Ancient Art Lecture 19: Hellenistic Greek Art

Hey everyone, welcome back. This is our final lecture about Greece. This is the Hellenistic period. So six lectures for a period of about 700 years, whereas we did five lectures, I think, for Egypt, and that was over about 3,000 years. Some works of art we're going to be talking about this lecture is the Temple of Olympian Zeus. We'll talk about the Venus de Milo. We're going to talk about Pergamon. Pergamum? Pergamon? Pergamos? You will hear different pronunciations of it. The Barberini Faun and the Dying Gaul, among others. All right, so before we discuss actual works of art, let's discuss the characteristics of what we're going to be looking at. So first of all, Hellenistic art focuses on emotion, genre scenes, which means everyday life. There's no aspect of life, however lowly or pathetic, that's off-limits to a Hellenistic artist. There are extremes of size. Charis of Lindos makes a 105-foot bronze statue, the Colossus of Rhodes, whose fingers were the size of most of the large statues that we've already looked at. And they were very different from presenting the ideal that you would have seen from Phidias at the beginning of the classical period, which would have instructed men how to behave. Art was now about conveying emotion. All right, so let's begin the Hellenistic period with architecture. I'm going to talk a little bit about the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens. It uses the Corinthian order. The Corinthian capitals, unlike in Doric and Ionic orders, had acanthus leaves and coiled flowers around a basket-shaped core. The leafy complex patterns created shadows and light, and this contributes to its Hellenistic characteristics. Like the Ionic order, this had a continuous frieze. The Temple of Olympian Zeus at the foot of the Acropolis followed long-established conventions, but was Hellenistic in that it was larger than Greek temples that were constructed before it. So remember, the Hellenistic period you have manipulations of size, and then also there's more sort of light and shadow. This is the theater at Epidaurus, and you probably know about Greek theater with tragedies like Oedipus and Antigone. Greek theater was much more than entertainment though. It was religious festivals, politics, social commentary. It was a communal experience. Many performances at the festivals were dedicated to the god Dionysus. What I find fascinating is that architectural painting and perspective seems to have derived from theatrical scene painting. In other words, they needed to fool the viewers into thinking the background was real, so they perfected perspective, the ability to make an image look three-dimensional and recede into space. The theater also has a semicircle of tiered seats. It was built into a hillside and faced the orchestra or the circular performance area and the proscenium platform stage. This design provided uninterrupted sight lines so everybody could see from every position and excellent acoustics. You could sit at the top and the person on the stage could whisper and you could still hear what they were saying. Okay, we're gonna move into sculpture now. This already is very different than what you are used to seeing in Greek sculpture, and that's kind of the point in this period of art is that things are much different and they're full of emotion and drama. So this is a satyr, and satyrs were human-like male woodland spirits. They had several animal features like a goat-like tail, hooves, ears, and horns, and they were the attendants of Dionysus. They were associated with the idea of the wild, uncontrolled, animalistic nature. And this sculpture has blatant sexuality like we haven't seen before. So now the issue of genitalia finally confronts us. Male genitalia in the past sculptures that we have looked at have been present but not pronounced. This was a matter of balance. If the figure were to be too well endowed, that's what the viewer would have no choice but to focus on. However, if genitalia simply exists, we take in the entirety of the sculpture. This is not the case with the Barberini Faun because it's not a human. We're meant to think about its animalistic traits. This is blatantly, unapologetically sexual. Okay, this is kind of a side note, but just bear with me for a second. So this sculpture was discovered by an Italian cardinal in the 1600s CE. So, you know, 400 years ago. And it was restored by artists of the time. And we see a fig leaf over its genitalia. And the fig leaf refers to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The church put these fig leaves on Roman statues because there was a ban on nude males in art as a reaction against the celebration of the nude figure during the Renaissance. So the interesting thing is the genitalia needed to be removed in order to put those leaves on. So there is a legend that all of those penises are hidden away somewhere in the Vatican. Maybe I should have put a warning at the beginning of this lecture. Okay, we're moving on. The Altar of Zeus at Pergamon actually combines architecture and sculpture. So it's gonna be both. Pergamon is a site in Asia Minor, which is modern-day Turkey. It's located on an Acropolis, or a high hill. Well, it was. It's been moved. But anyway, the theme is gods over giants, also known as order over chaos. The Acropolis includes a marketplace, temples, a royal palace, a theater, and the altar. So it was busier than the Athenian Acropolis. And it's very representative of the style and subject matter of the Hellenistic. This is an image of the frieze that wraps around the altar. The sculptured frieze around the base of the altar depicts the battle between gods and giants. And we're going to look at some very specific parts of this. You can see that this is really large. I mean, this is almost eight feet tall. And this is an image of Athena pulling a giant from the ground while her snakes attack the giant. And then his mother on the opposite side is trying to help, but she looks defeated. Meanwhile, Athena is being crowned by the winged victory, or Nike. So a few things are happening in this that make it feel dynamic, or like there's movement. Something that makes us kind of feel the gravity of all this. And the first thing is this triangular composition. And the idea of sort of creating a triangle out of a group of people is brand new, and doesn't really come back into play until the Renaissance. And we see Leonardo da Vinci doing this. So this idea of using the triangle to create a stable base, and then all of the action sort of culminating at the top is brand new. This sculpture also has a sort of a swirling effect, where if you look at the body of the giant that's being pulled by Athena, you can see that he has this curvature about his body. And then that leads into the mother on the bottom. And then that leads into the winged victory. And then it goes back to Athena's face. And if you follow the wings down, it goes back into the face of the giant. So there is this effect of sort of circling around, and your eye is constantly moving around. And that's another hallmark of colonistic sculpture, is there's all this movement and dynamism. Another