Greek Art for Dummies Flashcards
Downfall of Minoans
- In about 1500 B.C., aggressive Greek tribes invaded Crete and established the first Greek culture.
- Gradually, the Greeks fanned out over the Peloponnesus peninsula and Aegean Islands.
- Minoans merged with the Greeks, creating what we call Mycenaean culture (who started greek mythology)
- Hercules Slaying the Nemean Lion with Aiolos and Athena
- Psiax
- c530BC
- Black figure Amphora
- Details were added with purple- or red-dyed slip
- Hercules, guarded by Athena, overcomes the Nemean Lion
- one of his famous 12 labors
Trojan War and its Affect on Art
- Mycenaens conqured by invading Greek tribes called the Dorians in the Trojan War (The Iliad)
- Post Trojan War several centuries of squabbling passed before Greece setteld. Thus no art for 400 years
- In the calmer 8th century B.C., the earliest manifestations of Greek culture emerged in the visual arts and literature
The Ionic order
- The Ionic order is more elaborate than the Doric.
- The main difference is:
- The columns are elongated
- The capital (top of the column) is capped by a scroll
- The entablature features a continuous frieze or sculpted band.
- There are no metopes or triglyphs as in the Doric order
The Venus de Milo (or Venus of Melos)
Greek classicism didn’t fade away completely.
A throwback to 4th-century Athens.
With her unflappable calm, she could have been sculpted by Praxiteles. The fact that her clothes seem to be slipping off enhances the goddess’s potent sexuality. Yet her musing gaze takes the viewer beyond her sensuality to a place of mystery.”
- Kritios Boy (480 B.C.)
- Named after the artist who probably sculpted him
- Transitional piece between archaic and clasical
- Figure redistributes his weight
- The left hip is now slightly higher than the right
- Reests comfortably on his left foot instead of both feet as in the kouros
- Graceful thigh contours
- gentle swelling of the belly
- Face is increasingly more human than kouros faces
- Represent a symmetrical young man’s body in an asymmetrical stance was a predesesor to showing motion
One of the first free-standing female nudes.
Praxiteles
Shows Aphrodite’s delicate beauty and grace
three orders
- architectural formulas:
- Doric
- Ionic
- Corinthian .
- Each order is based on precise numerical relationships so that all the architectural elements in a structure harmonize
Brief History of Greek Vase Painting
- Geometric style (10th through 8th centuries B.C.)
- Somewhat primitive
- People and animals look like stick figures
- Early Classical style (early 5th century B.C.)
- Highly realistic
- Brief flirtation with an Oriental style
- Influenced by trade with Mesopotamia
Fourth-century BC Philosphers
After the fall of Athens in 404 B.C., the city-state gradually got on its feet again, though it never rose to its former glory. Nevertheless, Greek philosophy peaked in the 4th century B.C. Plato taught at his famous Athenian Academy from about 387 B.C. to 347 B.C., and Aristotle, his greatest student, taught at the Lyceum in Athens from 335 B.C. to 322 B.C., after educating Alexander the Great in Pella, Macedonia.
Minoan History
- Start of Aegean culture
- Island of Crete
- Late 3rd millennium B.C.
- Prepalatial Minoan Crete
- 1900 B.C.–1350 B.C. = minoan art
- Protopalatial Minoan Crete
- Neopalatial Minoan Crete
- As the first civilization to be surrounded by sea, lived in relative isolation on the island of Crete
- Developed a unique culture
- Probably too peacefull
Black-figure and red-figure techniques
- New archaic style more realsitic than oriental
- Archaic-style painters employed one of two techniques:
- Black-figure technique (early 7th century B.C.)
- Red-figure technique (invented around 530 B.C)
What Started the Hellenistic Era?
- Death of Alexander the Great
- Alexander’s generals divided his empire three ways:
- Seleucus - Nicator ruled Persia, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia.
- Ptolemy - Soter governed Egypt.
- Antigonus - Monophthalmus controlled Macedonia and Greece
Minoan Religion
- Minoans were a peaceful people.
- Made more tools than weapons,
- Chief god was a sexy-looking snake-goddess.
- Her cult animals (animals associated with worship) included the dove, snake, and bull.
History of the Rise and Fall of Athens
Disjointed city-states were constantly at war with outside aggressors like the Persians.
In 480 B.C., the Athenians foiled a Persian invasion by outwitting their powerful enemy. Their 380-ship navy outmaneuvered and crushed a much larger Persian fleet of 1,207 ships at Salamis.
This gave Athens great prestige in the Greek world and put her at the center of a defensive alliance called the Delian League.
All member states contributed money to pay for the navy, which Athens controlled.
