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IMAGES OF YAM GODS by Dr Bridget Nwanze
This paper describes the image of Ifejioku the yam god of Ossissa. The aim is to provide the socio-religious background for understanding the divine origin and the sacred nature of yams in the traditional belief of the Ossissa Igbo people.  Ossissa is in the southern western part of Igbo cultural area. The Igbo, most often referred to as Ibo, are a group of about six million people located in southwestern Nigeria ...read more

UNCOVERING IGBO ART by Dr. Bridget Nwanze
Igbo people, also referred to as the Ibo or Ndi Igbo, are an ethnic group living chiefly in southeastern Nigeria and speak various igbo languages and dialects. Various attempts by people at uncovering the history of the Igbos have been made with emphasis on the recovery and preservation of the past as well as the analysis of recently collected data ...read more

André Breton and The Death of DADA
The second phase of Dada in Paris was significant principally as a prelude to Surrealism.
With regard to its status as Dada, however, it gives us nothing essentially new, and there is
always a note of ambivalence in the way in which it was espoused ...read more

Gothic Sculpture
Superficially considered, it would seem that Gothic art developed naturally out of the Roman-
esque style. While it is true to say that Romanesque flourished during the eleventh and the first
half of the twelfth century, the style had many regional variations ...read more

Impressionist Painting Methods
Impressionist methods developed to meet several requirements and the artists also
capitalised an the possibilities opened up by the standardised paint tube and easily
portable equipment ...read more

Manet's Painting Methods
Manet's paintings aroused public and critical. ire because of their subject matter and their
ostensibly slapdash technique. These two issues are interrelated because new methods were
sought to render new ideas ...read more

Pedimental Sculpture of the Sixth Century
The number of surviving architectural sculptures, metopes, pedimental sculpture pieces, et
cetera that can be attributed to about the middle of the sixth century is evidence of the great
building activity throughout Greece at this time ...read more

The Archaic Kore
The kore is the female equivalent of the kouros. She makes her appearance at the beginning of
Greek monumental sculpture ...read more

The Archaic Kouros
The earliest monumental statues known in Greece are technically mature and sophisticated and
have nothing at all in common with the Minoan-Mycenaean figurines. They seem to have had their
origins in an established sculptural tradition ...read more

Archaic Greek Sculpture and The Rise of The Polis
With the Dorian invasions, the old monarchies of the Aegean came to an end, to be replaced by
feudal aristocracies in which the conquering warrior tribes lorded it over the indigenous peoples.
Gradually the various separate elements of the population interbred ...read more

Giorgio Vasari's Stylistic Phases in the Renaissance
In 1550 Vasari retrospectively viewed the development of the rebirth of classical art as an
evolutionary process in three phases, each corresponding to a phase in human life. The first phase
could be compared to childhood ...read more

The function of art in the Early-Renaissance
Wackernagel notes that in 1472, the Confraternity of St Luke in Florence listed 42 members, 32 of
whom specialised in figurative painting. He also notes that a survey conducted in Florence by the merchant Benedetto Dei ...read more

The Fifteenth-century artist's workshop
While twentieth-century artists tend, for the most part, to produce works in the solitary environment of a studio, fifteenth-century art was produced in workshops. The workshop - like the current art college - also functioned as a training ground for young artists ...read more

Seventeenth-century Portraiture
When the Papacy lost its hold on Europe after the Protestant Reformation and related events, a
division occurred between 'protestant' and 'catholic' art. Art also became specialised into new,
distinct categories ...read more

Las Meninas and the Problem of Interpretation
The contradictions and subtleties of form and content in Velazquez's painting Las Meninas have contributed to the enchantment and fascination that this work has exerted on viewers for several centuries ...read more

Eighteenth Century Painting in Italy
During the eighteenth century the power of Rome as a flourishing artistic centre was challenged
by Venice and Paris. But Rome continued to be a centre of interest for studies of antiquity. Travel
abroad was a natural result of the Enlightenment interest in new horizons ...read more

Mannerism in Art History
The term Mannerism is derived from the Italian word maniera, which, in its original usage,
meant "individual style". Its specific application to Mannerism originated in its use by the
sixteenth-century art critic, Vasari, who applied it in a number of distinct ways ...read more

Early Renaissance Italian Painting
The art of the third quarter of the fourteenth century tended to be reactionary and authoritarian
in character, qualities thought to have been precipitated by the devastation caused by the Black
Death in Florence and Siena ...read more

Leon Battista Alberti's Concept of Historia
Alberti calls the historia a painter's greatest work. To him, the laudable historia was that work "which holds the eye of the learned and unlearned spectator for a long while, with a sense of pleasure and emotion ...read more