Thomas Edison State College | 05 Beyond the Borders of Classical Greek Art
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In our last lecture, we whipped through the fifth century, the Golden Age of Greek culture centered in Athens,
moving from the period of the Persian Wars to the period of the Peloponnesian Wars, centered around a golden
era for Athens with Pericles at the helm.
And we ended with a series of examinations of parts of the Parthenon and the observation that the Parthenon was
itself built during this apogee of Periclean Golden Age, Athens culture, between the time when the Persian Wars
had become a memory and the time when, interestingly, ironically enough, Pericles would draw Athens into the
Peloponnesian Wars.
And in looking at that period of the wars between Athens, Sparta, and their respective allies, that carries us
through much of the last third of the fifth century. We have Thucydides, the Greek historian, as our guide. And it's
he who makes the observation that this was the most important war in Hellenic history because every state was
involved in it, because he recognizes in this war Athens as a kind of tragic character on the stage of history that
moves from the apogee of power, having everything, to its knees by the end of the war.
It's democracy humbled before the oligarchy enforced upon Athens by Sparta. And it is Thucydides as well who
speaks about the tragic flaws of Athens, the wisdom that it should have had, Pericles as wise, Athena as a
goddess of wisdom who is the patron of the city. And yet this decision in the year 413 to go off to Sicily on an
expedition, which was really not what Athens needed to do, was symptomatic of a lack of wisdom.
A lack of ethical forthrightness a few years before in 415, when the citizens of Melos wanted to remain neutral,
and Athens said, no, no, no. You must either be with us or you're against us because we have the power to
dictate such terms. And when the Melians persisted in wishing to remain neutral, Athens destroyed Melos,
enslaving all the women and children, killing all the men.
So this last third of the century proves to be one of enormous trauma, an accelerating trauma that grows out of
the triumphant first two thirds of the century for Athens. And in Greece and for Greece generally, this is a very
difficult period. It would be a surprise if the art itself did not reflect this atmosphere, this mood.
And so we find in late Greek, particularly late Athenian art, a kind of double direction of response to the reality
around them. One is a direction of frenzy, of frenetic art that bespeaks the frenzied and frenetic condition of being,
on and off, but largely at war during a quarter of a century almost nonstop, as exemplified in the work of a Nike
figure, a Victory figure, that comes from a balustrade of a temple, a small temple across from the Parthenon
figure, a Victory figure, that comes from a balustrade of a temple, a small temple across from the Parthenon
erected around the year 410.
In other words, erected towards the end of the game, by which time one might suppose Athens was becoming a
little bit desperate, erected in honor of Athena in her guise as victory. Nike means victory. It's a victory temple. And
Victory herself is personified in this image as a female whom we see pausing, as it were, in mid-flight-- because
Victory is typically shown flying in from elsewhere to here-- and we see her pausing, as it were, to adjust her
sandal.
And we see in this work, therefore, an abstraction recast as an allegorical, anthropomorphized figure. And that
figure is a delicious cacophony of draperies that are swishing and swirling every which way, creating an enormous
dynamism of light and shadows, of lines and volumes, of elements that are revealed and elements that are
concealed with respect to her breasts, her belly, her legs, as the garment in some places presses against her like
cellophane and in other places is clumped around her or beyond her. It is symptomatic of the frenzied mood of the
era.
On the other hand, we have an example from another temple nearby the Parthenon, the temple known as the
Erechtheum, built to Erechtheus, the eponymous ancestor of the Athenians, of the city itself. And here, too, we
see an exercise in frenzy at the same time as we see a further exercise in visual ideas and what they're about that
grows out of the classical vocabulary in new directions.
On the western porch of the Erechtheum, built between 421 and 407, or put another way, built between a brief
pause known as the Peace of Nicias in 421 between Athens and Sparta and the period when war would break out
again, the period when Athens would be engaged in that horrible and hopeless dialogue with the Melians and that
foolish expedition to Sicily, the point pushing almost to the edge of disaster and defeat, which would come finally in
404.
In that stretch of time, this temple is expanded, as it were, by way of a western porch where this series of female
figures known as caryatids, that is, female figures in lieu of columns. The architectural historian Vitruvius later on
in the first century BC will say of caryatids that the word comes from the word "karyai," referring to maidens who,
in a town Karyai, not far from Sparta, had betrayed the Athenians when they were leading the Greeks against the
Persians in the Persian War and so were enslaved.
And so caryatids are, in effect, slaves because they are doomed to be standing forever holding up some part of a
building. Although Vitruvius may be wrong. There seemed to have been such figures well before the time of the
Persian Wars.
But these are the classic statements of caryatid-ness. We have here not only the matter of symmetria, that is, a
bent leg, a straight leg, arms bent and straight, the matter of revealed and concealed, but we can see body parts
even through the clothing because it is pressed against those body parts, and elsewhere we see nothing but
drapery hiding body parts.
But most importantly here, of course, we have statues that are columns and columns that are statues. In other
words, the line between architecture and sculpture has been blurred in the opposite direction from what we have
seen 150 years earlier in the Archaic period exemplified by the Hera of Samos of 575-60, where we had an early
Archaic statue that, with the fluting of the garment, suggested architecture. Here we have architecture which is
obviously statuary.
So frenzy and its various concomitance is one direction that Athenian and Greek art take in the last part of the fifth
century. The other is the exact opposite sort of direction. It's the direction of silence, the direction of stillness, the
direction of emptiness that conveys a sense of pathos.
So the Tomb Stela, for example, of Hegeso that dates from 410 to 400 or so, which places the deceased young
woman-- already pathos because she is a deceased young woman, died before her time-- places her and her
servant girl in a little construction that looks temple-like-- so the relationship between the form of the tomb and the
form of the temple is, of course, obvious here-- places them there in a structure that marks the boundary between
sacer and profanus, between death and life, between us and where they have actually headed to.
And so we see this figure leaning just a bit forward. Her servant girl has brought her her jewelry box, and she's
opened it. And she has picked up, and occupying the dead center of the composition in her hand is a ring, no
doubt her wedding ring, around which there is nothing but empty space, nothing but stillness, nothing but silence.
We are naturally intended to feel empathos, feeling with sympathos, feeling with this tragedy of a woman who has
died too young.
That sort of sensibility will continue and even increase as we move from the fifth into the fourth centuries, as there
is a succession of would-be powerhouses after the collapse of Athens, obviously Sparta in the first place. But then
subsequently, Corinth, Thebes, and, again, Athens will come around to power by the middle of the century or so.
In the course of that, we observe, particularly where grave stele are concerned, fascinating developments with
respect to the notion of pathos, with respect to the notion of how we who are living engage those who have died,
recognizing that we, too, will one day die as they have.
And so in the Ilissos Stele, so-called because it was found near the Ilisos River in Athens, we see, once again,
someone who was died too young, a young man, a young hunter, in fact. And we see him contemplated, no doubt
by his father, that bearded old man who leans on his staff and places his head on his hand, the kind of image one
might imagine of Peleus, the father of Achilles, who would be mourning a son whom he tragically outlived. That
upsets the order of things in which sons outlive fathers, fathers don't outlive sons.
There's more there here, though. We see not just the young man and his father. We see the little slave boy
crumpled up weeping for his master. We see the dog sniffing the ground as if he would be seeking the traces of
his master's footsteps that he'll never find again.
And most importantly, we see the young man who sees us. His father looks at him. We look at them, but he looks
at us. There is a completed circle therefore, a 360-degree circle of engagement, of involvement, of sympathos,
feeling with, of empathos, feeling one with, because it's not just that they stand on the boundary of the space into
which we can visually peer beyond them as if they are full, three-dimensional figures and not merely relief
carvings on a flat surface, but the space encompasses us out here by virtue of the visual contact between the
young man and ourselves.
This work, coming about 340 or 330 or so, comes at a time by which Athens has started to reassert itself, but
unfortunately for Athens and the rest of Greece so has Philip of Macedon at that point, who is about to swallow up
Greece.
The Hellenic world, the Greek world is changing. And so with these changes, there continue to be changes in art,
not just a pushing out into our visual space by way of eyes, but other ways of pushing out of the visual space,
outside the block, so to speak, from which a figure might be carved.
So we look here at the Apoxyomenos, the scraper-offer, the sweat-scraper-offer, really, of Lysippos, dating from
about 325. Strictly speaking, this is a Roman copy of that work by Lysippos who pushes out into our space in the
literal sense because his right arm is extended, as with his left, strigil in hand, he is scraping off the sweat after his
exertions.
And we observe not only this pushing out into space, but we recognize that the proportions have changed in the
time since the Doryphoros, just as the Doryphoros of a century earlier had changed since the time of Archaic
kouroi, and even in the history of the Archaic kouros there had been a succession of proportional changes.
So the sense of what constitutes ideal proportion is shifting. This head is much smaller, vis a vis its body, than
what we have seen in the Classical period. And so we observe as well that the symmetria principle is observed,
but in a more extreme manner. That left leg/right leg, bent/straight, relaxed, and tensed is there, but with much
more of a weird kind of shift from one leg to the other.
And similarly, the right arm is extended. The left arm is bent. But the right arm and the left arm are both
horizontalized, whereas the legs are both verticalized. So there's another element within all of this shifting of
thinking.
Of course, the shifter of thinking par excellence is Praxiteles, the contemporary of Lysippos , who translates the
new terms of seeing toward the gods themselves in an image like this of the Apollo Sauroktonos, as it is called,
the Dragon Slayer, the Lizard Slayer.
And of course, there's irony here. The great Apollo, who slew the pytho, the enormous serpent dragon, and
established order in and around Delphi, that same Apollo whom earlier we saw imaged at a temple in Olympia
decreeing order has here become a kind of adolescent, very languorously leaning up against a tree and poking
with a stick at a lizard.
Very soft-bellied, his symmetria body shifting so extremely that his hips are really out of whack as he calmly
operates vis a vis this lizard. And Praxiteles has created a whole composition with two primary elements, the figure
and the tree, and not just a single element of the figure.
