Page 239 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

124 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Art is long, and Time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout
and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches
to the grave. • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)

was introduced to Greece. Beginning in the late seventh than in the strictly vertical and horizontal framework of
century, kouroi (male) and korai (female) appear as sixth-century sculpture.The decision of Phidias, the sculp-
votives and grave markers and, perhaps, as cult images. tor of the Parthenon, to ignore the developing tech-
There is probably a causal relationship between the niques of representing individual characteristics of age,
appearance of this sculpture and the coincidental relega- emotion, and character in favor of uniformly abstracted,
tion of pottery to an almost exclusively non-monumental ageless, “idealized” figures similarly indicates an analyti-
realm. The physical nature of kouroi and korai makes cal appreciation of the traditional character and tech-
them particularly appropriate as indicators and inspirers niques of monumental Greek art.
of spiritual transition. Like the religious sculpture of The Periclean building program on the Athenian
Egypt, they are represented as highly formalized compo- Acropolis, undertaken in the aftermath of the Persian
sitions, more religious emblem or hieroglyph than natu- destruction of Athens, is perhaps the most elaborate
ralistic representation of humans. Their tight symmetry expression of monumental art and architecture ever cre-
and stylization intentionally and effectively separates ated in Greece. Its religious roots and purpose are evi-
them from the strictly human realm, removes them from dent in the detailed expression of religious procession
the everyday, and places them in a mediating position through the organization of building types, the organi-
between human and divine. On the other hand, as in vase zation of their pedimental sculpture, and the incorpora-
painting and pedimental sculpture, an increasing interest tion of the processional language of Ionic temple
in the examination of things human is witnessed in sixth- architecture into the Doric tradition of the Acropolis. Its
century freestanding sculpture in the increasingly natural- political and historical context and tradition are ex-
istic modeling of the body.This parallels the change to the pressed through the many references to the Persian War,
more human conception of temple divinity as repre- both metaphorical and literal, through the cults of leg-
sented in pedimental sculpture, and reflects the increas- endary heroes, and through the use of the Ionic order as
ingly central role humans play in the Greek conception of areflection of Athens’s ancient genetic and linguistic con-
the cosmos. nections with Ionia and of its present position at the
head of an Ionian alliance against the Persians. The ex-
The Classical Period plicit celebration of the accomplishments and traditions
The increasingly detailed examination in art of the of the Athenians in the religious monuments of their cen-
human condition, physical and emotional, continued tral sanctuary is a remarkable deviation from canon and
unbroken into the classical period (beginning in 480 BCE represents an extreme evolution of the humanization of
with the Persian sack of the Athenian Acropolis). This divinity and divinization of humanity in Greek art and
movement toward naturalism, however, was potentially architecture.
inimical to the goals of monumentality, as the goals of After the hiatus of Phidian sculpture, the examination
monumental art and architecture had always been to lift of the human condition in ever-increasing detail recom-
viewers out of the ordinary, beyond the everyday, and menced with renewed energy in the fourth century BCE
into the contemplation of forces greater than themselves: and soon resulted in the monumental representation of
How could increasingly human representations lift generalized but, nevertheless, individual human beings.
humans beyond their own environment, inspire in them In the Hellenistic Age (the period beginning with the
the contemplation and understanding of something death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE and ending with
superhuman, of the divine realm? This seems to have the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE) the gradual humanization
been recognized by the mid-fifth-century sculptor Poly- of divinity in Greek art culminated in the worship and
kleitos, who reintroduced the formal symmetry of kouroi monumental representation of Hellenistic rulers as gods.
to his compositions, though along diagonal axes rather Similarly, while mythical or divine representation or ref-