Art history game: recognise architectural styles
An art history game for learning to recognise architectural styles, from Greece to Neoclassicism. Each round brings a drawn building — a Doric temple, an aqueduct, the arcade of a mosque, a Romanesque church, a Gothic cathedral, a Renaissance palace, a Baroque façade or a Neoclassical museum — and you say which style it is. Other rounds show an arch or a column on its own for you to name, or ask in which centuries this style was built. On hard, the options are always the styles that look most alike: Romanesque or Gothic, Greek or Neoclassical, Renaissance or Baroque.
Art History · Secondary, Sixth Form
The buildings are not photos of famous monuments, which you can recognise from memory without understanding anything, but drawings made from each style’s textbook features. To get them right you look at the same things as in an art commentary: the type of arch, the column order, the rose window, the flying buttresses or the curves of the façade.
Each style has a feature that separates it from its closest neighbour, and the explanation says so when the answer is shown. The Greek temple stands alone without windows, while the Neoclassical portico is the entrance to a building with rows of windows; Romanesque has thick walls and round arches, Gothic pointed arches and stained glass.
Round, pointed, horseshoe and lobed; Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Solomonic. They are the basic vocabulary of any architectural commentary, and here they are learnt by looking at the shape, with a sentence explaining which style uses them.
"A façade appears with two towers topped by spires, a large rose window in the centre and a doorway of pointed arches stepping inwards. Which style is it? Gothic: the pointed arch and the rose window give it away. If the doorway arches were round, the façade low and the windows small, it would be Romanesque."
Prefer to learn without screens? Try this analogue version:
Choose the old buildings in your town or neighbourhood: the church, the town hall, a mansion.
Photograph or sketch the arch of each doorway and, if there are any, the columns.
Using the features from the game, decide which style each building is.
Check afterwards on the council’s website or in a local history book.
If you like What Style Is It?, these activities work similar skills:
Multiple choice on the Greek orders, the Roman arch, the Mosque of Córdoba, Romanesque, Gothic cathedrals, Brunelleschi, Gaudí and Le Corbusier.
From Giotto and Leonardo to Velázquez, Goya, Impressionism and the avant-garde, with the Prado’s paintings.
Another history game: place objects and inventions in the era they belong to.
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