But perhaps Praxiteles' most famous work with respect to translating the gods into something less Olympian than
they were traditionally remembered as in the Classical period is his rendering of Aphrodite around 340 or 330, the
same time period as the Apollo, the Aphrodite known as the Knidian Aphrodite, because the citizens of Knidos
embraced her when the citizens of Kos, who had commissioned the sculpture as a statue for their temple to
Aphrodite, had rejected it.
They rejected it because they were horrified, first of all, that the glorious goddess whom Hesiod speaks of as
"foam born"-- that's what he etymologizes her name as, "foam born" from "aphros'-- who is represented as rising
up out of the sea and is swept up onto the island of Cyprus, here she's been reduced to a girl rising out of the
bathtub.
Moreover, everybody knew that the girl who posed for the statue was Praxiteles' girlfriend Phryne. So in a very
literal sense, the goddess has become the girl. The girl has become the goddess. And that effacing of the line
between human and divine offended the Kosians, so they rejected the sculpture. But the Knidians embraced her,
so we refer to her as the Knidian Aphrodite.
This was the first full-sized, full-length, nude female since the Cycladic period, with perhaps a slight interruption of
that in the Niobids of the last century who were largely naked but not full-sized. And once again, we're seeing a
Roman copy. So she's placed in a niche, whereas she was intended in the original form to be seen from all
around-- front, side, and back.
It's a new world, a world in which the Olympians are less distant, less dominated by ethos, that world that Philip of
Macedon is affecting as new for the Greeks and for the Athenians perforce.
Philip, whom we see here in a very small ivory representation of about 350 or 340, who managed through luck,
the discovery of silver in mines in the eastern part of Macedonia north by northeast of Greece, through skill by
establishing a series of dynastic marriages that connected his kingdom to those that he swallowed up, and by
applying skill and luck so as to create a full, professional standing army.
Whereas most of the Hellenic states had amateur armies whose members did what they did during the rest of the
time. And when they had to come fight, so they picked up their arms and came and fought. An army like that
coming up against Philip's army might be in trouble.
Philip we see here in a representation that evokes a third sculptor of the period beyond Lysippos and Praxiteles,
Scopas. Because of the way his head is tilted and his eyes are deep set, we speak of scopatic eyes. It has a kind
of pathos quality to it, although there's nothing pathetic about Philip.
He would come and engage the Athens-led Hellenic allies at Chaeronea in 338 and easily, of course, defeat them
and then made plans, on the other hand, for going on to take on the Persian Empire to avenge the sack of the
Acropolis back in 490.
He saw himself not as swallowing up Greece, but as a Greek simply unifying Greece to go out against the
Persians. Unfortunately he was assassinated, probably by his own wife Olympia, two years later in 336. Possibly,
possibly her son was involved, because Philip had taken on a new wife and that new wife had just birthed a new
son.
And so the son, who may or may not been involved in his assassination, was Alexander, who, at the age of 20,
took on the mantle of power that Philip had created, became the leader whom we see here with his scopatic eyes
and his slightly tilted head with his hair that is a very significant feature of his aura.
It is said by some of his biographers of the time that his hair was light-colored. He never wore a helmet going into
battle. He was never injured. So that he appeared to everyone with his golden hair gleaming in the sun, never
injured, to have a kind of divine quality to him so that when he asserted that he was descended from Heracles,
anyone and everyone could believe it. Heracles, of course, himself being the son of Zeus.
So it was Alexander who picked up the world that Philip had begun, so to say, and who carried the Greek world
east towards Persia. And in that expanding world of Philip and Alexander and the encounter to the east, we see,
again and again, the Olympians diminished, as it were, in size.
So we see it also in vase painting. This bell krater from Paestum of about 325 in red-figure style of a new sort
shows us a phylax play, that is to say, a farce that typically has as its job to bring the Olympians down to earth, so
to say, and which developed as a form of theatre, particularly among the Greek cities in South Italy and Sicily.
And here we see Zeus and Hermes trying to get to the window where a woman sits waiting. This is arguably
Alcmene, the mother of Heracles. But this is not the great Zeus appearing as he did in that story disguised as her
husband, or in another story as a rain of gold, or in another story as a swan, or in another story as a bull.
This is an old geezer who is already in his postmenopausal phase, showing breasts beneath his garment-- revealconceal in a new key-- struggling to carry a ladder. His old friend Hermes, who can't keep his caduceus up,
holding the lamp so they can get to the window. And the woman at the window is an image that usually represents
a prostitute. So the Olympians have fallen rather from the sky, you might say.
And conversely, in this period, late fourth century and beyond, we see mortals who come to be treated as god.
Heracles, the son of Zeus but of a mortal woman, Alcmene, dies but is taken up to heaven. Dionysis has a divine
father and a human mother. Asclepius, the great healer, the great father of medicine, comes to be treated as a
god.
And of course, Alexander himself comes naturally to be understood and portrayed again and again as a god, as
here we see him on a silver tetradrachm coin from Lysimachus, the Hellenistic king of the end of the fourth,
beginning of the third century. And he's got those rams horns of Ammon, for Alexander was not only the son of
Heracles, according to his account, but claimed to have been adopted as the son of the Egyptian god Amun-Ra
when he visited that temple in the late fourth century in Egypt.
Alexander would carry his troops beyond Greece, encounter the Persian Empire, dismantle it, move beyond the
Middle East as far as the Himalayas. He brought with him geographers and biographers, topographers and
historiographers, philosophers and artists.
So that the double consequence of Alexander's journeys to the East was the bringing back to Greece of ideas
from as far as India, for example, how language works, which the Greeks got from the grammarians of Sanskrit,
Panini having been the figure who first figured out how language works and, on the other hand, bringing Greek
culture into India. So robust physicality, lush sensuality, which is part of Greek art increasingly as we move
through the fourth century and into the Hellenistic period, becomes part of the art of India as a consequence of
Alexander's visit there.
So for example, we turn for a moment to India. And we see an image of the Hindu god Vishnu and his consort
Lakshmi, or Siva and Parvati, in dalliance together. And we see these swaying bodies that accentuate and
extenuate this notion of dynamically-balanced imbalances that were coming into play by the Hellenistic period in
the Greek world itself.
And we observe that there are Indian elements still very much present here. If with one hand the god reaches
around to fondle the breast of the goddess, you'll notice that he has several other hands, multiple limbs, each
carrying its own attribute. That kind of a representation of the gods is typical of Indian thought and of Indian art.
But this lush sensuality and this robust physicality is an element that has come into the picture as a consequence
of the arrival of the Greeks to the Himalayas and beyond.
We can see in looking in what amounts to an opposite kind of conceptual direction from Hindu deities to the
Buddha, who, I remind you, is not a deity. He is merely enlightened. The word "Buddha" in Sanskrit means
"enlightened." He's someone who has transcended the ordinary human failure to recognize how much this reality,
our reality, the profanus reality, is a reality of illusion in favor of recognizing that which resides beyond our own
reality.
And so we see him here depicted, a Buddha Maitreya, from the Gandharan period from the second/third century,
which we recognize as a period-- and the place is what is now Western Pakistan-- period and a place where a
good deal of Hellenistic Greek influence has come to play.
So we recognize the symmetria positioning of one leg bent and one leg straight, of one arm bent and one arm
straight. We recognize the shifting of weight so that one leg is tensed and the other relaxed, just as one arm is
raised holding something, now broken off, but once holding something and therefore tensed, and the opposite
arm is relaxed.
We see that the entire body is ensconced in the kind of flowing garment that we associate with the Greeks, and
eventually with the Romans as well, in this depiction of the Buddha as an ideal monk, as an ideal teacher.
We observe of him, at the same time, a kind of synthesis between these Greek-sourced elements, symmetria and
his flowing garments on the one hand, and elements that are part of the Indic vocabulary, such as the urna, the
mark between his eyes that suggests a third eye of enlightenment, such as the extended earlobes, such as the
cranial bump that also suggests, in Indic thinking, a connection to divinity. All of these, in other words, aspects of
his enlightenment.
We also recognize a broken element behind his head. It is, of course, that which looks like a sun and for which the
Greek word is "helios" and for which the anglicized version of that Greek word, of course, is "halo." The idea of a
figure that has a divine connection being represented with respect to that connection in terms of a sunburst is
something which originates in the Middle East.
So it's something that the Greeks pick up from the Middle East, the Greeks bring to India. We see it on the back of
this Seated Buddha on His Lion Throne, a Buddha, once again, whom we see ensconced in drapery that
bespeaks the influence of the Greek Hellenistic world.
And we can even follow this in what, at first glance, is a completely opposite visual direction in the image of the
Buddha Sakyamuni, this emaciated figure, according to a tradition in one branch of Buddhism that the Buddha
spent six years in extreme self-mortification. And so he's all skin and bones here. But the point, you see, is that
the reduction of his physicality to skin and bones offers him a kind of nobility and a kind of grandeur that everyday
physicality lacks.
And we see here a Hellenistic Greek inspiration as well because the work revels in a physiological extremity in a
way that we will see Hellenistic art does, even as, at the same time, it offers a strong emotional content, a strong
pathos content, we are to feel the physical suffering of the Buddha as we are to feel his complete transcendence
of physicality.
So that there is a paradox. The physical is diminished in favor of the spiritual. But from the perspective of the
artist, the aesthetic of depicting the physical with such careful visual verisimilitude is, of course, something in which
the artist revels.
So we end up, by way of a series of these Indian images, circling around to where we began with Alexander and
the Greeks back to the West, that the legacy of Alexander is carried as far as India. And it would be through
Alexander that elements of Indic thinking would be carried back to Greece. And the legacy of Alexander would be
a world in which the world extends from Greece to India in what, in Greek terms, will be called a large oikoumene,
coming from the Greek word "oikos" meaning "home."
In other words, in the world that Alexander leaves behind when he dies of fever at the age of 33 in 323, in that
world a Greek can find Greek spoken as far East as India and can find the elements of the Greek world, the
theater, the gymnasium, for example, throughout the world from Greece, to Egypt, to the Middle East, to India.
And in that world, he will find, wherever he goes, in art extremes explored, of different kinds of people, of different
kinds of feelings and emotions, such as are exemplified in old and young, as are exemplified in the most physically
concentrated and the most spiritually dissipated of images that, as we move into our next lecture, will carry us
across the Hellenistic world together.
