Ancient Art Lecture 14: Early Greek Art

This is our timeline for the class and you can see that we are kind of in the middle of the last century BCE and we're picking up right where the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations left off. Because this is more of an introductory lecture, we're not going to look at that much art, we're probably going to talk more about the history of early Greece, but the two things that we will look at are the Hirshfield crater and an Orientalizing Ulpi, and Orientalizing will be explained to you in the lecture. With the fall of the Mycenaean and Minoan civilizations, Greece was plunged into total chaos. So people lost most of the aspects of civilization that the prior Aegean societies had developed. Around 900 BCE there was a re-emergence of culture that is recognizably the Greek system and thought that we understand today. Two systems were adopted in the 7th century BCE that allowed for greater commercial and cultural success. One was coinage systems from Asia Minor, or Turkey, and the other was writing using the Phoenician alphabetic system. Corinth was initially the most powerful of the city-states. They eventually gave way to the dominance of Athens around the 6th century. Arable land in Greece was really poor, but they had a lot of artisans and they exported a lot of materials such as wine and olive oil. Those were two crops that did really well in the Greek rocky landscape. The economy was based on skilled artisans providing metal and ceramic wares in exchange for grain and raw materials. This system, which seems pretty modern, resulted in Greek ware spreading all across the Mediterranean. The Greeks left a legacy that is very impressive considering that there weren't that many of them. They operated in a fairly short period of time from around 900 to 100 BCE and their respective city-states were almost always at war except when they were fighting the Persians, which we will get to, and they were often beset by harsh economic conditions. Even though the Greeks were originally sea peoples, their system eventually evolved into city-states, kind of like the Sumerian city-states that we saw in the ancient Near East, although the Greeks worshipped more or less the same gods in all the city-states despite having some local variations. While in Sumer, the most important gods were the city-gods, while the elemental gods were all shared by all city-states. The Greek city-states were based on the concept of the polis, which meant an autonomous region governed by a city like Athens or Corinth or Sparta, as its political, cultural, economic, and religious center. Each polis decided its own government, managed its own affairs, and the city-states were often at war with each other. One thing I want you to notice about the Greeks is the pace of change in their art. We've been taking a kind of a long view, in most civilizations, looking at time in thousands of years rather than centuries or decades, as we will with the Greeks. However, there is far more change in Greek art than there ever was in Egyptian art, and this reflects the different values that the Greeks had, where the Egyptians valued continuity and permanence, as we have said time and time again. The Greeks were looking at improvement, development, innovation, to try to get to the ultimate example of how they saw the world. So, what were the city-states like in Greece at this time? Corinth was initially the most powerful, as I said before. Religion was a very important part of the culture. It was integrated into everyday life, as with celebrations and festivals and contests. Religion also helped to relieve some of the anxiety about chaos or urge for order that will distinguish the art in this early period. Most of the evidence that we have about life in early Greece comes from ceramic bases, and there are several reasons for this. First of all, ceramics don't get burnt, and lime kilns are melted down for various reasons, like bronze or other metals. Ceramics are basically indestructible. You can break them, but not obliterate them. Ceramics played a much larger role in culture. Without other containers, material like glass, cardboard, or plastic, so it was kind of the only thing they had, and the Greeks dominated the ceramics industry. The Greeks were anxious people. They were filled with dismay about the chaotic and unpredictable nature of the world, kind of like what we're dealing with right now. This may be because of the Dark Ages following the collapse of Mycenae. There was such disarray that they lost the technology of writing and slipped back into essentially a Neolithic lifestyle. For whatever reason, for the Greeks, chaos was pain, uncertainty, and anxiety, while order, reflected in love of pattern and reduction to geometric principles, was joy and a sort of spiritual ideal. These are two major principles of the Greek mindset and interpretation of the world, which can be seen not only in the art, but also the philosophy, literature, poetry, politics. The Greeks attempted to drive away this anxiety by finding order. This led to two of the most important aesthetic principles of Greek art, analysis of form into their component parts, and representation of the specific and light of the generic. We will talk about this in detail. As you can see from this slide, the Greek art went through a number of changes over about 600 years. Today we'll talk about geometric and orientalizing a bit, and then we will move on to archaic, and then we're going to spend a lot of time in classical because that gets broken down into three periods, and then we will finish with Hellenistic. All of this will make sense when we get to it. Early on in Greek art, the sort of first style we see is geometric, and it just comes from them. It's a thing that they do, and I'll explain why they do it in about three slides. Later on, with trade, there is all these outside influences, and you get a diversity and a hybridity, and that's called the orientalizing period. And then finally, you get a synthesis of these two styles, and they eventually lead into the archaic. The geometric art has its own timeline. There's proto-geometric, from about 1000 to 900. Proto-geometric is marked by an initial reticence to use black paint, and as time goes on, it seems like an attempt to order the world by controlling art. And perhaps the reason for such a conservative style that doesn't change much might be linked to their most common use, which was funerary urns, and it seems that funerals do not really inspire innovation. There are still some Mycenaean forms that are being used, probably derived from floral decorations, and they use standardized tools like compasses and the comb brush for parallel lines. The big first breakthrough in Greek art is the meander. And you can see it really clearly in the belly of this vase, and basically it's like a river, a kind of a continuous line that snakes and winds its way around the vase. And in fact, the meander is the name of a river in Turkey. So the name for this pattern came from the way that the river moves through the valleys as it travels down a mountain. Also, I want you to notice just how much pattern, and how many bands, and how many different kinds