The Case of the White Temple; Into Classical Greek

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Key Work: Dipylon Burial Vase/Krater, (Terracotta krater) ca. 750–735 BCE,  42 5/8 in. x 28 1/2 in. , Style= Archaic Greek, Metropolitan Museum

Dipylon Burial Vase/Krater, (Terracotta krater) ca. 750–735 BCE,  42 5/8 in. x 28 1/2 in. , Style= Archaic Greek, Metropolitan Museum

Key Work: Achilles and Ajax Amphora, Exekias, 540 bce , archaic period in Greece. Esther, Maya, and Sam's vase slide. 

Exekias' signature as potter: (“Exekias made [me]”), ca. 545–540 BCE (some pieces are inscribed "Exekias made and painted me"

Key Work: 

Kouros from Attica, ~ 580 

So-Called Peplos Kore

Key WorkKritios Boy, Classical Greek, ~480 bce, Kenneth Clark called it "The first beautiful nude in history," exhibiting a world of bias that may prove useful to examine. 

510-323 bce Classical Period of Greek Art and Architecture

extreme naturalism in sculpture, relaxed, freestanding males in contrapposto the ideal,  

and the development of the Classical orders in architecture,
  with the Parthenon providing the most recognizable/ideal example of classical architecture.

Key Work: 

Iktinos and Kallikrates, Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens, ~447 bce, Marble, 45' tall; floor space 240 x 112'
 

Parthenon atop the Acropolis, Athens

Architectural Refinements

West Metopes- Amazonomachy

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends, 1868 

The Greek Style, particularly the classical Greek style, has had extraordinary influence … on the entire Mediterranean, broadly speaking 

Greek Temple at Priene, Turkey, ~300 bce source

(Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Phoenecia, Italy and more) and then all of the many neoclassical periods around the world:

Andrea Palladio, Villa la Rotonda, 1566

the Renaissance, of course, is the rebirth of classicism, and periods of Neoclassicism have significantly colored the history of art in

Thomas Jefferson, Monticello,  Charlottesville, VA, 1772

France, Italy, England, (and to lesser extent all of Europe), USA and more.

Key Work Temple of Hera, Paestum,  550 bce, Greek, Doric Style (4-15) 

The case of the White Temple

Classical architecture and in particular Greek temple design influenced political buildings and the look of democracy around the world. We based our aesthetic on that look… but what, actually, did it look like?

Parthenon reconstruction

In every Greek city, people dedicated vast resources to create temples to honor particular gods. The typical temple included an open porch with columns, and a closed portion, or cella, where a statue honoring the god or goddess would prevail.

Temple of Athena Nike, Acropolis, Athens. Many spare bits of the temple have recently been reattached. The temple would have included a statue of Athena victorious... in the case of this temple she was represented without wings. 427-424 bce

These statues, as well as innumerable other sculptures of gods and humans executed in marble and stone formed an ideal which western art history has never let go of. Greece fell to Rome in 146 bce, at which time the Romans, having imperial ideas already evident in Greece after Alexander the Great, emerged powerfully.

The Romans admired the work of the greeks enormously; but they needed materials for construction and warfare even more. They burned great marble pillars and monumental statues to obtain lime for concrete, often making small copies in marble to document the original.   They melted bronze sculptures, after documenting them with marble copies, usually mere shadows of the original. Only a very rare few Greek bronzes remain.

Key Work: 

Riace Warrior  (4-27), 460-450 bce, Classical greece, Bronze, just over life size

Nike of Samothrace, (Athena Victorious), 2nd century bce,  Hellenistic Great Source

Key Work: 

Hagesandros, Athanadoros and Polydoros, Laocoön and his Sons, 200 BCE-70 BCE, 6'7" tall

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Key Work: 

Dying Gallic Trumpeter, Roman marble reproduction: 230-220 CE of a Hellenistic (323-31 BCE) Greek bronze. 323–31 BC) Contemporary art makes us think about this warrior again. 

Kehinde Wiley, Dying Gaul (Roman 1st Century), 2022, bronze, 21 1/8 × 18 7/8 × 47 inches

As lit in Wiley's exhibition, An Archeology of Silence, Venice Biennale, 2022

Romans allowed Greek architecture to fall to ruin, and, eventually, the Roman empire ran its well-known course, decline, transition to Christianity, takeover by Byzantine rule from the 400’s to 1450’s, then Ottonian Turkish Rule until the early 1800’s.  A combined British, French, and Russian force overthru the Ottonian leaders… and that gives our story another beginning.

