Greek Art

El trabajo aborda las imágenes de las mujeres en el ámbito privado, con el propósito de establecer los modos en que se construyen sus
cuerpos, gestualidades y movimientos, observando que la
anatomía femenina, salvo excepciones como algunos juegos, tiende a la quietud y al estatismo, con gestos acotados, como ocurre con las escenas de observación frente al espejo.
También toma en consideración la manera en que se adorna
y cubre el cuerpo femenino, así como el embellecimiento
con la utilización de joyas y maquillaje, elementos que tuvieron un desarrollo destacable en la Grecia clásica.

Борисюк-Дудкіна А.С., Шевченко Т.М. // Археологія та давня історія України. Вип.1 (18). К., 2016 – С. 145—149
Published is a Classical period protome kept in the Scientific Funds of the IA NASU from the excavations at Olbia in 1956 headed by L.M. Slavin. Presented are the description of and a basis for the restoration and conservation process conducted according to the modern requirements. After the cleaning and restoration, it became possible to discern the details not noticed before, which allowed to consider the attribution and dating of the protome anew. It appeared that the goddess is represented with a naked breast and a headdress and earrings are decorated with rosettes. Consequently, its relation with an Aphrodite image appears to be more convincing than with Kore-Persephone, as it was considered before. As for the dating, it should be reviewed not only because of the context of the finding, but also because of the peculiarities of fingers and hair depiction. Efficiently made fingers of this protome differ from the hands presented profiled during the 5th century BC. The hair depiction is common for Attic depiction of the first half of the 4th century BC, although it does not mean that the terracotta was produced in Attica, the clay composition evidence for its Chersonesan origin. The context of a find allows narrowing the dating to the first quarter of the 4th century BC. Protome is one of a few archaeologically intact Olbian terracottas and reminds of a chthonic aspect of Aphrodite cult.

In this essay, I discuss an essential turning point in the thought of Greek and Chinese culture applied to arts. This breakthrough, starting from the philosophy, it spanned the art fields in particular, where it had (and still has) its best representation through some inspired artists. I will take four symbolic art pieces to better show the new tendency the artists focused on and then I will analyze the specific principle which guided them.

One image dominates our contemporary world above all others: the human body. How Art Made the World travels from the modern world of advertising to the temples of classical Greece and the tombs of ancient Egypt to solve the mystery of why humans surround themselves with images of the body that are so unrealistic.

The main theme of this episode is how people rarely created images of the body that are realistic. By understanding this we  also understand something about our bodies, and human nature in general.

The Venus of Willendorf, in the Natural History Museum in Vienna, is a small Venus figure with exaggerated breasts, hips and sexual organs. These exaggerations are symbolic of fertility,  what is significant is that the artist ignored other parts of the body, such as her face and arms. Similar Venus figures with similar exaggerations and omissions have been found all over Europe and Russia. Professor Ramachandran explains why features were exaggerated. By making comparisons to research with Herring Gulls showing how their chicks, which are stimulated by the red stripe on their parents beaks, can be over stimulated by simulating a beak with additional stripes. He suggests that the same neurological process stimulated early man, explaining why they exaggerated these features of fertility over others.

Moving forward several thousand years. The Egyptians, who valued consistency and order in their society, abandoned the exaggerations of their ancestors and chose to use a mathematical approach to creating images of the body. They chose to show each part of the body from it’s clearest angle, developing their recognisable style and then preserving this style for thousands of years. When the Ancient Greek’s culture came into contact with the Egyptians, this ignited an artistic revolution across the Greek city states. The Greek culture wanted a more realistic representation of the figure for their temples, and as with the Kritios Boy, they measured and reproduced the body to exact dimensions in their sculptures. A generation later, however, the Greeks abandoned this ultra realism preferring exaggerated representations of the body based on the aestetic theories created by Polykleitos, such as the Riace Bronzes. Prof Ramachandran explains that art needs this exaggeration to be interesting.

The programme concludes with what we choose to exaggerate, saying this  “is where the magic comes in”. The choice of what to exaggerate has changed over the centuries to match changing human values.

The frescoes painted by Theofilos for the Zalkos' Mansion at Lesvos, now at the Museum of Modern Greek Culture (former Museum of Greek Folk Art). Paper announced at the International Congress for the life an work of the popular painter lead by the University of Thessaly and the  Iolkos Municipality, on 2008.

