CLAS 1120Q / ARCH 1707 THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

MWF 2 – 2:50 p.m. Rhode Island Hall 108 Prof. John Cherry

Class 27 April 2

Imagining and Visualizing Lost Wonders Joint presentaons in class, April 7, 9, and 11 “Other Ancient Wonders”

Monday 7 April Samantha Gay & Gillie Johnson (Stonehenge) Ted Gilbane & Joe Mello (Library of Alexandria) Tyrone Smith & Siyi Zhang (Great Wall of China)

Wednesday 9 April Sophie Cohen & Rob Weiner (Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae) Obasi Osborne & Lauren Morgan (King Solomon’s Temple, Jerusalem) Rudy Cuellar & Tanya Olson

Friday 11 April Mahew Knowlton & Marissa Peeru (Petra, Jordan) Walker Mills — presenng solo

Drawing by Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669)

The artist Deinokrates* and Pietro da Cortona deliver to Pope Alexander VII (1655-1667) Deinokrates’ plan to carve Mount Athos in the image of Alexander the Great

* Also called Stasikrates or Diokles

Another version:

Imagining and visualizing what no longer exists — or may never have existed

Ekphrasis: A rhetorical device in which one medium of art tries to relate to another, by describing it — e.g., the descripon of the Shield of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, or (here) the dramac visual recreaon of a story told by several ancient authors.

Fischer von Erlach (1656-1723) Historic Architecture Book 1

Dinocrates’s plan to carve Mt. Athos into a giganc seated statue of Alexander the Great, holding an enre city in his hand.

Vitruvius, On Architecture (27-23 B.C.) Plutarch, Life of Alexander, ch. 72 A.D. 75 Mt. Athos

Drawing by Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669)

The artist Deinokrates* and Pietro da Cortona deliver to Pope Alexander VII (1655-1667) Deinokrates’ plan to carve Mount Athos in the image of Alexander the Great

* Also called Stasikrates or Diokles

Another version:

Fischer von Erlach (1656-1723) Historic Architecture Book 1 Anthropocentric rendering of the Dinocrac myth.

Francesco di Giorgio Marni, Traa di architectura (ca. 1476)

Rennaissance humanist, Siena

Translated Vitruvius in to the vernacular and published it.

The human body as the architectural canon, or unit of measure.

• Lysippan stance • Herakles’ lion-skin Drawing by Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669)

The artist Deinokrates* and Pietro da Cortona deliver to Pope Alexander VII (1655-1667) Deinokrates’ plan to carve Mount Athos in the image of Alexander the Great

* Also called Stasikrates or Diokles

Another version:

Fischer von Erlach (1656-1723) Historic Architecture Book 1 Allegorical Portrait of Pope Alexander VII

Ciro Ferri, ca. 1660

Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome

• The ponfical body, imagined as Athos

• The seven bodies and their aributes allegorically represent the seven hills of Rome Mao of Eastern Mediterranean and its ancient monuments, J.B. Fischer von Erlach (1712) Drawing by Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669)

The artist Deinokrates* and Pietro da Cortona deliver to Pope Alexander VII (1655-1667) Deinokrates’ plan to carve Mount Athos in the image of Alexander the Great

* Also called Stasikrates or Diokles

Another version:

Fischer von Erlach (1656-1723) Historic Architecture Book 1

• The physical locaon of myth in the late Baroque geographical imaginaon • Athos’s imaginary seng on the border between two (imaginary) worlds: Greek anquity and the Orient Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes Mount Athos Carved as a Monument to Alexander the Great, ca. 1796 (Art Instute of Chicago)

• A purely fantasc mountain painted as a pastoral Arcadian landscape of the western imaginaon Which of the Seven Wonders would be easiest for an arst to visualize? The Great Pyramid?

Marn van Heemskirck, Pyramids of Egypt Later 16th century

Another 16th-century imagining of the Pyramids of Egypt The only place European arsts could see a pyramid was in Rome. Cesus’s mausoleum did not have the right proporons, so this is why in the Middle Ages and Renaissance visualizaons of ancient Egypt have too pointed monuments (some almost like obelisks)

Pyramid of Cesus (18-12 BC), Rome Joseph in Egypt 100 Roman feet (30 m) high Mosaic, San Marco cathedral, Venice Heemskirck Self-portrait at the Colosseum, 1553 Heemskirck, The Pantheon in Rome

Maarten van Heemskirck (1498-1574) was on the Grand Tour 1532-1536 in Northern and Central Italy, and especially in Rome He later made a cycle of engravings of all Seven Wonders; printers later found it profitable to reproduce them

Heemskirck’s Seven Wonder cycle of engravings (some of them hand-colored in later reprinngs)

Which of the Seven Wonders would have been hardest for an arst of Heemskirck’s era to visualize? Great Pyramid — sll in existence, but inaccessible to western arsts

Hanging Gardens at Babylon — gone by 1st century BC, Babylon inaccessible

Artemision — destroyed 3rd century AD, buried, inaccessible

Zeus statue, Olympia — site buried by 5th-6th century AD, statue destroyed by fire at Constannople

Mausoleum — picked apart for building materials 15th century, inaccessible

Colossos of Rhodes — collapsed 226 BC, materials carted away in late anquity, inaccessible

Pharos of Alexandria — collapsed into the sea by 14th-15th century, inaccessible

• Since all of these wonder-monuments were totally destroyed, or buried, or at places to which travel by westerners was not possible, arsts had to rely on ancient descripons alone.

• Texts of Greek and Lan authors became increasingly available with the Renaissance and their wide disseminaon with the invenon of prinng in the 15th century

• Aempts to re-create individual Wonders as images begin shortly thereaer