Early Europe & Colonial Americas

What this unit covers

The topics below follow the published Art History course framework for Unit 3. This unit is worth 20% of the exam, so budget your time against that rather than against how long the unit takes to teach.

Lessons in this unit

• Late Antiquity, Byzantium & the Gothic15 min · 3 objectivesExplain how early Christian, Byzantine, and Islamic art expressed faith through image, light, and pattern · Describe the structural and symbolic logic of Romanesque and Gothic churches · Analyze the shift from flat, symbolic imagery toward the naturalism of Giotto
• Renaissance, Baroque & the Colonial Americas15 min · 3 objectivesExplain Renaissance innovations: linear perspective, naturalism, and the revival of classical humanism · Describe how Baroque artists used light, movement, and emotion to engage the viewer · Analyze how colonial art in the Americas fused European, Indigenous, and Asian sources

Every term in Unit 3

All 30 terms we publish for Early Europe & Colonial Americas, with definitions. Reading them through is the fastest way to find the ones you cannot define — then drill those in cram mode until you can produce them without the prompt.

Catacomb of Priscilla

Rome, c. 200–400 CE. Early Christian imagery borrowing Roman forms — the Good Shepherd is a repurposed pastoral figure. Christians used the visual language available to them.

Santa Sabina

Rome, c. 422–432 CE. A basilica plan taken from Roman civic halls rather than temples: longitudinal, with a nave, side aisles and clerestory drawing worshippers toward the altar.

Vienna Genesis

Early Byzantine, early 6th century, tempera and gold on purple-dyed vellum. Purple was imperial; the manuscript's materials assert status before a word is read.

San Vitale

Ravenna, 526–547 CE. Central plan with mosaics of Justinian and Theodora facing each other across the apse — church and state depicted as a single authority.

Hagia Sophia

Anthemius and Isidorus, 532–537 CE. Pendentives carry a dome over a square, and a ring of windows at its base makes it appear to float. Later a mosque, now a monument.

Merovingian looped fibulae

Early medieval Europe, mid-6th century, silver gilt with garnets. Portable wealth for a mobile society; abstract animal interlace rather than figures.

Lindisfarne Gospels: cross-carpet page

Early medieval England, c. 700, ink and pigment on vellum. Insular interlace covering the whole surface — horror vacui — merging Christian symbol with Anglo-Saxon metalwork patterns.

Great Mosque of Córdoba

Spain, 8th–10th centuries. Double-tiered horseshoe arches in alternating stone and brick, reusing Roman and Visigothic columns. Later a cathedral was built inside it.

Church of Sainte-Foy

Conques, France, c. 1050–1130. Romanesque pilgrimage church: barrel vaults, thick walls, an ambulatory and radiating chapels to move crowds past relics without disrupting the service.

Bayeux Tapestry

Romanesque Europe, c. 1066–1080, embroidery on linen. Seventy meters of continuous narrative — and embroidery, not tapestry, despite the name.

Chartres Cathedral

France, 1145–1155 and rebuilt after 1194. Gothic: pointed arches, rib vaults and flying buttresses move the load outward, so walls become glass.

Bible moralisée

Gothic Europe, c. 1225–1245, illuminated manuscript. God depicted as an architect with a compass, measuring creation.

Röttgen Pietà

Late medieval Germany, c. 1300–1325, painted wood. Deliberately anti-naturalistic: exaggerated wounds and a shrunken Christ, made to provoke empathy rather than admiration.

Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel

Giotto, Padua, c. 1303, fresco. Weighty figures with real emotion in shallow but believable space — painting turning back toward observation.

Annunciation Triptych (Mérode Altarpiece)

Workshop of Robert Campin, 1427–1432, oil on oak. The Annunciation staged in a Flemish home, where every object doubles as a symbol. Oil allows detail tempera cannot.

Palazzo Rucellai

Alberti, c. 1450. Classical orders applied as flat pilasters to a domestic facade — antiquity quoted as decoration rather than structure.

The Arnolfini Portrait

Jan van Eyck, 1434, oil on wood. The convex mirror reflects two additional figures and the signature reads "Jan van Eyck was here" — the painter as witness.

David

Donatello, c. 1440–1460, bronze. The first freestanding nude since antiquity, in contrapposto — classical form recovered, and a civic symbol for Florence.

Birth of Venus

Botticelli, c. 1484–1486, tempera on canvas. Neoplatonic: pagan myth read as an allegory of divine love. Elegantly linear rather than anatomically strict.

Last Supper

Leonardo, c. 1494–1498, oil and tempera on plaster. One-point perspective converging on Christ's head; the apostles grouped in threes at the moment of the accusation.

Sistine Chapel ceiling

Michelangelo, 1508–1512, fresco. Painted architecture framing nine Genesis scenes; the sculptor's sense of the body drives every figure.

School of Athens

Raphael, 1509–1511, fresco. Plato points up, Aristotle out — idealism and empiricism composed within a coffered barrel vault that echoes the new St. Peter's.

Entombment of Christ

Pontormo, 1525–1528, oil on wood. Mannerist: acidic color, weightless bodies, no clear ground. Rejecting High Renaissance balance on purpose.

Venus of Urbino

Titian, c. 1538, oil on canvas. A reclining nude with a direct gaze, placed in a domestic interior rather than a myth.

Il Gesù

Giacomo della Porta and others, 1568–1584. The Counter-Reformation church: a wide single nave with no aisles, so nothing obstructs the sermon.

Calling of Saint Matthew

Caravaggio, 1597–1601, oil on canvas. Tenebrism — a shaft of light does the theological work, and the figures are dressed as contemporaries.

Las Meninas

Velázquez, 1656, oil on canvas. The painter, the mirror, and the viewer standing where the king and queen must be. A painting about who is looking.

Woman Holding a Balance

Vermeer, c. 1664, oil on canvas. Empty scales, a Last Judgment on the wall behind, and light doing the moralizing.

Angel with Arquebus, Asiel Timor Dei

Master of Calamarca, c. 17th century, oil on canvas. Andean colonial painting: a European angel in aristocratic Spanish dress carrying a firearm — conversion and colonial power in one image.

The Virgin of Guadalupe

Miguel González, c. 1698, oil on canvas on wood with mother-of-pearl inlay. Enconchado technique, absorbing Asian materials arriving via the Manila galleon into a Mexican devotional image.

What examiners penalize here

• For Gothic architecture, memorize the trio that makes height and light possible: **pointed arch + ribbed vault + flying buttress**. An FRQ on Chartres wants you to connect these structural features to the *effect* — thin walls, huge stained-glass windows, and an interior read as filled with divine light.

Practice Art History

Our practice bank is drawn from across the whole course rather than filtered to one unit, which is closer to how the exam asks anyway — it will not tell you which unit a question is testing.

Questions about this unit

All 10 units of AP Art History

1. Unit 1 · Global Prehistory
2. Unit 2 · Ancient Mediterranean
3. Unit 3 · Early Europe & Colonial Americas
4. Unit 4 · Later Europe & Americas
5. Unit 5 · Indigenous Americas
6. Unit 6 · Africa
7. Unit 7 · West & Central Asia
8. Unit 8 · South, East & Southeast Asia
9. Unit 9 · The Pacific
10. Unit 10 · Global Contemporary