SUBJECT: Ancient Aegean and Greek Art

SUBJECT: Ancient Aegean and Greek Art

Stokstad Chapter: 4 & 5

RESOURCES

Student discussion readings for this lecture:

MacGregor #18, Minoan Bull-leaper, Crete (1700–1450 BC)
MacGregor #27, Parthenon sculpture: Centaur and Lapith, Greece, (about 440 BC)
On nudity in Greek Art, see Prof. J. Hurwit in The American Journal of Archaeology or Prof. J. Mouratidis on The Origin of Nudity in Greek Athletics

Student discussion videos for this lecture:

PBS Nova Secrets of the Parthenon (discusses the mapping of the ideal human figure onto the ideal architectural monument). 1 hour in length. See Class Activity tab for guided at-home viewing questions.
Students can trace the Parthenon’s many lives through this interactive timeline on the PBS website, and read an interview with Prof. Jeffrey Hurwit that discusses the architectural, historical, and symbolic value of the Parthenon.
The Greek Gods – History Channel explains the Greek Pantheon
Crash Course History – Alexander the Great, and the concept of Greatness
Crash Course History - The Persians and the Greeks
Interactive tour of the Palace at Knossos

Optional in-class video resources for this lecture:

The Acropolis Deconstructed – facts and figures to play in the background in addition to slides
Dr. Nigel Spivey explains “contrapposto” (watch between 5min and 7min)

LECTURE NOTES

Key question for the lecture: What similarities and differences do we see between art we have already looked at (Prehistory, ANE, Egypt) and the objects we see today? How does the depiction of the human figure change?

Timeline: c. 2,700 BCE (early Cycladic Figures) through Hellenistic Art of the 3rd century BCE.

Historical outline:

Ancient Aegean Art (c. 3000 BCE – 1200 BCE) is the precursor for Ancient Greek (900 BCE – 31 BCE).
Although we know that there were communities established in Greece from the Paleolithic period onwards, Aegean material culture really begins to flourish just after the time period as we’ve just looked at in the Ancient Near East and Egypt. This is the period of time after Prehistory, after Neolithic cultures settled, and when they began to work in and use metal.
We’ll see that, just like the Ancient Egyptian, the Greeks systematized the depiction of the human figure (canon of proportions) in ways that acknowledged earlier Aegean examples BUT took it steps further – creating “perfect” sculptures and then building entire architectural systems based on the proportions of the ideal human body.

Objects covered:

Aegean Art

Cycladic figures
The palace at Knossos, and Knossos interior

Bull leaping (supplementary)
Woman or goddess with snake (supplementary)
Kamares ware jug (supplementary)
Flotilla Fresco (supplementary)

Citadel and Lion’s Gate at Mycenae

Corbeled Vault, Tholos (supplementary)

Mask of Agamemnon (supplementary)

Gold bee pendant (supplementary)

Art of Ancient Greece

Funerary Vase
Kouros

Anavysos kouros (supplementary)

Herakles Driving a Bull to Sacrifice
Polykleitos, Spear Bearer
Alexander the Great Confronts Darius III at the Battle of Issos, floor
Nike of Samothrace

Old Woman (supplementary)

Aphrodite of Melos (supplementary)

Dying Gallic Trumpeter (supplementary)

Reconstructed West Front of the Altar from Pergamon, Turkey (& detail: Athena Attacking the Giants) (supplementary)

Parthenon and Acropolis, Athens; Frieze and Pediment of the Parthenon

Greek temple plans; Greek architectural orders (supplementary)

Plan of the Agora

Theater, Epidauros (supplementary)

Earrings

Conclusion:From the Cycladic figure through Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic figures of Ancient Greece, an ideal is created, manipulated, and exaggerated for aesthetic effect and to celebrate technologically advanced, skilled craftsmanship. The forms we see in Ancient Greece are copied by the Romans, and live on in the Western Hemisphere today.

Aegean Art

Geography:

What is “Aegean”?
Breaks down in to 3 areas – Cycladic Islands, Minoan art on Crete, and Mycenean Art on the mainland of Greece.
When are we looking? Timeline 3000 BCE – 1200 BCE – “Bronze Age Cultures”
What are we looking at? The Egyptians were wedded to the Nile, but these groups of people are tied to the sea as seafarers. Instead of just burials and temples, we also have evidence of shipwrecks, which tell us about what these cultures made, and also what they traded, and with whom.
This geographic area was rich in some minerals and natural resources (esp. marble!) but not in others so there was reason to fish, shipbuild, exchange resources, and goods made from these resources.
It’s difficult to date these cultures. Like the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii, the eruption of a volcano on the island of Thera helps archeologists date some artifacts based on working back from or towards the date it obliterated those living on the Cycladic island and its impact on nearby Crete, but dates are always approximate.

Cycladic figures

What are we looking at here?

