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ARCHAIC GREECE

The period after the destruction of the Helladic palaces in about 1300 BC by invaders from the north (see p. 87) is generally called the Dark Age. The country lapsed into total illiteracy until about 800 BC, when an entirely different script was developed from the Phoenician alphabet. Nor was there any architecture, painting or large-scale sculpture until about the same date. Only two arts survived from the Helladic past: those of the bronze-worker and potter, the former engaged for the most part in producing weapons and the latter mainly simple utilitarian wares, roughly decorated, if at all, with motifs handed down from an earlier period. (Of some 70 Helladic vase forms only ten continued to be made.)

In the archeological record, which is our only source of information, signs of recovery start to appear about the beginning of the first millennium BC with the introduction of iron technology. The most interesting artifacts of this period are pottery vases made in Athens - then a small town which had had a citadel on the Acropolis in Helladic times but only now began to gain a leading position. The word 'vases' is perhaps misleading, for they were all strictly utilitarian - cups, jugs and mixing-bowls for wine and water - and never intended for ornamental purposes, though they were sometimes placed over graves. Technically they are as fine in quality as any previously made in Greece or Crete, wheel-thrown, boldly and symmetrically shaped with an even surface texture. But the lively free-hand painted decoration of natural forms and scrolls on earlier vessels has given way to very severe patterns of lustrous black bands and lines and concentric circles on a buff ground; the bands and lines were painted by holding a brush against the surface while the vessel was rotated on a wheel, the circles by brushes attached to a pair of compasses. Decoration thus echoes both the form of the pot and the process by which it had been made - hinting at a precocious development of that rationalizing mentality later to be expressed in the words inscribed on the entrance to Plato's Academy: 'Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry'

Such vases are called 'Proto-geometric' and precede the much more elaborately painted 'Geometric' vessels found at Athens and elsewhere on the Greek mainland and the Aegean islands. On Geometric pottery the spaces between the horizontal bands are filled with lozenges, checkers, chevrons, the squared scroll of the Greek fret pattern (later used extensively in architectural decoration) and sometimes men and animals. The finest example is nearly 5 feet (1.5m) high - a virtuoso display of ceramic craftsmanship, for so large a vase had to be constructed in horizontal sections and fitted together (4,1). It has a frieze (see Glossary) of grazing deer just below the top, another of seated deer at the base of the neck and panels with human figures encircling the belly between the handles. The animals are schematically rendered and those on each band are so exactly like one another that they seem almost to have been painted through a stencil. Human figures are only slightly less stereotyped. They are represented conceptually in a short-hand reduction of the 'Egyptian' pose - blobs for heads with slight excrescences to denote the chin, simple triangles filled in for frontal torsos and extended upwards to indicate arms bent at the elbow. The figures conform to the regularity which Greek artists were always to favour and are likewise arranged with strict symmetry. On the front they mourn a corpse laid out on a central bier: on the other side similar figures are shown in the same traditional attitude of lamentation with their hands on their heads. The figurative scenes thus express the purpose of the vase, which was one of several used to mark graves in the Dipylon cemetery at Athens.



