Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [11]
“Nike of Samothrace,” c.190 B.C., Louvre, Paris.
Michelangelo, “David,” 1501-4, Galleria dell’ Accademia, Florence.
Rodin, “The Age of Bronze,” 1876, Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
ARCHITECTURE FIT FOR THE GODS. Greek culture influenced the art and architecture of every subsequent period of Western civilization, but most especially the Renaissance (when many Classical works were rediscovered) and eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Greek Revival crazes. During the latter period, the vogue for Greek style was so widespread that every museum, art academy, and college proudly displayed reproductions of Greek sculpture. Public buildings, such as courthouses and banks, became pseudo-Greek temples.
Architects intended the brilliant white marble Parthenon to be the ultimate expression of Athens’ grandeur. Even in ruins, it crowns the Acropolis. The Parthenon’s perfection was due to barely perceptible departures from straight lines. Columns curve slightly inward and the entablature and stepped platform are barely arched. These “refinements,” as they were called, bent straight lines to give the illusion of upward thrust and solid support for the central mass. Built without mortar, the Parthenon remained relatively intact until 1687, when a direct rocket hit destroyed its core. In 1801 Lord Elgin carted off much of the sculpture to the British Museum, where the poet John Keats gazed at the marbles for hours, “like a sick eagle looking at the sky.”
WHO WAS WHO IN ANCIENT GREECE
Ancient Greece is best known for its philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), playwrights (Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles), and mathematicians (Euclid, Pythagoras). Some of the leading artists were:
PHIDIAS (500-432 B.C.), most famous Athenian sculptor, overseer of Parthenon statuary, first used drapery to reveal body
POLYKLEITOS (active 450-420 B.C.), rival of Phidias, wrote book on proportion; most celebrated work colossal gold and ivory statue of Hera at Argos
PRAXITELES (active mid-4th century B.C.), Athenian sculptor famous forfirst entirely nude Aphrodite statue; introduced more sensual, natural concept of physical beauty
ARCHITECTURE FOR THE AGES
Considered one of the most beautiful and influential buildings of all time, the Parthenon indirectly inspired the temple format of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Capital and Michael Graves’s Post-Modern revival of Classical elements like columns and arcades.
Iktinos and Kallikrates, the Parthenon, 448-432 B.C., Acropolis, Athens.
Jefferson, Capitol of Virginia, 1785-92, Richmond, VA.
Groves, Clos Pegase Winery, 1987, Napa Valley, CA.
GREEK ARCHITECTURE: A PRIMER
Monuments were treated by the Greeks as large sculpture and were built with the same rules of symmetry and ideal proportions. Public rites took place in front of the temple, where elaborate sculpture told the story of the temple’s deity. The most common locations for sculpture were the triangular pediments and horizontal frieze. During the Classic period, features on faces were impassive, giving rise to the term Severe Style. Regardless of the violent events depicted, faces showed little expression as in the Temple of Zeus at Olympic, where a woman seemed lost in thought as she, almost incidentally, removed a drunken centaur’s hand from her breast.
Sculpted figures on a building’s pediment often protruded sharply from their background stone, which was painted red or blue. Even though the backs of figures could not be seen, because of the Greek obsession with completeness and harmony they were nearly finished.
The phrase “Doric order” referred to all the standard components of a Doric temple, typically found on mainland Greece. The “lonic order” was more widespread in the Greek settlements of Asia Minor and the Aegean. The “Corinthian order,” its columns topped by stylized