REMINDER >>>MAKE UP EXAM TODAY AFTER SCHOOL IN ROOM !!!!!!!!!!! WE START PROMPTLY AT 3PM!!!!! 

Bringing the Color Back to Ancient Greece

The white marble statutes we revere were originally dressed in eye-popping pigments

• By Jamie Katz
• Smithsonian magazine, November 2012, Subscribe

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As the goddess of love, beauty and sexual pleasure, Aphrodite inspired cult worship and challenged artists to render her in suitably magnificent form. (Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann / Stiftung Archäologie)

The Greeks took their beauty seriously. It was a beauty contest, after all, that touched off the Trojan War. Athena, Hera and Aphrodite vied for Paris to decide who was the fairest among them. After Aphrodite promised him the love of the most beautiful mortal woman, Paris carried off Helen to Troy. Thus began the true mother of all wars.
As the goddess of love, beauty and sexual pleasure, Aphrodite inspired cult worship and challenged artists to render her in suitably magnificent form. We have inherited an image of her as an idealized nude chiseled in white marble, immortalized by works such as Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos or the Venus de Milo.
That image is dead wrong, according to modern scholars. Ancient sculptors were very much interested in color as well as form; the white marble statues we admire looked stunningly different in antiquity. They were painted with a palette that displayed a sophisticated understanding of color and shading.
To illustrate how a marble Aphrodite might have appeared to the ancients, we asked German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann, who has pioneered techniques of color restoration, to create a photomechanical reconstruction—never before published—of the first-century A.D. Roman Lovatelli Venus. It was excavated from the ruins of a villa in Pompeii. Unlike most ancient statues, this one gave Brinkmann a head start, because copious evidence of original paint survived. “There are rich traces of pigment which we analyzed using noninvasive methods such as UV-Vis absorption spectroscopy,” he explains. “What we do is absolutely faithful, based on physical and chemical measurements.”
Brinkmann is struck by the synergy of form and color in modeling the goddess’s act of disrobing. “The spectator,” he says, “awaits the next second, when her nakedness will be displayed. The sculptor creates a mantle that is heavy on the upper rim, to clearly explain that it will slide—and enhances this narrative by giving the rim its own color.”
The Lovatelli Venus may be one of the earliest examples of private art collecting, Brinkmann says. The work lent a decorative flourish to a nouveau-riche household.
To the Greeks, the marriage of color and form had deeper connotations, suggests Harvard art historian Susanne Ebbinghaus. She points to a passage in Euripides, in which a remorseful Helen bewails her role in sparking a catastrophic war:

If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect
The way you would wipe color off a statue.

“The passage is very interesting,” Ebbinghaus says, “because it conveys the superficial, transient nature of paint—it can be easily removed. But at the same time, if we take the words literally, what the paint contains is the very essence—the beauty—of an image.”

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/bringing-the-color-back-to-ancient-greece-174841661.html#ixzz2Ll7Q6ZBz
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bullet points: study guide

bullet points: study guide

A list based on our review(s) for test-soon

Identify the parts of a Romanesque portal
Identify the parts of a Gothic Cathedral
Identify the International style
Identify-the English,Italian, German,French Gothic styles
Sites to remember...Pisa,Durham,Florence Cathedral St Denis, that [bayeux]"Tapestry",Arena etc,etc.

Artists to know and identify-
Suger
Duccio
Cimabue
Giotto
Gislebertus

REMINDER

Hans Haacke, Saladin Ambar, Hal Foster

Gerhard Richter Painting (documentary, 2011)

Guess who

Portal? Portal...what's a Portal.

Follow the metamorphosis of architectural engineering...from

POST and LINTEL
CORBELLED WALLS
RELIEVING TRIANGLES
CEMENT
ARCHES
DOMES
COFFERED CEILINGS
BASILICAS
CENTRAL PLANNED STRUCTURES
PENDENTIVES
SQUINCES

Follow the development of painting...from

THE FOUR STYLES OF ROMAN MURALS
PORTRAITS IN ENCAUSTIC FROM THE FAYUM REGION
ATMOSPHERIC/ARIEL PERSPECTIVE
STYLIZATION VS NATURALISM
ICONS/IKONA
VENERATION VS ADORATION
"To pray through not to"
HIERATIC
ILLUSION THAT RE-ENFORCES THE FLATNESS OF THE PICTURE PLANE

Some terms to travel artstor with-
Byzantine icon
iconastasis (sacred image wall)
Ravenna
Hagia Sophia
Mount Athos
Saint Catherines MonastaryByzantine mosaics
Byzantine reliquaries
Andre Rublev
Theophanes

Islamic Art vocabulary...


MIHRAB:

QIBLA:

IMAM:

MINBAR:

MAQSURA:

MINARET:

HYPOSTYLE HALLS:

MOSQUE:translation-

REMINDER-DISCUSSION GROUP IS MEETING TUESDAY (2/19) RIGHT AFTER SCHOOL IN ROOM 172!  BYOF!!!!!

(BringYourOwnFood) Topics will include a review of Gothic and preview of late Gothic through the "arrival on the scene" of GIOTTO

Face Of The Day

Face Of The Day

Feb 10 2013 @ 6:49pm

Julia Sklar marvels at a very old visage:

Twenty-six thousand years ago in the Czech Republic, one of our ice-age ancestors selected a hunk of mammoth ivory and carved this enigmatic portrait of a woman – the oldest ever found. By looking at artefacts like this as works of art, rather than archaeological finds, a new exhibition at the British Museum in London hopes to help us see them and their creators with new eyes. Human ancestors date back millions of years, but the earliest evidence of the human mind producing symbolic imagery as a form of creative expression cannot be much older than 100,000 years. That evidence comes from Africa: this exhibition explores the later dawning of representative art in Europe and shows that even before the remarkable paintings of the Lascaux cave, France, humans were able to make work as subtle as the expressive face above.

(Image: The oldest known portrait of a woman sculpted from mammoth ivory found at Dolní Věstonice, Moravia, Czech Republic. c.26,000 years old. Height 4.8 cm. Courtesy of the Moravian Museum, Anthropos Institute)

Just came across these

  [The Calf-Bearer and the Kritios Boy Shortly After Exhumation on the Acropolis]

    ca. 1865

    Albumen silver print from glass negative

    Unknown

    The Metropolitan Museum of Art

    Samurai Dog Armour

    “This suit of dog armour — identified by antique Japanese armour dealer Toraba.Com as the only known and certified authentic example of its kind — is believed to have been created for the pet of a wealthy, high-ranking and presumably eccentric samurai or daimyo (feudal lord) in the mid to late Edo period (mid-18th to mid-19th century). Although the carved wooden helmet and coat of black-lacquered scale mail would have provided effective protection against enemy attack, evidence suggests the canine never wore the armour into battle. More likely, the suit served as a decorative costume for parades and other formal ceremonial occasions. The samurai dog armour now belongs to an unnamed UK museum.”

 Terracotta figure holding an infant

    1450-1200 BC

    Late Cypriot II Culture

    via: The British Museum)

Class of 2012-2013

REMINDER-DISCUSSION GROUP IS MEETING TOMORROW/THURSDAY(2/07) RIGHT AFTER SCHOOL IN ROOM 172!

Minoans?!