Hellenistic Art after the fall of the Hellenistic Kingdoms

  Paris, Louvre.  The Borghese Krater, a famous "Grecian Urn" (although the Medici Krater, q.v., is probably the one Keats alludes to in the Ode).  Supreme example of the Neo-Attic Style (not all retrospective work is "Neo-Attic", just as not all decorative work ca. AD 1900 is "Art Nouveau"), this artist's personal style combines Hellenistic innovations of many kinds (techniques, poses, etc.) with late-5h-century decorative drapery, probably inspired primarily by the Nike parapet, all on a marble calyx krater imitating the shape of a Late Classical or Hellenistic bronze one.  See J. J. Pollitt, Art in the Hellenistic Age, CUP 1986, pp. 169-175, on this kind of Late Hellenistic style; Pollitt dates the Borghese Krater to the end of the 2nd century BC.

B. Hellenistic Art under Rome (i.e., during the Roman Republic)  
A few works dated to the early 1st century are included here owing to their truly Hellenistic affiliation.

[MG 226] [MG 228]  Etruscan art of the Hellenistic Age, politically subject to Rome and culturally open to the same Hellenizing as the rest of the Mediterranean world, remains distinctive.  Their family vaults are still house-like chambers, but no longer decorated with pictures of banqueting and dancing.  The painted tombs now have scenes of the underworld, while the most interesting Tomb of the Reliefs at Cerveteri suggests that the Etruscans in real life used pegs and nails in the walls of their houses to store all their implements; the capitals on the square piers are still the Near Eastern (probably Phoenician) type, based on a palmetto, that the Etruscans had always liked, though the Greeks abandoned it once the Ionic capital was developed.  The Porta Augusta at Perugia (we New World people are always surprised to visit ancient cities and see modern business men and teen-agers walking through and lounging around gates like these) is interesting for anticipating the Romans in the way it combines arches and orders.  By now arches for gateways are not rare (Priene in Asia Minor had one), nor are applied orders (we just saw them on the Miletos Bouleuterion), but framing arches with Orders, no matter how peculiar the Order here, is much harder to match anywhere in the Greek-speaking regions of the Hellenistic world.  Of course, it may have been done in Rome itself by this time, where most old structures were replaced and so are lost to us.

[MG 366] Although Pompeii owes its basic layout to its centuries as an Oscan (Italic) and Greek town on the Bay of Naples in Campania (see MAP 3), its main buildings date from the time of Sulla, in the 80's B.C., through the time of Julius Caesar, and into the early Empire, until its destruction by Vesuvius in A.D. 79.  It is a perfect introduction to distinctively Roman building types of the Late Hellenistic Age.  Roman city planning, even more than Hellenistic Miletos, designs and controls whole spaces that govern our perception of them and even tend to compel us to walk through them in a certain way.  The principal temple of the city, of Jupiter, is placed on axis at the end of a forum, which we enter at the opposite end; the porticoes on either side provide shade, and seen in perspective (which architects understand very well by now) they draw us towards the temple.  The Roman temple is set up on a high podium, taller than its Etruscan prototype; like the Etruscan temple, it has a deep porch of columns, but now its columns are in Hellenistic Greek Orders.  At the far end of the city, in the air view, we see the amphitheater; although Pompeii built it using a natural hollow as part of the support for its seats (to that extent comparable to a Greek theater), the amphitheater is a sports arena alien to Greek architecture, native to Roman.  Between the forum and the amphitheater in the air view, we see a theater and an odeum (we'll use the Latin spelling for Roman ones); the odeum (concert hall) is small and was roofed [G 79], while the large theater is similar in shape to a Greek theater, except that the circle of the orchestra is truncated by the construction of a scene building in which the stage area is far more important and the back wall was designed in applied Orders and niches.  Both theater and odeum are built up on the flat ground, using arches and vaults to support the seating, and these are built of Roman concrete, faced with irregularly fitted stones (opus incertum), rather than ashlar masonry; regularly cut stone is used for steps and seats.  This kind of a built theater also can be closed, and access is more easily controlled; it is the usual Roman theater, since their engineering genius in the possible applications of concrete allowed them thus to build theaters wherever they wished, rather than only in the hollow of a hill.  Finally, alongside the Forum, we find one of the earliest good examples of the building form that may be most typically Roman of all.  Later, from end to end of the Roman Empire, from Wales to Mesopotamia, every Roman town had one, though the building materials and methods would be different in a place like Wales (as any Irishman will tell you, the Romans never got to Ireland): the basilica.  This building type, whether as a Roman civic building or a Christian church (to be studied later), is designed to hold many people on occasion: a great rectangular central space, taller than the rest, is lit by windows in a clerestory; the central space is framed by colonnades which support walls that rise high to form the clerestory.  Around the central space, or at least on both long sides, are aisles roofed at a lower level; the clerestory wall rises above the aisles; at one or both ends is an apse, which, when the basilica is functioning as the court of law, is the site of the tribunal.  Small towns have small basilicas; the great city of Rome had several great ones; that of Pompeii [G 76] is rather large and very well built, dating from the time of Sulla.

