hi my name is lola palomo i'm an art
historian and a singer and today i'll be
speaking to you about the art of ancient
greece
now the greeks are among us like no
other ancient civilization is and it
doesn't take much
to notice it think about the olympics
think about how many facades you've seen
with this type of artwork
think about mythology prometheus the
minotaur
narcissus think about the trojan horse
pandora's box these are all myths of the
greek civilization
also think about tragedy and comedy
homer the iliad
the odyssey philosophy
and also music the musical notation that
we have today
stems from the first style of musical
notation of the ancient greeks
so we owe a lot to the ancient greeks
and today i want to focus on one
specific topic which is movement
and look at movement in sculpture and in
pottery or
the visual arts and see how movement
transforms itself
throughout different periods of the
greek civilization so stick around and
see how
movement is present in inanimate objects
see you there
right so in terms of place we are in
current day greece is ancient greece so
that's no problem in terms of time
i want you to look at this little chart
where we see that
we're going to be focusing on three
different time periods of the ancient
greek civilization we'll be looking at
the archaic
the classical and hellenistic periods
there is
uh some time before that where there is
development for example
we have homer writing the iliad and the
odyssey before the archaic period
but we won't go into that because of
time and we will reach the hellenistic
period which is the
end of the greek civilization but
already the romans are around
so this is our time lapse and as i said
before we're going to be
focusing on movement now when i talk
about movement basically what i'm saying
is there is either movement
lack of movement or extreme movement so
there's kind of that scale
and to give you an example look at this
man here dancing
as you can see there's a core that is
not being moved away from very much
he has an axis from which he moves only
ever slightly
there's many there's not many diagonal
lines there's a lot of
vertical lines around what he is doing
now to go to the extreme
this other man here that you're seeing
dancing he is
very much away from his core away from
his axis so there's a lot of swirls
there's a lot of diagonals there's a lot
of spirals going on
and there's an intermediate point in
this example here
where you see yes there is movement from
the center
but he still maintains a core or an axis
and this is going to be important
because this is what we're going to be
focusing on today
but in terms of pottery and sculpture
not in dance
tragically i don't have time to go into
all the arts today
but usually when you study art history
you focus on
not the performing arts that'll be
hopefully another time
another style of art that i'll be doing
later on
so let's focus on sculpture let's focus
on
the archaic sculpture and the first
person that you're going to see is
called the
codos so the codos is a young man
and as you can see does this remind you
of anything that we've seen before
yeah so he looks very much like an
ancient egyptian sculpture
and he is very in line he does not move
a lot from his axis and there's very few
movements but he
is lifelike now that's going to be
important because there's going to be a
very
dramatic transformation in very few
centuries
of what you're seeing now and there's
this female
version which is the gore and there you
have an example and all these
sculptures were almost lifelike the life
size so you know almost two meters or a
bit less
and they were colored today we have not
many examples and many of them
have lost most their color but this
corey as you can see has some
red still on her and there's one concept
that i want to tell you about which is
the law of frontality
this sculpture is forward facing as you
can see
they are there's not much movement
they're staying on axis
yes he's realistic but not so much
because it looks almost
stiff there's this really famous um
archaic smile that you can see
and yes there is an idea of some kind of
life-like
style now let's go to the pottery of the
arcade arcade
times now this pottery is
called of the black figures or the black
figure style pottery
as you can see there is realism there is
some type of
movement but not very much and the type
of black
figure doesn't permit a lot of detailed
elements and for the first time in all
the series i'm going to talk to you
about a specific
artist and this case is execus and it's
really interesting because
he is part of a pottery um
obviously um guild not guilt
he is he has his own business
as a potter very very exquisite pieces
that he's doing and some of them he
is signing and he signs them like
exexias
made me so that's something new and here
let's talk about composition
so we don't have a lot of the paintings
of ancient greek civilization because of
they were very easily lost but as i've
said before
pottery maintains and today i want to
show you this piece
and i want to show you how composition
is presented now exec
yes was one of the famous artist of his
time
and look at this piece called it can be
called the trojan war
and if you see there is a composition in
terms of
where these two it's ajax and achilles
and they're both playing a board game so
it's basically
a metaphor of the trojan war
done into a board game and there's lines
that are diagonally focusing on the
center
and look at their expressions as well
they're very much focused in
as they would be on the battle so that
type of composition
is present to us in the pottery and then
look at this other piece also by execus
called pentecilea and achilles and again
we have some kind of composition even in
pottery
already present in the greek
civilization and i
i encourage you to see the story of
fantasyla and achilles
which is i guess the most tragic form of
love
love at first sight and then being
withered away
so that would be the archaic type of
pottery that you have in the black
figures
and then in the classical time it
changes into
what is called the red figure pottery
and here
