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Spotting Style
Place any painting, piece or building — by eye and ear.
The recognition skill behind the quiz answers: how to look at an unfamiliar painting, hear eight bars of unfamiliar music, or walk past a building, and place it within fifty years. Movement by movement, period by period, with the tells that actually distinguish them and the confusions that catch people out.
Painting: movements & how to spot them
From Renaissance light to Pop Art irony — what's actually in the picture.
- Early and High Renaissance: weight, space and the vanishing point How to recognise Italian painting from Giotto to Raphael by its solidity, its measured perspective space and its pyramid compositions — and how to tell an Italian panel from a Northern one at a glance. ●●○○○ 16 min
- Mannerism: the deliberate strangeness after Raphael Why sixteenth-century Italian painting goes elongated, acid-coloured and airless on purpose — and how to tell a Mannerist picture from both the High Renaissance it departs from and the Baroque that answers it. ●●●○○ 15 min
- Baroque: one light, one moment, one diagonal Recognising seventeenth-century painting from Caravaggio's tenebrism to Rubens' diagonals and the sober Dutch alternative — and never again confusing Baroque with Rococo. ●●○○○ 16 min
- Rococo: pastel, shell-curve and the fête galante Recognise a Rococo painting or interior from its high-key pastel palette, asymmetric shell and scroll curves, small scale and flirtatious pastoral subjects — and tell it apart from the Baroque grandeur it grew out of. ●●○○○ 14 min
- Neoclassicism: hard edges, Roman virtue and the frieze Recognise Neoclassical painting from its shallow frieze-like staging, sharp contours, invisible brushwork, sober local colour and Roman subjects — and separate it from the Rococo it attacked and the Romanticism that attacked it. ●●○○○ 14 min
- Romanticism: the sublime, the storm and the loaded brush Recognise Romantic painting from its unstable diagonals, weather, ruins and small figures against vast nature, its loaded visible brushwork and saturated complementary colour — and place the Ingres and Delacroix quarrel over line against colour. ●●●○○ 15 min
- Realism: ordinary labour at heroic scale Recognise mid-nineteenth-century Realism from its huge canvases of unidealised rural and urban labour, its earth-and-black tonal palette and solid studio modelling — and keep it clearly apart from the Impressionism that follows. ●●●○○ 15 min
- Impressionism: light, touch and modern leisure How to recognise an Impressionist painting from its broken colour, visible brushwork and coloured shadows — and how to tell a Monet from a Renoir, a Degas from a Pissarro without reading the label. ●●○○○ 14 min
- Post-Impressionism: four answers to the same problem Why Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh and Gauguin all start from Impressionism and end up somewhere different — and how to tell structure from dots from impasto from flat outlined colour at a glance. ●●●○○ 15 min
- The Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolism The British thread: how to recognise Pre-Raphaelite jewel colour on wet white ground and its obsessive botany, tell it from the Victorian academic painting it is constantly confused with, and follow the line through Rossetti and Burne-Jones into European Symbolism. ●●●○○ 15 min
- Fauvism and Expressionism: colour off the leash How to recognise a painting whose colour has stopped describing the world — and then tell the sunlit hedonism of a Matisse or Derain from the jagged anxiety of a Kirchner, the mysticism of Der Blaue Reiter, and the sickly undertow of a Munch. ●●○○○ 16 min
- Cubism and Futurism: the fractured plane How to date a Cubist picture from its palette alone, separate the Analytic from the Synthetic phase, tell a Braque from a Picasso, and distinguish Cubism's motionless brown table from Futurism's noisy coloured speed — with Orphism and Vorticism placed alongside. ●●●○○ 18 min
- Dada and Surrealism: chance, dream and the unconscious How to recognise Dada's anti-art objects, readymades, chance collages and political photomontage, then split Surrealism into its dream-realist and automatist halves — and tell a Magritte from a Dalí across a gallery. ●●●○○ 17 min
- Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism How to tell the early European abstractionists apart by eye — Kandinsky's floating colour, Mondrian's grid, Malevich's void, the Bauhaus diagram — and then how to separate post-war gestural action painting from colour field at a glance. ●●●○○ 14 min
- Pop Art and after Separating British Pop from American Pop by tone and technique, reading commercial printing methods as subject matter, and carrying a set of quick tells for Minimalism, Conceptual art, Land art, the YBAs and today. ●●●○○ 14 min
- Dating a painting: the ten-second routine A repeatable order of checks — support, ground, palette, brushwork, space, subject, format, signature — that places an unfamiliar painting within fifty years, plus the revival traps and the long-career problem that break naive guesses. ●●●○○ 15 min
Classical music: periods by ear
Instrumentation, harmony and form — placing a piece from the first few bars.