Thomas Edison State College | 06 The Birth of the New-Hellenistic Art
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Think back with me for a moment. Thucydides, at the beginning of the 4th century, in looking back at the
Peloponnesian Wars and seeing Athens as a kind of tragic hero on the stage of history, places in the mouth of
Perikles-- the key figure in the Athenian Golden Age-- a speech that is known as the Funeral Oration, delivered
ostensibly at the end of the first year of the war, when everyone stops fighting during the wintertime because it's
too inconvenient and buries their dead. It's in that speech that Perikles speaks of Athens as the school of all of
Hellas. But in the next year, Perikles is dead of plague. And within a quarter of a century, the Athenian democracy
has been forced into an oligarchic position by the victorious Spartans.
The 4th century begins, in fact, for Athens with their execution of Socrates in 399 because he was too much of an
iconoclast. He asked too many questions to the kind of people who don't like questions asked. And from Socrates,
we move to his disciple, Plato, who founds a world away from the world of politics and the street that he calls "the
world away from the demons,"-- the academia, the Academy. And when Plato passes on, he passes on the baton
of leadership not, interestingly, to his best pupil, Aristotle, but to one of his nephews. And Aristotle founds his own
Academy called the "Lyceum" on the Hill of the Wolf-- across from the Acropolis, the lyceum.
And by then, Philip of Macedon is becoming the most important political and military figure in the entire Hellenic
world. He will do two things of consequence. The second is that he will defeat the Athenian-led allies at the Battle
of Chaeronea in 338 and prepare an expedition to go to Persia two years later. The other is that he had brought
up to his capital at Pella Aristotle-- the preeminent Greek philosopher-- because Philip saw himself as Greek, and
he wanted Aristotle to tutor his son, Alexander.
So as a consequence, when Alexander, who may not have gotten along all that well with Aristotle-- the man of
thought and the boy of action, you understand-- but when Alexander conquered not only Persia but the world as
far as India, he went not only with an army but with an army of different kinds of intellectuals-- biographers and
historiographers and geographers and topographers and artists and philosophers-- and brought back from, as far
as India, new ideas to Greece and carried, as far as India, new ideas for India from Greece. But Alexander is dead
himself of fever in 323 at the age of 33.
In the generation that follows that death, there is a power struggle among his best friends and best generals. And
when the smoke clears-- let's say around the year 300 or so-- we see the erstwhile united empire of Alexander
that had succeeded-- the united empire of the Achaemenid Persians-- become a series of megakingdoms in
which increasingly large cities are being founded or expanded. So the legacy of Alexander that we associate with
the word "Greek-like," "Hellenistic"-- because our perspective is a prejudicial one; we look from the west to the
east, so we're more aware of Greek-like things going east than the things that come from the east into Greece-the Hellenistic period, which is his legacy, has at least two obvious features.
The first, in fact, I've already stated. It's that feature of syncretism-- of the combination of different issues and
ideas and language and literature in art and architecture, in philosophy and theology-- the fact that a Greek could
go as far as North India and find a gymnasium and a theater there such as he would find in Athens or Corinth.
And the other issue, however, is the issue of alienation. Because in this expanded oikos called "oikoumene"-- this
expanded home in which I can find elements that are familiar to me-- the word "oikoumene" gives us both the
word "economy" and "ecumenical," by the way-- so a bringing together of diverse elements to feel home-like.
That's what ecumenical is about, and economy is the matter of the same corresponding forms of money being
usable from Greece to India.
But within all of that, considering the large cities in particular-- the large megakingdoms-- the tax collector who
comes to my village who doesn't actually speak my language, if I don't speak the Greek that he speaks, is
alienation-- alienation and, therefore, the need for gods that feel more like we do. And therefore, not merely
diminished Olympians, but humans become gods-- like Asclepius, like Heracles, like Alexander himself-- to feel
with us, sympathos; to feel one with us, empathos. And so Hellenistic art broadly engages the broad ideas of the
oikoumene.
It is an art of synthesis, of syncretism. It is an art of pathos. It is an art that engages the moment.
It's not the eternalizing, archaic style. It's not the stable but dynamic classical style. It's the style of the moment
because it is a world of change that is a world of unpredictables.
So we see, in an image of the Dying Gaul so-called-- a Roman copy of a Hellenistic work of about 230 to 220-- a
figure who has been wounded. We can see the blood gushing from the wound in his side. We can identify him as
a Gaul-- that is to say, the Greeks and Romans called them "Gauls." These are the Celts who had migrated to
serve in armies in Western Turkey-- Western Anatolia.
They might otherwise be called "Galations." They might otherwise be called "Celts," but the Greeks and Romans
tended to call them "Guals." We recognize him by the torc around his neck.
One of the Roman writers speaks about how the Gauls would fight naked-- only wearing torcs around their necks
so as to expose themselves heroically to all kinds of wounds. And this one has been wounded, and we see him in
that moment when he is about finally to collapse. That right arm that holds him up is about to give way, and he will
fall over.
And it's not just a matter of the moment. It's not just a matter of the skill with which the artist has rendered not only
his flesh, and his hair, but a sense of the muscles and the ligaments and the tendons and the bones beneath. It's
not only all of that.
It is the fact that we feel with him empathos. We feel one with him. He's human.
This isn't Greek, not Greek. This isn't, "He's a barbaros. I'm not concerned about him." It's-- we realize-- that he
can be a noble individual who fought bravely and who is now struggling against death, but death is inevitable. And
so I can feel with him, who, in the same position, would be struggling not to die, but, for me, death is also
inevitable.
In a completely different sense, Hellenistic art produces works that show an interest in the extremes of the human
experience-- very old people, like this old woman struggling on her way to market. Once again, this is a Roman
version of a Hellenistic original. She is old. She is impoverished.
She is an exercise in symmetria gone crazy as it were-- the one leg bent, the other leg straight. Presumably the
same is true of the arms, but not because she's standing but because she's hurrying forward bent over by the
weight of her years and by the weight of what she carries. The whole notion of reveal and conceal has taken on a
new nuance as well. Hasn't it?
We see her naked left shoulder to our right. We see part of one of her breasts exposed, the other covered; one of
her knees completely covered but exposed because of that cellophane-like quality to the drapery. Whereas other
body parts are ensconced deeply in variously contrived draperies. We have then a whole symphony of textures to
accompany the sense of old, weak, and at the edge-- where any of us could be and with which at least any of us
capable of feeling can feel one with.
And completely at the opposite end, so to say, of the spectrum-- life-wise, anyhow-- works like this one, where the
old woman has a tragic quality to her, the little boy attempting to strangle a goose has a comic element to him.
The goose is practically his size. And of course, the moment is-- because he's twisting around to strangle that
goose that perhaps is going to whip around and nip his little nose off, so there's something cute and funny about
it-- the whole issue of textures here, the flesh of the child, the feathers of the goose and the hair of the child; the
notion of pyramidal stability but in a pinwheel kind of way. Look at the composition where his two splayed legs and
then the legs of the goose-- if we could come around and see it from all sides-- gives us actually very stable
pyramidal kind of composition, but the whole thing torqued by the way in which he pulls back and the way in which
he twists across his chest in dynamic tension; that right arm with that firmly-planted right leg. All of it for a moment,
though.
And the moment can even apply in this new world of an expanded oikoumene to the gods in picking up a page, as
it were, from that book that Praxiteles opened for Greek art back in the 4th century. So here, from the middle of
the 3rd-- about 250 or so BC-- we see an image of Aphrodite. She is about to spring up.
So again, the moment-- this is not a stable dynamic reality. It is surely not an eternalized reality. It's a momentary
reality.
And as much as she is an Olympian, she is very much human. She's naturalized, not idealized. Look at all the
folds across her belly.
Human women may have folds across their bellies when they crouch like that, but not goddesses. But this
goddess looks more like a human even than Praxiteles Phryne did 100 years or so before. There was a kind of
symmetria here also with respect to the balanced imbalance of the way the legs are positioned, and we might
imagine the arms to recapitulate that balanced imbalance from a slightly different angle.
So differently still, this marvelous little image-- all of 8 inches tall or so-- in bronze of a veiled dancer-- also about
to spring but not spring up as the Aphrodite was about to, but to spring out, so to speak. Her arm is about to fly
across and reveal herself to us so that what is concealed is about to be revealed even as, at the same time, parts
of her body that are ostensibly concealed are, in fact, revealed because, once again, the drapery is so tightly
wound around those parts in contrast to the parts that are concealed because of the concatenation the lines and
thicknesses of drapery. And of course, the whole composition is a series of these marvelous geometric forms
contrived not only by the outer shape and volume of the figure overall but by all of the crossed lines that work their
way up and down and around and across this tiny statue that reminds us that, in this Hellenistic world of
expanding cities and expanding interests and different kinds of populations and a cross-referencing of languages
and literatures, of religion, philosophy, of art and historiography that there is a growing class interested in small
statuary that can be collected by them, by private collectors. We are also mindful of the fact that the way-- in this
work and the work of the little boy strangling the goose-- we see a moment that is about to come across in a
horizontal way that recalls in a strange way the Discobolus of Myron of centuries earlier but carried into a new
direction.
So all of this offering us new dialects of the language of tension and relaxedness, of revelation and concealment,
of motion and stasis. And there is no work of the Hellenistic period that speaks that language with these new
dialects more astonishingly than that of the Nike of Samothrace-- known commonly as The Winged Victory -- and
that comes from the late 3rd, early 2nd century, where-- rushing before us-- this victory figure with her torso
completely bared even as it is covered by that cellaphanous quality that shows us her belly and her breasts and
her right leg that contrasts dynamically with the clumping of the drapery that moves from her waist down to her
hips and that offers a separate contrast from the contrast between the two legs, for example-- one of which is
exposed and the other concealed; both of them concealed by drapery, but the one as if it is exposed and the
other tightly concealed. All of this coming to a culmination backwards with these soaring clumps of drapery that
swirl out behind her, that echo the swirl of drapery, which, from the front, is not as apparent as from the side that
slips between her legs and out her back and then, of course, is echoed by those magnificent wings, which, in fact,
contain her arms within them.