there is going to be more movement
there's going to be more expressions in
the faces because there
you're able to see more of what is going
on
so if you look at that berlin painter
bell crater now
there is movement in how she is being
that's the rapture of
europa so she's being taken away by
the god in in the cow form
and you can see her her movement of her
feet
and that starts to develop even more in
the what she's wearing
and so movement and expression starts to
become more important
as well as the third type of pottery
style that we have is more of the
classical which is the white pottery and
here
we see a lot of everyday activities so
this type of pottery is was more of
the funerary style so there's pots for
everything
in ancient greece i mean everything
there's more than a hundred thousand
pots left to us today so
this these were less so um present
because they would
they didn't last as long but look at
this different type of
pottery where you see yes at the end of
at the main classical time pottery is
made
itself very very expressive now let's go
into the classical sculptures
and here we go back to the idea of
movement the first piece that i want to
show you
is a comparison of what is called the
kritios boy
with the kodos that we saw before so
remember the codos has this straight
axis and there is a movement but
basically he's
frontal there is this idea of frontality
to the sculpture
in kritios boy that's what he's called
but it's also a
young man in the classical form what
you're seeing is
another concept of the day which is
so this means there's a counter poise
in the way that he has been sculpted and
what you see is there's almost like an s
shape on the figure and if you see it on
the side
there's also more movement so the law of
frontality
is basically let go of in this classical
time
and it goes on and becomes even more
strong so next
you can see here that there is even more
of that presence if we compare
um the gritios boy with a piece by
polyclatos which is the derifuros
34 and here the s shape or the
contrapposto is even
more more prominent and it's going to go
on and on so more
movement and more moving away from the
axis
in the sculptures of the classical greek
style and finally we start to see female
sculptures
being more represented more so than they
were before
and it's really interesting to see that
even though the male sculptures were all
nude in the female sculptures they
become nude all
until the classical the late classical
period
which is with praxiteles example here
that you see aphrodite
in the nude which was not the case
usually she they were females were
clothed
and again you see that s shape you see
there is more of a naturalistic
movement in her stance more so than we
saw before
now we're in the classical time which is
uh the 6th century bce let me check that
yeah so the 6th century bce so the
century before that the 7th century is
the archaic times
and a century after that we've had a
huge transformation in
art and this is not the norm in ancient
civilizations
if you remember in the
egyptian greek in the egyptian greeks in
the egyptian civilizations it took
thousands of years for art to change and
in the greeks that is not the case
it changes very very quickly in very
little time
so we have the sculptures in this
contraposo style
and then when we go into the hellenistic
times
which is the late greek times after
so the hellenistic period begins when
alexander the great
dies so alexander the great dies in 323
which is the beginning
of the hellenistic period and by this
time the romans are already in the scene
and basically the greeks are no longer
as powerful as they were before
but the artwork is going to continue and
here
we're going to see pieces of sculpture
that you would not
think were possible in the greeks coming
from the codo so
look at these pieces for example the
mostness that piece there
the first thing that you see is a very
weathered
man he is a philosopher of the ancient
times
so he is very well um well he was a
scholar as well
so poli politos was a sculptor that made
this piece
and you can see he is trying to present
the importance of this great orator and
philosopher through the weathered head
and
features that he has so in the classical
sculptures
the faces are usually seen much more
perfect
in the hellenistic we're going to see a
lot of more pathos
or a lot more grievance on the faces and
that's going to be well looked at
another piece that i love is the boxer
so if you see
look at his face look at his hands look
at how you know he's a boxer by trade
so he's been weathered by so many years
and that is presented in the piece
and it's well seen
and another piece here it's called the
spinario or the boy that is taking out
something from his foot so remember the
spirals that i was
talking about at the beginning you see a
lot of spirals here
very different from the very rectilinear
sculptures that we saw at the beginning
and then very far away from that
classical contrapposto that we saw
just before so by the hellenistic times
there's a lot of spiraling going on
what you're seeing is ancient greek
civilization went from
the gore or the koros very strict
line to this in very very few centuries
and to this day the way that we develop
art is very much based on the greek
style
a lot of the greek art has to do with
humans or human
form or human tragedy because gods
remember this is a polytheistic
civilization and culture
the gods were sometimes semi-human so
gods and humans were alike
and to see the god in perfection would
be to see
the human imperfection and to this day
we still look at art in that perfect or
non-perfect or
tragic or
balanced or non-balanced way so it's
really interesting to see
and i hope you've enjoyed this this is
where the comparison ends
and next week we'll be seeing more of
the transformation of the greek into the
roman civilization so basically
the greeks created the foundation and
the romans
spread it out throughout their you know
their kingdom and their their
civilization and their
empire so stick around and as always
make sure that creativity is part of
your day
it's been a pleasure and i'll see you
next week
you
