Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe
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Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe Fine Art as a Force for Innovation in Greek Lifting Technologies Introduction “Hundreds of small new technologies and technological refinements occurred in the 800 years of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman periods, but overall the technological bases of production did not change fundamentally during the period.” McClellan and Dorn Science and Technology in World History 2nd Ed., p88. “In art, [it is easy] to amass a glittering array of lasting classical discoveries” Stewart Classical Greece and the Birth of Western Art 1 Ed., p7. These quotes, taken from standard textbooks on the history of technology and art, illustrate a divide in the treatment of innovation in classical Greece. While these are oversimplified assessments of the scholarship in these subjects, they nonetheless capture the presiding view of Greece’s role in world history from two disparate perspectives. To the technologist, Greece was a place of dull cunning, whereas in art, it was a place of constant creative revolution. In this paper, I seek an avenue toward mending this discrepancy in the historiography of ancient Greece by examining the intersection of Greek art and technology in one device: the crane. Previous scholarship by Smith and others suggests that artistic innovation can lead to improvements in utilitarian techniques as well.1 If this holds true in ancient Greece, then we can begin to question how and why Greek improvements in the fine arts had a more lasting impact on the western world. This study focuses on the invention of the crane in the Archaic period, which provides a convenient place to explore art and technology intersections due to its general applicability and the relatively large amount of physical and textual evidence. Archaeological remains suggest that the crane was invented as a way to more efficiently construct monumental architecture, particularly temples. 1 Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure (Mit Pr, 1981). Smith’s work primarily focuses on metalworking technologies, but the theories he developed can equally well be applied to other systems, although little work has been done in this area. 1 Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe These temples played a key role in Greek society as unifiers of secular and religious realms, which drove the creation of temples at a scale entirely unlike previous construction projects. Since this boom period for temple building in the archaic and classical era coincided with the appearance of cranes, it seems likely that the crane was invented to enable these grandiose visions. After being developed for monumental architecture, cranes found wide use throughout Greek society. In that way, the drive to build on a grand scale drove technical innovations that aided society in general. This path from art to technology, as Smith argues, is often overlooked in the modern world, to the detriment of technical progress. A deeper appreciation for the technological influence of art may provide new avenues for creative innovation, even for practical problems. Differentiating Art and Technology in the Ancient World Before discussing the historical record for lifting technologies, it is important to develop a litmus for differentiating art and technology in the ancient world. To modern readers, it may be surprising that art and technology should be at all difficult to separate—one brings connotations of creativity, beauty, and class, and the other industry, war, and rigor. Ancient Greeks, however, had no such distinction. Instead, the much broader concept of techne encompassed modern notions of both art and technology, along with other ideas like craft, method and skill. Although it is essentially untranslatable, techne is perhaps nearest in sense to its English derivative “technique,” a larger idea than technology. Rhetoric, sculpting, painting, metalworking, medicine, cooking, farming, and many other skills all fell within this blanket term2. In the word techne, we see art and technology living so close together in the ancient Greek mind that we must be careful in how we separate the two in hindsight.3 Our modern western categories – art, technology, science, craft, and others – have grown from this all-encompassing 2 See, for example, the use of techne in Thucydides, The Pelopennesian War, 1.71.3. 3 Chapter 1 of S.Cuomo, Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007) gives a good broad analysis of the concept of techne in the ancient world. 