Her arms are wings. Her wings are arms. This is, again, victory personified, concretized, allegorized, visualized-that abstraction become all of these things.
And more than that, this figure was placed by choice of the artist-- very carefully sited-- so that, placed on the
peak of a rocky outcropping, so that one can see it from a distance from the front or from the side. One can't
approach it because it's not only rocky outcropping but a kind of gully to either side of that outcropping-- as if it
was swooping in for a landing on the ship's prow. Because the shape of the outcropping is like a ship's prow, it
gives us then another dynamic tension between the winds of her flight that are causing the effect on the garment
and on the body that we see before us and the winds of the sea that are rushing up and pushing against her front
as she soars in onto the ship prow.
So there is a drama of surge and countersurge-- an implied drama between different kinds of wind flows that are
expressed in the different directionalities of the flow of garment and the contrast between garment and wing and
wing and flesh, and so on. The viewers' viewpoint is prescribed, and so we have moved then from works that we
have seen that try to focus the viewers' emotions to a work that-- controlling our prospective-- controls our site
and, therefore, evokes emotion and invokes emotion for us based in part on site. We are awestruck. Our breath is
taken away because this figure soars-- if we're looking from the side-- right past us; or if we're looking from the
front, soars above us.
So emotional drama-- pathos-- in an extended kind of moment and aesthetic contrasts that are multiplied in this
confusing world where nothing seems as simple as, well, I always thought it was. Even gender can seem confused
in the Hellenistic world. So the Sleeping Hermaphrodite of about 150 BC or so blurs one of the ultimate lines of
demarcation within human experience-- gender lines.
From the rear, we see this attractive female-- asleep, one leg delicately just half over the other, her head leaning
on one of her arms. This spectacular representation. And on the other side, we also recognize the breasts of a
female. But if we look carefully, we see there's a phallus as well.
This is the combination of male and female. The word "hermaphrodite," of course, coming from two Greek gods-Hermes and Aphrodite; one who is masculine, the other who is feminine-- in this setting that, together with its
dynamic textural renderings, ultimately blurs the ultimate line. Or is it the ultimate?
There are yet more ultimate ultimate lines-- as in the apparent innocent Eros, whom we see here peacefully
asleep in another work of the 3rd/2nd century, who offers another Hellenistic innovation by way of contrast of
media-- so a bronze little baby on a stone, combining different media. But more to the point in himself, offering a
paradox. He's so sweet. He's so quiet. He's so baby-like as he sleeps. But boy, can he be dangerous when he
awakens.
Everyone who viewed this delicious little work would have remembered-- no doubt-- the story of how Apollo-- the
great far-darter darker at once-- challenged little Eros-- the little son of Aphrodite, the little baby god-- and said,
"Oh, your little bow and arrow. That's just sort of child stuff. I'm the great far-darter." And of course, at that
moment, Eros said, "Yeah. I'll show you who's boss," and shot Apollo with a gold-tipped arrow that caused him to
fall in love passionately-- or perhaps, "in lust" would be a better turn of phrase-- for this young mortal woman, this
daughter of a river god who was passing by at that moment, Daphne.
And at the same moment, Eros shot her with a lead-tipped arrow, so she had nothing but distaste for Apollo. And
everyone knows the story of his attempt to pursue her and her crying out in distress to her father, who saved her
by transforming her into the laurel tree. That little sleeping baby who seems so sweet, innocent, and harmless can
be quite dangerous when he awakens.
New media are very much in evidence when we move through the Hellenistic period-- not just a matter of mixing
media as bronze and stone but introducing new media, such as mosaic. We have before us a spectacular
rendering of the Battle at Issus where Darius III was defeated around the year 333 by Alexander the Great in the
first major encounter of the new Alexander-led forces toward the Achaemenid/Persian Empire. He is now in the
process, over the following couple of years, of dismantling it by defeating Darius in a series of battles.
This work, which is a Roman one based arguably on a Hellenistic original, is a mosaic work of exquisite rendering,
of enormous proportion, and-- most interestingly-- which takes us from the vase painting mode of two-dimensional
arts that we have seen up to this point to the mode of mosaic and mosaic floors and mosaic walls-- mostly floors
more than walls-- and where we see, by way of true-- not significance/perspective-- who is who. We know who
Darius is simply because the artist has placed him on his chariot rising above the fray. We know who Alexander is
for this similar reason. To the left, the artist has raised him above the fray, and we recognize him because, of
course, he is the only one without a helmet. But more to the point, neither of them is larger than the other figures
around them.
And the sense of two-dimensionality as three and three-dimensionality as two is exhibited, for example, by the
horses, who we see twisted and turning in all directions; that horse's rear that is coming directly out at us, just
below Darius. And next to that, a shield in which we see the reflected face of a figure we actually can't really see,
who is lying there. And all we see is the reflection-- in other words, our sense is not only pushed in to where the
reflection is but out to where we can't see him where we are. So that three-dimensionality is very much at issue
here together with the intense pathos that we are expected to feel when we see the terror on the face of Darius.
So, too, the mosaic mode is carried into more straightforward and humbler conditions such as a proliferation of
hunting scenes; mosaics from Pella, the capital up in Macedonia; of Philip and Alexander and their successors. In
a compositional mode, a three-figure composition, which, earlier in the 5th and 4th centuries, had being used in
relief statuary to show Lapiths and centaurs or Amazons and Greeks.
Here, we have it in two-dimensional mosaic mode, and we have hunters and stags-- the idea of symmetria, of
dynamic balance of imbalance. We see here in the two figures-- the one with an axe, the other with a sword-- for
example, the positioning of their legs and their arms; the kind of diagonalized echoes between, for example, the
right-hand figure's left leg to our right rising up to his right elbow; and the horns of the stag that he holds on to, its
antlers. And the back of the stag, and-- on the other hand-- the stag's legs and his other leg and the right leg of
the other fellow are all part and parcel of this three-figure dynamism within this very staid and stabled rectangular
kind of framing.
So new media and expanding the vocabulary of media with which we are familiar-- mosaic to succeed painting on
vases, but then vases painted in a whole new way. A funeral vase, such as we see here-- from South Italy or
Sicily-- gives us a whole expanded vocabulary of color, a whole expanded sense of mood in a scene that is
somewhat familiar to us. This polychrome-- rather than straightforward black figure or red figure-- shows us the
deceased. Her ashes are contained within this pot that holds them. It is a cinerarium. And yet, she lives forever-seated, as it were, at her own funerary banquet; immortalized, who is so mortal, surrounded by her attendants.
So lines are being blurred between mortality and immortality-- as between gender, as between divine and human,
life and death, us and her, male and female, being asleep and being awake, two dimensions and three
dimensions. So one of the new directions that pottery takes is away from the ceramic mode into the direction that
the Derveni Krater of gilded bronze offers, where we actually have this vessel that is overrun with relief-carved
satyrs and maenads or bacchantes swirling their garments-- this dialogue between garments and flesh, between
drapery and hair. The very dynamic moment-to-moment series of motions associated with Dionysius, the god of
wine, who is, after all, the inspirer of the bacchantes and whose followers are the satyrs and who occupies the
central scene on the side of this vase together with Ariadne-- Ariadne, the one who helped Theseus find his way
through the labyrinth, who gave him the sword and the thread, the one he left abandoned on the island of Naxos
on the way home to Athens, but whom Dionysius saw in her beauty and picked up and made his wife.
And so here, we see the two of them together-- one of his legs already over one of her legs-- obviously, well into
their cups and, obviously, the drinking is a prelude to other kinds of activity. But what we see is the dynamic
contrast between his flesh and her drapery-- the contrast between the drapery that conceals her and the drapery
that very clearly does not conceal her body parts. Everything mixed together, divine and human-- like the water
and wine mixed together in this vessel called a "krater"-- a mixing vessel-- for just that sort of combination.
The lines are blurred, crisscrossed. Visions are revisioned in the small elementa and the large ones of the
Hellenistic world and that which approaches it. So revisioning tombs as temples-- both of them are border
territories between our reality and the other, the profonos and the sacer, the human and the divine, the living and
the dead.
We have seen, going back to Egypt, the notion of a tomb that is temple-like. But here, coming from the middle of
the 4th century, toward the Hellenistic period, in this tomb of Mausolus, which is thus called the "mausoleum"-meaning the "temple of Mausolus"-- we see the rise in the Greek world of monumental tombs that circle us back
then to Egyptian inspiration. The top of it is inspired by the pyramid. The middle part is inspired by the continuous
colonnades of late Egyptian architecture that inspired the Greek temples.
But here, between the columns-- there are some 40 of them-- is a series of statuary that represent Mausolus and
his wife and his ancestors but placed in a way that one almost has the impression that they are reliefed carvings
against the backdrop of the wall rather than freestanding statues. So the line between two dimensions and three
dimensions, which earlier we have seen engaged by way of relief carving made to look as if it's freestanding, is
reversed here. Freestanding statuary is made to look as if it is relief carved.
The altar of Zeus at Pergamon-- dating from about 180-- transforms an altar into a temple-sized structure. What
you're looking at here is just one wing of an altar. The stairs that you see toward the right of the image are the
stairs you would be going up to the altar of offering-- just at the top of the stairs-- and what you have to your left,
you'd have to your right. And before you, an extensive complex, which is the size of a temple but is merely an
altar.
Altars of temple-size-- like tombs of temple-type-- are part and parcel of this expanding world of visual and
conceptual thought that we think of as Hellenistic. So we see verticals and horizontals, typically, and diagonals that
are in dialogue with each other; so we see a dialogue between the very staid and strict rectilinearity of the upper
part of the structure and its dialogue with the stairs. And those two elements and the figures on the other that are
spilling off the lower part of the side's structure onto the stairs-- figures that are part and parcel of a
gigantomachy-- the battle between the gods and the Titans and giants-- to establish the order of things as we
know it. This is the confrontation of chaos and order.
Figures break the frame. They fall off the wall onto the stairs. In other words, we're walking up the stairs and
they're falling off onto the stairs with us. They are one with us. We are one with them.
