou Château de Versailles

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a mausoleum located in Agra, India. It is one of the most recognizable structures in the world. It was built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal. It is widely considered as one of the most beautiful buildings in the world and stands as a symbol of eternal love.

Taj Mahal is the finest example of Mughal architecture, a style that combines elements from Persian, Islamic and Indian architectural styles.

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an external free-standing building constructed as a monument enclosing the interment space or burial chamber of a deceased person or persons. A monument without the interment is a cenotaph. A mausoleum may be considered a type of tomb or the tomb may be considered to be within the mausoleum. A Christian mausoleum sometimes includes a chapel.

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the architecture of the Byzantine Empire. Most of the works of Byzantine Architecture can be clearly seen in the magnificent churches built at that time. The Byzantine churches were made mainly by two types of plans – axial and circular plans, of which the later one was used prominently. Byzantine Architecture also concentrated more on the decoration of the interior of the building.

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the acting out a story through body motions, without use of speech.

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the ability to adapt the body to the properties of things.

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a technique in which a performer creates circumstances and applies it to games. It can also be described as the practice of acting, singing, talking and reacting, of making and creating in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one's immediate environment and inner feelings.

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a famous Russian ballet dancer who is best known for changing the ideals for ballet dancers. Small and thin, she was not the preferred body of a ballerina during her time. She is also credited for creating the modern pointe shoe.

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a famous Russian dancer who is known as the best living male ballet dancer. He has had roles in film, as he starred in the last season of Sex and the City.

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a Russian dancer often regarded as the greatest ballet dancer of the 1960s and 1970s.

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a pop star of the 1980s who wowed audiences with eye-popping dance moves, notably one called the "moonwalk." He displayed an amazing talent for rhythm and dance at a very young age.

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An American dancer remembered mostly for his tap dancing ability. He began tap dancing at the age of four.

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an American dancer and choreographer known as the pioneer of modern dance. She dared to introduce new, modern dance moves to the world.

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a famous American film and Broadway dancer. He is well-known for starring with Ginger Rogers in musical films.

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an American dancer mostly known for his outstanding tap dancing abilities. He appeared in several dance movies, including White Nights and Tap.

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an American dancer remembered for his highly energetic and athletic dancing style. He is well-known for his performance in Singin' in the Rain.

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a well-known American dancer and actor. He starred as a dance instructor in the popular movie Dirty Dancing.

Johann Sebastian Bach

(31 March 1685 – 28 July 1750)

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a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist best known for his fugues. His sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity. Although he did not introduce new forms, he enriched the prevailing German style with a robust contrapuntal technique, an unrivalled control of harmonic and motivic organisation, and the adaptation of rhythms, forms and textures from abroad, particularly from Italy and France.

Revered for their intellectual depth, technical command and artistic beauty, Bach's works include the Brandenburg concertos, the Goldberg Variations, the Partitas, The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B minor, the St Matthew Passion, the St John Passion, the Magnificat, The Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue, the English and French Suites, the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, the Cello Suites, more than 200 surviving cantatas, and a similar number of organ works, including the celebrated Toccata and Fugue in D minor and Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor.

Bach is generally regarded as one of the main composers of the Baroque style, and as one of the greatest composers of all time.

Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev

(2 January 1837 – 29 May 1910)

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a German composer and pianist best known for his symphonies. He is considered to have been the most crucial figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western classical music, and remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.

Some of his works include five Piano Concertos, Pathétique Piano Sonata, nine symphonies, 'Kreutzer' Violin Sonata, 'Appassionata' Piano Sonata, Opera Fidelio, Violin Concerto, 'Fur Elise', Overture and incidental music to Egmont, 'Archduke' Piano Trio, Mass in D (Missa Solemnis), and 'Diabelli' Piano Variations.

Irving Berlin

(May 11, 1888 – September 22, 1989)

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an American composer and lyricist, widely considered one of the greatest American songwriters in history.

His first hit song, "Alexander's Ragtime Band", became world famous. Over the years he was known for writing music and lyrics in the American vernacular.

He wrote hundreds of songs, many becoming major hits. During his 60-year career he wrote an estimated 1,500 songs, including "Easter Parade", "White Christmas", "Happy Holiday", "This is the Army, Mr. Jones", and "There's No Business Like Show Business".

Georges Bizet

(25 October 1838 – 3 June 1875)

Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin

(12 November 1833 – 27 February 1887) 

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a Russian Romantic composer and chemist of Georgian–Russian parentage. He was a member of the group of composers called The Five (or "The Mighty Handful"), who were dedicated to producing a specifically Russian kind of art music. He is best known for his symphonies, his two string quartets, and his opera Prince Igor.

Johannes Brahms

(7 May 1833 – 3 April 1897)

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a Polish composer, virtuoso pianist, and music teacher best known for his lyrical nocturnes for piano. He was one of the great masters of Romantic music.

All of Chopin's works involve the piano. They are technically demanding but emphasize nuance and expressive depth. Chopin invented the musical form known as the instrumental ballade and made major innovations to the piano sonata, mazurka, waltz, nocturne, polonaise, étude, impromptu and prélude.

Antonín Leopold Dvořák

(September 8, 1841 – May 1, 1904)

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a Czech composer of Romantic music, who employed the idioms of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. His works include operas, symphonic, choral and chamber music. His best-known works include his New World Symphony, the Slavonic Dances, "American" String Quartet, and Cello Concerto in B minor.

Sir Edward William Elgar

(2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934)

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an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe.

George Gershwin

(September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937)

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an American composer and pianist. Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are widely known. He wrote most of his vocal and theatrical works, including more than a dozen Broadway shows. His most famous works include Rhapsody in Blue, Piano Concerto in F, An American In Paris, Porgy And Bess, and Three Preludes.

