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Chapter 5. Ancient Greece. www.utexas.edu/courses/classicalarch/images.html. What do you think the ideal male and female bodies should look like? This question can be traced back to ancient Greece. Greek sculptors tried to create ideal images of beauty for both men and women. The
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Chapter 5 Ancient Greece www.utexas.edu/courses/classicalarch/images.html
What do you think the ideal male and female bodies should look like? This question can be traced back to ancient Greece. Greek sculptors tried to create ideal images of beauty for both men and women. The statues they carved created “classic” models of beauty that link ancient Greece to Renaissance Italy and even to contemporary celebrity magazines.
The importance of the art of the ancient Greeks is not limited to their quest to define ideal male and female proportions. Greek architecture, sculpture, and vase paintings have all had an influence on subsequent Western art and culture.
Ancient Greek art is a complex topic. Unlike the art of the ancient Egyptians, Greek art did not remain static. As a result, art historians have traditionally divided ancient Greek into four stylistic periods: Geometric and Orientalizing Archaic Classical Hellenistic
Mycenaean civilization collapsed around 1200 B.C.E. As population declined and the arts of reading and writing were lost, Greece plunged into a four-hundred year period known as the Dark Ages of Greece. After four long centuries of decline, Greece slowly began to recover. Farmers settled in city-states, writers preserved Homer’s epics, and artists created a new Geometric style of art.
As its name implies, the Geometric style featured triangles, concentric circles, and “checkerboard” shapes that were used for both ornamental and human figures.
By the seventh century B.C.E., painters in major pottery centers in Greece had moved away from the dense linear decoration of the Geometric style, preferring more open compositions built around large motifs- real and imaginary animals, abstract plant forms, and human figures.
The source of these motifs can be traced to the arts of the Near East and Egypt. Greek painters did not simply copy the work of Eastern artists, they drew on work in a variety of media- sculpture, metalwork, and textiles to invent an entirely new approach to painting vessels.
The Archaic period does not deserve its name. “Archaic” means “old-fashioned” even “primitive” and the term was chosen by art historians who wanted to stress what they perceived as a contrast between the undeveloped art of this time and the subsequent Classical period, once thought to be the most admirable and highly developed phase of Greek art.
But the Archaic period was a time of great new achievement in Greece. In literature, Sappho wrote her inspired poetry on the island of Lesbos, while on another island the legendary storyteller, Aesop, crafted his animal fables. Artists and architects shared in the growing prosperity as city councils and wealthy individuals sponsored the creation of extraordinary sculpture and fine ceramics and commissioned elaborate civic and religious buildings in cities and sanctuaries.
Sculpture Comparison Handout
Video on Kouros, New York • https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ancient-art-civilizations/greek-art/daedalic-archaic/v/kouros-youth-archaic-greek-c-590-580-b-c-e • 6 min • Class quiz
Anavysos, Kroisos • https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ancient-art-civilizations/greek-art/daedalic-archaic/v/anavysos-kouros • 5 min. • Class quiz
Complete Sculpture Comparison Handout Kouros (not cue card) Kroisos (AP)
Peplos Kore (AP) Kore from Acropolis • 5 min • https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ancient-art-civilizations/greek-art/daedalic-archaic/v/peplos-kore • Class quiz
Moscophoros (Calf- bearer) IB How does this statue differ from earlier Greek statues and those of Egypt and Mesopotamia? And that seems to signify what?
Sophilos, The Wedding Procession of Peleas and Thetis (IB) Annotate Handout
Berlin Painter (IB) • Flourished 500–460 bce, Athenian vase painter who, is considered one of the outstanding vase painters of the Late Archaic period. He is best known as the decorator of an amphora now in Berlin that depicts Hermes and a satyr. He has made over 200 • vases.
Stylistically, the Berlin amphora is decorated on a new principle of design. It had been customary to frame the groups of figures on each side with pattern bands. The Berlin Painter eliminated this frame, allowing the figures to dominate. The unusually large figures stand out sharply against the amphora’s black background and, as in many of his other works, are characterized by refined grandeur.
Capitals& Orders CorinthianIonic Doric
Temple of Aphaia & Plan (IB) Archaic period transition to classical
Video on Temple of Aphaia, Aegina and Dying Warrior https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ancient-art-civilizations/greek-art/early-classical/v/east-and-west-pediments-from-the-temple-of-aphaia-aegina-c-490-480-b-c-e 15 min.
West Pediment of the Temple of Aphaia (IB) Dying Warrior from west pediment Dying Warrior from east pediment