The global social and economic processes that took place in the 1990, known as globalisation, exerted a decisive impact on the mechanisms of art production and circulation. The concept of nationality is redefined and contemporary art, now on an international level, continues to draw inspiration from national cultural symbols. The political version of neo-avant-garde in the1960s and 1970s was the last significant period of Parisian contribution to Greek art modernization, appearing to complete its course around 1980. Until the last decade of the 20th century, though, many young Greek artists still visit Paris, as it transpires from the French National Archives. We shall research the causes of this artistic practice, the origins of their artistic background and their relation with the previous generations that created a European consciousness and artwork defining a critical attitude and perception of the world as well as mobility of space and meaning. As far as the presence of Greek artists in Paris is concerned, the decade of 1990 finds representatives of all ages and artistic currents coexisting and creating together. Their artistic activity is evident through their participation in major artistic events, while their publicization is depicted in the Greek and Parisian magazine press of the time.

This paper explores the elements of Greek Influences in Gandhara Art, which existed in ancient NorthWestern India. Gandhara Art was a result of the cultural interruptions made by the conquests of Greeks. The aim of this paper is to identify the elements of Greek Influence on Gandhara Art. The presence of Greek elements of art, motifs and influence of Greek mythical stories are shown through reliefs which were excavated at Gandhara region. This paper will analyze such reliefs to show the cultural flow of artistic elements from the West to the East as a result of political conquests.

This study traces the development of Roman architecture and its sculpture from the earliest days to the middle of the 5th century BCE. Existing narratives cast Greeks as the progenitors of classical art and architecture or rely on historical sources dating centuries after the fact to establish the Roman context. Hopkins allows the material and visual record to play the primary role in telling the story of Rome’s roots, synthesizing important new evidence from recent excavations. From the late 7th century, Romans looked to increasingly distant lands for shifts in artistic production. By the end of the archaic period they were building temples that would outstrip the monumentality of even those on the Greek mainland. The book’s extensive illustrations feature new reconstructions, allowing readers a rare visual exploration of this fragmentary evidence.  This is an excerpt.

Greek artists and architects were important social agents who played significant roles in the social, cultural, and economic life of the ancient Greek world. In Artists and Artistic Production in Ancient Greece, art historians, archaeologists, and historians explore the roles and impacts of artists and craftsmen in ancient Greek society. The contributing authors draw upon artistic, architectural, literary, epigraphical, and historical evidence to discuss a range of artists, architects, artistic media, and regions. They refer to historiography and modern theory, taking stock of the past while offering some new directions for future research. Incorporating a variety of methodological approaches and making use of often-neglected evidence, Artists and Artistic Production in Ancient Greece re-examines many long-held ideas and provides a deeper understanding of particular artists and architects, their works, and their social agency.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Introduction: Greek artists, yesterday and today/Kristen Seaman
2. The social and educational background of elite Greek artists/Kristen Seaman
3. Portrait of an artist: Euthymides, son of Pollias/Jenifer Neils
4. Kritios and Nesiotes: two revolutionaries in context/Andrew Stewart
5. Craft identity: mosaics in the Hellenistic East/S. Rebecca Martin
6. Artistic choice and constraint on coins/Isabelle A. Pafford
7. Constructing architects: the so-called 'Theseum architect'/Margaret M. Miles
8. Euphranor/Olga Palagia
9. Politics and personality?: the case of Kephisodotos the Younger/Peter Schultz
10. Artists' signatures on archaic Greek vases from Athens/Sarah Bolmarcich and Georgina Muskett
11. Response: reflections on identity, personality, and originality/Jeffrey M. Hurwit

Greek scholars have produced a vast body of evidence bearing on nuptial practices that has yet to be mined by a professional economist. By standing on their shoulders, the author proposes and tests radically new interpretations of three important status groups in Greek history: the pallakē, the hetaira, and the nothos. It is argued that legitimate marriage—that is, “marriage by loan of the bride to the groom”—was not the only form of legal marriage in classical Athens and the ancient Greek world generally. Pallakia—that is, “marriage by sale of the bride to the groom”— also was legally recognized. The pallakē-wifeship transaction is a sale into slavery with a restrictive covenant mandating the employment of the sold woman as a wife. The book proposes and tests the hypothesis that the likelihood of bride sale rises with increases in the distance between the ancestral residence of the groom and the father’s household. The “bastard” (nothoi) children of pallakai lacked the legal right to inherit from their fathers but were routinely eligible for Athenian citizenship.. It is argued that the basic social meaning of hetaira (“companion”) is not “prostitute”/”courtesan” but “single woman”—that is, woman legally recognized as being under her own authority (kuria). The defensive adaptation of single women is reflected in Greek myth and social practice by their grouping into packs, most famously the Daniads and Amazons.