Proportion/canon and proportions/geometry
All conform to conventions
Essentalised
Would have been polychromatic, paint worn off
Details such as eyes, mouths, hair, and headdresses were often added in paint; where paint has disappeared, areas of discoloration or very low relief document its original presence.
Precursor to the freestanding sculpture we’ll see in “classical” Greek Art
Think about: conventions for representing human forms. Is this ideal or real?

When were these made? Who for?

Around 2700 BCE
Used as burial goods; figures almost always female
At least some of them show clear signs of having been repaired, implying that they were objects valued by the deceased during life and were not made specifically for burial.
The figures apparently were buried equally with both men and women. Such figures were not found in every grave
Maybe they were added to and used throughout life? Burial or mourning tool? We really don’t know.

Technique: Compare and Contrast

Comparison between Cycladic and Willendorf

How do they compare to other female forms that we’ve seen so far?

They point us in the direction of Greek art and the depiction of the body in an idealized, pared down form. But - Egyptians did this too, even Willendorf is essentialized.
Sculptures made because of the availability of marble and the abrasive materials (pumice, emery, sand, obsidian) with which the stone was worked

Transition: Cycladic figures were evidently designed according to simple geometric principles and proportions that could be marked on a piece of marble with a compass, a straightedge, and some charcoal. How might this relate to some of the later Greek Art we see? This combination makes a very prominent reappearance in the art that began to take shape about 1000 BCE, and is called Geometric (for obvious reasons).

The palace at Knossos, and Knossos interior

Bull leaping (supplementary)
Woman or goddess with snake (supplementary)
Kamares ware jug (supplementary)
Flotilla Fresco (supplementary)

What is Minoan Art?

Same time period of Bronze Age (c. 3000 BCE) as Cycladic Art of the Islands.
Centered on the larger Greek island of Crete although we don’t want to be too “separatist” about Cycladic, Minoan and Mycenaean art as remember, these peoples move about – they are seafarers, and they invade one another too!
The people that lived on Crete – the Minoans - traded with mainland Greece, Egypt and the Near East, and so would have been aware of some of the art that we have already looked at.
Minoan art (Bronze Age art from Crete) was thus called because of the legend of the Minotaur – the son of King Minos’ wife and a bull that lived in a maze at Knossos that feasted on human flesh.
The name was given in the early 20th C by the British archeologist who led excavations at Knossos. Consider this in light of the question of cultural patrimony we have begun to think about already “who should look after a country’s cultural artifacts?” – who should name them? Who should own them? The archaeologist Arthur Evans bought the whole site – he oversaw excavation as his own personal project, v different from modern archaeology.

What were some of the objects found at Knossos?

Minoan art really began to flourish in the 2nd millennium BCE, later than Cycladic art.
A natural disaster wiped the slate clean again in around 1700 BCE, after which architecture and communities were rebuilt, including the Great Palace at Knossos.
The palace was complex, including distinctive Minoan columns, which taper to the bottom. Originally in wood, they have been restored in stone.
Much of the palace at Knossos was painted very colorfully with animal figures, and groupings of humans and animals.
One example is the fresco (explain technique) of the Bull leaping. The fresco shows the type of entertainment that night have taken place in the palace courtyard, although it was a “bull game” rather than a fight and the animal would only have been killed if it was part of the sacrifice afterward.
The bull painting is a visual explication of where the term “Minoan” comes from. Stylized. Energetic. Figures in profile. Quick drying medium leaves impressionistic results.
The potters wheel was introduced to Crete around 20000 BCE so we see many types of pottery forms as part of excavations at Knossos, including Kamares ware jug (named for the mountain on Crete where many were found) – you’ll see in Stokstad that the decoration of these ceramics are much more abstract and expressive than the “Geometric” examples we will see in the later Greek period. They were popular and were exported.
Glazed earthenware figurines like the Woman or goddess with Snake have also been found. Feline creature on her head, snakes in her hands, exposed breasts – is this a fertility figure?
Minoan influence spread outside of Crete, to places like Thera, an island about 60 miles north.
The Flotilla Fresco is an example of an interior wall decoration in a much less grand setting than Knossos.
The fresco is very detailed, depicting a flotilla of ships and ports that prizes variation rather than strict adherence to conventions of depiction

Citadel and Lion’s Gate at Mycenae

Corbeled Vault, Tholos (supplementary)

Mask of Agamemnon (supplementary)

Gold bee pendant (supplementary)

MYCENAEAN CULTRE = Mainland Greece
Mainland Greece invaded Crete around 1450 BCE and took over the palace at Knossos, as well as building their own palaces on the mainland.
Mycenaean culture runs concurrently with Cycladic and Minoan cultures.
The large architectural complexes of this culture were built between 1400-1200 BCE, at which time all Aegean material culture “drops off” – archaeologists think that the Aegean populations succumbed either to an outside attack or internal warfare, but don’t know exactly
The period between 1200-900 BCE when Ancient Greek culture emerges is called the “Greek Dark Ages.”

