In this wide-ranging study, Richard Neer offers a new way to understand the epoch-making sculpture of classical Greece. Working at the intersection of art history, archaeology, literature, and aesthetics, he reveals a people fascinated with the power of sculpture to provoke wonder in beholders. Wonder, not accuracy, realism, naturalism or truth, was the supreme objective of Greek sculptors. Neer traces this way of thinking about art from the poems of Homer to the philosophy of Plato. Then, through meticulous accounts of major sculpture from around the Greek world, he shows how the demand for wonder-inducing statues gave rise to some of the greatest masterpieces of Greek art. Rewriting the history of Greek sculpture in Greek terms and restoring wonder to a sometimes dusty subject, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the art of sculpture or the history of the ancient world.
This handsome volume presents an innovative look at the imagery of libations, the most commonly depicted ritual in ancient Greece, and how it engaged viewers in religious performance. In a libation, liquid--water, wine, milk, oil, or honey--was poured from a vessel such as a jug or a bowl onto the ground, an altar, or another surface. Libations were made on occasions like banquets, sacrifices, oath-taking, departures to war, and visitations to tombs, and their iconography provides essential insight into religious and social life in 5th-century BC Athens. Scenes depicting the ritual often involved beholders directly--a statue's gaze might establish the onlooker as a fellow participant, or painted vases could draw parallels between human practices and acts of gods or heroes. Beautifully illustrated with a broad range of examples, including the Caryatids at the Acropolis, the Parthenon Frieze, Attic red-figure pottery, and funerary sculpture, this important book demonstrates the power of Greek art to transcend the boundaries between visual representation and everyday experience.
This book aims to enhance our appreciation of the modernity of the classical cultures and, conversely, of cinema's debt to ancient Greece and Rome. It explores filmic perspectives on the ancient verbal and visual arts and applies what is often referred to as pre-cinema and what Sergei Eisenstein called cinematism: that paintings, statues, and literature anticipate modern visual technologies. The motion of bodies depicted in static arts and the vividness of epic ecphrases point to modern features of storytelling, while Plato's Cave Allegory and Zeno's Arrow Paradox have been related to film exhibition and projection since the early days of cinema. The book additionally demonstrates the extensive influence of antiquity on an age dominated by moving-image media, as with stagings of Odysseus' arrow shot through twelve axes or depictions of the Golden Fleece. Chapters interpret numerous European and American silent and sound films and some television productions and digital videos.
For statesmen, friendship is the lingua franca of politics. Considering the connections between personal and political friendship, John von Heyking’s The Form of Politics interprets the texts of Plato and Aristotle and emphasizes the role that friendship has in enduring philosophical and contemporary political contexts. Beginning with a discussion on virtue-friendship, described by Aristotle and Plato as an agreement on what qualifies as the pursuit of good, The Form of Politics demonstrates that virtue and political friendship form a paradoxical relationship in which political friendships need to be nourished by virtue-friendships that transcend the moral and intellectual horizons of the political society. Von Heyking then examines Aristotle’s ethical and political writings – which are set within the boundaries of political life – and Plato’s dialogues on friendship in Lysis and the Laws, which characterize political friendship as festivity. Ultimately, arguing that friendship is the high point of a virtuous political life, von Heyking presents a fresh interpretation of Aristotle and Plato’s political thought, and a new take on the most essential goals in politics. Inviting reassessment of the relationship between friendship and politics by returning to the origins of Western philosophy, The Form of Politics is a lucid work on the foundations of political cooperation.
This book collects essays and other contributions by colleagues, students, and friends of the late Diskin Clay, reflecting the unusually broad range of his interests. Clay’s work in ancient philosophy, and particularly in Epicurus and Epicureanism and in Plato, is reflected chapters on Epicurean concerns by André Laks, David Sedley and Martin Ferguson Smith, as well as Jed Atkins on Lucretius and Leo Strauss; Michael Erler contributes a chapter on Plato. James Lesher discusses Xenophanes and Sophocles, and Aryeh Kosman contributes a jeu d’esprit on the obscure Pythagorean Ameinias. Greek cultural history finds multidisciplinary treatment in Rebecca Sinos’s study of Archilochus’ Heros and the Parian Relief, Frank Romer’s mythographic essay on Aphrodite’s origins and archaic mythopoieia more generally, and Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou’s explication of Callimachus’s kenning of Mt. Athos as "ox-piercing spit of your mother Arsinoe." More purely literary interests are pursued in chapters on ancient Greek (Joseph Russo on Homer, Dirk Obbink on Sappho), Latin (Jenny Strauss Clay and Gregson Davis on Horace), and post-classical poetry (Helen Hadzichronoglou on Cavafy, John Miller on Robert Pinsky and Ovid). Peter Burian contributes an essay on the possibility and impossibility of translating Aeschylus. In addition to these essays, two original poems (Rosanna Warren and Jeffrey Carson) and two pairs of translations (from Horace by Davis and from Foscolo by Burian) recognize Clay’s own activity as poet and translator. The volume begins with an Introduction discussing Clay’s life and work, and concludes with a bibliography of Clay’s publications.
