Still life is a depiction of inanimate objects for the sake of their qualities of form, colour, texture, and composition. Although decorative fresco murals and mosaics with still-life subjects occasionally appeared in antiquity, it was not until the Renaissance that still life emerged as an independent painting genre, rather than existing primarily as a subsidiary … Read more
Sandro Botticelli, original name Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. Botticelli’s name is derived from that of his elder brother Giovanni, a pawnbroker who was called Botticello (“Little Barrel”). As is often the case with Renaissance artists, most of the modern information about Botticelli’s life and character derives from … Read more
Acting is an activity in which a story is told by means of its enactment by an actor or actress who adopts a character—in theatre, television, film, radio, or any other medium that makes use of the mimetic mode. Acting involves a broad range of skills, including a well-developed imagination, emotional facility, physical expressivity, vocal … Read more
The Olympic Games or Olympics are the leading international sporting events featuring summer and winter sports competitions in which thousands of athletes from around the world participate in a variety of competitions. The first known Olympics were held in the summer of 776 BC at Olympia, a site in southern Greece where people went to … Read more
Cubism, highly influential visual arts style of the 20th century that was created principally by the artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro and refuting time-honoured theories that … Read more
Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch Baroque Period painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. During his lifetime, he was a moderately successful provincial genre painter, recognized in Delft and The Hague. Nonetheless, he produced relatively few paintings and evidently was not wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death. … Read more
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, … Read more
Tennis is a racket sport that is played either individually against a single opponent (singles) or between two teams of two players each (doubles). The dimensions of the tennis court are 78 by 27 feet (23.8 by 8.2 metres) for singles and 78 by 36 feet (23.8 by 11.0 metres) for doubles. The height of … Read more
Cleopatra VII Philopator, often simply called Cleopatra, was the last of a series of rulers called the Ptolemies who ruled ancient Egypt for nearly 300 years. A member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, she was a descendant of its founder Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general and companion of Alexander the Great. Cleopatra ruled an … Read more