Ancient Art Lecture 18: Late Classical Greek Art

Hey everyone, welcome back. This is the fifth lecture of the chapter on Greece and we are going to continue with the high classical period and then go into the late classical period. We're going to cover basically the end of one and entirety of another. It's going to be about 100 years worth of sculpture. So we're looking at Polykleitos and Lysippos and Praxiteles. Those are the big names of sculptors and we'll look at works from each of those sculptors and how they sort of changed the game with these works of art. So let's start with Polykleitos. He was a sculptor who continued the quest to create order out of chaos. He worked around the middle of the 5th century. He wrote the canon which was a treatise on the principle of symmetria or ratios and proportions and applied it to the representation of the body in sculpture. So this wasn't so weird to think about ratios and proportions when you look at something like the Parthenon but to take the idea of ratio and proportion and then impose it on a human figure is a different idea. His goals were to describe an ideal nature in man and harmonize opposing forces. To make art more interesting and exciting by creating rules which allow for plausible exaggeration. So make the rules and then try to play within those rules. So just to remind you where we're coming from this is the Critias Boi and this was the first time that Greek artists got as close as possible to a human but it's not very exciting. Polykleitos on the other hand tries to create an energetic statue using math. This is the Doryphoros or spare bearer also called Achilles or the canon because it was an illustration of the three principles. All of the forces are counterbalanced also balanced between motion and stability. It was a display piece intended to illustrate the principles of the written canon which I spoke of earlier. Polykleitos had three goals to achieve in this sculpture. Symmetria or the clearly definable and measurable parts. Isonomia which was equilibrium and Rhythmos which is a momentary position taken by a dancer or athlete in mid-performance very similar to the disc thrower. There is an amazing video to watch about this and the modules please do so. Pause now or watch it after. Did you watch it? Welcome back. This is another sculpture by Polykleitos and I want to explain something to you just so you really understand that there is math involved in this. So here's how Polykleitos used math in order to create a human form. His method begins with one part such as the last or distal phalange. Phalange? I'm going with phalange. Of the little finger and then you treat that as one side of a square then you rotate that square's diagonal and that gives you a one to the square root of two rectangle and then that's suitable for the next phalange the medial and then the method is repeated to get to the next phalange and then you use the whole finger to get the palm and then you use the whole hand to get the forearm to the elbow and then the forearm to get the upper arm etc etc. So Polykleitos was a follower of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans were concerned with finding some underlying pattern in visual phenomenon and the fascination with numbers was directly connected to this belief the idea that in numbers one can not only find the key to physical bodies the way that Polykleitos did but also of abstract qualities like justice. The Pythagoreans also saw reality as having a pattern of opposition limited and unlimited odd and even one and plurality right and left male and female rest and movement straight and curve light and darkness good and bad square and oblong etc. And now for funsies I'm going to give you this sculpture by Polykleitos and in your lecture questions I'm going to ask you to name as many of these oppositions as you can and then explain them so you can't just say oh there's right and left you have to explain to me what you mean. All of those that I just listed in the last slide I want you to use those see as many as you can find in this sculpture and then tell me where you found them. Okay moving on from the high classical we're going to go into the late classical period and a few historical references. First the power of Athens was beginning to wane at this point because they were defeated by Sparta and then up in Macedonia Philip II and then his son Alexander the Great led this campaign to defeat the Persians and then Alexander's empire basically spreads from Greece into North Africa and all the way basically to India and Pakistan. Once arriving in Pakistan his troops said no more and so they were heading back and then Alexander the Great died of fever on the way back. And then the empire was divided after a series of civil wars between the generals of Alexander the Great and after 40 years of these civil wars there were four stable power blocs. There was Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucid Mesopotamia and Central Asia, Attalid Anatolia and then Antigonid or Antigonid not really sure how to pronounce that Macedon. They basically all served to spread Greek architecture, city planning, language and religion across the entire area and then oftentimes it would be hybridized with an existing culture. The art in Greece is also changing and we're going to start off in the late classical with Praxiteles and Praxiteles was kind of rebelling against the idea of standards for ideal proportions. His statues have smaller heads, don't really look proportional to the body, there's a more exaggerated s-curve pose and then he does this thing where he creates a lot of depth with textures and flesh to create more shadows which then creates more drama. One of Praxiteles' main concerns as an artist was to introduce as much realism as possible into his work and he wanted to convey the impression of inward dreaming. This pose became known as the Praxitelian curve and this curve influenced generations of future sculptors. Hermes is so far displaced