NCEA Level 3 Art History 91482 (3.1) — page 1 of 7

SAMPLE ASSESSMENT SCHEDULE

Art History 91482 (3.1): Demonstrate understanding of style in art works

Assessment Criteria

Achievement / Achievement with Merit / Achievement with Excellence
Demonstrate understanding involves analysing art works to explain stylistic characteristics to identify similarities and/or differences in style between art works, using supporting evidence from art works. / Demonstrate in-depth understanding involves analysing art works to justify reasons for similarities and/or differences in style between art works, using supporting evidence from art works. / Demonstrate perceptive understanding involves an insightful explanation of the reasons for similarities and/or differences in style, using supporting evidence from art works and/or their context(s).

Evidence Statement

Expected coverage Question One – Italian Renaissance
Selected art works:
Plate 3 – Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ, 1440–45
Plate 1 – Donatello, St George and the Dragon, c1417
Example of Achievement level response:
Piero has used a balanced composition for his picture of Jesus getting baptised because he has put Jesus in the centre with figures on each side and this arrangement links to the shape of the painting and the tree which ties the top and bottom together. There is a lot of space in the painting and it goes into the distance behind Jesus with the light fading at the bottom of the sky and the edge of the hills. This is called aerial perspective. It makes it look very natural.
The other work I chose is a relief sculpture and it has lots of space too because the figures are more rounded and the background elements are very light. It has a horizontal composition because it is a horizontal sculpture and the composition is a lot simpler because there are only a few figures in it and not much background. The figures are balanced with the man on the horse in the middle. There is a lot of space in this one because you can see it in the way the buildings on the sides get smaller and take your eye into it.
Example of Merit level response:
The composition and treatment of space in these two art works are similar in that both artists are using one-point perspective techniques to show three dimensional space and an outside scene, and both artists are showing some sort of action. Donatello uses the recession of buildings and the inwards looking figures to help create his space, and he has the moving horse and rider to catch our attention in the middle. Piero's movement is less dynamic but he also uses the angles on the left and the pose of John the Baptist baptising Jesus to frame and balance his picture of Jesus. The differences can be explained by the fact that Donatello's sculpture is much earlier than Piero's painting. Although Alberti's treatises about art were not published until 1435, many of his ideas about perspective can be seen in earlier Florentine works, such as Donatello's St George and the Dragon. Piero's later work incorporates some of Alberti's ideas about istoria and the natural environment, which were included in his treatises.
Example of Excellence level response:
Donatello's sculpture demonstrates an early interest in mathematically constructed space, which dominated Florentine art in the fifteenth century. The success of Donatello's spatial illusion is largely dependent on his use of high and low relief as well as the recessive angle of the arcade on the right of the panel, which leads the viewer's eye into the distance. The space and composition of Donatello's work share a single focal point where St George plunges his spear into the dragon. This unity of space and action became a major characteristic of the Florentine early Renaissance style, especially after Alberti's publication of his theories of perspective and istoria in 1435–6.
Piero della Francesca has been described as the “artist who most embodied Alberti's ideals”; this is clearly evident in his Baptism work, which was painted after Alberti's theories had gained wide acceptance in Florence and the surrounding areas. Both the composition and space are centralised on the figure of Jesus who stands in the foreground of the painting. There is a harmony and clarity in Piero's painting, which was characteristic of Tuscan painting in the second half of the fifteenth century. This harmony can be attributed to a sense of unity provided by the use of a consistent light source and foreshortened and naturalistically proportioned figures. A consistent light source has been used to model the foreshortened figures and landscape features, which have been carefully reproduced from nature. The greater use of natural features in Piero's work contrasts with the sparse setting of Donatello's sculpture and points the way to the fusion of form and surrounding landscape, which was characteristic of later Italian Renaissance works, such as Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks.
Expected coverage Question Two – Italian Renaissance
Selected art works:
Plate 4 – Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks, 1483–85
Plate 6 – Michelangelo, Holy Family (Doni Madonna), c1503–04
Example of Achievement level response:
These two paintings are both of the same subject but they look very different because they are in different places. Leonardo's one is in a shadowy cave, which is very dark and gloomy because Leonardo has done it in lots of browns and greens so that it looks spiritual. There is sfumato in the painting, which is because Leonardo was so good at sfumato and that is one of his characteristics. The skin on Leonardo’s figures glows because of the way he has painted it in light glowing colours so that important bits of the figures stand out in the gloom. You can see this on the arm of baby Jesus and the face of the Virgin Mary and they seem to come out from the shadows. Michelangelo didn't like gloomy colours and he used bright colours like you see in his Holy Family. There are lots of bright colours like pink and orange and this is very different from Leonardo's gloomy dark colours. Michelangelo has used bright light, which makes all the edges look sharp, and its very clear all over and in the background too, which is different from Leonardo who makes the background all gloomy. In Michelangelo's Holy Family, you can see the nude figures in the background clearly and no one knows why they are there but it might be an attempt at humanism.
Example of Merit level response:
