Different Greek Sculptures

• Explain the differences between the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic Greek sculpture. In three short paragraphs.
• Use three short paragraphs which should be approximately five sentences.
• Choose and Identify ("title", date & number of the illustration from the textbook) only one specific example of a sculpture from the given three stages or periods in Greek art and elaborate, in relation to the others.
• How would you describe all the types of Greek sculpture: Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic?
• Describe their similarities, and cite your sources if you quote them from another textbook. Greek sculpture provided below in blue Archaic period-. (Polykleitos) Classical period-( the dying warrior) Hellenistic period-. (Sleeping satyr (Barberini Faun) from Rome
• Give a Response to these 2 statements below with at least 3 sentences . 1 sentence for each period.

1. Archaic art-Greek art became less geometric and more naturalistic.Paintings on vases changed from geometric designs to representations of human figures. During this archaic period the first life-size stone statues appeared in Greece. During this periods sculptures emerged as a principal form of artistic expression. As an example I choose Exekias Achilles and Ajax playing a dice game from Vulci Italy 540-530 BCE. Fig 2-24, on page 59. During this time they started black figure painting. Painters still applied black silhouettes to the clay surface but then use a sharp instrument to incise more details in black forms. Painters throughout Greece adopted this new technique.

Classical art- Early fifth century Greek artists began to portray human and animal forms realistically. Careful observation of the model and understanding the mechanics of the anatomy. Sculptors started introducing weight shift to their figures and how a body behaves in violent motion. Greek artists began to focus more on the real world of appearances than the perfect beings. Late classical period the sculptors used athletes of the fifth century.Example on fig 2-47 Praxiteles, Aphrodite of Knidos. The first nude statue of Greek goddess caused a sensation. It was made in 350-340 BCE.

Hellenistic art- this age extended from the death of Alexander the Great until the death of Cleopatra. During this period artists gave more importance to human emotions, expression. The sculptures of this period abandons the self containment of the earlier styles and appears to include the physical surroundings and creative landscaping. Example - Nike of Samothrace from Greece 190 BCE. To compare these periods in Greek art Sculptors started to concentrate on human figures during Archaic period. During classical period the human figures became more realistic and stylized. Classical sculptors created a sense of life in their figures through accurate postures while Hallenistic sculptors placed more emphasis on motion and drama.

2. The Archaic period was dated around 700-480 BCE, and during this time the “first life-sized stone statues appeared in Greece.” (Gardner, 85) The artists sculpted these statues in the form of young men nude, and added “Archaic smiles to their faces” (Gardner, 85). These smiles made the sculptures seem more “lifelike”. This early Greek style is referred to as Daedalic after the artist Daedalus, “whose name means the skillful one”. (Gardner, 57) During the Archaic period and one of the earliest Greek sculptures was the Lady of Auxerre. She was created around 650-625 BCE, was made of limestone, and stands 2’ 1½’’ high. (Fig 2-15). I found it very interesting that many of the sculptures had the Archaic smile and the “smile” disappeared as the Classical period began.

The Classical period dated from about 480-323 BCE and was broken down into three sections: Early Classical (480-450 BCE), High Classical (450-400 BCE) and Late Classical (400-323 BCE). In the Early Classical period, sculptures added “contrapposto (weight shift) to their figures.” (Gardner 85) I the High Classical period proportions for the perfect sculpture were added. Mathematic formulas were added to “temple design” that created beauty. During the late Classical era, sculptors harmonized the “remote deities and athletes” during that time. During the Classical period, the sculpture that stuck out to me was figure 2-31, Kritios Boy which was created around 480 BCE and was made of marble standing 3’ 10’’ high. This was the first sculpture to show how a person actually stands using weight shift from one leg to the other. There is deffinently much more detail along with the weight shift that makes the classical sculptures look more realistic than the Archaic ones.

The Hellenistic age was dated from about 323 BCE to 30 BCE. In this age artists depicted violent movement and “unbridled emotion”. Much of the art during this period was similar to impoverished old woman and Gauls. They treated “traditional subjects in new ways (Gardner 85) During the Hellenistic age figure 2-54, Epigonos is a statue of a dying Gaul dating to about 230-220 BCE made of marble as well. The sculptors during this period portrayed the gauls as noble men. You can tell how much more detail that is put into these sculptures rather than than those of the Archaic period. The proportions are much more realistic as well.

