The Parthenon, Part I: from Its Multiple Beginnings to 432 BCE"
1 THE FORTNIGHTLY CLUB Of REDLANDS, CALIFORNIA Founded 24 January 1895 Meeting Number 1856 March 13, 2014 "The Parthenon, Part I: From its Multiple Beginnings to 432 BCE" Bill McDonald Assembly Room, A. K. Smiley Public Library 2 [1] (Numbers in red catalog the slides) Fortnightly Talk #6 From Herekleides of Crete, in the 3rd century BCE: “The most beautiful things in the world are there [in Athens}… The sumptuous temple of Athena stands out, and is well worth a look. It is called the Parthenon and it is on the hill above the theatre. It makes a tremendous impression on visitors.” Reporter: Did you visit the Parthenon during your trip to Greece?” Shaq: “I can’t really remember the names of the clubs we went to.” Architects, aesthetes, grand tour-takers from England, France and Germany all came to Rome in the 3rd quarter of the 18th century, where they developed on uneven evidence a newly austere view of the classical world that in turn produced the Greek revival across northern Europe and in America. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717 – 1768) [2], a self-made scholar of ancient Greek language and texts, was their unofficial high priest. In 1755 Winckelmann arrived for the first time in Rome, where thanks not only to his brilliant publications but also to a recent and, shall we say, a timely conversion to Catholicism, he was admitted by papal authorities to the Vatican galleries and storerooms (his friend Goethe said that Winckelmann was really “a pagan”). His contemporaries in Rome saw Greek civilization as a primitive source for Roman art, and had never troubled to isolate Greek art from its successor; Winckelmann reversed that, making Greek art and 3 architecture, especially sculpture—and especially of the young male form that he especially admired—not only distinctive in its own right but the font of the greatest Western art.
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