Michelangelo and Leonardo were two very different people and two very different artists. Michelangelo is famous for being a great sculptor and you can see that reflected in his use of light and tone, which make his figures look hard and like stone. Leonardo thought sculpture was dirty and thought painting was like poetry so he tried to make his paintings a bit mysterious, like a poem. In this work, he has used shadows and chiaroscuro to give his figures a special quality, like melting, and his use of sfumato in the aerial perspective helps make it look spiritual and un-human, so that you can tell the people are divine. Michelangelo was friends with stonecutters and he made his Virgin Mary look tough like one of them so that people could see themselves in his art. His bright clear light makes the figures stand out but it is a bit too clear to be real and this makes us see that his figures are not ordinary either.
Example of Excellence level response:
Although Leonardo and Michelangelo were brought up in Florence and studied there, they both travelled widely and were influenced by the styles of other regions as well as Florence. Leonardo's early works, such as his Annunciation, clearly reflect the early Renaissance style of Florence with its carefully constructed one-point perspective. The Virgin of the Rocks was painted after Leonardo moved to Milan and where he began to move beyond the confines of Florentine painting of the 1470s, which was dominated by compositions with foreground figurative subjects set against distant receding landscapes, as seen in Pollaiuolo's Martyrdom of St Sebastian or Verrochio's Baptism. In Leonardo’s work, we see the development of his personal style, which sought to move away from what he regarded as the ‘too mathematical and anatomical’ Florentine style towards a more mysterious, spiritual depiction of Biblical events and figures.
Michelangelo painted his Holy Family (Doni Madonna) after he returned to Florence from Rome in 1501 and it is obvious that he has incorporated influences from Roman art into his painting. The nudes, who recline against a stonewall in the background of the painting, are derived from ancient Roman sculptural reliefs, which he had access to in the Vatican collections. The bright, clear light in this painting clearly represents the Florentine liking for clear, bright tones, which can be seen in earlier Florentine art, including the work of Ghirlandaio. However, the muscular grandeur of his figures was not part of Florentine art and represents the grand style that developed in Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century, during which time Popes’ used monumental art and architecture to create Roma into an imperial city.
Expected coverage Question Three – Modernism
Selected art works:
Plate 8 – Henri Matisse, The Dance, 1910
Plate 9 – Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self Portrait with Model, 1910
Example of Achievement level response:
Both of these paintings were done in the early twentieth century and both show features of early modernism. Kirchner's painting has been painted crudely with thick rough paint strokes. The forms of the artist and his model are not well defined and they are angular and simplified, not naturalistic. There is space in the painting because you can tell that the artist is in the front of the painting because the hand of the sitting model is behind the artist but it is not very clear and he hasn't used any traditional perspective. Matisse's painting has got more people in it but it is still pretty simple because the background is just green and blue and it doesn't really go anywhere. Matisse's people are not round like real people, they are flat and reddish pink and very simple but you can tell that they are people because there are black lines on them, that shows their form. The people are dancers and they are dancing in a circle but the circle is flat too. The blue and green background has no space in it; it’s just flat zones of colour.
Example of Merit level response:
The main reason why these paintings are so different is because one was done by a French painter and one was done by a German painter. In France, people were really happy during this time, so they liked happy paintings like The Dance. Matisse has used bright colours and has put his figures in a moving circle, which almost floats on the painting to create happy feelings, as life was like in France at the time. This also emphasises the 2D surface of the painting.
Germany, on the other hand, was full of angst; it was a relatively new country, they were getting ready for war, and Freud was there. Therefore, the paintings depicted more serious ideas about human relationships – Kirchner's artist has his back to the model, which indicates that they aren't communicating well. This lack of communication was a common subject for German expressionists.
Example of Excellence level response:
European life was changing rapidly in the early twentieth century and this led to change and experimentation in art in many European countries. Matisse was the leading Fauve painter and, although his experiments with colour and form led to many early modern developments in European art, his use of colour and texture was developed out of the work of the nineteenth century post-impressionists. His simplified figures can be linked to the simplified figures in Cezanne's late works such as The Bathers (1899) as well as to the non-European art works from Africa and Asia, which were becoming popular with the Parisian avant-garde. The Dance was painted for a Russian collector who wanted it to hang in the staircase of his Moscow house to demonstrate his progressive, modern good taste.
Kirchner was a young painter who had a major influence on the development of German expressionism, especially the Die Brucke group, which he founded in Dresden in 1904. This group published a manifesto saying that they wanted to be a bridge between great German artists of the past, like Durer, and the future. Some of the Manifesto repeated Nietzsche’s ideas about rooting out the past – this is said to account for the Die Brucke artists' adoption of the naïve, primitive style that is apparent in this work. Primitivism can also be linked to the influences coming into Europe from colonised territories overseas. The crude forms of this work and the bright, unsullied colours can be linked to the art produced in German colonies in the Pacific and Africa. Kirchner and other Die Brucke artists like Schmidt-Rottluff and Pechstein used these primitive influences to challenge European traditions, which they believed were in decline.
Expected coverage Question Four – Modernism
Selected art works:
Plate 10 – Giorgio de Chirico, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914
Plate 12 – Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, 1929–31
Example of Achievement level response:
Le Corbusier's building is modernist because it is a simple shape with white walls separated by horizontal strip windows, which make the walls look smooth and flat. It is also off the ground on pilotis, which was a modernist thing to do to buildings to create space underneath. And it has a free-form roof.