Week 4

• BYZANTINE & ISLAMIC ART & ARCHITECTURE ( 6-7 sentences)

Jews, Christians and Muslims all share a belief in the same God, yet their respective traditions in art differ greatly from one another. In Ch. 4, we encounter early Christian art and the art of Byzantium. Ch. 5 introduces some of the traditions of the art of the Islamic world.
What is the major difference between the art of these two traditions? What is the central reason for this difference? In your discussion, include one or two examples from each which illustrate this difference.

• Give a Response to these 2 statements below (1-2 sentences for each statement) The statement are below in blue

1. From chapter four and five from our books all of them Jews, Christian and Muslims, all of them have a lot of similarities and a lot of differences as well.Basically all three of them focus a lot on religion. I completely agree with Sunhita, as she said in her discussion " They both use similar media led mosaic. They also use abstract patterns and geometric designs. The main difference are cultural and religious". In the byzantine art historians divide the history of Byzantine art into three periods. In the early Byzantine period, Byzantine art emerged as a recognizably novel and distinctive style, leaving behind the uncertainties and hesitations of early Christian artistic experiment. In the middle Byzantine period a powerful reaction against iconoclasm set in in the ninth century. Also, in the middle Byzantine churches such as those at Hosios ,Loukas and Daphni have highly decorative exterior walls and feature domes resting on drums above the center of a Greek cross. The climax of the interior mosaic programs was often an image of Christ and Pantokrator in the dome. This artist also excelled in ivory and manuscript illusions. In the Islamic art, the first great Islamic building was the Dome of the Rock, a domed octagon commemorating the triumph of Islamic in Jerusalem, which the Muslims captured from the Byzantines. The earliest mosques were of the hypo style hall type and incorporated arcaded courtyards and minarets. The last Spanish Muslims dynasty was the Nasrid, whose capital was at Granada. The Alhambra is the best surviving example of Islamic palace of architecture. It's really famous for it's stuccoed walls and arches and its muqarnas decoration on vaults and domes. In both chapters, five and six there are a lot of examples were we can see the comparisons between their architectural buildings. In page 150, chapter five we can see a really good example of Islamic architecture, example 5-3, The interior of the dome of the rock.Also, in chapter four, the interior of Saint Mark's, example 4-23,page 142, is a really good example of Byzantine art.
2. After reading chapters 4 and 5, it became evident that the main difference between Byzantine and Islamic Art is the sense of religion existing within them. In Early Christian Buildings, mosaics quickly became the standard means of decorating walls and vaults in buildings. Mosaics not only provided a beautiful setting for Christian rituals but also were vehicles for instructing the faithful. These mosaics often tell a biblical story, and Christ was often seen as a main point of the design. One example of a mosaic that incorporates this faith based scene is Figure 4-8, The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. It depicts the scenes from Jesus's life while also making him the center of the mosaic. Another mosaic that proves to be faith based is figure 4-7, Christ as Good Shepherd. This mosaic shows Christ to be centered around a flock of sheep. Both mosaics relate to biblical stories. The Byzantine buildings used these mosaics along with other intricate plans to produce an effect of great complexity. One building that encompasses this complexity is shown in figure 4-16 called San Vitale. The building is a dome- covered octagon rising above another octagon to provide the interior with clerestory lighting. It also contains some of the most intricate mosaics on the walls.

The most important form of art to the Islamic world was the buildings. Although religion both plays a tremendous role in the creation of the buildings, they do not contain mosaics creating a story based on religion like the Byzantine art. The first great Islamic building was the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, seen in figure 5-2. It was created to commemorate the triumph of Islam in Jerusalem on a site sacred to Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Although this building resembles the Byzantines basic design of San Vitale with its domed octagon shape, the main difference within this is the art inside. The interior of the building does contain mosaics, but it differs greatly from the Byzantines because it does not portray any religious symbols. These interior mosaics show a lush vegetal backgrounds with crowns, jewels, chalices and other royal motifs. The exterior, soaring and majestic, creates a more demanding effect than those of the Byzantine structures. This art proves to be different in reference to the triumph of Islam over the Byzantine and Persian Empires. The central reasoning for these differences reside in religion itself. The Old Testament played an important role in Christian life and art. Jesus was seen in most of the mosaics within architecture because he himself was a Jew but also because Christians came to view many of the people and events of the Old Testament in relation to the New Testament. The Muslim pressures against the shrinking of Byzantine Empire caused its collapse in 1453 along with its ideas of religion and art. Although the Islam took some of their ideas, they did not incorporate religious values to their buildings like Byzantines did./p>

