ART HISTORY I Ancient Greece Part 1

Hello again. And we are in one of the most exciting weeks of this course. We are in the second week and we are really coming to Greece. The glory that was Greece. And basically Greece, Greek art, is the ancestor of Western civilization. The ancestor. I mean, this is the origin. Yes, we have Egyptians right before the Greeks. And columns and other things were given by the Egyptians that the Greeks took over. But Greece is the ancestor. Okay? And things were similar today to things from Greece, like the architecture of the temples. But let me tell you something. Don't get fooled. Many things are different in many respects. There are many mysteries about Greece that we kind of got the look, but we don't really know what was in the heart. So, you know, the one thing that we are still, that continues, is this inspiration, this sort of profound study that the Greeks started of the human, of the humanistic tradition. And also, like all civilizations from antiquity, there are religious traditions that always bring to the study of the human psyche, of the human self. Now, what are similarities today with ancient Greek civilization? Well, for one thing, government buildings, some of them look like Greek temples. They have that look. Alright? You can see banks that look like temples. Even college campuses, the fraternities, you know, all these things go back to the architecture that started in Greece such a long time ago. Sculpture, nude sculptures in the West, right? Strong men, you know, plump, beautiful women, you know, also strong women. All those things, the style is still around today. Also, philosophical questions and models that started with the Greeks, right? Philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, you know, that kind of inquiry to think about things, just to think about them, comes from them. And of course, you have political systems. Democracy, it's very different today, but it's based on Greek political thought. Now, there is a big dualism. This is a dualist culture. It is based on two poles, order, the Greeks, and chaos, the barbarians. In that way, it's very much like China. China is the middle kingdom, China is the central culture, and everybody that's out there in the steppes is a barbarian. So, again, the Greeks have this dualistic thing of order and chaos. And the Greeks also have this champion of gods with human forms that we started to talk about. You know, Apollo is the god of the sun, Dionysus is the god of wine, the king god, you know, that kind of stuff. So, again, we start with the Greeks, and it's a club. There's us, civilized Greeks, and there's them, the barbarians, okay? Now, we have three sources of information about Greek art, you know, from back in the day. Number one, we have Greek original sculptures. We have some Greek originals, not as many as we would like, but we do have some of them. However, a lot of people confuse Greek originals, and they think they're originals from their Roman copies. So, for studying Greeks, we have the Greek originals and sometimes Roman copies. But the question is, how close is the copy? We don't have the original. It's not a mechanical photocopy. It's not a mechanically built, perfect replica. How do we know if the artist didn't add a little bit or take away a little bit? How the artist didn't change it, the Roman artist? So, we have to be careful with the Roman copies, okay? So, sometimes it's confusing. The other thing we have to study Greek culture, civilization, not just its literature. The Greeks wrote a lot, so they have descriptions and treatises about arts. So, the Greeks already have art history. They write about the art they produced, okay? Now, let's look at the periodization, the sort of benchmarks of Greek art. And they're very interesting and very exciting. Number one, we have geometric style, okay? And here's a geometric style vase, you know, from that time. Look at the figures, you know, very geometric. Maybe they come from the hieroglyphs in Egypt. That's what Egypt is behind, you know, behind Greece in the very midst of origin. So, we have this geometric style. And basically, then we go on to orientalizing, influences from the Near East, okay? So, the big civilizations that we studied last week, Near East and Egypt, they both influence Greek art. So, we have an orientalizing influence also. And that's very, very important. And in the orientalizing, we get more people. We get more people. And during the orientalizing influence, we also have all these great, what you would call it, vases. Forms of vases start appearing. There's like a whole range of shapes that appear at this time. Also, during the orientalizing era, 735 to 615 before Christ, you also have the evolution of the Greek polis. When we talk about policy, when we talk about metropolis, the polis is the city. So, we have like a little bit of political thinking emerging in this period, okay? Here we have some shapes, some characters. Here we have some, you know, political ideas. Monarchy, the monarchy of a sole ruler. Christati, the ruling of the best. Tyrannos, the word tyrannos, tyrant, the king. Okay, oligarchy, okay, the rule of the elite. Democracy, Athens was a democracy. You know, so all this political stuff, all this political thought starts emerging at this time. So, first stage, second stage. Now we get to this incredible stage. It's called the Archaic. The Archaic style. Archaic means old, okay? And look at this Archaic style. Look at these sculptures of young men. It looks like Egypt, right? It looks like some of the far-out sculptures, but now they're getting shapelier, a little bit more muscle definition. And you have step. And you also have a hole between the limbs and the torso. It's not stuck here. There is a little, you know, there is a little something, so it's not so massive. It's more volumetric in the part of the sculpture. So, here look at this standing youth. And compare Egyptian sculpture with Greek Archaic sculpture. Of course, thousands of years have gone by. And look how the influence. Also, with Greek sculptures, you always get a nice generous butt with the guys. They got great butts, you know. Look at this thing. You know, and they have, so they have that of Egypt. And remember when we were talking in the Middle East about the eyes, the big eyes in the Middle Eastern sculpture. Well, look at this big eyes. Look at the big eyes of this cop bearer, okay? From 517 before