- Early music by ear: plainchant to Palestrina How to hear that a recording is early — unaccompanied voices, modal cadences, no driving bass line — and then split medieval from Renaissance, organum from imitative polyphony, a Machaut ballade from a Palestrina mass. ●●●○○ 16 min
- Baroque by ear: continuo, sequence and the machine that never stops The audible tells of 1600–1750 — a chugging basso continuo, terraced dynamics, sequences and motor rhythm, the smell of gut strings and valveless horns — and how to tell Bach from Handel from Vivaldi from Purcell in a few bars. ●●●○○ 16 min
- The Classical style: balanced phrases, Alberti bass and sonata form Why music of 1750–1810 sounds clear, symmetrical and full of full stops; sonata form explained plainly; and how to tell late Haydn from early Beethoven when both are on the same page. ●●●○○ 16 min
- Early Romantic music: the miniature, the song and the virtuoso Place music of roughly 1800–1850 by ear: the swollen Classical forms of Beethoven, the piano-as-narrator of Schubert and Schumann, Chopin's pedalled rubato, Mendelssohn's deliberate classicism, the showman's cadenza, and Berlioz's idée fixe. ●●○○○ 14 min
- Late Romanticism and nationalism: the huge orchestra and the folk accent Place music of roughly 1850–1920 by ear: the swollen orchestra and chromatic saturation of Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler, Brahms's classical counter-position, Tchaikovsky and late Verdi — and how to tell a genuinely nationalist piece from a generically Romantic one. ●●●○○ 16 min
- Impressionism and early modernism: Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky How to hear the French sound of 1890–1914 — whole-tone and pentatonic scales, chords that slide in parallel, harp and woodwind colour, rhythm that floats — how to tell Debussy from Ravel, and how to recognise the moment Stravinsky's Rite broke the whole thing open. ●●●○○ 16 min
- Atonality and serialism: the Second Viennese School by ear Why tonality broke, what free atonality and the twelve-tone method actually sound like, how to tell Schoenberg from Berg from Webern in a few bars, and how to date the music that followed — plus an honest word about why most listeners find it hard. ●●●●○ 16 min
- Minimalism and since: Reich, Glass, Pärt and the late twentieth century How to recognise minimalism from its pulse, repetition and glacial harmonic change, tell Reich from Glass from Adams, place Pärt's tintinnabuli and the holy minimalists, and know why Baroque repetition is not the same thing at all. ●●●○○ 15 min
- Placing a piece by ear: the ten-question routine A repeatable listening routine for dating unfamiliar music: continuo, orchestra size and instrument floors, dynamic behaviour, phrase shape, harmonic language, tuning and performance style — and the four traps that defeat idiom-based guessing. ●●●○○ 16 min
Architecture: reading a building
Arches, windows, ornament and material — dating a building from the street.
- The classical orders: the vocabulary everything reuses Name the order from the capital in two seconds, read an entablature into its three bands, and tell Greek post-and-lintel practice from Roman arch, vault and concrete — the grammar behind every classical revival from Palladio to the Victorian town hall. ●●○○○ 16 min
- Romanesque and Norman: reading the round arch Recognise eleventh- and twelfth-century work on sight — round arches, wall as mass, small deep-set windows, cushion capitals and chevron — and separate Norman fabric from the Gothic that was grafted onto it in the same building. ●●○○○ 16 min
- Gothic: dating a church by its tracery Place Gothic work within a generation using window tracery, and distinguish the English sequence (Early English, Decorated, Perpendicular) from French High Gothic and Flamboyant — then tell real Gothic from the Victorian Revival that imitates it. ●●●○○ 18 min
- Renaissance architecture: the orders come back Recognise a Renaissance building from its round arches, correctly used classical orders, flat ruled façade and whole-number proportions — and tell an Italian palazzo, a Bramante rotunda, a Michelangelo giant order and a Palladian villa apart at a glance. ●●○○○ 14 min
- Baroque and Rococo: movement in stone, then froth in plaster Tell a Baroque building from a Renaissance one by the way its wall moves, separate Borromini from Bernini, place the Central European, Iberian and English variants, and stop confusing Baroque with the lighter, whiter, interior-bound Rococo that follows it. ●●●○○ 15 min
- Georgian and Neoclassical: reading the British street Date a Georgian terrace to within a couple of decades from the pavement — glazing bars, sash boxes, fanlights, brick bond, doorcases, stucco and ironwork — and place Palladian, Adam, Regency and Greek Revival work without confusing any of it with Victorian. ●●●○○ 16 min
- Victorian and the revivals: the age of choice How to tell a Gothic Revival church from a real Gothic one, separate Italianate from Second Empire from Queen Anne, read constructional polychromy and terracotta, and date a Victorian terrace against a Georgian one from the pavement. ●●●○○ 16 min
- Arts and Crafts to Art Deco Recognising the vernacular revival of Morris, Webb, Voysey and Lutyens; telling Art Nouveau's whiplash line from Mackintosh's austere Glasgow version and Gaudí's geology; and reading Art Deco's ziggurats, sunbursts and chrome on cinemas, factories and skyscrapers. ●●●○○ 15 min
- Modernism and after Placing a twentieth-century building: the International Style's pilotis, ribbon windows and white render; Brutalism's board-marked concrete and why not every concrete building is Brutalist; then High-Tech's exposed services, Postmodernism's quoted ornament and today's parametric curves. ●●●○○ 16 min
- Dating a building from the pavement A repeatable routine for putting a date on almost any British building without going inside: bond and brick gauge, glazing bars and sash horns, arch shapes, roof pitch, eaves and parapets, doorcases, and the tell-tale scars of refronting. Plus how listing, conservation areas and Pevsner actually work. ●●●○○ 20 min
- Reading an English parish church How to walk round a parish church and unpick the six or seven centuries usually stacked inside it: the plan, Saxon long-and-short work, Norman doorways and fonts, the tracery sequence that dates every window, clerestories and roofs, fittings, monuments and brasses, and how to see through Victorian restoration. ●●●○○ 20 min