Week 6

Merriam-Webster (www.m-w.com) defines HUMANISM:
“devotion to the humanities : literary culture b: the revival of classical letters, individualistic and critical spirit, and emphasis on secular concerns characteristic of the Renaissance”
OR
“a doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values; especially : a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual's dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason”

The textbook describes humanism as “fundamental to the development of the Italian Renaissance” and defines it as:
“more a code of civil conduct, a theory of education, and a scholarly discipline than a philosophical system.”

There are two parts to this week’s discussion question:
1.)Conduct some online research and copy a brief, judiciously selected quote from a source you identify which defines/elaborates upon the concept of humanism.

NOTE: CITE the website you use & out the text you quote in “QUOTATION MARKS”. Hopefully you will all learn a little more from reading what your classmates find and post, too.
2.)Can you find ways in which the work of the great High Renaissance masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo reflect humanist ideas?

Select at least one work of art to illustrate/demonstrate humanist concerns.(This is a somewhat philosophical question but I believe that the trick here that will help you is to "keep it simple" - it can be quite straightforward – try not to look so hard that you miss the simple answer, if you know what I mean!) (4 – 5 sentences)

Give a 2 individual Responses to these 2 statements below

1. A.Conduct some online research and copy a brief, judiciously selected quote from a source you identify which defines/elaborates upon the concept of humanism.

" Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance that affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own life".iheu.org/humanism/what-is-humanism/

B. Can you find ways in which the work of the great high renaissance masters as Leonardo da Vinci , Raphael , and Michelangelo reflect humanist ideas?

The great high renaissance masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo reflect humanist ideas because they made a hero out of man. They put aside the middle ages about God and concentrated on man , on there achievements. Everything from the "Human" point of view , hence "Humanism" as their doctrine. Raphael's " The School of Athens' illustrates/Demonstrates humanist concerns because it used classical Greek culture as the subject. This relied more on the Gods stand point instead of expressing humans concerns.

2. . A system of thought that focuses on humans and their values,capacities,and worth.

A cultural and intellectual movement of the Renaissance that emphasized human potential

to attain excellence and promoted direct study of literature,art,and civilization of classical

Greece and Rome.

www.freedictionary.com/humanism

Michelangelo's sculpture Pieta was a good example of how humanism influenced the arts

during the Renaissance.In this work Michelangelo shows the body of Jesus placed on top

of the lap of the Virgin Mary after the saviors crucifixtion.(fig 7-27)

The way Michelangelo sculpted the body of Jesus emphasized

the beauty and grandeur of his human form.It shows the classical humanism in its ideas

of physical beauty.

Week 10

Romanticism as defined by the Grove Dictionary of Art:

"Dominant cultural tendency in the Western world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It caused a re-evaluation of the nature of art and the role of the artist in society. Significantly, from the 1790s it was a self-proclaimed movement, the first such, and so initiated a tradition that has remained in Western culture since. Romanticism was rejected or ignored by most of the major artists later seen as associated with it, but it nevertheless identified several key tendencies of the period. Though hard to define precisely, it essentially involves: 1) placing emotion and intuition before (or at least on an equal footing with) reason; 2) a belief that there are crucial areas of experience neglected by the rational mind; and 3) a belief in the general importance of the individual, the personal and the subjective. In fact it embodies a critique of that faith in progress and rationality that had characterized the main trend of Western thought and action since the Renaissance. This resulted in an opposition to the dominant contemporary values and social structures. Romanticism started as a literary movement but soon came to include the visual arts, particularly painting, the most notable exponents being Blake, Delacroix, Friedrich, Gericault, Goya, Philipp Otto Runge and Turner. To a lesser extent it also affected the graphic arts, sculpture and architecture. By the 1840s it was being superseded by Realism, though many of its ideas persisted throughout the 19th century and into the 20th."

Romanticism (Blake, Goya, Friedrich, Constable, Gericault, Delacroix, Turner, Cole), please select two artists and discuss their work in terms of what makes them emblematic of Romanticism. 2-3 short paragraphs.