And we look at some of the details. And aside from the exquisite rendering of bodies, aside from the exquisite
contrasts of texture between human-like flesh-- that of the giants and gods-- and equine flesh or leonine flesh, we
also recognize an intense range of pathos-- the snarling pathos of the lion that reminds us of that vase where
Perikles was battling in the Nemean lion, the figures with their scopatic eyes, those deep-set diagonalized eyes,
those slightly-turned heads that give us a sense of suffering, of pathos.
Suffering and pathos in a world where alienation is so endemic, in an extended and expanding oikoumene-where Greece swallows up and is swallowed up by the east at the outset with Alexander's journey and, in the end,
will be swallowed up by Rome to the west. And Rome will see itself as coming from the Trojan hero Aeneas-Aeneas who fled a burning Troy and ultimately came to Italy.
In the statue complex of Laocoon-- from about 180 or so-- we see the moment of Troy's doomed being spelled
out. We see that moment when fate has decreed that Troy must be destroyed, and so Poseidon-- the patron of
the city-- is the one who sends up the serpent, who devours the priest, Laocoon, who says to the Trojans, "Don't
take that horse inside. It's not a good thing like you think. It's a bad thing."
Poseidon's serpent devouring Laocoon, so his fellow Trojans understand that, if Poseidon himself is destroying
Laocoon, Laocoon must be wrong. Yes, let's take that horse into the city. And the rest, as they say, is history-- or
perhaps mythology.
So we see, in this magnificent work, the struggle between Laocoon and his sons, on the one hand, and the
serpent on the other. We see dynamic contrasts between his flesh and their flesh and the flesh of the serpent-the diagonal that describes his struggle. We feel the tension as if we are one step from the moment when the
serpent's coils will have tightened to such an extent that blood is about to burst onto the ground below us. We're
then two steps from taking the horse into the city, which means we're three steps from the destruction of the city,
which means we're four steps from Aenaes's flight from the city and his long journey that will ultimately bring him
to Italy, which means we're five steps from the founding of the founding of Rome that will ultimately swallow up the
Hellenistic oikoumene and the art of which we will encounter in our next lecture.
Thomas Edison State College | 07 Hellenistic, Etruscan, and Early Roman Art
[MUSIC PLAYING]
One of the obvious questions we ask when we begin the discussion of Roman art is where does it begin,
specifically in relationship to Hellenistic art, or put another way, where does Hellenistic art end in relationship to
Roman art. That is, the Hellenistic world, the expanded oikoumene of the Hellenistic world, is ultimately continued
and expanded by Rome over the centuries that follow Rome's expansion west so that there's an obvious sense in
which Rome is merely a continuation of the Hellenistic oikoumene.
Rome specifically engages the Hellenistic Greeks already in the late third, early second centuries by a series of
Macedonian wars there in Corinth in 196. They're back in Corinth to stay in 146. In 133, the last king of
Pergamon, Attalus III, leaves his kingdom in his will to Rome. So Rome therefore has an invited foothold into
Anatolia, western what is now Turkey. By the time of Antony and Cleopatra, of course, and the defeat at Actium in
31, Rome has encompassed the entire Mediterranean, but in so doing, has encompassed and continued so much
of the Hellenistic Greek world.
From the perspective of Rome's own identity, another sub-question we'll have been asked along the way, when
does the republic, the res publica, the people's thing that Rome triumphantly speaks of in speaking about itself,
when does it become an imperium? So one could argue that already in the fourth pre-Christian century as Rome
is starting to expand and dominate Italy, or by the third century, when it is expanding to dominate the Western
Mediterranean.
Certainly by the second then the first half of the first century BCE, the Romans have come to dominate most of the
Mediterranean. So at what point does the republic cease to be a republic although the form of the Republican
government, the Senate, will continue all the way to 476 CEAD and the end of the Western Empire from the
founding of the Republican in 508 to the time of Actium in 31 to the declaration by the Roman Senate of Octavian
as Augustus Caesar the Great One, we have that growing question for many Romans.
So Roman art and Hellenistic art have a kind of relationship whereby the one often copies and emulates the other.
In fact, many of the Greek works we've seen over the last couple of lectures have actually been Roman copies.
Fortunately, because in many cases, the Greek originals no longer exist. But at the same time, we ask, do the
Romans do more than merely copy? Do they do more than imitate and emulate?
And the answer is yes. They add to. They subtract from. And I believe they innovate. If we look back at The
Laocoon, the last image from our previous lecture, we recall that it represents a story of that moment where Rome
is ultimately experiencing its creation and destruction.
That is, this is the moment when the Trojan priest Laocoon is destroyed by the serpent sent up by Poseidon when
he says to the Trojans, don't take in that horse. And his destruction leads to the Trojan taking in of the horse,
which leads to destruction of Troy, which leads to the escape from Troy by Aeneas and ultimately his arrival in
Italy, which will be the beginnings of the beginnings of Rome itself.
If we look at this work carefully, we recognize features that we can identify as Hellenistic in terms of pathos, in
terms of this dramatic struggle between this heroic and muscular figure whom we see virtually nude except for the
textual contrasts offered by his drapery, between him and the serpent, the contrast between his flesh and his
muscles, and the softer flesh and softer muscles of his sons, the marvelous contrast between his hair and beard
and between their hair, between all of their human flesh and the scales of the serpent.
This dramatic struggle, we understand to have Hellenistic qualities to it. But the interesting thing is that the Greek
story speaks of one son. And here we see two sons. And if we look for a source for two sons, it's a Roman source.
In Virgil's Aeneid, it's Aeneas relating the story to Dido in Carthage of the destruction of Troy that gives us the
most magnificent description of this moment in which two serpents envelop the priest and his two sons.
So one might argue, it's my own pet theory, that what we have here is a Hellenistic original of Laocoon and his
son spilling off its pedestal, as we've seen happens with Hellenistic work, as for example, we saw in the altar of
Zeus at Pergamon. And the Romans, I would suggest, had added the secondary base below and added the
second son.
Now they would have had to do some recarving with respect to serpent and its relationship to human. But on the
other hand, this work was found in 1506 in fragments and then put back together again. So we're not quite certain
how it originally looked anyway. Well I could be right. I could be wrong.
The point is that the relationship between Hellenistic and Roman art is an interesting and complex one. And one
could ask the same sort of question with respect to the relationship between Roman art and Etruscan art, since
after all, in the Roman tradition, the Etruscans were so to say their elder Italic brothers, dominating them, in fact,
between the end of the seventh and the beginning, excuse me, the end of the sixth century in a series of Etruscan
kings until the republic was founded.
And so we see here before us what is popularly referred to as the Capitoline Wolf, a work that is said to date from
about 500 or so, and which is typically understood to be an Etruscan work originally. That is to say, the wolf, its
careful carving, the very rigid way in which she stands and turns her head in a very rigid way, and the very rigid
representation of the mouth and the eyes, a ferocity which is very stylized, are all taken to be Etruscan.
Of course, one issue that we immediately recognize is that this work was hit by lightning in the 16th century. And
one can still see on the backside the damage and the two little babies, Romulus, and Remus, as we have them,
were placed there by Pollaiuolo. So we don't know in fact whether for a fact there were two babies there in the first
place. So whether this was a work that represents Romulus and Remus, the founders of the city of Rome in 753,
some 450 years after Aeneas, being suckled by the she wolf, as the Roman historian Livy discusses in the first
century BC, or whether it was just a wolf to which later on the babes were added.
In 2007, an Italian archaeologist has asserted that he's chemically analyzed the bronze and that it actually dates
from the sixth century, that it's a Christian work. And it's not even a Roman, much less an Etruscan work. Others
disagree with him. The point is not right or wrong. The point is to recognize that we can't be certain about so many
of these interesting border kinds of issues, the Romans vis a vis the Greeks, the Romans vis a vis the Etruscans,
in the matter of the productivity of art.
If we look for a moment at one of the more typical manifestations of Etruscan artistic skill, and the Etruscans were
known for their bronzes, for their mirrors, neatly and nicely incized with mythological scenes, and for beautiful
jewelry, but also for great terracotta work. So we see here before us a spectacular terracotta sarcophagus, which
represents what is not entirely unfamiliar to us from the Hellenistic period, that is, someone lying on his funerary
couch or her funerary couch.
What is unfamiliar is that we have her and him together, husband and wife, lying lovingly together on this
celebratory couch, which bespeaks what we take to be an attitude towards women among the Etruscans very
different from that among the Greeks, where women stayed separate from men. Or women had very little to do
with the world outside the home. Here it would seem that there is a closer relationship between men and women,
even as in looking at the faces of these two figures, we recognize the influence and the imprint of the archaic
Greek style.
This work dates from about 520 BC or so, so the late archaic period in Greek terms, as we discussed a few
lectures back. And we see the archaic smile. We see the stylized eyes, the stylized hair, the stylized nose on both
of them that recognizes the influence of Greece. Because the Greeks, of course, had been establishing, by that
point, settlements in Sicily and southern Italy for a couple of hundred years and had increasing contacts with the
Etruscans, who nonetheless create this setting in a different way from the Greeks, as far as any Greek art that we
have.
If we turn to one of the more famous bronzes of the fourth or third or second century BC, the so-called Capitoline
Brutus, we come back to that question of Romans vis a vis Etruscans, for Brutus together with Collatinus is one
half of the pair that overthrew the last Etruscan king, according to the Roman tradition. They overthrew Tarquinius
Superbus in 509, establishing the res publica, the people's thing, at that point. And this is taken to be, by tradition,
a rendering of Brutus.
Well, whether it is Brutus or not, the larger question is, is he a Roman? And if he's a Roman, who made him? Is
this a work of art by Roman artist? Or is it a work of art by an Etruscan artist? It looks very Etruscan in terms of the
rigidity of presentation, in terms of the finely rendered detail work that we find in other Etruscan bronzes. So was it
done by an Etruscan under commission for a Roman? Is it done by a Roman who worked in an Etruscan
workshop? It's very difficult to know for sure.
What we have, in any case, is a very idealized visage with the eyes still staring out, with a careful rendering of the
hair and the beard, this marvelous garment, the pallium, the cloak around his shoulders, and the work that falls
onto the border between Roman and Etruscan thought. But as with so many other things, the Romans would take
this ball of portraiture and run with it beyond emulation and imitation toward something which is innovative and all
their own.
