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This week • Tuesday: The ’start’ of ‘art’: the human body on display from Archaic to Classical Greece • Thursday: Curating the Classical in the RISD-museum: meet at 10.30 at RISD Benefit Street entrance! Today • 1 The Greek ‘revolution’ in sculpture and naturalism – form • 2. Religion and sculpture – context • 3. The female nude • 4. Re-labelling the past: exercise II The Greek evolution in sculpture and naturalism • Geometrical period (900-700BC) first sculptures made after the dark ages (terracotta) later also made in stone and bronze • Archaic Period (c.650-500 BC) start of making monumental sculptures • Classical Period (ca.500-323 BC) creative peak of Greek sculpture production • Hellenistic Period (ca.323-27 BC) Greek style becomes spread through the entire Mediterranean area Centaur of Lefkandi • 920 BC • Grave context • Chiron? First bronze sculptures Horse, 8th c. BC. Karditsa- Mantiklos Apollo, Thebes Metropolitan Museum warrior, 700-675 BC., Boston New York Thessaly, ca. Museum of Fine Arts 700 BC Nat. Museum Athens "Auxerre Goddess", c. 640- Archaic period 630 BC • Orientalising: 750-650 BC- introduction stone, influence Syria, Egypt and Phoenicia. Human and animal figures become more important • Daedelic Style (700-600 BC) Characteristics: triangular shaped mask-like face Kneeling young • 600-480: kouroi boy, Samos Frontal forms Straight profiles Surface decoration (incision) to reveal anatomical details- later it becomes sculpted instead of incised Increasingly naturalistic style Egypt, Late period Early Archaic Kouros Late Archaic Kouros Archaic sculptures kouroi Late-Archaic period, ca. 580 BC Archeological museum Delphi Kore-kouros • Young men-women • Kouros naked, Kore dressed The Archaic smile Poseidon/Zeus of Artemision Deconstructing Naturalism • What is naturalism to whom? • The ideal of Greek revolution and artistic progress and the story of progressive evolution Critian, or Kritios Boy Kritios Boy. Marble, c. 480 BC. Acropolis Museum, Athens Ernst Gombrich Our sense of the natural object world against which we might test visual representations is itself already determined by the cultural system in which we live Figuring out what comes naturally CHIANG YEE: Cows in Derwentwater. 1931 A Greek revolution??? Richard Neer: “Its like Columbus set out deliberately to discover the New World and not a roundabout way to the East Indies” Kritios Boy Kouros 590–580 BC, Metropolitan NYC Polykleitos Doryphoros or Spear bearer, original from 440 BC Polykleitos’ Canon A system of rules or standards by which the human figure is rendered. the Canon regers to a system of proportions for carving a figure developed by the sculpturer Polykleitos. Each part of the body related proportionally to an adjacent part. A statue sculpted according to the Canon was a visalization of the values of truth, beauty and goodness. No original statue by polykleitas has survived! but there is archaeological evidence that the Romans took plaster casts from statues of his or of the Polykleitan school to produce their own versions. Doryphoros by Polykleitos • Roman marble copy, Museum of Napels • Original ca. 440 BC • Spear bearer • Philosophical ideals – absolute beauty: • left/right- ease/movement and straight/bend Natural or supernatural? Quintilian: supra verum Beyond the real What did Greeks know about the human body? • Shigehisa Kuriyama: the ancient Greeks knew nothing of what we conceptualize of muscles, rather, they imagined the body as a system of interconnecting neura. What seems to have motivated an image like Hercules or Doryphoros is not the rule and the measurement of each muscle but in the aesthetics of articulation Riace bronzes • Found in 1972 in the sea in Calabria Italy, by a diver on holiday • cast about 460–450 BC • Statue A: a younger warrior, and Statue B: bearded older looking The discobolus, 450 BC, Myron We are not dealing with the invention of naturalism at all, it were the challenges of representing the gods that were at issue. 2. The challenge of representing the gods Greek religion Agalmata, magic talismans From archaic to classical Kore Artemis, Roman copy of Greek Athena statue attributed to Leochares ca 325 B.C The ritual process of viewing Access to the sacred is defined less in terms of the essential qualities of a particular elite status group, and more in terms of specific ritual performances. Naturalism permits the construction of this relational space in the votive representation. Anthropomorphism Tanner: What seems to have been valued in artists' technè -was the capacity to produce statues which might facilitate religious experiences, and in which the strictly material, human and worldly basis of the production of the statue was bracketed off or transcended. The human body constituted the definitive vehicle for conceptualizing what the gods were on the one hand, and for visually manifesting them on the other The assemblage of naturalism Greek religion • Change in visual subjectivity • Ideal image of health and fitness: influence gymnasion • from artistic language that served aristocratic elite to giving way to one oriented more closely t the expressive needs to the entire population • Invention of the lost wax technique Why is Classical art not religious? Reformation and the museum secular cloister of the museum -Rationalization of art as nonreligious -Enlightenment 3. The ancient ‘nude’ Womanfacture Nude or naked? • John Berger (Ways of Seeing): nudity is a convention of genre, bound up with the institution of the western male gaze • To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized. Nakedness reveals itself, nudity is placed on display • inherently voyeuristic and capitalist fabrication Judgement of Paris THE JUDGEMENT OF PARIS was a contest between the three most beautiful goddesses of Olympos--Aphrodite, Hera and Athena--for the prize of a golden apple addressed "To the Fairest." Question To what extent did ancient representations of the unclothed female body solicit the same sorts of responses as the modern? First female nude Aphrodite of Knidos (350-40 BC) by Praxiteles Knidos Pliny “.. The artist made two statues of the goddess, and offered them both for sale: one of them was represented with drapery, and for this reason was preferred by the people of Cos, who had the choice; Upon this, the Cnidians purchased the rejected statue, and immensely superior has it always been held in general estimation. … The little temple in which it, is placed is open on all sides, so that the beauties of the statue admit of being seen from every point of view; an arrangement which was favoured by the goddess herself, it is generally believed.. A certain individual, it is said, became enamoured of this statue, and, concealing himself in the temple during the night, gratified his lustful passion upon it, traces of which are to be seen in a stain left upon the marble.” “Woman, thus fashioned, is reduced in a humiliating way to her sexuality: the immediate and long-term implications of this fiction in the visual arts are incalculable” Nanette Salomon-(Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in Seventeenth-century Dutch Painting) Paris, Adonis, and Anchises saw me naked, Those are all I know of, but how did Praxiteles contrive it? Discussion point There is no real space for the ancient view on the objects on display in the museum, they are only displayed as Enlightenment artworks The sculpture and the museum Religious viewing. “the specifically religious nature of the act of viewing the statue was reinforced through the manipulation of visual, auditory and olfactory sensations. The manipulation of light and darkness in temples, using such devices as reflective pools of liquid or polished floors in front of the statue, enhanced the aura of deities sculpted in reflective materials like marble, gold and ivory” Exercise Re-label the past part II Label this statue : -as if a 5th c. Greek would describe this object what would he or she write down? -from a purely modern perspective ignoring all references to the past .
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