From the start of the archaic period to the middle of the Hellenistic era, female nudity in Greek art is visible only in its absence. It did emerge, but only scarcely, often for specific reasons and within specific circumstances. The notion of the archaic Kouroi and Korai  provides a basis to which we can compare the evolution of the representation of female body and dress. These figures provide a chance to compare the model of male and female nudity, while taking into consideration different Greek concepts of heroic nudity and the difference between the Greek views regarding nudity and those of the rest of the Mediterranean world. By examining the concept of nudity in both males and females, focusing on the social convictions and principals regarding the differences between male and female roles in ancient Greece and these genders’ dissimilar status in society, a fundamental model of female morality and role can be established. As such, it can be concluded that through different periods of Greek history, female and male representation in art was solely based on their societal roles and moral principles within various time frames but that female nude representation remained more restrictive than those of males.

The art and iconography of the Minoan civilisation of Bronze Age Crete is rightly described as having a refreshing vitality with a fortunate combination of stylisation and spontaneity in which the artist is able to transform conventional imagery into a personal expression. The dynamism, torsion and naturalism evident in Minoan art stands in stark contrast to the hieratic rigidity of other ancient civilisations, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the iconography of the Minoan Epiphany, a set of mainly glyptic (rings, seals, and seal impression) images which appear to depict religious celebrants experiencing direct and seemingly ecstatic encounters with deities.

This collection of essays explores this central aspect of Minoan religion, taking a strongly archaeological focus to allow the artefacts to speak for themselves, and moving from traditional ‘representational’ interpretations into ‘embodied’ perspectives in which the ecstatic capabilities of the human body throw new light on Aegean Bronze Age ritual practices. Such ideas challenge rather passive assumptions modern Western observers hold about the nature of religious feelings and experiences, in particular the depictions of altered states of consciousness in ancient art, and the visionary potential of dance gestures.

Speculative asides on the potential for a Minoan origin for Classical Greek humanism, and hints in the imagery on ancient Cretan conceptions of the cosmos, are set against sound archaeological theories to explain this lively and dynamic corpus of images. Beautifully illustrated with images and sketches of the relevant artefacts, this wide-ranging volume will stimulate audiences with archaeological, prehistorical and spiritual interests, as well as historians of religion and art. ‘The Minoan Epiphany’ also represents an influential antecedent to the Visionary Humanist philosophy which forms the majority of Bruce’s current independent research interests.

The successful exibition "Zȕruck zur Klassik" at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt (2013) confirmed the great attirance of the classical art. Since 1973 the two Greek bronze statues from an ancient wreck at Riace (Calabria, Italy) provoked great admiration; but today the increase of interest by public opinion and common curiosity triggered a dangerous marketing. On the contrary main debates should be focused on five important open questions: the identity and the iconography of the two statues, the chronology and the workshops, the original location (Greece?).

L'autore studia in profondità il gruppo marmoreo dei Dioscuri del Quirinale, ritracciando dapprima e in maniera critica la lunga storia della loro realizzazione all'epoca di Settimio Se-vero e seguendone i restauri e adattamenti in età tardo antica, medievale e rinascimentale. Concepiti come allegoria di fratellanza dei futuri prìncipi Caracalla e Geta, stavano inizial-mente sulla rampa d'accesso al monumentale tempio di Eracle e Dioniso, per poi essere trasfe-riti sul Quirinale nel Ninfeo adiacente alle Terme di Costantino. L'autore privilegia nella sua indagine il valore storico-artistico del gruppo marmoreo, risalendo fino all'archetipo bronzeo che le iscrizioni e la ricostruzione storica riferiscono a grandi maestri del classico, Fidia (per il Polluce) e Prassitele I (per il Castore). Quei loro colossi, grazie all'acuta interpretazione di un passo di Plinio, sarebbero stati portati a Roma in Campo Marzio da Fare in Acaia per ini-ziativa del console Emilio Paolo, vincitore della Macedonia nel 168 a.C., il quale presentò a Roma il successo sotto il segno divino dei Dioscuri. Poco dopo il 100 a.C. il gruppo originale in bronzo fu trasferito sulle grandi basi ai fianchi della scalinata del nuovo tempio della For-tuna Odierna. Decisivo è il collegamento formale del prototipo dei Dioscuri sia al precedente dei Tirannicidi sull' Agorà di Atene, sia alla scultura decorativa del Partenone, con la tenace persistenza del modello per innumerevoli immagini eroiche e divine dalla classicità alla ma-niera nella generazione dei diadochi e all'ellenismo, fino alle copie di età romana.