of zigzags and stripes are on this vase. And that says something very important about the early Greek people. Here, we're looking at the handle of the amphora, and you can see that there is a snake that kind of winds down the handle. And snakes symbolize healing and eternity. A snake unzips its skin and makes itself new. This was a funerary urn, and it served as a headstone. And what you would do is you would pour libations and offerings into it, and then there were holes on the bottom that would drain out. And on these urns like this, there were representations of highly stylized funerals. And there was this tight, controlled use of space that may have been an attempt to control the uncontrollable. Remember that when the Greeks made these vases, they were sort of stuck in this time of chaos and uncertainty. And it is quite possible that these designs might have been an elixir of sorts. Patterns were derived from textiles, weaving, or basket making, especially the cross-hatching that you see. And it's possible that women made most of the decorations on the vases, or at least the decorations were influenced by or they were imitations of women's work. Keeping with this same Greek base, you can see this is a detail of the decoration at the shoulder of the vase. That is a horse and some kind of seabird. And animals appear right around the time of Homer. And they are incorporated as part of the pattern, but they don't really disrupt the pattern. And when animals are depicted, they're repeated in a frieze or a horizontal band. And they become elements of a pattern rather than depictions of individual animals. Okay, so one of your lecture questions is going to be to describe how the anxiety of the early Greeks is reflected in this space. I feel like I've given you a lot of this already. There is a term out there, it's called the horror vacui, which means the abhorring an empty space. And you see this in other works of art, but the Greeks really used it in this. So you might want to look up horror vacui and see what that is about. But then also write a paragraph or so, kind of dissecting this work of art, and then talking about the anxiety that the Greeks might have felt, their fear of chaos, and their hope of controlling the world. This next thing is known as the Hirschfeld or Dipylon crater, and it's from the late geometric period. And there are narrative scenes on it. Some of them are taken from Homer's epic poems, The Iliad and the Odyssey. In these funerary vases you'll see common scenes like the prothesis, which is the laying out of the body for cremation or burial, and the ephphora or chariot-led funeral procession. And emotion is translated into action. And one example of this is the woman that's tearing out her hair. I want to stress that all the patterning and the figures themselves can be seen as the Greeks' first and most repressive attempt at creating order out of chaos. The sectioning off, dividing up, and filling with pattern reflects an urge to classify and organize. It seems like the Greeks of the geometric period attempted to analyze different components of a larger story, and then reshape those components according to how they want the story to appear for themselves, in order to make sense of their world. With Greek sculpture at this time, we can draw parallels between the human and animal types on the vases and those we see in sculpture. They kind of share the same spirit. Here are a couple of centaur statues, one on its own with designs that we might have seen in those earlier craters and vases, and the other with a pairing of a man and a centaur together, perhaps fighting. We'll see this a lot, this pairing, because centaurs are opposed to men quite often in Greek mythology. They're seen as the foil to man. In other words, if man is rational, then the centaurs are the opposite. And the question is why? The centaurs were said to be a breed of wild horse slash men from the hinterlands of northern Greece. They were uncontrolled, often gave in to their urges to drink, rape, and fight, etc. And this is a stark contrast to the Greek ideal man. I don't mean to sound sexist when I say man, it's just that they believed that men were the ideal. These tripods were used as prizes in athletic games and competitions, and winners would have placed them in sanctuaries dedicated to specific gods. And these tripods bring me to kind of a tangential thing, but I want to talk a little bit about craftsmen and their place in society. So despite the beauty and ubiquity of all their products, artists and artisans in Greece were not universally loved. The Greeks considered potters and painters to be banosos, or manual laborers, and many derogatory terms have this root meaning lowly, boorish, or vulgar. In fact, Plutarch, who was a Greek biographer and essayist, states that labor, with one's hands on lowly tasks, makes one indifferent to higher things. While we may delight in the work, we despise the workman. This is partially because the Greeks revere the ideal of the athlete, who is fit, tanned, outdoorsy, over that of Hephaestus or Vulcan, who was ugly and crabbed, but also a brilliant god of technology. In contrast to the fairly slow and conservative development of the geometric period around 700, there is the appearance of a totally new style in Greek-based painting and sculpture, and it's called orientalizing. And that just means it's from the east. This style is also known as Corinthian, because Corinth is the city where it was most popular. And from the example, you can see that the Corinthian style borrowed this kind of winged sphinx thing from Assyria. There are probably a few reasons for this change in style. One is due to the influence of the older civilizations of the Near East, like Assyria. The other might have been an impulse to break free from the confines of the geometric borders, and this is accomplished through imports that are then Hellenized or made recognizably Greek. In other words, they saw something they liked from another culture and then made it their own. This picture is a great example of this kind of cultural borrowing. The figures are outline drawn and then filled in. The anatomy is more accurate than we've seen so far in the geometric period, even though these are made up creatures. They use floral devices and rosettes, and these are probably derived from textiles that they would have gotten from the Near East. They incised detail, and then there's some red and white that they used to pick out the detail. And then you've got all these kind of new monsters in these pictures, and these monsters are from the Near Eastern art that we have seen so far in this class. Another thing that we have already looked at in this class is how to show somebody's in front or behind. We saw larger and smaller figures in Assyrian art when we looked at the enemies swimming across the Euphrates. We've seen vertical perspective, like in the Minoan mural Athera, where it's like if it's at the top, then it's far away, and if it's at the bottom, then it's closer. But the Greeks give us this idea of stacking, which basically just means putting figures right on top of each other, but are meant to look like they are further back. Okay, I'm going to leave it there.