2 Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe whole over the past two millennia4. From the medieval split of liberal and mechanical arts5, to the invention of high art as a distinct category in the 18th century6 and the redefinition of technology from an obscure study of practical arts7 to a major facet of modern life, techne has slowly been dissected into finer categories. Despite this greater specificity, art can still take on many meanings – including creativity, craft or skill. To prevent confusion, when discussing art alone, I am referring to the modern usage more specifically known as fine art. This includes subjects like painting, sculpture, and architecture, where the aesthetic values take precedence over practical ones. This modern category of fine art can be traced back to d’Alembert’s Enlightenment manifesto, the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, where fine arts are placed with the poetic arts, defined with “pleasure for their principal object.” 8 This definition, despite its age, cuts to the center of our modern definition of fine art. However, since Greek art often served a primarily cultural role, fitting into a tapestry of social values and traditions, applying modern definitions that emphasize aesthetics may be anachronistic. Even the famous Venus de Milo seems to have served an educational purpose in the gymnasium of Melos9. Shirer argues that, in these roles, modern aesthetic sensibilities would be almost wholly absent from the value of an object. 10 However, it is important not to take this argument too far. If the value of artistic objects in ancient Greece was completely independent of the aesthetic pleasure it induced, we would 4 See Eric Schatzberg, “From Art to Applied Science,” Isis 103, no. 3 (September 2012): 555–63 for a broad and valuable history of this speciation. 5 Elspeth Whitney, “Paradise Restored. The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity through the Thirteenth Century,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 80, no. 1 (January 1, 1990): 1–169, doi:10.2307/1006521. 6 This point is strongly argued in Larry Shirer, The Invention of Art (University of Chicago press, 2001). 7 See, for example George Crabb, Universal Technological Dictionary (London: Printed for Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, by CBaldwin, 1823), where ‘technological’ is meant as the study of technical fields. 8 Jean Le Rond d’ Alembert, “Preliminary Discourse,” trans. Richard N Schwab and Walter Rex, Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert - Collaborative Translation Project, May 15, 2009, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0001.083. 9 Rachel Kousser, “The Venus de Milo and the Hellenistic Reception of Classical Greece.pdf,” American Journal of Archaeology 109, no. 2 (April 2005): 227–50. 10 Shirer, The Invention of Art. 3 Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe not see the continuous progress in techniques that enabled more pleasing forms. The invention of red figure pottery or large scale casting processes required resources and experimentation that would have been pointless if aesthetics did not enter into the value somewhere. Nevertheless, we should relax our definition of fine art to account for the fact that pleasure may have been a secondary quality for many of the artefacts we will study. Fine art, then, should be relaxed to have pleasure as just one of the principle objectives. Technology, since it is such a modern concept, is in many ways easier to describe. I will take Bain’s 1937 sociological definition: “technology includes all tools, machines, utensils, weapons, instruments, housing, clothing, communicating and transporting devices and the skills by which we produce and use them.”11 The breadth of this view is necessary in order to apply this modern concept to the classical world. The tools of technology can be derived and applied in a variety of contexts, from the fine arts (sculpting) to the pragmatic tasks of daily life (carrying water). The Utility of Monumental Construction in the Archaic and Classical Eras The cultural system of monumental architecture created a strong incentive for the creation of awe inspiring architectures at a vast scale, which provided the impetus for the crane and other technologies. Greek temples of the Archaic and Classical eras were honorable outlets for the wealth that cities and individuals might gain through trade or war. Whereas early (before the 8th century) temples were simple wood and clay structures similar to common houses, they quickly blossomed with the economic and martial growth of Greece in the Archaic period12. This is likely because temples allowed a way for Greek city states and individuals to display megalopsychia, or magnanimity, a term that 11 Read Bain, “Technology and State Government,” American Sociological Review 2, no. 6 (December 1, 1937): 860–74, doi:10.2307/2084365. 12 Tomlinson R. A, Greek Sanctuaries (Book Club, 1976). 4 Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe frequently appears on dedicatory inscriptions.13 Aristotle defines this word in part by the grandness of the dedications a person makes, “The man who in small or middling things spends according to the merits of the case is not called magnificent (e.g. the man who can say 'many a gift I gave the wanderer'), but only the man who does so in great things.”14 This type of virtue, unlike the virtue of liberality described earlier in the Nichomacean Ethics, is fundamentally not egalitarian: it requires significant capital, applied properly.