Christ, you know. What is this? These big eyes of this cop bearer. They come from the Middle East, okay? It's like, I'm here, I'm alive. And you also get a little bit of the views, okay? From the Middle East. All this is happening. And you know, this Archaic style, this Archaic style is perhaps most exciting when we consider temples. I have a theory. I could be wrong. We have some Greeks going to travel into Egypt. Everybody has columns. But the Greeks have their columns made out of wood. They go to Egypt and they say, look at that. Okay, those are made of stone. That's perhaps how things go back and forth. And the Greeks start making stone column temples, okay? So the Greek temple is really one of the most fundamental sort of architectures that we have from antiquity. And the temples come in three. And these temples start appearing in the Archaic era. Now, these temples come in three styles, okay? We have them in Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, it's in your notes. And what makes this style change? The columns. If the columns have this, if the columns have that, that's what makes the temples change. Now, look at, again, this very, very Archaic sculpture. And you have a little bit of naturalism. It's going from the Egyptian into more naturalistic. And you have Khoros for a man and Khore for a woman. The men are always naked. The women are always clothed, okay, in this Archaic sculpture. But look how beautiful, look at the shape. And look at that mysterious Archaic line, okay? I'll show you a couple of things. Now, a lot of people, you know, we always think like, oh, in marble. They were painted. They were colorful. The color disappears because they're so old. But they were all painted. And always left leg forward, like they're springing forward, like they're going to walk. I'll let you just study the temples on your own. But, again, here are pediments. Pediments are like that shape at the front of the temple. And these pediments, they put sculptures, okay? And these sculptures are the narratives of God's fight of scenes. So this is the beginning. The beginning. And little by little, they get more sophisticated. They get more and more naturalistic. The sculptures get better until we arrive at the great explosion that was the Classic. And what is the Classic Age? The Classic Age has influenced us today. We use that word all the time. Oh, that's classic. Oh, how classic. Oh, what classic, you know. And what's a classic? It's the 5th century, you know, off before Christ. So pretty much 500 to 400. But there's a couple of interesting, you know, of interesting things that happened. The Greeks have a great victory, okay, over the Persians. The Greeks had lost to the Persians and now they beat the Persians. So this leaves them feeling great. The city of Athens, it's like New York or Beijing or Mexico or Havana, you know. It's like really, really a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of art, a lot of well-being. And you have this remarkable explosion of art. And basically everything that was there in the Archaic now becomes more pronounced and better achieved in the Classic. The kodos, the kore, the temples, the pediments, all these things sort of gain a tremendous sophistication. But simplicity, insimplicity, you have visual harmony, you have proportions, greater naturalism. All these things make the Classic unforgettable, okay. And here's where we get the very sexy pose. Like the Greeks learned that you don't stand on two feet like a cowboy about to draw. You always put your weight on, or you put your weight on. And that naturalism, that becomes the chiastic pose. They discovered the chiastic. Chiastic is the X, the letter X. And that also is going to be used in the Renaissance. It's going to be rediscovered many years later. And in the Renaissance we call it contrapposto. You know contrapposto, but it's also the Greek and the chiastic pose. Now, you have to look at this incredible sculpture of the doryphoros. I would like you to look at the doryphoros, which is a spear-bearer. And you know, what the Greeks value is symmetry. Symmetria, okay. And so everything is symmetrical in some way or other. Because basically, the works of the Greeks have a canon. Canon is a rule. Canon is a measure. So everything with the Greeks is measured, proportional, and symmetrical, or harmonic. They really want harmonic. They want things to harmonize in mathematical terms, okay. And basically, this is when I told you that art is truth and beauty is the beauty part. The beauty comes from the Greeks. The beauty comes from the harmony. The beauty comes from proportion, okay. From proportion. And so, you know, we keep our story. And we dwell in Athens. And Athens has an agora, or a marketplace. And then later there's like this hill called the Acropolis. There you have the temple, the Parthenon. And what is the Parthenon? The Parthenon is the temple that homages, that celebrates Athena. Athena, the goddess of the hunt, who is the tutelary deity of the Greeks. And this is the highest achievement of the Greeks of the classical age, the proportions of the Parthenon, okay. Now, look at the Parthenon. We have it there. And basically, the history continues. And we have a lot to talk about in terms of temples. But we won't have the time here. So, I would rather we discuss some of the sculptures, you know. Like, look at Cretaceous boys. Look at Doryphoros, okay. And look at Poseidon, okay. Or Zeus. It could be Zeus. Look at the Riyashi warriors. The materials are either marble or bronze. The things are cast in bronze. Look at this beautiful man. It's a culture of male beauty, okay, in the Mediterranean at this time. Not so many women. Look at the discobolos, the discus thrower. Look at the dynamism of 450 BC sculpture, right in the middle of the classic. Look at the one perhaps the earliest sculpture of a woman, at least that we have recorded, is Aphrodite. Okay, Aphrodite. Venus of Nido, right? Nido was Venus of Nido. You can see it right there. And you know, and what happened? Well, all the things come to an end. We started this century of marvels. We started with the Greeks winning over the Persians, the great enemies. And it ends when the people of Athens get into a fight with their neighbors in Sparta, okay? And that Peloponnesian war, that civil war, brings to an end the classical age. We'll stop right now, and then we'll continue with the Hellenistic era after the classical age. Thank you.