A shared vocabulary of art-historical descriptors used across Clio’s wikis. Each individual work page in any wiki cross-links to the terms here that its close-looking note invokes — composition, palette, triptych, scumble, and so on. The aim is that a reader can travel from a vision note on a Schizocollage room into a vision note on a Baselitz painting because both invoke [[layering]] or [[picture-plane]].
The vocabulary is small on purpose — about thirty terms across five clusters: composition & space, mark & surface, colour & light, form & figure, and format. Each term gets a short, neutral, definitional entry. The vocabulary expands consciously, not by accretion — new terms are added when a vision note genuinely needs a word that isn’t here yet.
The clusters
- Composition & space — composition, picture-plane, figure-ground, framing, scale, depth, flatness
- Mark & surface — gesture, brushwork, mark-making, scumble, impasto, glaze, layering, wash
- Colour & light — palette, monochrome, chiaroscuro, ground, tonality, contrast
- Form & figure — contour, silhouette, mass, volume, posture
- Format & surface-type — triptych, panel, photograph, texture