The Citadel of Mycenae, where the Lion’s Gate is found, is so heavily fortified and built at when the Ancient Greeks discovered it, they thought it couldn’t be the work of humans but of the mythical race of giants, the Cyclopes.

It is sometimes known as Cyclopean masonry because of this, and is up to 20 feet thick in some sites
“Corbelling” means where bricks have been piled up in the direction of each other until they meet
No mortar is used, the weight of the bricks keeps things in place
Monumental architectural sculpture is used to break up the corbelling, such as the Lion’s Gate where two (now headless) creatures – maybe lions? – flank a Minoan-style column.
Powerful guarding symbolism!
To the right of the gate was found a grave circle, in which Agamemnon is thought to have been buried. Agamemnon was a Mycenaean king who, when Helen is abducted by Paris of Troy, commands the united Greek armed forces in the ensuing Trojan War.
The Mask of Agamemnon is an artifact discovered at Mycenae in 1876 by Heinrich Schliemann, a German archaeologist closely linked to Aegean Art. It is undetermined whether the mask is a fake or not.
Let’s watch the short History Channel video that takes us inside this tomb.
Minoans, whom the Mycenaeans conquered, were very skilled at metalwork and so became sought after on the mainland of Greece, both the artisans and the objects they made.
Remember, the “Bronze Age” follows the Stone Age because the development is moving from working with Stone to working with Metals in many geographic areas and cultures.
Objects like the very complex Bee pendant are evidence of this highly skilled craftsmanship

Art of Ancient Greece

Art Historians have divided up the chronology of this period of Ancient Greek Art for us into the following sections.

900-600 BCE: Geometric

600-480 BCE: The Archaic Period

480-323 BCE: The Classical Period

323-31/30 BCE: The Hellenistic Period

Where do these divisions of time come from?

Well, they originate from historical events that are momentous enough to divide time into before and after, for example the “Classical” turns into the “Hellenistic” after Alexander the Great dies in 323 BCE and his Greek Empire begins to fall apart.
However, they are retrospective divisions. Although the Greeks would have certainly felt that Alexander’s death was very important, these classifications actually – like MANY art historical vocab terms and historical distinctions – come from the 18th and 19th centuries.
So these divisions of time are about value judgments made by art historians as much as they reflect actual hard-and-fast historical divisions. They’re a product of art history.
These divisions of time are useful in some respects – they tell us that art objects and architecture changed in the way it looked and sometimes in the way it functioned over time, and how these changes reflect other cultural changes –but Greek people were not labeling their art in the same way that modern art historians do.

Funerary Vase

Painted vases were often made in specific shapes for specific daily uses:

storing and transporting wine and foodstuffs (amphora),
drawing water (hydria),
drinking wine or water (kantharos or kylix)

And for special, often ritual occasions, such as

pouring libations, or a tribute to the gods or the dead (lekythos) or carrying water for the bridal bath (loutrophoros).
Vases were also used as grave markers, known as funerary kraters like the one we can see in the slide, which is actually at the Met Museum.

What do we notice about this vase?

registers
narrative is formed on the registers,
in the krater, the narrative occurs at the widest point of the vase, so is given the most space
there are conventions for painting the “decorative elements” too – “meander pattern”

What can we see depicted on the vase?

The vase, shows the prothesis, a ritual in ancient Greek funerary practice in which the deceased is laid out on a high bed and relatives and friends may come to mourn and pay their respects to the deceased (before cremation).
The deceased is shown on his side and the checkered shroud that would normally cover the body has been raised and regularized into a long rectangle so we can see the dead body clearly.
there are conventions for portraying the figures – chests are frontal and heads are in profile. The legs are shown with frontal thighs but calves in profile. Where have we seen this before? Egypt. What did we call it? Twisted perspective.

What was it made of?

Terracotta, which is a clay-based ceramic.
A meander pattern delineates the neck from the body of the vessel. This vase represents the Geometric style, which takes its name from the geometric shapes that constitute its artistic language.
In a band below the funeral scene, chariots stand hitched to teams of horses and warriors carry spears and large shields. The figures may refer to the military exploits of the deceased;
However, these types of weapons were more “Bronze Age,” and therefore the scene more likely evokes the glorious ancestry and traditions to which the dead man belonged rather than things he might have done personally.

What did the Ancient Greeks believe about death?

In the Odyssey, Homer describes the Underworld, deep beneath the earth, where Hades and his wife, Persephone, reigned over all those who had died. However, there was less definite ideas about what happened after death than the Egyptians, who thought of a full afterlife.
Very few objects were actually placed in Greek graves, but monumental earth mounds, rectangular built tombs, and elaborate marble stelai and statues were often erected to mark the grave and to ensure that the deceased would not be forgotten. Immortality lay in the continued remembrance of the dead by the living.

Transition: So, the Geometric period was a watershed moment for Greek culture. The Greek city-state (polis) formalized, the Greek alphabet was developed, and new opportunities for trade and colonization were realized. It’s the same story as many of the developments of cultures and empires we’ve seen so far.