terms.

It is certainly interesting. However, I like keeping it in the context of the essay because I can show, in the actual painting, where the artist is using the style. I guess I could do both! I might even have some fun with titling it, just to take more hot air out of the usual art history critiques. Simon Schama was a master of this in his excellent PBS series "The Power of Art," which was one of my inspirations for this book.

I use them and appreciate them. I looked up the word disengo. It means drawing in Italian but when applied to art becomes more complex. Sometimes wish novels with lots of characters had glossaries. Makes keeping everyone straight easier

It's one of the things I love about ebooks. There is an icon that will bring you to a characters mentions in the book so you can recall who they are. It's fantastic. You can search in them also.

publishing arts and assisted with a few self published books.

I learned the old school methods before computers were common in the industry and before desktop publishing.

As mentioned above, a glossary would be helpful to your audience and you can make it fun.

Italics will help the reader easily identify the term after looking away to the glossary and help them learn the term along the way if it is used often enough throughout the book. My familiarity with reference material is broad, including fine arts and especially music. In music, at least on sheet music and direct reference materials, much of it is in some language other than English. The notations for dynamics are always in italics and usually in Italian. If you perform classical genres for any length of time you learn a number of terms from use. In large works, like Handel's oratorios, there are many pages in the front of the book for instruction to the performers including a glossary for text (for works not in English) and for notations (dynamics) which are in Italian normally. Look at almost any older written music and you will see these notations like piano, forte, etc..

Since you are dealing with the fine arts, I can imagine you want to make the information appealing, as it can get pretty stuffy. "Classical" music is very much like that but can be interpreted with a tone that reaches the modern human. I think you could do that.

I like the posts you put up here with beautiful works and a history lesson included! The Friday guessing games were fun too, I look forward to seeing the final work.

I hope that helps.

2na

Off the top of my head here are some terms often used in art history: trecent, quattrocento, cinquecento, predella, la figura serpenatina, fresco, crocefisso, contrapposto.

I often used these terms in my essays accompanied by an example of the terms themselves. That obviates in a way the use of a Glossary but I might just include one to be helpful to the reader. When you tell people to just think of the pose of The David for the term contrapposto, they get it quickly. A crocefisso is a crucifix. A predellae is a series of little pictures beneath the main art work that helps tell the main story (since so many people were unable to read in those days).

This is a nice explanation https://becomingitalianwordbyword.typepad.com/becomingitalian/2013/01/a-year-of-italian-culture-and-language-michelangelo.html

ask @BCDreyer. He'll likely answer you. Alternatively, you can check websites like Grammar Girl or run your copy through Grammarly.

You could also purchase Benjamin Dreyer's new book. It's wonderful!

Not a copy editor, but a grammar geek and self-styled Google-fu'er. Here's some relevant info:


From the Association of Art Editors' style guide:

The use of foreign-language words in text should be minimized. Where it is essential, the English translation should be added within parentheses or quotation marks.

Foreign words and phrases that are likely to be unfamiliar should be in italics; translations following the foreign language are in parentheses, or quoted, but not both.

Many foreign words and phrases have entered the English language and are no longer italicized. Examples:

fin de siècle
trompe l’oeil
Zeitgeist

A good guide to their status is whether they appear in the latest version of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Also, most proper nouns that are not titles are not italicized. Examples:

the Curia
the Stanza d’Eliodoro
the Piazza del Fonte Moroso.

<snip>

For a detailed examination of foreign-language style matters, see Chicago, chapter 11. (Link added by me.)


Hope that helps!!

I think it's very helpful, thanks!

and later for technical manuals, but they were pretty industry-specific so the use of italicization was specific to the content. In legal writing, for example, you always italicize case names (Roe v. Wade) and footnote designators like e.g. and id. Aircraft (engineering) manuals didn't italicize anything; boldface was used for paragraph headings. So it kind of depends on both your audience and the accepted conventions. I wouldn't italicize "chiaroscuro," for example, because that's the word that's always used to describe that style; there's no commonly-used English equivalent. I might italicize quattrocento, though, because it's a word that does have an English substitute. There are probably a number of ways you could do this and none of them would be wrong.

you could just break all the rules and conventions, you know? I trust you'll find an acceptable solution, there are some good suggestions in the thread.

I would put the definition in a footnote at the bottom of the page the term first appears on. No italics necessary.

The bottom of the page is fine for the first usage. When the word appears 20 pages later, some of us old folks will have forgotten what the term means, and will have forgotten which page holds the definition.

