Visual Art Genre

A still life is a work of art depicting inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, plants and natural substances like rocks) or man-made (drinking glasses, cigarettes, pipes, hotdogs and so on) in an artificial setting. Popular in Western art since the 17th century, still life painting give the artist more leeway in the arrangement of design elements within a composition than do paintings of other types of subjects such as landscape or portrait. ...

A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. For this reason, in photography a portrait is generally not a snapshot, but a composed image of a person in a still position. A portrait often shows a person looking directly at the painter or photographer, in order to most successfully engage the subject with the...

Christian art is a term that covers all visual works produced in an attempt to illustrate, supplement and portray in tangible form the principles of Christianity. Virtually all Christian groupings use or have used art to some extent. The prominence of art and the media, style, and representations change; however, the unifying theme is ultimately the representation of the life and times of Jesus Christ and in some cases the Old Testament. Depictions of saints are also common, especially in...

History painting, as formulated in 1667 by André Félibien, a historiographer, architect and theoretician of French classicism, was in the hierarchy of genres considered to be the grand genre. History painting is the painting of scenes with narrative content from classical history, Christian history, and mythology, as well as depicting the historical events of the near past. These include paintings with religious, mythological, historical, literary, or allegorical subjects--they embodied some...

Throughout history people have told stories with pictures. Long ago, people drew and painted stories on the walls of caves and tombs. The Romans carved stories into stone, the Ancient Greek painted pictures on pots and in the Middle Ages, women used needles and thread to create tapestries. The repeated and orderly overlapped shapes create a series of connected pictures, or frames. This method of linking scenes together led to a popular ways of telling stories in the 20th century, the newspaper,...

A monument is a statue, building, or other edifice created to commemorate a person or important event. They are frequently used to improve the appearance of a city or location. Cities that are planned such as Washington D.C., New Delhi and Brasília are often built around monuments. The Washington Monument's location (and vertical geometry, though not physical detail) was conceived to help organize public space in the city before it was ever connected with George Washington. Older cities have...

A religious image is a work of visual art that is representational and has a religious purpose, subject or connection. All major historical religions have made some use of religious images, although their use is strictly controlled and often controversial in many religions, especially Abrahamic ones. General terms associated with religious images include cult image, a term for images, especially in sculpture which are or have been claimed to be the object of religious worship in their own right...

[[Image:Filippino Lippi 001.jpg|thumb|260px|right|''Allegory of Music by Filippino Lippi.'' Tempera on panel, 61 × 51 cm, c. 1500.The "Allegory of Music" is a popular theme in painting; in this example, Lippi uses symbols popular during the High Renaissance, many of which refer to Greek mythology.]]An allegory (from , allos, "other", and , agoreuein, "to speak in public") is a figurative mode of representation conveying a meaning other than the literal. Allegory is generally treated as a...