Eventually, Pericles, Athens’s greatest leader, skimmed from the defense funds to give Athens a facelift, making it one of the most glorious cities of the ancient world.
This gave the city-state even more prestige, but awakened the jealousy and fear of rivals like Sparta and Corinth, and naturally angered Athens’s allies.
The rivalry escalated and finally erupted into the Peloponnesian War in 431 B.C. The war ended in 404 B.C. with Athens’s definitive defeat. The Golden Age of Greece was over.
But the age of Alexander the Great and Hellenism, which would spread Greek culture across most of the civilized world, was about to dawn.
- The Nike of Samothrace
- Pythokritos
- 2nd century B.C
- Victory statue, looks like she’s just landed with her Air Jordans on the prow of a ship, the wind still gusting in her wings and gown.
- You can feel victory in the folds of her garment and uplifted wings. Also the sculptor has learned to create art that charges the atmosphere around it. Instead of being self-contained, the statue radiates energy beyond itself into the surrounding space.
Pericles and Phidias
Phidias was the most celebrated Greek sculptor and the overseer of the sculptural work for Pericles’s building projects on the Athenian Acropolis (downtown Athens).
Phidias
Most celebrated Greek sculptor and the overseer of the sculptural work for Pericles’s building projects on the Athenian Acropolis (downtown Athens).
Most of Phidias’s works are lost.
Only surviving sculpture (or perhaps it’s the work of his workshop) are the friezes and pediment statues of the Parthenon
These available pieces and the praise of ancient writers are enough to ensure the sculptor’s immortality.
The ancients called Phidias’s works sublime and timeless.
- New York Kouros (c. 600 B.C.)
- Similar to King Menkaura and his queen (2515 B.C.)
- Similarities
- Both equally symmetrical and rigid
- squared shoulders;
- straight, rigid arms and legs;
- clenched fists held firmly at their sides.
- Step slightly forward with the left foot.
- Pronounced, geometric kneecaps, and the same angular calves
- Differences
- kouros is completely naked. Pharaohs were never represented nude; only childern were nude in Egyptian art
- The Parthenon
- Doric temple
- Built between 447 B.C. and 438 B.C. under Pericles
- Supervised by Phidias, and designed by two architects, Iktinos and Kallikrates.
- At 8 columns wide and 17 columns long, it is bigger than the Doric Temple of Hera in Paestum built 100 years earlier, yet the Parthenon seems lighter and more graceful.
- The architects managed this effect by tweaking the proportions (in other words, by breaking the rules).
- The legs or columns of the Parthenon are thinner than the bulky ones at Paestum. The tapering (or thinning) of the legs toward the top is more subtle.
- The entablature and platform are not purely rectangular; they curve upward toward the center, giving the structure a feeling of upward lift.
- All the capitals (tops of the columns) were adjusted to support this slight curving. The columns also lean imperceptibly toward the center, heightening the upward feeling.
- Because of this fine-tuning, the weight-bearing columns of the Parthenon don’t seem to have to work as hard as those of Paestum. The Paestum temple is oppressive — you can feel its weight bearing down on you. But the Parthenon uplifts you as if it had magically overcome gravity
- The architects managed this effect by tweaking the proportions (in other words, by breaking the rules).
What’s a key differance between Mioan art and Mesopotomia and Egypt?
What may this be influenced by?
- Minoan shapes
- Graceful
- Flow like waves
- The tides of the Aegean seem to wash refreshingly through the Minoans’ art and culture
- Egyptian and Mesopotamian art.
- Sturdy
- River-based cultures, hemmed in by deserts.
Oriental style Vase
More realistic than Geometric
Brief period
Allowed for clearer visual narrative
- Three Goddesses (420 BC)
- A surviving Parthenon statue
- Superbly rendered fabrics (which have the wet or clingy look pioneered by Phidias)
- Reveals the moods, spirit, and down-to-earth sensuality of the flesh-and-blood women behind the clothes
- Watching the birth of Athena
- Hermes and the Infant Dionysus
- 320 B.C.– 310 B.C.
- Praxiteles
- Once thought to be an original, it is a Hellenistic or Roman copy
- Closer to the spirit of the original than the copy of Knidian Aphrodite (Praxiteles)
- Classical serenity of the facial features and delicate grace of Hermes’s body are hallmarks of Praxiteles’s style.
- Kroisos Kouros (525 BC)
- In later kouros sculputures Greeks gradually shed strict Egyptian symmetry for a more subtle form of balance. Kourous were:
- much more realistic, though he’s still stuck in the same Egyptian pose.
- more lifelike; more finely modeled curves of the shoulders, arms, and thighs
- Looks signifigantly less rigid, almost mobile
- The Toreador Fresco (circa 1500 B.C.)
