Art History Class (A)

MR. NEWMAN'S TEST NOTES

Notes: Art History – Newman/Buckley

Combination of Notes from site visits in Greece and multiple texts

The Aegean World

Time Line and Geography

• 3,000 – 5,000 years ago
• Flourishing culture on mainland Greece, Cycladic islands, Crete and larger Aegean islands
• Aegean peoples were primarily herders and farmers, but their proximity and the dominance of the sea provided them a natural waterway for trade and enabled cultural diffusion with Egypt and the Near East
• 3,000 – 1,000 – Use of Bronze (a superior alloy to tin for making tools and weapons) They gained metal ores from Europe, Arabia, and Anatolia – metalwares become prized objects
• Consequences of Bronze – occurred at the end of the Neolithic period and created a new political and economic power
• The secrets to working metal were kept among the social elite to solidify a system of social hierarchy and power
• Material culture enlightens knowledge

Focus of Study (Early Cycladic, Minoan, Mycenaean)

• The ruined palaces, fortresses, and tombs
• Objects: architecture, sculpture, metalwork, ceramics, wall paintings
• Stylized: A manner of representation that conforms to an intellectual or artistic idea rather than to naturalistic appearances.
• Palace Structure: religious, political, and economic centers
• Religious worship: epiphanic – meaning that during rituals gods and goddesses were believed to appear to their worshippers, often in the form of human stand-ins.
• Chief deities: (may represent goddesses, priestesses, or female worshippers) goddesses who controlled the natural world – may have been the ancestors of the alter Greek goddesses (Demeter, Artemis, and Athena)
• Found in hilltop sacred shrines, palace shrines
• Early Cycladic (on the Islands of the Cyclades)
• Art Objects: materials – artists used a coarse, poor-quality local clay
• 6,000 – 3,000 variety of objects produced
• 3,000 – forward crude, but engaging ceramic figures of humans and animals, as well as domestic and ceremonial wares
• General Observations from notes – National Archaeological Museum Athens
• Figures: flat pieces of marble with vague anthropomorphic outline
• Votive figures: An image created as a devotional offering to a god or other deity.
• Less than 10% have an archaeological context, minimal amount of data about the function of the objects in the society
• Females had simple, violin-like shapes
• Impossible to date the cutting of the marble
• Minimalist and geometric
• Most were found cemeteries, not always found in graves
• Early Cycladic graves were communal
• 94% of the figures were female
• Painted: with bright red, green and blue
• Figures did not stand by themselves, natural position was lying down on their backs
• Teaching tool for women – puberty or sympathetic magic
• Further details: anatomical details have been kept to a minimum; the body’s natural articulation lines at the hips, knees, and ankles are indicate, and the pubic area is marked with a lightly incised triangle. Now paintless, but they originally had painted facial features, hair and ornaments in black, red, and blue.

• Specific Example
• HARP PLAYER
• Sculpture in the round: Three-dimensional sculpture that is carved free of any attaching background block.
• Sculptor gave equal attention to the negative spaces and the solid forms which serve to balance each other.
• Expressive pose – hear the music
• Could be used for purposes of home worship and then buried with the owners after being symbolically broken as part of the funeral ritual