that, at least for optical equilibrium, he needs a pillar or other support to lean on. The arm is extended more loosely and the head is turned further to the side. Just as a side note and to sort of give you a glimpse into how art historians do their job, this was actually discovered in the rubble of the ruined temple of Hera at Olympia in 1875 and the statue is now widely accepted as a Roman or Hellenistic copy and there's support for this conclusion and it comes from certain elements that were typical of Roman sculpture. For example, Hermes' sandals, which recent studies suggest weren't accurate to 4th century BCE depiction of his sandals and that the supporting element of crumpled fabric covering a tree stump and then the use of a reinforcing strut or brace between his hip and the tree stump. Praxiteles was seemingly obsessed with pushing the boundaries of his art. He was constantly trying new techniques to make his artwork ripple with light and to be as natural as possible and to achieve this sort of naturalism he worked the stone and bronze to create curves with light and shadow and he used this special technique for polishing his marble which gave it a real lifelike appearance. His immediate predecessors produced works which were detached and majestic in style and then Praxiteles wanted to introduce a more humanistic gentle grace into Greek sculpture. The style was seen as delicate, luminous and sensual. This is a satyr by Praxiteles and we know it's a satyr because it has pointed ears and it's wearing a panther pelt. So I'm going to ask you now looking at a few examples of Praxiteles and knowing a little bit about him how does this sculpture fit into the other works that we've seen by him? But for all this Praxiteles was actually most famous for his sculpture of Aphrodite of Nidus. It was the first well-known Greek statue with full female nudity and there were hundreds of copies of this made during the Roman and Hellenistic periods. The Aphrodite stands upright and nude with thighs together and a slack left leg slightly turned out. The left arm is dropping her clothing onto a water jar and the head is turned to the left and the right hand is brought across in the front. This is a gesture that from repetition seems prudish or banal to us but at the time there was no hint of self-consciousness. The Aphrodites of both Kos and Nidus were made by Praxiteles and the one from Kos is clothed and the one from Nidus is nude and he offered them for the same price at the same time and the people of Kos took the clothed version because they thought it more proper. The people of Nidos got the rejected nude which ended up being way more famous, sought after, and copied and it made Nidos a famous tourist attraction and it was sort of like the classical version of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. My favorite part of this sculpture though is that she's not leaning but holding her drapery. This gives the impression of a freestanding sculpture however that drapery is actually acting as a support structure. The last sculptor we're going to look at is Lysippos and there are many copies of works by Lysippos but not any originals. The one that we're going to look at next is the Man Scraping Himself or Epoxiominus and that depicts an athlete not engaging in a sport but actually using a strigil. I will explain momentarily what that means. The figure has a pronounced curve and this will be the first sculpture we see that actually projects out into the viewer's space. And there is a new set of rules with Lysippos and that is the figure needs to be eight or more heads taller than in the past when it was six and a half or seven heads tall. Lysippos is moving us away from naturalism. There is a new canon of proportions that makes the head noticeably smaller, one-eighth instead of one-seventh. You can actually look at the head and then you look at the body. It doesn't really work. Lysippos is also making sculpture no longer dependent on the four cardinal elevations, front, two sides, and back. And this is done by extending both arms in a direction noticeably different from that of the body so that it's not immediately obvious which front view is intended as the principal one. Originally, the left hand held a strigil, which is a sort of long, thin scoop of bronze, which athletes would use to scrape themselves clean after exercise. They would put olive oil on their body and then they would scrape the olive oil and the dirt off. The epoxy ominous is using it on his right arm and this is an obviously momentary sort of balanced pose and the position of the feet are in harmony with this pose. In other words, the figure would fall if the feet were planted that way. In its proportion, the epoxy ominous follows this new system, attributed to Lysippos, of smaller head and longer legs. It's kind of like the Deriphorus in that it is a statement of artistic values. This sculpture is called Hermes fastening his sandal, although nothing really identifies this figure as Hermes. He looks like an ideal athlete with a tiny head, but he doesn't have winged sandals and there's no helmet. In fact, this could be Jason of the Jason and the Argonauts story. He had a sandal thing too. He lost his sandal helping an old lady cross a river and then when he entered the town with the lack of a sandal, that was the identifier that he was the rightful king. This presages the next period we're going to talk about, which is the Hellenistic, in which there is this interest in all aspects of life, not just myths and heroes, but genre scenes of everyday events, especially in a major art form like sculpture. We've actually seen this in vase painting many times already. Okay, there is a video about Lysippos that I want you to watch as well. All right, you have gone through a few different periods of art now in Greece. And so another question I'm going to ask you are, what are the differences from the Critias Boi in the early classical period to the Epoxyominus of the late classical period?