Offering a unique blend of thematic and chronological investigation, this highly illustrated, engaging text explores the rich historical, cultural, and social contexts of 3,000 years of Greek art, from the Bronze Age through the Hellenistic period. Uniquely intersperses chapters devoted to major periods of Greek art from the Bronze Age through the Hellenistic period, with chapters containing discussions of important contextual themes across all of the periods Contextual chapters illustrate how a range of factors, such as the urban environment, gender, markets, and cross-cultural contact, influenced the development of art Chronological chapters survey the appearance and development of key artistic genres and explore how artifacts and architecture of the time reflect these styles Offers a variety of engaging and informative pedagogical features to help students navigate the subject, such as timelines, theme-based textboxes, key terms defined in margins, and further readings. Information is presented clearly and contextualized so that it is accessible to students regardless of their prior level of knowledge A book companion website is available at www.wiley.gom/go/greekart with the following resources: PowerPoint slides, glossary, and timeline
Considerations about size and scale have always played a central role within Greek and Roman visual culture, deeply affecting sculptural production. Both Greeks and Romans, in particular, had a clear notion of “colossality” and were able to fully exploit its implications with sculpture in many different areas of social, cultural and religious life. Instead, despite their ubiquitous presence, an equal and contrary categorization for small size statues does not seem to have existed in Greek and Roman culture, leading one to wonder what were the ancient ways of conceptualizing sculptural representations in a format markedly smaller than “life-size.” Even in the context of modern scholarship on Classical Art, few notions appear to be as elusive as that of “small sculpture”, often treated with a certain degree of diffidence well summarized in the formula Klein, aber Kunst? In fact, a large and heterogeneous variety of objects corresponds to this definition: all kinds of small sculpture, from statuettes to miniatures, in a variety of materials including stone, bronze, and terracotta, associated with a great array of functions and contexts, and with extremely different levels of manufacture and patronage. It would be a major misunderstanding to think of these small sculptures in general as nothing more than a cheap and simplified alternative to larger scale statues. Compared with those, their peculiar format allowed for a wider range of choices, in terms, for example, of use of either cheap or extremely valuable materials (not only marble and bronze, but also gold and silver, ivory, hard stones, among others), methods of production (combining seriality and variation), modes of fruition (such as involving a degree of intimacy with the beholder, rather than staging an illusion of “presence”). Furthermore, their pervasive presence in both private and public spaces at many levels of Greek and Roman society presents us with a privileged point of view on the visual literacy of a large and varied public. Although very different in many respects, small-sized sculptures entertained often a rather ambivalent relationship with their larger counterparts, drawing from them at the same time schemes, forms and iconographies. By offering a fresh, new analysis of archaeological evidence and literary sources, through a variety of disciplinary approaches, this volume helps to illuminate this rather complex dynamic and aims to contribute to a better understanding of the status of Greek and Roman small size sculpture within the general development of ancient art.
Indexes the Times, Sunday times and magazine, Times literary supplement, Times educational supplement, Times educational supplement Scotland, and the Times higher education supplement.
The frames of classical art are often seen as marginal to the images that they surround. Traditional art history has tended to view framing devices as supplementary 'ornaments'. Likewise, classical archaeologists have often treated them as tools for taxonomic analysis. This book not only argues for the integral role of framing within Graeco-Roman art, but also explores the relationship between the frames of classical antiquity and those of more modern art and aesthetics. Contributors combine close formal analysis with more theoretical approaches: chapters examine framing devices across multiple media (including vase and fresco painting, relief and free-standing sculpture, mosaics, manuscripts and inscriptions), structuring analysis around the themes of 'framing pictorial space', 'framing bodies', 'framing the sacred' and 'framing texts'. The result is a new cultural history of framing - one that probes the sophisticated and playful ways in which frames could support, delimit, shape and even interrogate the images contained within.
In The Classics and Children's Literature between West and East a team of contributors from different continents offers a survey of the reception of Classical Antiquity in children’s and young adults’ literature by applying regional perspectives.