If we look, for example, at a soldier farmer from about 80 BC, we observe of him that he's idealized but not as a
youth, not in the way that elsewhere and otherwise we've seen idealizing people. He's idealized as a man of the
Earth, as someone who first served Rome for 30 years as a soldier, and then in retirement continues to serve
Rome as a farmer working its earth.
And we see all of that carved across his face with his sucked-in cheeks, the lacking teeth, obviously, the broken
nose, the marvelous wrinkles across the forehead, and the bags underneath the eyes. This is someone who is as
sturdy as the earth itself, who exhibits a kind of pietas, a piety, that important Roman trait.
And we can see that in a second Roman portrait of the first century BC, a Roman patrician who shows us how he
wants to be seen. We recognize the Greekified stylization of his garments, those wonderful draperies, and the
crisscrossings of lines, and the symmetry of positioning of the legs, and the one knee that pushes out, and the
other knee that is obscured by the drapery. But that's not the issue. The issue is we see him and with him we see
his father and grandfather. The patrician and his ancestors are what we see.
This is naturalistic pietas once again, which we can recognize even to extend to imperial portraits. That is, pietas
on the one hand and naturalism on the other. Imperial portraits are almost always identifiable by us, because they
are so tied to the particular subject that when I look at this face. I know it's Hadrian. It's Hadrian identified by his
neat curls. It's Hadrian identified by that short beard that associates him with philosophers.
It's Hadrian who ruled over the empire when it was at its greatest extent between 118 and 137, who himself came
from Spain, so in other words, was part of the Antonine line that underscored the fact that Rome's greatness was
in part due to their obscuring ethnic citizenship and elevating political citizenship. I could even be the emperor if I
were good enough, even though I'm not Roman. I'm not even Italian. I came from Spain.
And one can see that in a second imperial portrait from the third century. This is Philippus Arabus, Philip the Arab,
who comes from the Middle East, and who is the Roman emperor between 244 and 249. And we can see perhaps
in his very worried expression in those deep-set almost scopatic eyes his concern for that overextended empire
and how he's going to maintain it.
So even Roman imperial portraiture is individualized rather than stylized. And in fact, the exception to prove the
rule is all the representations that have survived of Augustus, the most famous of them perhaps being the portrait
of him from the villa of Prima Porta associated with his wife Livia, which portrait dates by tradition to about 15 AD
commissioned by his successor and adoptive son Tiberius.
Augustus died at 77. That's not a 77-year-old man you see before you. You see someone in the peak of his
prime, in his 20s. You see someone dressed in a military uniform gesturing as if he's giving a speech to his troops.
And you see him commanding, therefore, the troops, and you and me, the space before him, placed with his back
to a niche. You would come out into the garden of Livia's villa. And there before you in that niche would be the
emperor himself.
And this work compares very obviously with that classic Doryphoros by Polykleitos of the mid-fifth century, except
for the obvious differences. Polykleitos's interest is in the body of his subject, whom he has therefore represented
as nude. He wants his subject to be seen from all around. He wants the subject's muscles to be part of the picture.
He is interested in symmetria of the legs and the arms as we have earlier discussed several lectures ago.
Whereas the artist who has created Augustus, while he has an interest in symmetria, while he has an interest in
representing his figure, his figure is represented as the emperor, clothed not because the artist cares one way or
the other about his body, but because the importance of this work is its educated, its propagandistic role in what
you and I see in it, because this work commemorates Augustus's feet back in 20 BC, when he'd reclaimed the
Roman standards in defeating the Parthians, those standards that had been lost to the Parthians when Crassus
had lost them and been killed fighting back in 53 BC.
So we have this moment of Augustus having recaptured the standards. And that's what we see represented on his
breastplate. And then the peculiar thing you see is that he's wearing a soldier's uniform. But he's barefoot. And it
is the barefoot representation that suggests that he is dead so that it was done posthumously. Why else would he
be barefoot?
By his side, of course, is a little Cupid, a little Eros riding a dolphin. And that's to remind the viewer that his
ancestry is Aeneas, and Aeneas is the son of Venus, who is associated, obviously, both with Cupid and with the
dolphin as she was born out of the sea. The mytho-historical elements of Augustus conveyed by that the fact of
his bringing back the Roman standards.
That's the issue here. Roman art is educative. It is propagandistic one might say. No work is more symptomatic in
that regard than that which Augustus himself created, the Ara Pacis, the altar of peace, that when he came back
from Spain and Gaul in the year 13 BC, he began to construct and was finished by about 9 BC. It was placed on
the campus Marchius, the field of Mars northwest of the city, so that one accessed it from the west and therefore
looking to the east. And Rome is behind it, so to say, as the sun rises. So Rome rises to the east as one is looking
towards this altar.
Its marble casement, its marble screen, which is what we see before us here, is along its lower parts a symphonic
representation of fecundity, of rich fertility, of carefully orchestrated and yet dynamically individuated elements of
vegetal and floral and occasional animal parts. And on the interior of this outer screen, the lower part suggests
wooden slats to connote the old values of the old Republic when altars and their casements were in wood before
we had marble to use as they used here, and above it, a series of swags, a Roman invention to suggest fertility
and fecundity. That's what we see on the upper part of the inside. And then the altar itself is within that.
On the upper part of the outer rung, we have the embodiment of Roman leadership as Pious and as family
directed. It's an imperial procession that recalls the procession of the Panathenea on the Parthenon, but of course
with a more rhythmic and a more staid or less dynamic kind of activity than those writers on horses represented
there, and at the same time stayed serious and yet family-oriented, all those little children.
Augustus himself is shown as the high priest in this procession. On the image you see before you, we've moved
back a bit from him. And the first figure on your left, the tall one, is his best friend, his son-in-law, his adopted son,
the guy who helped him win Actium, Agrippa. And that cute little child right next to Agrippa is young Gaius, the
step-nephew of Augustus who will one day grow up to be Caligula. The next figure, that tall woman, is Augustus's
daughter Julia.
And other images around the periphery show senators and priests in this marvelous lineup that bespeaks pietas. I
remind you that Aeneas's epithet is pious. He's pious Aeneas as compared with Odysseus, who is swift-witted or
Achilles, who is swift-footed, those Greek models are individualized models.
Aeneas as a Roman model is a model of community. He must lead those around him. He must be constantly
aware of those who've come before him and those who will come after him. And that's the kind of code that
Augustus is trying to promote as he promotes the notion that he has saved the republic and not brought it finally to
its end.
The part of the Ara Pacis screen facing Rome itself is in fact dominated by the earth, Romulus and Remus. And to
our left, the earth air is rising on a swan. And to our right, the sea breeze is rising on a sea monster, their
garments puffed out to suggest wind, the fecundity, fertility all around, the fertility and fecundity of Italy brought
about by the Pax Romana.
So Roman art copies. It borrows. It imitates. It emulates. It transforms. It adds. It deletes from Greek, from
Etruscan, from Egyptian sources. It innovates. And it educates. Nothing is more innovative than the Roman arch,
the freestanding monumental triumphal arch, such as the arch of triumph of Titus that was built to honor him by
his brother Domitian.
And arches such as this typically either stood at the meeting of the two main streets in a Roman city, the cargo
and the decumonos or stood on the edge of the city, marking the beginning of the city itself and the beginning of
the wilderness beyond. Here the Arch of Titus marks the border between the area leading up to and the area
leading into the old Roman forum. What runs under it is the sacred way, the Sacra Via.
We see embedded Corinthian columns. But the Romans could take arches and columns. And combine them to
create extraordinary structures based on a combination of artistic and engineering skill.
So at the same period, the period of Vespasian Titus and Domitian, the great double theater, the both theater, the
ambitheater, the amphitheater known as the Colosseum, because it stood near what had once been the site of a
colossal statue of Nero as the sun god, is one of scores of amphitheaters that the Romans built across their world,
in which the arched idea has enabled them both to take the Greek half-moon theater out of the mountain side,
and stand it up, and to take two of them, as it were. And put them together to give us an ambi, a double theater, in
this case, marked by order. You see the order of Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian embedded columns between the
arches that work around the periphery.
On the inside, surrounded by seats that could fit some 55,000 spectators in them, sometimes sand, harena. And
so it's called the arena. More often, irregular landscapes with rocks and trees, so the audience sitting up in the
seats can see what is going on down below when the protagonist themselves cannot. Animals against animals.
Animals against humans. Humans against humans.
Up in those seats, we feel while we're watching those efforts going on below, like the gods themselves. The
Romans are, in a sense, self-considered as God-like in that they order the chaos of nature. No kind of Roman
contrivance using arches is more obvious for that purpose than the aqueducts, the leaders of water, which is what
aqueduct means.
The most famous and lengthiest for Rome was the Appian aqueduct, which moved water some 50 miles, 80
kilometers, to the city. Every 1,000 feet, it would go down about a foot. That's how carefully it was rated.
The most famous of these aqueducts, of course, is the Pont du Gard, from 19 BC, named The Bridge of the River
Guard in what is now southern France, some 49 meters, 165 feet high or so, and that carried water some 31
miles to the Roman city of Nemausus, which we call Nimes today, going at a slow gradation of changing one foot
every 3,000 feet, in other words, ignoring the irregularities of nature, ignoring the irregular forms of nature, as it
regularizes the passage of water carefully to the city.
The Romans are about rethinking and reshaping space. The Roman city grows around fora, open spaces. In the
image before you, you have a reconstruction of the center of Rome by about the middle of the second century.
You have the old Roman forum and beyond it, the forum that Julius Caesar created with a temple to Venus at one
end of it. Beyond that, the forum of Augustus, with a temple to Mars the Avenger, Mars Ultor, and next to it, the
narrow form of Nerva, and beyond Augustus's forum on the other side, the forum of Trajan, a whole series of
spaces marked by structures, marked by colonnades around the periphery of those spaces.