It sucks getting old.

Normally we'd italicize non-English words, but this can get distracting (or look a bit precious) if they're used often in the text.

One option if they are used frequently is to italicize the word on the first use, then set it normally (we call it "roman" ) thereafter.

Or you could do away with using italics for them at all as long as none were likely to be confused with English words of the same spelling.

Terms like "chiaroscuro" (note spelling; also "quattrocento" ) are familiar enough to many English speakers that they can be considered English loan words anyway.

The main thing is to try to put yourself in your readers' shoes and figure out what approach you think would be most helpful for them and least distracting or confusing.

would have been like doing another book. Besides, the whole point of the book was to make art more accessible to people who might feel it doesn't "speak" to them. But I searched out those terms in the actual essays themselves and found that I had almost invariably explained those terms in the context of the essay. For example, most people know the statue, The David, and so I explained that contrapposto was that pose.

So, if I'm reading my book and I don't understand a term, the worst that could happen is that I go to Google and look it up (that is, if I am interested in following my story of that artist).

Most of the essays are about paintings/sculpture I have actually seen since I traveled to Europe for 10 years to pursue these works. What a great adventure! (I also learned Italian so I could better understand the culture that produced so much wondrous art and learn the art terms). It was the best way to understand how culture/history plays into the creation of the art in the first place).

I finally gave up the whole idea of a glossary when I got to the term "color field" used in the context of an essay on Rothko. If the reader was interested enough in Rothko, he/she would probably be interested enough to look it up.

BTW, I'm not so sure about "quattrocento" being understood right off the bat by English speakers. I always have to remind myself that what is being referred to is what we call the fifteenth century... .

and their level of existing knowledge.

In among the jargon, it's important not to lose focus on the artwork and what you're aiming to do with your book and the story you want to tell. The terms are a tool and shouldn't be too obtrusive, and maybe in a few cases a plain old English word might fit the bill better unless you deliberately want to provide a primer on the jargon while engaging the reader.

If you've explained most the specialist terms as you go along (and it wouldn't be too intrusive), you could just make sure you explain any others you think necessary as well. You could do this in footnotes or endnotes if it clutters up the text too much to do so within parentheses (this may be a better solution if some of the definitions/translations are long).

I didn't mean to imply that "quattrocento" would be equally familiar to "chiaroscuro": I'd noticed the typo in in your OP for the latter term (hey, it's a Lounge forum, not a published volume, and I don't always spel stuff rite myself in the heat of the moment), and then "quatrocento" popped out as well. (I've seen both used without italics in books I've worked on over the years.)

Whatever you do, I'd advise coming up with a consistent approach - inconsistency's particularly distracting for readers.

The different approaches I described above (always using italics, italics on first usage only, no italics at all) have all been acceptable to publishers I've worked for on various books - generally, especially nowadays when publishers are looking to cut copy-editing costs to the bone, we're briefed to go along with the author's preferences as long as they've been consistent.

they are putting together this book. Neither of them has any Italian so I have to get the terms right. Thanks for spotting the two errors I made in the OP. I went thru my essays that included those terms and they were correct. So in the meantime I have gotten a bit sloppy!

I note that I did make use of the term piccolini but it was in reference to decorative medallions on the outside of Florence's fabulous Ospedale degli Innocenti (orphanage). However, I showed them in a photo in the essay so the meaning was clear.

My readers are chosen, by me, to receive this book. Of course, I have made pretty sure they are interested in the first place, mostly family, some DUers who were around when I published them here, and those dear friends who helped me with my understanding of such things as architecture terms. (I am even sending one to my idol, Meryl Streep, in care of her agent at his office in Los Angeles).

Thanks so much for you input. I value your opinion very much!

I'm sure your daughter and daughter-in-law will see you right. There are often nearly as many opinions as there copy-editors!

If you do decide to include the Italian term definitions as notes:

Footnotes are more reader-friendly, but they can clutter up the page if there are many of them on the same page or some are long.

Endnotes gathered at the end of each chapter are less reader-friendly, but they could serve as a sort of chapter "glossary" (especially if you won't be including notes for any other purpose).

Gathering the endnotes for all the chapters at the end of the book isn't something I'd recommend. Readers seldom look them up unless they're very engaged.

Good luck with your book.

point of the book).

I remember doing endnotes at the end of each section of my Master's thesis and found it easy to do, like you said. It made the whole thing less stuffy, I think. Your comment brings back those days when I slaved over that thesis Thanks a lot!