- Depicts bull jumping and it’s sequence and actions
- Young men and women somersaulted off the backs of wild bulls
- Women vaulters are white-skinned, suggesting that they spent more time indoors than the men.
- But, the art for the first time in history suggests sexual equality
- The streamlined bodies brim with exuberant life.
- Bull’s S-shaped tail looks like a wisp of playful energy.
- The wavelike shapes of bull and jumper harmonize, suggesting that man and nature are one in Crete
- Medea Krater (c 400BC)
- This much detail could not have been achieved in the black-figure technique.
- Painted about 30 years after Euripides’s famous tragedy Medea premiered in Athens
- Depicts the play’s climax: The witch Medea has just murdered her sons to get revenge on her unfaithful husband Jason (of Jason and the Argonauts fame). With sword raised, she makes her getaway in a dragon-drawn chariot, a loan from her grandfather Helios, the god of the sun. The defeated Jason looks up helplessly at her, his weapon dangling uselessly at his side. The winged women flanking Medea, the daughters of the night, will fight for him. They are furies whose job is to avenge within-the-family murders. But they’ll have a tough time getting past the sunburst of Helios.
- Knidian Aphrodite
- Praxiteles
- everyday, down-to-earth quality
- Doryphoros - Spear Bearer (Roman recreation)
- Polykleitos - Greek sculptor in bronze of the 5th century
- An example of Contrapposto, and showcases Polykleitos’ canon
- The off-center pose that gives this relaxed-but-balanced look
- The cocked left arm contrasts with the straight or engaged right leg
- Straight right arm offsets the bent left leg. The left leg seems to propel the figure forward.
- Opposite forces preserve the feeling of balance while imparting a sense of tension and action.
- Oriental style Amphora
- Used for storing and pouring wine or olive oil
- Depicts a scene from The Odyssey
- Odysseus and his companions burn out the eye of the one-eyed giant Cyclops (Polyphemus) by first getting the giant drunk.
- The Mesopotamian influence is in the figures.
- Odysseus and his men look like Mesopotamians, ie, the scorpion-man in the bottom band of the Puabi Lyre.
- The animals in the middle band and the gorgons (sisters of the snake-haired Medusa) on the belly of the vase also have a Near Eastern flavor.
- But the Greeks added their own playful charm to the monsters. If you look closely, you can see that the bug-eyed gorgons show off their sexy left legs like can-can dancers
- The belts of interlaced wavy lines (like basket weaving) at the top, bottom, and neck are leftovers from the Geometric period.
Athena of Parthenon
One of Phidias’s greatest sculptures
40-foot-high, gold-and-ivory statue
Once stood in the Parthenon
- Laocoön and His Sons
- Hellenistic sculpture from Rhodes.
- This 1st-century B.C. statue was discovered in 1506 in the ruins of the Emperor Nero’s famed “Golden House” in Rome.
- Laocoön and His Sons captures the mythical life-and-death struggle between a father, his boys, and two vicious sea serpents. (Laocoön was punished by the goddess Athena for trying to expose the Trojan Horse as a fraud to the Trojans who viewed it as a gift and sign that the Greeks had quit their siege of Troy. Actually the horse concealed a bevy of Greek kings waiting to pounce on the Trojans when they dragged the giant wooden horse into their unsuspecting city.)
Diskobolus (“Disk Thrower”)
Myron
High Clasical Style
Shows motion in a single, compressed action.
The statue appears wound up, his energy ready to burst forth.
His classically serene face and the faraway look in his eyes contrast with the action of his body, gives the athlete a timeless quality, as if he were throwing his discus into eternity
- The Dipylon Krater
- ca. 750–735 B.C.
- Tells the story of figures pulling their hair out in mourning at the funeral pyre of a Greek warrior.
The Dying Trumpeter
Carved in the 3rd century B.C. in Pergamon (in modern-day Turkey)
Moving depiction of an enemy Celt warrior wounded in a battle with the Greeks who colonized Asia Minor.
The statue is carved in a way that enables the viewer to feel the death pains that the man faces with quiet dignity
- Charioteer from Delphi/Heniokhos (circa 470 B.C.)
- Severe style/Early Clasical - 5th-century Greek realism
- Pose is still very rigid when compared with later works of the Classical period
- But there are departures from the Archaic style
- Head is inclined slightly to one side.
- The naturalistic rendering of his feet was greatly admired in ancient times.
- The introverted, concentrated expression does away with the old ‘Archaic smile’.
- The elegant, naturalistic folds of his robe
- The statue was commissioned to celebrate a chariot race victory