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an opera, first performed in 1935, with music by George Gershwin. It was based on DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy and his subsequent play Porgy and Bess. All three works deal with African American life in the fictitious Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1920s.

Originally conceived by George Gershwin as an "American folk opera", Porgy and Bess featured an entire cast of classically trained African-American singers—a daring and visionary artistic choice at the time. The opera is admired for Gershwin's innovative synthesis of European orchestral techniques with American jazz and folk music idioms.

Porgy and Bess tells the story of Porgy, a disabled black beggar living in the slums of Charleston, South Carolina. It deals with his attempts to rescue Bess from the clutches of Crown, her violent and possessive lover, and Sportin' Life, the drug dealer.

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka

(June 1 1804 – February 15 1857)

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the first Russian composer to gain wide recognition within his own country, and is often regarded as the father of Russian classical music. Glinka's compositions were an important influence on future Russian composers, notably the members of The Five, who took Glinka's lead and produced a distinctive Russian style of music. His most important works include A Life for the Tsar, Russlan and Ludmilla, Jota Aragonesa, Night in Madrid, and Kamarinskaya.

Edvard Hagerup Grieg

(15 June 1843 – 4 September 1907) 

Henrik Ibsen

(20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906)

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a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father" of modern theater and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre. His plays were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theater was required to model strict mores of family life and propriety. Ibsen's work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition. His works are Peer Gynt, A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, and Hedda Gabler.

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a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Hjalmar Ekdal, a photographer, lives with his wife Gina and daughter Hedvig in a combined studio and apartment with a large adjoining loft where they keep chickens and rabbits. Living with the family is old Ekdal, a former lieutenant who was earlier imprisoned for a financial offence for which Werle, a wholesaler, was actually responsible. Gina was Werle's housekeeper earlier. At the beginning of the play his son, Gregers Werle, has come home to attend a dinner given by his father. Gregers discovers that Gina Ekdal was his father's mistress before she married Hjalmar, and that his father had brought the two of them together and helped them financially. Gregers now considers it his duty to get Hjalmar to see the truth behind his marriage so that he and Gina can live together in a marriage based on truth. Hjalmar confronts Gina with her background and asks her whether he is Hedvig's father. Gina replies that she does not know, and in distraction Hjalmar rejects Hedvig as his daughter. Meanwhile Gregers has convinced Hedvig that she can win back her father's love by sacrificing the wild duck that lives in the loft and to which she is deeply attached. But Hedvig shoots herself instead of the wild duck, and the play ends with general despair at the death of the child.

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an 1879 play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. The play was the first of Ibsen's to create a sensation and is now perhaps his most famous play. The play was controversial when first published, as it is sharply critical of 19th century marriage norms. It follows the formula of well-made play up until the final act, when it breaks convention by ending with a discussion, not an unravelling. It is often called the first true feminist play. The play is also an important work of the naturalist movement, in which real events and situations are depicted on stage in a departure from previous forms such as romanticism.

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a five-act play in verse by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, loosely based on the fairy tale Per Gynt. Interpreted in its day as a satire on the Norwegian personality, Peer Gynt is the story of a life based on procrastination and avoidance.

Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt in deliberate disregard of the limitations that the conventional stagecraft of the 19th century imposed on drama. Its 40 scenes move uninhibitedly in time and space and between consciousness and the unconscious, blending folkloric fantasy and unsentimental realism.

genre works

or genre scenes

or genre views

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pictorial representations in any of various media that represent scenes or events from everyday life. Such representations may be realistic, imagined, or romanticized by the artist. Genre works, especially when referring to the painting of the Dutch Golden Age and Flemish Baroque painting, may also be used as an umbrella term for painting in various specialized categories such as still-life, marine painting, architectural painting and animal painting.

Op art

or optical art

rib vault

or ribbed vault

groin vault

or groined vault

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the intersection at right angles of two barrel vaults. The word groin refers to the edge between the intersecting vaults. Sometimes the arches of groin vaults are pointed instead of round. In comparison with a barrel vault, a groin vault provides good economies of material and labour. The thrust is concentrated along the groins or arrises (the four diagonal edges formed along the points where the barrel vaults intersect), so the vault need only be abutted at its four corners.

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the view that the world described by science is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be.

Saint Grimbald

or Grimwald

(827 – July 8, 901)

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a Benedictine, invited to England by King Alfred the Great in 885. Grimbald is credited with restoring learning to England.

Jean Genet

(December 19, 1910 – April 15, 1986)

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a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing. His major works include the novels Querelle of Brest, The Thief's Journal, and Our Lady of the Flowers, and the plays The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids and The Screens.

George Berkeley

(12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753)

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an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism" (later called "subjective idealism"). This theory contends that individuals can only know sensations and ideas of objects, not abstractions such as "matter", and that ideas depend on perceiving minds for their very existence. This belief later became immortalized in the dictum, "esse est percipi" ("to be is to be perceived"). His major works include An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, and De Motu.

Van Wyck Brooks

(February 16, 1886 - May 2, 1963)

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an American literary critic, biographer, and historian. The masterpiece of his literary career was a series of studies entitled Makers and Finders, which chronicled the development of American literature during the long 19th century. Brooks' reputation rested on the dexterity with which he embroidered elaborate biographical detail into brilliant anecdotal prose.

Another of his books, The Ordeal of Mark Twain, published in 1920, analyzes the literary progression of Samuel L. Clemens and attributes shortcomings to Clemens' mother and wife.

Dyskolos

or The Grouch

or The Misanthrope

or The Curmudgeon

or Old Cantankerous

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an Ancient Greek comedy by Menander is the only one of his plays, or of the whole New Comedy, that has survived in all but complete form.