Give 2 individual Responses to these 2 statements below

1. Romanticism was an artistic movement that began in the late 18th century. Romantic art concentrated on feelings, moods, emotions, myth and ideas about individualism. Two artists that had a major role in romanticism were Francisco Goya and Eugène Delacroix.

Francisco Goya (1746-1828) was born in Spain in the village of Fuendetodos in Aragon. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and 19th century, and best known for his emotive paintings. He created works that criticized the social and political problems of his era. In 1793 the painter suffered the mysterious, traumatic illness, which left him stone deaf. This incident affected Francisco Goya severely and led him to begin producing much darker painting and etchings.The most famous of etching is No. 43. “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” In the painting, an artist, asleep at his drawing table, is surrounded by creatures associated in Spanish fork tradition with mystery and evil. Goya believed that imagination should never be completely renounced in favor of the strictly rational. For Goya, art is the child of reason in combination with imagination.

Eugène Delacroix was a French romantic artist that was known for his broad brushstrokes. Delacroix had a passion for his art and he deeply expressed his feeling toward his painting. One of his famous painting that was viewed during the romanticism was “The Death of Sardanapalus". The painting shows an emotional scene with an assorted amount of colors and an unlucky tragic event. The main picture was to catch the death of the civilians other than the background has it seems to fade off. Delacroix showed romanticism in this painting by incorporating his own style and a great demand of colored canvases that implied either pain or suffering.

2. Romanticism is the artistic and musical movement that started toward the end of the 18th century. In response to the new, rising Industrial Revolution, people changed and adapted to these new lifestyles, and began to feel nostalgic about medieval and classical times, which gave birth to the Romantic movement. There are many artists that utilized their talents in this era with some of them being more representative than other. There are no better representatives of the Romantic era than Eugene Delacroix and Francisco de Goya. Both artists have managed to mix the basic ideals of the Romantic period: raw emotion, surprise, awe, nature, and a nostalgic look at old medieval times.

Eugene Delacroix was fond of utilizing terror and awe in his works. Paintings such as “Massacre of the Innocents” and “Horseman attacked by Lion” have Delacroix use his vibrant contrasting colors and themes of chaos and destruction, both of which are part of his signature style. Over time, Delacroix also developed abilities with watercolors, and came up with works such as “Norham Castle Sunrise” the illustrate the admiration of natural beauty that is often shown to be a part of Romanticism. Being active mostly in the middle of the era, Delacroix was very emblematic of the Romantic Era and is even responsible for influencing other artists of that time.

Another Romantic painter that managed to capture the essence of the Romantic era is Francisco de Goya. Being one of the earlier artists of that era, Goya had an impact on later artists, with his emotional and horrific ways he depicted violence and destruction in war. His work, “Execution of the Defenders of Madrid” shows the destruction after a war in one of the most impartial, neutral positions, focusing on the very act of war rather than making one side seem better than another. His series, known as “The Disasters of War” also uses the aftermath of war as its central theme.

WEEK 11

(Courbet's painting depicts a harsh reality of hard labor and Monet's seascape represents light upon water as well as leisure.)

After looking at many hundreds of years of Biblical and allegorical (symbolic) or mythological (gods and goddesses) and sometimes historical (politics and wars) subjects in painting and sculpture, now we have seen that during the Enlightenment there was a new interest (like that which inspired Renaissance Humanism) in studying the reality of our natural, scientific, modern world. "Realism" of the nineteenth century is an art that tells it like it IS, which, during the Industrial Revolution, sometimes meant painting "ugly" realities like hard laborers, poverty (research Degas "Laundress" subjects"), prostitutes, alcoholics,(see Toulouse Lautrec or Picasso's bar scenes) and even modern things in people's daily, lives like trains and train stations. To some people in the 19th century, painting "modern reality" was a terrible idea! They wanted to see things that would help them forget prostitutes, poverty, trains, pollution- they wanted to stick with the lovely, dreamy traditional mythologies, and in a way this is understandable. (After all, for example, sometimes we like a movie that is about someone having a "romantic" adventure in the countryside or in another country altogether, and we don't want to watch a movie about how hard or ugly real life can be! We know this as "escapism".) "IMPRESSIONISM" is different from "REALISM" – but Impressionism also bothered some people at the time- why? People that did not approve of Impressionistic painting didn't like the fact that it was made up of so many visible little dots and brushstrokes- they wanted to see paintings continue to look more smooth and "real" as they traditionally had for centuries. (Look, for example, at Claude Lorraine or Poussin from the 18th century)Impressionism was a STYLE or a WAY (manner) of painting which did not HIDE the fact that it was paint, coming off a brush onto a canvas, and this made it harder for people to pretend they were looking into a "real" scene. Impressionism also did not necessarily use color in the traditional way, did it? Impressionist painters also painted modern life scenes, but they tend to be nice ones, like leisurely weekend activities, not the harsh realities that "Realism" represented. These are elements of Impressionism that made it modern and even startling to contemporaries (the people of the time).