And the same sort of principle applied to private homes. So if we look to the House of the Silver Wedding at
Pompeii, we see a space, an atrium open to the sky with a fountain, an impluvium to catch the rainwater in the
center, a series of columns, and around that, the walls with doorways leading into the rooms around the
periphery. And that would in turn lead to a second open area, a garden area with columns all around it, therefore
called a peristyle, stylos meaning column, peri meaning around, so columns all around it.
So architecture, envelopment of space, the development of the arch in particular and its different uses is one
aspect of Roman innovation. A second aspect is the creation of a new kind of monument, the monumental
column, the commemorative column, so the arch and the column as two key Roman architectural contributions to
the history of civilization.
The one before us is a column built about 113 or so to commemorate the wars that Trajan fought with the
Dacians, that is, in the area of what is now Romania in 101-2 and 105-6. We recognize that the Romans have in
fact adapted an earlier idea. So often they did. So we see before us now an obelisk, an Egyptian obelisk, this one
from Ramses the Second's temple of Amon at Luxor.
And so this squared, rising figure is overrun with hieroglyphic descriptions of Ramses and his accomplishments.
And what the Romans have, of course, in turn done is made, rather than rectilinear, a circular kind of contrivance,
made it even larger so that the Column of Trajan is about 98 feet high. That's without its pedestal. Add the
pedestal and it comes to about 125 feet high, made of 20 carrara marble drums that have been carefully laid one
on top of the other, with an interior staircase of about 185 stairs and windows periodically to allow light in, and the
whole thing carved up with an extraordinary range and array of reliefs that are perhaps inspired by Assyrian relief
carving.
It's an encyclopedic effort. There are some 2,500 figures up this column. No zoom lenses in those days to see the
details. So most of its intention was to overwhelm and impress the viewer as opposed to have the viewer actually
be able to read all the details and understand all the features of the narrative. Although, at the bottom range, one
can see here a detail everyone would recognize, the river god, the Danube, rising up, the ships behind him, to
watch the Roman troops leaving their camp to go battle the Dacians, their camp signified by an arch, because the
arch comes to symbolize not only Rome but Roman encampments everywhere.
Later on in the same century, there would be a second column modeled on the Column of Trajan built to
commemorate Marcus Aurelius's ongoing battles in the Danube area with the Teutons and the Sarmatians and
the Marcomani and the Quadi, he was constantly in the saddle from 166 to his death in 180. And this work was
built to commemorate those wars and was finished about 193.
It's a little bit higher than Trajan's Column, about 100 feet rather than 98, and a few more steps than Trajan's
Column's had on the inside. And most importantly, on the outside, the carving is deeper. The relief is higher. The
heads are larger vis a vis the body so that one can really see facial expressions.
Pathos is more of an issue here. We see prisoners being rounded up on the second register to the upper left. On
the lower register, we see prisoners being fought against and women and children being rounded up in the lower
right and everything filled with pathos except the image of the emperor himself, one rendition of which we see on
the lower right-hand corner there, who holds forth with ethos, with calm. So pathos and ethos in the back and forth
between the images of the emperor and the images of the Roman soldiers and the images of the various barbari
whom they are defeating.
Overall, to overwhelm is the issue and the idea, obviously, in both of these cases. The Romans take an Egyptian
and an Assyrian idea or pair of ideas and synthesize them to innovate something new. They extend the idea of
synthesis and syncretism from the Hellenistic period. And as such, they cement the foundations of Western art,
the lower portions of which have been laid by the civilizations that precede them. And from Rome, we'll continue
the edifice of Western art within it, to either side of it, and forward up from it as we move through history, as we
shall continue to move in our next lecture.
Thomas Edison State College | 08 Roman and Judaean Art
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Rome's identity as a people's thing, a republic, a res publica, as opposed to an imperium, a power that doesn't
consider the right and the needs of the people, is something that the Romans, themselves, are starting to worry
about already in the fourth century. They at that time are starting to dominate central Italy and expanding north
and south. By the third century, in a pair of wars with the Carthaginians, of course, they come to dominate the
Western Mediterranean. And by the end of that time, as we move from the third into the second centuries, their
power is starting to creep east into the Eastern Mediterranean.
They have a series of three wars with the Macedonians, and gradually they swallow up the Hellenistic powers one
after the other, culminating finally in the success of Octavian and Agrippa against Antony and Cleopatra at Actium
in 31. And the last Hellenistic kingdom, the Egyptian kingdom, has been encompassed. And thereafter, one might
say, as many have, that the Mediterranean becomes a Roman lake.
So as such, Rome becomes then not only the heir to the Hellenistic ideas of synthesis, but the heir to the very
principle of encompassing different kinds of peoples so that synthesis is almost inevitable. And one might wonder
what kind of influence Rome has not only from others unto itself but from itself unto others as it comes to
dominate that world. Roman art and architecture, as we have seen in part, continues. Hellenistic syncretism,
Roman art is influenced from the Greeks, of course, from the Etruscans, from the Egyptians, even to an extent
from the Syrians. But Roman art is not only imitative emulative, as we have said, but also innovative as in
particular the triumphal arch represents.
And so if we start this lecture by looking at the very arch we saw in the previous one, the Arch of Titus, an arch
that was built to commemorate Titus's accomplishments by his younger brother, Domitian, and Titus was emperor
between 79 and 81. So the arch dates, therefore, from the early '80s. We understand it not only has the
Corinthian embedded columns to which I referred in my previous lecture. It not only has the inscription across the
top that signifies not that his brother, Domitian, but that the Senate decreed this arch. And on the underside, the
representation of what his most important accomplishments were, and in Titus's case, the key accomplishment
was the completion of the suppression of the, for Rome, painfully long revolt against their authority in Judea, 65 to
70 AD.
And if one adds an epilogue of Masada, the Romans were still dealing with Judean rebelliousness until the year
73. So here we see on the underside of the arch Rome, itself, personified by an arch, as we have seen before,
Roman soldiers moving into the arch, carrying on their shoulders the Roman standards with the letters SPQR,
Senatus Populusque Romanus, Senate and People of Rome, and the Judean captives carrying on their shoulders
the seven-branched candelabrum, the seven-branched menorah from the temple in Jerusalem. And that image
causes us to ask a kind of double question.
The first part is, is that image an actual representation of the seven-branched menorah of the temple in Jerusalem
or some stylized rendering of it on the part of the Romans? And in turn, we might be inclined to ask, given the
details of this menorah as we see it here, how influenced were other peoples, and in this case, the Judeans, by
Roman art and architecture in their own style? So what is the influence on Judea as a symptom of the larger
influence of the Romans all around?
We have clues to the answer to that question in looking at the menorah and particularly at its stem, at the
bottommost part of which we see a series of fronds. It's the kind of frond motif that we recognize from
Achaemenid Persian furniture. And then we remember that the first temple built by Solomon was destroyed by the
Babylonians, and 50 years later, it was Cyrus II, the Achaemenid Persian monarch, who after he defeated the
Babylonians permitted the Judeans in the year 538 to go back and rebuild their temple.
So if their temple was rebuilt under Achaemenid Persian patronage, it stands to reason that it might have included
any number of Achaemenid-style features, including that frond motif. So that would suggest that we are seeing
something as it might have looked, really, when that second temple still stood until the Romans destroyed it 600
years later. Ezekiel, in chapters 40 and following of his biblical book, also talks about the second temple, the
temple for him of the future, and describes it as a longhouse structure.
His description is added to for us by Josephus, the Judean historian writing under Roman patronage in the first
century AD, who speaks about the expanding three courtyards outside the temple, the outermost one to which
anyone could enter, called the Courtyard of the Gentiles, the second one, to which Judean men and women could
enter, called the Courtyard of the Women, and the innermost one, to which Judean men alone could enter, called
the Courtyard of the Israelites. And we realize, of course, by the time Josephus is writing, well, that Achaemenid
Persian Empire has been swallowed up by Alexander the Great, who defeats Darius III and ends the empire
around the year 330, 331 or so.
Alexander has come and gone. He's been succeeded by Ptolemy and Seleucus and his other buddies who carved
up his empire into Hellenistic kingdoms. And the Judeans, themselves, were subject briefly back and forth to the
Ptolemies and the Seleucids and ultimately achieve independence led by the Maccabees or the Hasmoneans, a
story told and celebrated in the festival of Hanukkah every year, in the 160s BC. And in turn, Judean
independence culminated in the figure of Herod the Great, who was the last independent king before Judea
essentially was itself swallowed up by the Romans.
Now, along the way, we find that Judean art and architecture was interested in and influenced by the world around
it, not just the Achaemenid Persians, but after that, the Hellenistic world. So if we look at a spectacular tomb in the
Kidron Valley just outside Jerusalem, we recognize in this image the influence of Egypt, this pyramid kind of roof,
and Greece, the Ionic-style pilasters. And we recognize, moreover, that the mere fact of a tomb that is as large as
this recalls the kind of large tomb initiated into the Hellenistic world by Mausolus, who, himself, combined Egyptian
and Greek elements. So the combinations that are endemic to Hellenistic art, we're finding in this so-called tomb
of Zechariah of the third-second second century in the Kidron Valley.
Moreover, that Hellenistic penchant for illusion and for causing the viewer to have to look twice to realize what he
or she is seeing is very much in evidence here as well. If you look carefully at the image at the bottom of it, the
bottom right, you can see the entryway into the tomb. And we realize that this structure with these carved steps
leading up to what is then a solid wall, although we're intended from front on to have the illusion of space, column,
space, column and it's pyramidal top, that all of that is in any case a solid marker of the tomb below and not the
tomb itself.
So along the way from the Achaeminds to the Romans, we have strong evidence that the Judeans, at least the
nobility, the upper class, was very much concerned with and emulative of the Hellenistic world around. And when
we arrive to Herod, the last independent Judean King, he, himself, who ironaically enough was actually Nabateaen
on his mother's side, Iidumaean on his father's side, whose grandfather had been defeated by the Judeans,
whose father was involved in Judean politics, who became, himself, king over Judea, just in case you thought this
era was a simple one to understand, the last independent king of Judea is not really a Judean. Herod is not really
a Judean, and yet he's king over Judea.