• Crete and the Minoan Civilization
• Peak of Civilization: (1600 – 1450 BCE)
• Legends: Minotaur
• Evidence of the myth
• Layout of the palace, # of bulls is huge and very important, bull leaping and bull contests occur, people had to pay tribute to king Minos, people freed themselves from paying taxes
• Geography:
• Crete: largest of the Aegean islands, 150 miles long, 36 miles wide
• Economically self-sufficient, producing own grains, olives, and other fruits, cattle, sheep (Med triad – olives, grapes, grains)
• Lacked necessary ore production – turned toward trade – looked outward and took advantage of its strategic location.
• Trade – mainland Greece, Egypt, the Near East, Anatolia
• Architecturally (1900 – 1300 BCE)
• Palace complexes;
• Administrative, commercial, and religious centers
• Building materials: complex made out of local stones – gypsum, limestone,
• Structure – wood (supports), stone (foundation walls), mud (plaster)
• Design:
• maximize light, air and adaptability, as well as define access and circulation patterns. Daylight and fresh air entered through staggered levels, open stairwells, and strategically placed air shafts and light wells
• consciously rejected as unnecessary the axiality, symmetry, and abstraction the East had employed for creating monumentality.
• Knossos as example:
• Excavated by Arthur Evans (early 20^th C.)
• Cretan monarchy gathered all functions of the office in chambers around a central courtyard.
• Picturesque, and colorful, atmosphere was one of comfort and informality.
• Ease and richness in the building materials.
• Materials (wood & gypsum) did not last
• Archaeologists reconstructed columns: shaft tapers not upward but from the top down, producing an unstable, almost floating effect. If the shaft denies architectural weight, a massive disc shoulders the load, and transfers it through a swelling, cushion-like form to the top of the shaft. Precursor of the Doric order
• focus of the complex was inward
• rectangular courtyard from which a maze of corridors and staircases led to other courtyards, private rooms and apartments, administrative and ritual areas, storerooms and baths.
• Walls coated plaster – painted with murals
• Plumbing – terracotta pipes
• Workshops – crafts officially controlled
• Commercial centers - ? disputed?
• Art
• Characterization: singular spontaneity and fluidity
• Paintings: depicted joyous hunts, dances with sacred bulls, and sea creatures such as the fluid octopus (lightness, freely shaped forms, and movements where one might feel the rhythms of the sea
• Artistic Mediums
• Sculptures
• Small, finely executed works, wood, ivory, precious metals, stone and faience(a glazing technique for ceramic vessels, utilizing a glass paste that, upon firing, acquires a lustrous shine and smooth texture).
• Religious figures “Woman/Goddess with Snakes”
• Shrine figures: associated with water, regenerative powers, and protection of the home
• Bare-breasted, arms extended, brandishing snakes in each hand, a wild cat perched on her crown, belt cinched at the waist (belts importance in the Iliad?), geometric patterns on skirt resembles snake skin
• Importance of the Bull in Minoan culture
• Rhyton: a vessel used for pouring liquids during sacred ceremonies
• Ceramics
• Kamares Ware:
• named after the cave overlooking the palace complex at Phaistos
• Characteristics: delicacy, use of color, energetically stylized, and painted decoration
• Movement toward naturalism, but no human figures
• Marine Style:
• “Octopus Flask”
• possibly celebrates Cretan sea power
• grace and energy of the natural forms while presenting them as a stylized design in harmony with the vessels shape.
• Metalwork
• Lost-wax casting: a method of casting metal (bronze) by a process in which a wax mold is covered with clay and plaster, then fired, melting the wax and leaving a hollow form. Molten metal is then poured into the hollow space and slowly cooled. When the hardened clay and plaster exterior shell is removed, a solid metal form remains to e smoothed and polished.
• Inlay: a decorative process in which pieces of one material are set into the surface of an object fashioned from a different material
• Filigree: delicate, lacelike ornamental work of interwined wire
• Repousee (embossing): A technique in which metal reliefs are created. Thin sheets of metal are gently hammered from the back to create a protruding image. More elaborate reliefs are created with wooden forms against which the metal sheets are pressed.
• Vapheio Cup, funerary mask
• Granulation: a technique for decorating gold in which tiny balls of the precious metal are fused to the main surface in a pattern
• Two Bees or wasps
• Niello: an inlay technique in which a black sulphur alloy is rubbed into fine lines engraved into metal (usually gold or silver). The alloy becomes fused with the surrounded metal when heated, and provides contrasting detail.
• Mycenaean dagger blades
• Gilding: the application of paper-thin gold leaf to an object made of another medium. Usually used as a decorative finishing detail
• Bull jumper
• Wall Painting
• Covered palace walls with geometric borders, views of nature, and scenes of human activity.
• Murals:
• Painted on still-wet plaster or a dry plaster
• Mural subjects were most often matched to room function
• Motifs: lilies – associated with goddess-priest celebrations
• Bull jumping – fertility ritual?
• Natural landscapes adorned the palaces
• Some Egyptian influences found in facial features, in particular, the shape of the eyes.
• Mycenaean Culture (Synonym for the Late Helladic)
• Period (3000 – 1000 BCE)
• Greek speaking peoples invaded mainland Greece and brought with them advanced metalworking, ceramic, and architectural techniques, and displaced the indigenous Neolithic Culture. Minoan culture declined about 1500 BCE, the Mycenaeans rose to dominance.
• Trade: the transition from the agricultural economy of the Middle Helladic period to the palatial administrative system is primarily due to the trading activities of the Mycen.
• As the tombs revealed, contact waas made with Crete, Cyclades, Egypt, and the Western Med., and Northern Europee.
• Raw materials such as amber, gold, bronze, tin, and exotic goods as faience and semi-precious stones
• Import – amber, bronze, stone vases, obsidian, chanaanite, amphorae, lapis Luzuli, Ivory, gold, Cycladic vases
• Export: vases and products
• Furthest Mycenaean settlement found in Dacia (Hungry)
• According to Homer – Mycenae was “rich in gold” – masks, daggers, silver, pottery
• Destruction around 1125 BCE (last building phase in 1200 BCE) reasons:
• Social decline (lack of contentedness with leadership)
• Drought
• Earthquake
• Citadels: area of a city – commanding post
• Tautly organized royal precincts enclosed by huge Cyclopean walls of roughhewn, immense stone blocks, difficult to access and highly defensible.
• Mycenaean builders: key to monumentality was geometry and proportions
• Trabeated: Structural system based on the use of columns or posts and beams. It contrasts with arcuated construction, involving the use of arches and vaults. Trabeated construction is an inherent characteristic of framed structures, from the traditional timber-framed architecture of China and Japan to steel-framed buildings of the 20th century. It played a particularly important role in the architecture of ancient Greece, where it was directly related to the development of the architectural orders, a system in which the columns surrounding temples and other public buildings were surmounted by an entablature formed by rectangular architrave blocks, a frieze and cornice. The Temple of Hephaistos in Athens, the best preserved of all Doric temples, illustrates its principles. It was also the usual type of structure in the architecture of both ancient Egypt and southern Arabia, where columns or piers were crowned by rectangular block
• Tyrins (13^th Century)
• Cyclopean walls were 36 feet thick and lined with galleries with massive corbelled ceilings.
• Megaron: in ornamental form, a rectangular box with a single door. Its main space, at the center was a hearth which lay behind a double-chambered vestibule.
• Structure is designed to keep the visitor on edge – what you are looking for is hidden from you
• Tombs: tholos was a pointed domical shape – corbelled structure. Sunk into the ground, it was sometimes given a sloping entrance passage called a dromos. It was the dromos-tholos combination that captured the imagination of the Mycenaeans, and they gradually developed it into a structure of grandeur.
• Diameter equals the height – upper levels of corbelling into uninterrupted rings of stone
• Façade: the red stone of the entrance door frame was carved into three fasciae – like later Ionic portals – and to its jambs were attached green alabaster columns similar in the form of Knossos but even closer to the Greek Doric order. The lintel of the portal was decorated with imitations of the circular ends of ceiling poles - a forerunner of the Greek dentil molding
• Dromos: 100 ft. in length – 30ft. in height at the end
• Invisible monument to the deceased as after the burial it was sealed
• Treasury of Atreus
• Treasury of Minyas
• Tomb of Clytemnestra
• Mycenae
• Lion’s Gate Portal:
• Massive trabeated portal was built into the wall, with cyclopean jambs and lintel, surmounted by a triangular relief of two heraldic lions standing at a Minoan column, the sacred symbol of the earth that they supposedly protected.
• Immense historical portent: A monumental stone carving in the Lion relief, an element inherited from Egypt but now infused with a new sensitivity to the organic logic and beauty of its subject.
• The very notion of a triangular relief over a trabeated form was the archetype of the Greek temple front, with its tympanum over a colonnade.
• Sculpture
• Carefully observed natural forms
• Metalwork
• Ceremonial blades (burial shafts) made out of copper, silver and gold – set these materials into bronze blades
• Animated and naturalistic treatment of the figures
• Ceramics
• Uniform sizes and shapes
• Vessels were superior in terms of technique, the decorations applied to them were generally less innovative, more conventional than those of earlier wares.
• Warrior Vase
• Harvester Vase
• Vapheio Cup

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Art History Test Wednesday

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