This week, you will write just a short discussion reply that shares your thoughts on these modern developments, Realism and Impressionism. Pick one art example you like - I just want to see that the class understands what is beginning to make art "modern" in different ways (compared to the art we have studied so far) and how you respond to these new qualities personally. This is a short Discussion; ONE short paragraph is fine.

Realism, as an art movement, is associated with embracing the stark reality of life, in art. It is the primary modern art movement that expanded the definition of what is art, by moving away from aesthetics and taking on undertones of political and social responsibility, Realist painters gave marginalized society a place of equal importance, along with the grand narratives of history. It is one of the more democratic art movements in art history, spurred on by the development of photography. Gustave Courbet’s Burial at Ornans is an example of realist painting. There is nothing heroic about this painting – only the drab facts of undramatized life and death. In contrast, the subject of Impressionist paintings are often ‘nice’ subjects – unlike the harsh subjects of realist paintings. The focus here is on colour theory, instead of painting the disfranchised. Thus, impressionism is a return to aesthetics; however, aesthetics in Impressionism is now motivated by intellectualism. There is an element of the scientific in impressionist paintings – George Seurat, for example, used the method of divisionism, that was based on the colour theories of Delacroix and the colour scientists Hermann von Helmholtz.

Week 12

Early 20C Art: Duchamp's Mona Lisa, Franz Marc (Blue Horses) and Piet Mondrian

Early twentieth-century Modernism was Western art’s response to a rapidly changing world.
Discuss some of those changes and describe art’s response to them - ie. What were the various political and social upheavals and what were the various artistic movements that respond to or reflect those upheavals/changes in modern life and the world stage?
In simple terms, from Ch. 15:

-choose three twentieth-century art movements as your examples (A few sentences)
-identify one work of art from each movement
-state what that movement was for/against, concerned with, responding to, etc.

An important social advancement in the early 20th century was in the area of science and technology. The two World Wars could not have been fought nor won without the help of science and technology. Science distorts and destroys the idea of an ‘objective world’, since how we see the world can be altered by microscopes, or be expanded far beyond human scale. This impacted the art world significantly, giving rise to the view that the world itself cannot be taken as ‘real’. In this sense, representative art does not correctly ‘record’ the world as it is, since the notion of an optical reality is discredited by science and technology. This realization gave rise to abstraction – as Modernist artists tried to express the myriad ways in which the world can be experienced.

Art Nouveau was a movement that emerged at the end of the 19th century. Primarily realized in architecture and sculpture, art nouveau aimed to synthesized all the arts, to create art based on natural forms. An important work of this movement is Casa Mila, by Antonio Guadi, whose work is crafted as a symbolically living thing, with naturalistic elements like the undulating tiled roof.

Abstract art was first manifested as cubism, which in itself was a radical turning point away from the pictorial illusionism of the tradition in Western art history. An example of a cubist painting is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Pablo Picasso. Picasso, like other artists in this period, aimed to achieve a kind of total view in their paintings, instead of the traditional perspective. Hence, Picasso analyzed the forms of his subjects from every possible vantage and combined the various views into one pictorial whole. This new form of perspective seems to be reflective of Einstein’s theory of the merge of space and time, as the cubism perspective suggests the addition of the dimension of time to spatial dimensions.

Under Nonobjective art, several artists started their own movements. Artists of nonobjective art wanted to eliminate all traces and references of the objective. Their preferred an entirely fresh start – often incorporating pure forms in their work, to regain a kind of simplicity and sincerity. Kazimir Malevich is one such artist, who named his approach Suprematism. One example is the Suprematist Composition: Aeroplane Flying. He wanted his art to be understood by everyone, even those with no education, using the square as a base form and colour singularity that would appeal to peope on an instinctive level.