Greatly abbreviated, the story goes like this.

Anton Graff, Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin, ~1788

At the time of these battles, Thomas Bruce, 7^th Earl of Elgin, came upon hard times at home. His finances were a wreck. He acquired two salves for his suffering: he married an heiress and achieved an important military appointment, which took him to Greece. These dual solutions also allowed him to pursue his true love: classical antiquities. He dispatched his secretary to collect casts and make drawings around the acropolis in Athens.

Because the Parthenon was serving at this time as a munitions store for the Turks, he had to receive permission for his secretary to be in that area.  The secretary makes some now highly controversial deals with the Turks. Before long, the proposed casts of objects turn into crates, packed with the original objects

key work: Pediment of Parthenon (Elgin Marbles) 4-29,

438-432 bce

Elgin ships the sculptures home, at huge personal cost, to decorate his country villa.

Eventually, he divorces his philandering wife, runs again into financial difficulties, in large part because of the expense of collecting the sculptures from the Parthenon, and sells the fragments of this building  to the British Museum at a fraction of the cost. Had they remained in Athens, they would not likely exist, as a shot at the Parthenon (remember, it’s a munitions store) led to an explosion that destroyed large portions of the building. Yet, the Greeks wonder if sculpture and artifacts acquired through shady dealings with a different invading party is reason for them to remain in England.

key work: Pediment of Parthenon (Elgin Marbles) 4-29,

Even at the time, many described Lord Elgin's work as a travesty, or even a rape. The poet Byron visited the site, and rebuked his fellow Lord scathingly in verse:

key work: Pediment of Parthenon (Elgin Marbles) 4-29,

438-432 bce

Dull is the eye that will not weep to see

Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed

By British hands, which it had best behov'd

To guard those relics ne'er to be restored

       -Byron, "Childe Harolde's Pilgrimage"

So, what does an experience of ‘the Parthenon’ today look like… and what should it look like?

Scholars working on the Parthenon spend time at the Athens Museum,

Bernard Tschumi, Acropolis Museum, 2008

where many remnants of the Parthenon are housed, go to the

 British Museum to see the so-called Elgin Marbles,

Parthenon Marbles in Copenhagen, Denmark

 travel to Denmark, to see a set of marble sculptures which a Danish sea captain bought from a street vendor in Athens, 

spend time at the actual Parthenon ruins on the Acropolis in Athens,

and study reconstructions of the building. None of these, of course, gives a complete experience of what the Parthenon and other temples that informed our architectural and sculptural aesthetic may have looked like in their own time.

key work: Marbles from the pediment of Parthenon (Elgin Marbles), 438-432 bce 4-29,

During the time of its stewardship over the sculptures, the British Museum spent vast resources of elbow grease and chemical experimentation to scrub and scour and clean the marbles of all traces of age and paint that they believed unoriginal

This scrubbing informed scholar Martin Bernal who leapt into hot water with the publication of his book, Black Athena,  which proposed that the influence of African and Asiatic peoples and cultures on Ancient Greece had been suppressed by  European Scholars throughout the 19^th century.

Sculptural ideals in Europe and the United States from the 1400’s to the mid 1900’s were based on a particular idea of Greek Art, which looks pretty much like this, and, presumably, you recognize almost as readily for the simple marble surfaces as for the elegant lines and focus on ideal anatomy.

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However, in 2008, and exhibit travelled the world called “The Gods in Color” which showed how the marbles on which  we've based our ideal of art may have looked in their own time. 

Here's another example of a painted classical object reported by the University of Cinncinatti.

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

BY JOHN KEATS

My spirit is too weak—mortality

   Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,

   And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

   Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep

   That I have not the cloudy winds to keep

Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain

   Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

   That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude

Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—

   A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.

323-146 bce Hellenistic Period

marked by Greek political expansion begun under Alexander the Great. Artwork demonstrates exaggerated grace and spiraling, twisting movement as well as emotional intensity not seen in Classical Artwork.

Greece after Greek Rule

Roman Conquest