Italian Art & Architecture Study Guide: 180 Flashcards from Etruscan Frescoes to Arte Povera

Despite its title, deck HN8933 "Italian Art, Architecture & Fashion" has no fashion cards at all. Its 180 cards cover Italian art and architecture in order, from rock drawings at Valcamonica (8,000 BC) to Arte Povera and Italy's 2017 cultural-heritage law. Treat it as a timeline and you can learn the whole thing in about two weeks.

Ten cards that anchor the timeline

What the deck covers

Etruscan art (Chimera of Arezzo, Tomb of the Lioness in Tarquinia), Pompeii's Villa of the Mysteries, insulae, Vitruvius' De Architectura, Ravenna mosaics under Justinian, Italo-Byzantine Madonnas, Duecento and Trecento, Cimabue, Duccio's Maestà, the Sienese School and the Lorenzetti brothers, Alberti's De re aedificatoria, Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael's School of Athens, the Cellini Salt Cellar, Bronzino, Caravaggio's chiaroscuro, the Carracci, Bernini, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Piranesi, Canova, Hayez's The Kiss, the Macchiaioli, Modigliani, de Chirico's Metaphysical painting, Boccioni and Sant'Elia, the Novecento movement, Fontana's Spatialism and the Transavantgarde.

Study tips for this deck

Learn it as eras, not as 180 separate facts. The cards already run in chronological order, so split them at the turning points: Etruscan/Roman (cards 3-31), Duecento to Trecento (32-49), Renaissance (50-79), Mannerism and Baroque (80-104), Neoclassicism to Macchiaioli (105-124) and the 20th century (125-175). Learn one block at a time, then shuffle the whole deck once all of them are solid. The last five cards cover the 2017 export law (works must be 70 years old instead of 50, €13,500 self-certification threshold). That's legal trivia, so file it separately.

Merge the repeats. Giotto shows up as "Proto-Renaissance artist", "most significant Trecento painter" and "first to depict nature realistically" (cards 8, 43, 57). The Macchiaioli are asked about four times (13, 14, 118, 121), so keep the card with the 1862 date and the macchie meaning. Card 40 asks for three artists and gives four, so add Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti to your answer. Cards 29-31 (Constantinople, Hagia Sophia) are background on Byzantium, not Italian monuments, so tag them that way. Card 82 says Mannerism flourished in Florence, but Rome and Parma (Parmigianino) belong in that answer too.

For the same story told across Europe, read our guide to modern art movements from Manet to Neo-Expressionism.

To start studying, search for deck code HN8933 in the library on Flip It.