Exercises
1/ The mystery: It’s know that the Book of Kells was sometime in Kildare Abbey. It’s also possible that Gerald of Wales told about a book already dissapeared. What do you think about, after analyzing the historical text? Was Gerald talking about the Book of Kells or about an unknown Book of Kildare?Read the text carefully and look at the drawings to assume a decision.
Book of Kildare, the mystery of the lost book, or not.
The 12th-century writer Gerald of Wales, in his Topographia Hibernica, described in a famous passage seeing a great Gospel Book in Kildare which many have since assumed was the Book of Kells. The description certainly matches Kells:
"This book contains the harmony of the Four Evangelists according to Jerome, where for almost every page there are different designs, distinguished by varied colors. Here you may see the face of majesty, divinely drawn, here the mystic symbols of the Evangelists, each with wings, now six, now four, now two; here the eagle, there the calf, here the man and there the lion, and other forms almost infinite. Look at them superficially with the ordinary glance, and you would think it is an erasure, and not tracery. Fine craftsmanship is all about you, but you might not notice it. Look more keenly at it and you will penetrate to the very shrine of art. You will make out intricacies, so delicate and so subtle, so full of knots and links, with colors so fresh and vivid, that you might say that all this were the work of an angel, and not of a man."
2/
a)Underline the words that you don’t understand in the Introduction page. Find into the dictionary their meaning.
b)Translate into Spanish the following terms. Use the dictionary:
Artist's Proof:
Bronze:
Ceramics:
Certificate of Authenticity:
Etching:
Lithography:
Manifesto:
Maquette:
Layout:
Montage:
Performance:
Installation:
Monotype:
Museum:
Perspective:
Pointillism:
Dot:
Pixel:
Serigraph:
Stipple:
4/ Describe the picture:
a) The most important elements of Visual Language (Shape, Measurement, Color, Texture)
b) The kind of Basic Composition used (Symmetry or Compensation). Explain your reasons.
5/ Join the sentences below.
Impasto:
was a most prolific user of pastel
was a very famous watercolor artist from UK
the paints are made of pigments suspended in a water soluble vehicle
with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil
Pastel is an art medium in the form of a stick, consisting
Edgar Degas
JMW Turner
A watercolor is the medium or the resulting artwork, in which
a broad thin layer of diluted pigment or ink
Paint applied in outstanding heavy layers or strokes
of pure powdered pigment and a binder
Wash: Used in watercolor painting, brush drawing, and occasionally in oil painting to describe
Oil painting is the process of painting