More than 20 years after presenting his first interpretation of the mosaic from the House of Aion in a paper entitled “Uwagi na temat mozaiki z Domu Aiona w Nea Paphos (Cypr)” (Meander 9/10, 1987, p. 421-438, in Polish, and translated to English: « The Immortality of the Human Soul and the Dionysiac Mysteries in the 4th Century Allegory [in Connection with the Interpretation of the Mosaic from the “House of Aion” at Paphos in Cyprus]»), where he proposed reading the five mythological panels (1. Leda and Zeus; 2. Dionysus on Mount Nysa; 3. The Dionysian thiasos; 4. Apollo and Marsyas; 5. The Apotheosis of Cassiopeia) as an allegory of the destiny of the human soul and body, starting with conception and ending with the liberation of the soul and its apotheosis, the author now enhances his initial interpretation with numerous reflections concerning the historical context of this work of art, created in the years 320-360.
If, according to the author, the mosaic is a “Hymn” in honour of the pagan gods, Man (his soul) and his place in the (pagan) universe, then at the same time it polemicises with the Christian faith and its God, Jesus Christ.
The author puts forward numerous new solutions relating to the mosaic’s iconography and iconology. Analysis of the mosaic also leads him to propose a solution to the as-yet unanswered question regarding the absence of images of the crucified Christ in Christian art of the 3rd and 4th centuries, up until 420/430, when the first images of Christ on the cross appear.
CONTENTS:
Introduction
1. Research to-date (recap)
2. Description of mosaic (recap)
2.1. Composition of five mythological scenes
2.2. Brief iconographic description of mythological panels
2.3. Outline of individual iconographic elements and their respective roles
2.4. The pagan gods’ air of majesty and dignity as an expression of piety
3. A few words about the pagan reaction
4. An apology of pious human life according to pagan principles and a polemic on the Christian model of Man and his theological idol, Jesus Christ
4.1. Divine intervention in the act of human conception (allusion to/polemic on the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary)
4.2. The Epiphany of Dionysus (an allusion to the Epiphany of Christ – Theou Pais)
4.3. The procession and dissemination of Dionysian order (allusion to/polemic on Christ’s entry into Jerusalem)
4.4. The error of Marsyas (polemic on/allusion to the error of Jesus the Messiah): arrest, sentencing for arrogance and lack of piety (asebeia) and condemnation to a martyr’s death
4.5. The anabasis (or anagoge psyches) of a ‘beautiful soul’ (allusion to/polemic on the Ascension of Christ)
5. A few words on the mosaic programme prior to final conclusions
Final conclusions
Key words: mythological mosaic, House of Aion, Nea Paphos, Late Antiquity, Roman art, allegorical narrative, allusive language of mythological pictures, wordplay (Marsyas-Messias), Jesus Christ, anti-Christian polemic, Dionysos, Cassiopeia, Apollon, Nereides, Abstract Personifications, Greek Mythology, ΚΥΠΡΟΣ

Tramite un intreccio di paralleli e riferimenti letterari roteanti attorno all'opera bronzea del Polidamante di Lisippo il presente contributo analizza configurazione, cronologia e attribuzione del famoso pancraziaste. L'opera, conosciuta anche quale Pugile delle terme e conservata al Museo Nazionale Romano raffigura appunto Polidamante di Scotussa, atleta effigiato da Lisippo per committenza di Daoco II – lo stesso contesto è ricostruibile per l' Agia di Farsalo, come già precedentemente sostenuto dall'autore (si veda NAC 43, 2014). Esposto in origine a Olimpia, dove si trova ancora la sua «base alta» scolpita nel-l'eternità dalla descrizione di Pausania, per l'atleta difetta la documentazione storica per descriverne il passaggio da Olimpia a Roma. Non solo le questioni di prestigio legate al-la realizzazione dell'opera e alla sua presenza in Italia ma un'esauriente analisi struttu-rale del bronzo e della potenza narrativa dei suoi dettagli veristici rappresentano il fulcro della discussione. L'attribuzione del Polidamante, discussa nella compagine di fonti scrit-te e raffronti sia scultorei che numismatici, è sostenuta infine dalla esposizione di una se-rie di produzioni del Sicionio, arrivando fino a considerare dei derivati moderni del-l'opera dell'artista. Un contributo dedicato dunque al vasto operato di Lisippo, che come Plinio (24,65) suggeriva «sembra propria di lui l'acutezza espressiva affidata anche ai minimi dettagli».

Technologies of replication have long played a strong hand in removing color from
images and in selecting form over material color. This excision of color contributed
to the technical and intellectual disembodiment of the Western artistic and philosophical
traditions, which came to elevate the mind as something separate from and
superior to the body. Color has been a player in this splitting; explanations for color
as phenomenon tend to cleave rather than bring together mind and body. In this
essay, I turn to the material presence, or materiality, of color in the ancient Mediterranean
world of the sixth-fourth centuries BCE, a status that, I argue, brings mind
and body into unified being.