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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

 

 

Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
Fax: (401) 863-9423
[email protected]

Style is a distinct, characteristic expression of works of art from a specific period. Style is comprised of both form and content. According to The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms, “artistic styles emerge from individual and collective interpretations in social, political, and economic contexts.” The Nabataeans created their own unique style by adopting aspects of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, and Hellenistic architecture. The Nabataean column capital, for example, is a reduction of the Corinthian capital. This abstract new capital is a less floral capital, with a boxier appearance.

--Sarah Evelyn

Style is used to describe a coherence of qualities in a period or people. Schapiro describes it as, "the constant form-and sometimes the constant elements, qualities, and expression-in the art of an individual or group". The Attalids of Pergamon, the builders of the Great Altar of Zeus, saw themselves as preserves of Greek culture and art forms. Therefore, they adopted the style of their predecessors for their own art, creating such hellenistic sculptures as "Dying Gual" and the Telephos Frieze. (Grove Dictionary)

Elizabeth Bowman

Style is a distinctive quality or form, a manner of expression that can be identified to match a certain time period or place. For example, the exterior of the Palace of Knossos was unfortified, its spacious courts and pillared porticos open and exposed on every side – a style typical of Minoan architecture in the New Palace Period. An archaeologist could potentially look at this building, examine its layout, design, and architectural style, and successfully determine its historical context.

--Charlotte Oldsman

Styles of periods may be distinguished from styles of people. This dichotomy was formulated by Heinrich Wölfflin (1913), who called it the ‘double root of style’. It is sometimes remarked that personal style is synchronic (pertaining to a moment) while period style is diachronic (taking place through time), but in fact both kinds of style have both elements. Both concern coherence within a day’s or a season’s work, a year or larger portion of a lifetime, or the ‘life’ of a school, period or era (i.e. Classical, medieval, Renaissance, modern). Period style can be applied indifferently to any such division, including the span of a lifetime (as in such terms as the ‘age of Michelangelo’). Whatever coherence is perceived may be unitary or else may be divided into two, three or more phases. (Oxford Art Online) 

--Samantha Beik

Style is the coherence of qualities associated with a person, place, or time period. The word is derived from "stilus," Latin for the needle used to write on wax tablets, and has been associated with the manner or quality of writing due to the sharpness of the stilus. Artistic style is “a particular, distinctive, or characteristic mode or form of construction or execution in any art or work” (Dictionary.com). In other words, style is a “way” or “manner” that defines an art form produced by a person/place or connected to a period. Art critic Heinrich Wölfflin proposed that there are “two roots of artistic style”: the culture or society the artist comes from and the visual tradition the artist belongs to. --Jean Mendoza