The practice of burying the dead with elaborate 'grave goods', like those of Mycenae (see p. 83), had by this date been abandoned. But great importance was attached to the ritual of burial, which enabled the spirits of the dead to pass into the other world, and to the setting up of some kind of memorial. In the Odyssey, the shade of an unburied companion of Odysseus pleads: 'Burn me with all my arms and build me a grave mound upon the gray sea's shore so that the future may learn of luckless me; on it shall be raised the towering oar I used to ply while I saw the light.' Similarly in funerary art the focus shifted from the afterlife (about which Greek notions were very vague) to the world of the living. Greek religion and philosophy henceforth were to concentrate on the here and now - how to confront death rat Geometric pottery was not exclusively funerary: nor was art confined to pottery. Bronze statuettes of stiffly posed men, wearing nothing but very tight belts, and equally wasp-waisted centaurs and horses survive from the eighth century BC, molded versions of the men and animals on Geometric vases. The bronze figure of a helmet-maker is in a different class aesthetically - no less remarkable as the image of a craftsman wholly absorbed in his work than as a representation of the human figure in an entirely natural, unconventional and uncontrived pose of great three-dimensional subtlety (4,2). That metalwork was the most highly regarded form of art or craft (the Greeks did not distinguish between the two) is evident from descriptions in the Homeric epics, which were given their final form at this time, notably the famous description of Achilles' shield. This is almost certainly fanciful, but that of Agamemnon's may correspond with one Homer had actually seen: 'Big enough to hide a man, intricately worked, mighty, a beautiful shield; around it there were ten circles of bronze, and on it were 20 raised bosses of white tin, in the middle of which was one of dark enamel. And wreathed around in the very centre was the grim face of the Gorgon, glaring terribly, and around it were Terror and Fear.' The few surviving examples of eighth-century BC armour are a good deal less extravagant. Significantly, perhaps, a silver vase said in the Iliad to have 'surpassed all others on earth by far' was made at Sidon on the coast of the Lebanon - 'skilled Sidonians had wrought it well, and Phoenicians had carried it over the misty sea'. Significantly, because shortly before the end of the eighth century BC luxury articles made in the Assyrian empire, then at the height of its power, began to exert an animating influence on Greek art; and thus Greece was drawn briefly into a Near Eastern current.Motifs derived from the Near East had occasionally been incorporated into the decorations on Geometric pottery -the two friezes of deer on the funerary vase illustrated on page 129, for instance (4,1). But in the seventh century BC they predominate on vessels in what has, as a result, been termed the Orientalizing style. This is especially evident on pottery made at Corinth, which now emerged as a rival to Athens in pottery production. A jug painted with monstrous beasts of Oriental breed is typical (4,3). It differs from Geometric pieces on account not only of the Oriental motifs but also of the red, black and buff color scheme, the greater size of the animals in relation to the vessel and the use of incised lines to suggest the form and texture of their bodies. No pottery exactly like this is known to have been made in the Near East, and the Corinthian painter must have taken his motifs from Near Eastern works in other media, probably metal and perhaps also textiles.Influences from the East are also apparent in carvings of the human figure, but here they are more complex and seem to have been more quickly assimilated into a new and unmistakably Greek idiom. An ivory carving of a kneeling boy found on the Aegean island of Samos - originally perhaps part of the decoration of a lyre - seems to be Syrian or Phoenician in its refinement of carving and minute elaboration of detail, but not in the boy's nakedness, which is accentuated by the intricate belt, the carefully dressed hair and the head-band (4,4)- Male nudity is rare in Near Eastern art. Its peculiar appeal and significance for the ancient Greeks - and the enormous effect this was to have on the visual arts - will be discussed later. It was, however, connected in some no less mysterious way with their avoidance of female nudity until well into the fourth century BC. The Phoenician mother-goddess and goddess of fertility, Astarte, usually nude in her homeland, was clothed by the Greeks when they transformed her into Aphrodite. A marble goddess from the island of Delos, influenced by the images of Astarte, is one of the earliest large-scale Greek statues to survive, carved in the rudimentary style called Daedalic (after Daedalus, the legendary founder of the art of sculpture, who was said to have worked in Crete) (4,5). Despite its battered condition and the loss of coloring,

by such luxury objects as ivory carvings from the Near East. All this finery is, however, worn with an air of happy innocence, lending the statues a tender poignancy as new to art as that of .Sappho's epigrammatic poems to young brides (written c. 600 BC) had been to literature:

Like the wild hyacinth flower, which on the hills is found, Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound, Until the purple blossom is trodden into the ground.

From an early stage the Greeks had a trading station on the Syrian coast at Al Mina (in present-day Turkey). In the mid-seventh century BC they established another in the delta of the Nile. Syria provided a repertory of exotic motifs, but Egypt may have contributed a stronger stimulus to the independent development of Greek art. In Egypt the Greeks encountered monumental sculpture and architecture in stone, and although they copied neither in detail, they seem to have learned from both. They almost certainly took over Egyptian techniques of working in hard stone - a trickier process than that of carving wood or even limestone - and adapted them to their native types of marble. In these they were extraordinarily fortunate, for Parian marble and that from other Aegean islands and from Mount Hymettus and Mount Pentelicus near Athens are most beautiful, almost golden in color and gently luminous.

The Egyptian method of preparing a block by drawing the outlines of the statue on its faces (see p. 72) also seems to have been taken over. Archaic Greek sculpture has the same limited number of viewpoints - sometimes only two, front and back. Archaic statues are posed with their weight distributed equally on two legs, one of which is slightly advanced. Of the many that survive, however, only one conforms to the strict Egyptian canon of proportion, which was based on an abstract numerical system. From the beginning Greek sculptors seem to have preferred a more empirical approach to the human figure, and since the disparity between the Egyptian canon and a normally proportioned body becomes more obvious when the figure is completely undressed - which it seldom was in ancient Egypt - this may well have resulted from the Greek demand for male nudes.


Date: 2015-02-28; view: 743


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