And he who was Rome's great client state, who in fact served as a kind of buffer to the southeastern border with
the Nabateaen and the Idumaean's, he, himself, was obsessed with Roman style. So Josephus, in fact, writes
about how he expanded the Temple Mount area because as a non-Judean, he also wanted to impress the
Judeans whom now he ruled that he's really with them. And so he expands the Temple Mount, expanding in
particular the outer courtyard, creating a peristyle that is a kind of, well, forum on the Temple Mount with columns
all around the periphery, as we have seen happen in Roman public and private spaces, alike. He added in the
northwest corner a palace complex for himself, a small one. You might call it a kind of observation post so he
could look from there down into the temple precincts and see what was going on.
So his desire to please the Judeans must have backfired at the same time because doing that surely displeased
the priesthood and therefore displeased the Judeans, a complicated condition, to be sure. But he also
refurbished, according to Josephus, the temple itself, at least its front facade, so that he [? vetted ?] the whole
thing with marble. And the pair of columns, that you may recall, were traditional to the longhouse temples of those
the Greeks called the Phoenicians, whom Solomon's biblical terms called the Tyrians, who are otherwise referred
to in the Bible as the Canaanites. That pair of columns which stood before the temple of Solomon has, in Herod's
refurbishing of the second temple, become a pair of embedded pilasters made of bronze [? vetted ?] with gold.
And Josephus describes this in terms of arriving to Jerusalem from a distance as if there is a snow-covered
mountain in that distance because of the marble and the gold glinting in the sunlight and all. It must have been a
spectacular contrivance, but here's the thing. We come back to the question of the menorah, the bottom of the
stem with the Achaemenid fronds. We've come through the Hellenistic period. We come to Herod and the Roman
period and his obsession with Rome.
And, lo and behold, what do we find on the base as it is represented in the Arch of Titus? A zodiac motif, which
one might suppose Herod, himself, added because this was a particularly popular Hellenistic and Roman, but
particularly Roman, motif. That is to say, we have 12 rectangular lozenges. In each of them, there is a zodiacal
motif. But we also understand that the twelveness of the zodiac could work as a [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH], as a
symbol, of the Judeans in the sense of their own ancestry as 12 Israelite tribes.
So it would seem that long before losing their independence to Rome, because when Herod who took power in 37
died in 4 BC, in effect, Judea lost its independence. In effect, at that point, Augustus put in place the governor kind
of program, known as procuratorship, that caused the procurator, the sub-governor of Judea, to answer to the
governor of Syria, to Senate of Rome. Of course, the most famous of these fellows, coming a generation later, is a
fellow by the name of Pontius Pilate. But that change which removed the independence of Judea came well after
Judea had already been swallowed up, culturally speaking, by Rome.
And by that time, Rome, itself, is engaged in its own artistic journey. We will recall that the Hellenistic image of
Alexander defeating Darius, the last Achaemenid Persian King, at the Battle of Issus around 333 is referred to as
based on a Hellenistic original, but that the actual image, itself, that we looked at a few lectures back and that we
look at again now is a Roman mosaic from Pompeii. So either we are here speaking, once again, of a Roman
copiest, a brilliant one, copying a Greek original, and then we don't know whether the Greek original was, itself,
mosaic or painted or whether this is actually an original Roman work.
In any case, the Romans become very inventive and very original with respect to the painting of walls that cause
the wall gradually, in a sense, to disappear. So if one looks at an example of a wall painting from the house of
Sallust, so-called, from Pompeii from the late second pre-Christian century in the style that's referred to as first
style or encrusted style, even with the damage that has been sustained, we understand what the Roman artist is
engaged in. What would have been a flat, undifferentiated wall has, as it were, been broken up into a series of
different parts, colored differently, some to convey the illusion of marble so that instead of having this solid wall,
one has a sense of a lighter facade, broken up, as it is.
And so space is, as it were, being controlled. That Roman desire to transform space, to paint away walls, is
profound as we move from the first to what is called the second style of Roman painting, exemplified here by a
work also from Pompeii from about 50 BC or so, what is referred to because of this wall painting or this series of
paintings as the Villa of the Mysteries. What apparently we see is a series that shows a young woman being
initiated into the mysteries. And in the image, the corner to which we're looking here, we can see one of the
renditions of her, toward the corner, facing over her shoulder as if she might flee from what she is seeing.
So perhaps she won't go through with the initiation. And what is it that she is seeing? A figure, an old, satyr-like
man, holding in his hand some kind of a vessel and a young man staring into it and seeing either the reflection of
his own face and/or the reflection of the mask that is being held behind his head by the third individual so that
from our purpose what is significant here is that we are speaking not of a flat surface, but of a surface treated as if
it's not that, as if we are looking into space.
We understand the implications of the young man looking into a reflection. That means that he is looking at
something that we can't see that pushes into our space. It means that there is a kind of balance between what
he's seeing there and the head held behind him. And the whole thing is set, if you look carefully, as if it's taking
place on a kind of stage because in a fool-the-eye, a trompe l'oeil manner, the lower third or so, the lower part of
the wall, is painted as if it's a ledge or a stage coming out towards us, just as the uppermost part of the wall is
painted as if it's a series of marble slabs.
And this notion, then, of changing a flat wall into something that dissipates it is nowhere more wonderfully done
than in the image that comes from Livia's Villa at Prima Porta, that same villa discussed briefly in lecture 7 where
the statue of Augustus commanding us before him once stood. In that villa was a room that we like to call her
garden room. I imagine her having her breakfast in this room, done about 20 BC or so, where she is surrounded
not by walls but by a wattle fence and beyond the fence grasses and trees and bushes and fruits and animals and
birds. I can almost imagine her hearing all of the sounds of the forest outside when she is sitting inside this room
with its walls gone.
Or we might look at a Nile landscape that comes from Pompeii in the early first century in which we see pygmies
battling crocodiles and hippopotami. And we see buildings, and we see trees. And we see a sense of the river and
a sense of depth and perspective and almost a sense of sky. These are among the earliest efforts towards
landscape within the Western artistic tradition that the Romans offer to us, framed, as you can see, in a dark
frame placed, as it were, against a red background.
So the wall is painted away by presenting a series of paintings on it, so to say. One might compare this with
Etruscan wall paintings such as we find only in the tombs of Tarquinia and such places. So here in the necropolis,
the city of the dead, below where the dead will live forever, perhaps, or hope for another world, we see the world
of today as the world of tomorrow.
We see hunting and fishing. We see dolphins, and we see boats. And we see people with their fishing lines, and
we see birds flitting around. It's a stunning and magnificent representation of the world as the Etruscans
presumably imagined it would be after death.
And the question is, might the Romans have seen any of these wall paintings? They are, after all, underground in
tombs, so the answer is, maybe yes, maybe no. But whether they did or they didn't, they carried their sense of
how to paint a wall away all together in a further and more exotic direction, as we can see as we shift towards
what are the third and fourth styles of Roman painting with their theatrical elements, with their increasing
subdivision of the wall into a series of elements that suggest volumetric space, three dimensions in two.
So here, we're looking at the Villa of Publius Fannius Synistor from Boscoreale, done about 50 CE. Boscoreale is
about a mile north of Pompeii or so. It was also swallowed up by Vesuvius, as I'll mention again in a moment. And
here, we see architectural elements which are endemic to parts of the second, third, and fourth styles of Roman
painting, with this series of paintings, as it were, hanging on the wall with a series of pilasters represented in foolthe-eye trompe l'oeil style as if they are coming out at us and seated on bases, where we even see the figure of a
woman coming through a door and stairs leading from where she's coming down to the floor.
Above, we see to the right ceiling beams, as if what is beyond that is the sky. And yet it's not quite the sky, both
because of its colors and because of the figures that are dancing around up there. So all of this complex maze of
contrary elements of envisioning, all of this is part of painting away the wall. All of this will be swallowed up in 79
AD, August, by the explosion of Mount Vesuvius, to await our rediscovery so many centuries later.
All of this is part and parcel of how the Romans command space, how their synchrotistic relationship with the
Greeks and the Etruscans and the Egyptians and the Assyrians, carries into different areas of artistic enterprise. If
we look, for example, at a model of an Etruscan temple from Veii, from the fifth-fourth century BC, we see that it
commands the space before it, that it's raised on a platform. It has stairs leading up to a front porch with a series
of, in this case, four columns that comprise the rows of the porch. And then the structure is behind it.
We find that it is wider and longer going backwards than it is high. Picture the Parthenon. You recognize those
columns going all the way around the periphery and rising from a stylobate, that is the base that supports the
columns with stairs going all around the periphery. This is the Maison Carree.
This is a Roman temple, not far from where the Pont du Gard was. In fact, this is in Nimes, the city that was fed by
the aqueduct known as the Pont du Gard. And we can see how it synthesizes Greek and Etruscan ideas. It
commands the space before it, as an Etruscan temple does. It's risen on a platform. Stairs go up to a front porch
with a series of columns before it.
But the sense of columns going all the way around, which sense is typical for a Greek temple, is conveyed by the
pilasters that go around, the embedded columns that go around the sides and back. And proportionately, it is
higher relative to its width, more like a Greek temple than an Etruscan temple would be, so a perfect kind of
synthesis. But the Romans don't merely synthesize, as I keep saying. They innovate.
And if we look at the structure known as the Pantheon, and we can tell from the inscription across the front that
Agrippa, the son-in-law and best friend of Augustus, built it in 27 BC as a Corinthian-style temple. And take note.
The ground level today is about 30 feet higher than it was then, so we can get the sense of the stairs leading up
and the commanding of the space that way, that it was on a kind of platform.
What's more to the point, Hadrian came along 140 years later or so, between 118 and 128, and maintaining the
front porch, added a whole new back, which is a freestanding dome, the first freestanding dome in architectural
history, some 142 feet in diameter, supported by 20-foot-thick walls. It three dimensionalizes the two-dimensional
arch that the Romans had innovated in the first place, that we have seen carried in different directions by way of
the amphitheater, by way of the aqueduct, here three dimensionalized to create a dome which, practically
speaking, was built by way of a wooden form over which a mixture of concrete and ash were poured.
Now, there are kind of forerunners. The Etruscan acropolis at Cerveteri, for example, is a series of tholos or
beehive kinds of tombs, but of course much smaller, built into the earth, and buil...
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