This week we pivot from the two thousand years of Egyptian history that we examined last week to the relatively condensed period of Mediterranean history known as the Greek Archaic and Classical Period, cusping on the Hellenistic period—that is, the period from the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE) to the battle of Actium (31 BCE). These dates demarcating the Hellenistic period are marked on both ends by conquest and battle—Alexander’s death and Augustus’s naval victory—and it can be easy to pivot quickly from the social history of last week to the gods and warriors visual imagery and rhetoric of Greek art. Similarly, new ideas like frontally, naturalism, verism, beauty—these become important words for our discussion this week. Nevertheless, we can bring the same questions from last week forward: what do these works reveal about the culture in which they were made, used, performed for, and lived alongside? What remains and what changes as we make our first shift not only in time, but place? How are comparisons drawn, and what distinctions appear? This week we will examine two features of Greek art: the single, named artist and the idea of ‘naturalism’, a profoundly loaded term extending from last week through until the end of this course. Today we might consider the named, identifiable artist as a given, yet the relationship between artist, artisan, and a marketplace of producer of images and consumer of images, will prove to far more complex than we might assume it today.

Key-works:

1) The “New York Kouros,” limestone statue from Athens, Greece, ca. 600 BCE (Archaic Period)

2) Exekias, Achilles and Ajax playing dice, Athenian black-figure amphora, ca. 540 BCE (Archaic Period)

3) Euthymides,Three Revelers, Athenian red-figure amphora, ca. 510 BCE (Archaic Period)

4) Polykleitos, Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer), ca. 450-440 BCE (Classical Period) [Roman marble copy of a High Classical Period bronze sculpture now lost. Note: date is tied to original, not Roman Copy]

5) Iktinos and Kallikrate, Architects; Phidias, head sculptor.The Parthenon (temple of Athena Parthenos), Athens, 447-438 BCE (High Classical Period)

6) Praxiteles, Aphrodite of Knidos, ca. 350 BCE [Roman marble copy of a Late Classical Period bronze sculpture now lost. Note: date is tied to original, not Roman Copy]

7) Nike of Samothrace, Marble sculpture of the goddess of Victory, ca. 190 BCE (Hellenistic Period)

Keywords:

Naturalism (naturalistic art):

Relief sculpture (relief sculpture vs. sculpture ‘in the round’):

Contrapposto: In the visual arts, the arrangement of a figure so that the action of arms and shoulders contrasts as strongly as possible with that of hips and legs; a twisting of the figure on its own axis. (OED)

Black-figure vs. red-figure pottery:

Foreshortening: Of the effect of visual perspective: To cause (an object) to be apparently shortened in the directions not lying in a plane perpendicular to the line of sight. Of a draughtsman: To delineate (an object) so as to represent this apparent shortening. (OED)

Slides