wonderful little detail is on these stairs on the altar that lead up to the temple are all of these fighting figures of gods and giants. And they're starting to sort of spill out onto the stairs. And there is this sort of sight-generated effect that's happening, which is not really new. We've seen this before at the Temple of Aegina or even on the Parthenon with the figures and the pediments. But unlike those figures with that classical preference for smooth surfaces, this altar has all of these dramatic forms and different textures. And there's this deeply undercut high relief that creates light and shadow. So there's far more drama happening in these sculptures than what we saw earlier. Also at Pergamon, these sculptures were found. They are statues that celebrated the victory over the Gauls. And it's completed in the Hellenistic style. These Gauls, which you might know from medieval history or Roman history, are the same ones that come from northern Europe. They moved down through Italy, they sacked Rome, and then they traveled east to Macedon. And they tried to move south and east into Greece and Near East territories. And then the Greeks defeated them. Okay, so what's happening in this sculpture? So first of all, in order to avoid humiliation, the king of the Gauls killed himself and then killed his wife to keep her from being enslaved. And what's interesting about this sculpture is that no matter how you look at it, it's hard to see his face completely. It's as if he's turning away in shame. It looks like he's holding his wife, but technically she's a device in the sculpture to create balance, like what we saw with the Aphrodite of Nidus. There's a video about this. It's really great. Please watch it. This statue is known as the Dying Gaul or the Dying Gallic Trumpeter. And it was originally a bronze figure and it survives in this marble copy. The figure himself is wearing what's called a torc. It's that thing around his neck. And it was worn by noblemen and consisted of kind of an abstract design. And the pattern in it is an integral part of the object. It's not applied decoration. I'm showing you this because the sculptor, Epigonos, I think is trying to convey both beauty and destruction. The monument that this and the other sculpture were from had no images of the victors, only the defeated. So we have to ask ourselves why? Why make a monument to the defeated? And of course it's not the same, the Dying Gaul and the Wounded Lioness. But there is something about showing the defeated in agony and pain as a sign of maybe respect or you're sympathetic to your enemies. There will be a lecture question on this, so I'll let you decide. This is a very famous statue group known as Lau Cohen and His Sons. And it is thought to be a Hellenistic original from the first century BCE, but it may be a copy. The complex composition relates to a story from the Trojan War. Lau Cohen, the big guy in the middle there, was a priest who tried to warn the Trojans about the giant wooden horse that they were about to let into the city. But the gods did not want that to happen, so they sent sea serpents out of the ocean to drag him and his sons into the ocean as they walked on the beach. It was meant to be viewed frontally despite it being sculpted in the round. So you can walk around this and you can see all aspects of it. There are some similarities between this sculpture and the Athena relief that we looked at earlier in that it has that triangular form. And instead of this kind of circular swirling effect, these sea serpents act as a guide to get us to move around and the way that they look at each other. Also all of those diagonals, like in the arms and the way that the legs seem to be pushing and pulling, all help to move us around. By the way, there's an amazing copy of this at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco. It's not actually inside the museum, it's on the south edge of the museum, kind of between the golf course and the museum. But if you're downstairs and you're near the bathrooms, you can look out the door and you can see it there. You can't go out those doors, you have to go out the museum and kind of walk around the museum. But you can see this sculpture. Besides the serpents and the writhing and the biting, there's also true anguish in the face of Lau Cohen. And that is something that we have not seen in Greek sculpture at all. We often see this kind of cool, calm demeanor. The man in control of his emotions, that order over chaos. This man is not in control and he's sad and scared and maybe resigned. It's all reflected in the faces of Lau Cohen and his son. I have a few more examples of Hellenistic art and we're going to call it a day. This is the Nike of Samothrace. And originally the statue was carved for a niche in a hillside, which kind of explains the forward thrust of the Nike's body. And it's balanced by these enormous wings behind her. And what makes this Hellenistic are a few things. The contrasting textures of feathers and fabric and skin. We've actually seen this device before where the clothing seems to sort of stick to the body so that it reveals and conceals. But there's even more drama with the clothing of this Nike. This sculpture is a little different than what we've been looking at because this plays to more of that everyday subject matter that I was talking about. And this is basically a representation of an old woman who might be on her way to the Agora. She could be a follower of Dionysus on her way to a religious festival. That could be what she's carrying in her basket. But the fact that it's a realistic old woman and not some idealized youthful woman is another Hellenistic quality. There's a truth to this sculpture that is different from the ideal truth. And that's something that the Romans are going to pick up on. And we're going to see a lot of this truthfulness in sculpture in Rome once we get there. But to see it in a Greek sculpture is a real surprise. Okay we're going to end with the Venus de Milo because everybody knows it. It's actually the Aphrodite of Milos. And it is inspired by the sculptures from Praxiteles and Lysippos. But the Hellenistic sculptors switched it up a little bit. And they did things like twisted the body more. And there's more of a three-dimensionality and the drapery. And just an ending side note. A lot of times people look at sculptures like this and go, what happened to the arm? And a few things might have happened. The first thing is sometimes they made the arms out of wood. And because they painted these sculptures it wouldn't have mattered if the arms were made of wood or marble. You wouldn't have been able to tell except upon really close inspection. So the arms could have just decayed and fallen off. The other thing is if you look at the sculpture of the Aphrodite of Nidos and you see that sort of bar that connects her to the cloth, they didn't maybe have that in place. And so the arm was too heavy and it fell off over time. But now you can sort of understand why the Egyptian statues or those Mesopotamian statues the arms are so close together because there's no parts to fall off like we've seen in these Greek sculptures.