[MG 227]  The Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste (Palestrina, about 50 miles east of Rome) is largely the work of the dictator Sulla in the 80's B.C.  It imparts architectural design to the entire hillside, to an extent that we have not seen since Hatshepsut's funerary temple at Deir el Bahari.  Although total design was undertaken at several Hellenistic sites, work so comprehensive as this at so grand a scale was difficult if not impossible without Roman concrete.  The use of concrete could not spread all over the Greek and Roman world as an idea, because it is dependent on regional supplies of volcanic ash that when mixed with water reacts chemically to make an hydraulic, waterproof cement when it sets.  Roman concrete is made with the ash from Puteoli (Pozzuoli in Italian, hence Pozzolana for the ash) mixed with broken rock or river pebbles in a thick, dense mixture that is not poured like modern concrete (a quite different recipe) but packed in.  The facings (at this date in opus incertum) are made first, the height of a day's work at a time, and the freshly mixed concrete is laid in to the height of those facings.  When concrete is used for vaults and domes, however, the method is necessarily different; wooden forms are built, the concrete is laid on the forms, and, when it is thoroughly set, the forms are taken out; the wood can be reused then to build the forms for the next unit.  Concrete is very strong, but not pretty; it was always covered, with veneers or stucco.  First they used it for utilitarian structures, such as warehouses and cisterns, and in vaulted substructures, such as terraces to extend a flat area on a sloping site.  In Fortuna Primigenia we see the latter application raised to the level of total site design.  The reconstruction model shows how the actual structure, in concrete vaulting, was almost wholly screened by white stone colonnades and stuccoed wall surfaces to match (Roman stucco also is very hard and waterproof, a far cry from Santa Barbara bungalow stucco).  It will be more that a century before, in the time of Nero and his successors, Roman architects will realize that they can design spaces in the language of concrete, so to speak, rather than using it for the engineering of buildings that are still designed in terms of colonnades and flat walls.  The Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia survives because medieval and Renaissance Palestrina was built right into it (they would not waste such good structures!), but it could not be studied for the same reason.  The loss of old Palestrina to air bombardment in World War II was a tragedy, but there was a small compensation; Fortuna Primigenia survived and could be fully revealed and published, greatly impressing modern architects with its use of ramps and niched and colonnaded terraces rising to the semi-circular theatral area (behind this, in the form of a round temple, was the shrine proper).

[MA 37] [A 483]  The Seated Boxer in the Museo Nazionale Romano, called the Terme Museum because housed in the Baths (terme) of Diocletian since the 1930s, was found on the Esquiline in Rome, and, considering its Late Hellenistic date, we cannot guess whether it was originally made for Greeks, perhaps to be set up in a gymnasium or palaestra or to be dedicated to adorn one of the sanctuaries where athletic games were held, or for a Roman, to be set up in a villa or in a bath or in a private or public gymnasium in Rome, where it was found.  By this date, all the Hellenistic kingdoms but Ptolemaic Egypt were already under Roman rule; the Romans were importing art treasures by the ton (all those shipwrecks with statues, and most of their ships did not sink), but also they had become the principal patrons of the best artists; Rome was wealthy; that is, it had a sizable wealthy class.  Rome is the heir to the Hellenistic world; its art now is her art.  The Boxer is by a Greek sculptor, no doubt, but the opinion that some scratches on the bindings of his gloves, on the under side, can be read as a signature is wrong; they are random scratches.  This Late Hellenistic bronze (notice that it, too, once had the inset eyes) is powerfully conceived and technically very well cast.  It is both heroic in its forms and genre art in its expression, a conversation piece, like an interview with the 50-year-old former heavyweight who is determined to fight again.  The Boxer has a broken nose and cauliflower ears and looks punch drunk.  No wonder.  Look at his gloves, which are designed to do damage, not prevent injury.  The composition encloses space and invites us to walk around it, but less magically than the British Museum marble Spinario; it is more academic.

[MA 73, left]  The Athens Man from Delos is of about the same date as the Boxer.  It is the work of a Greek sculptor; that is to say, the work of a sculptor trained in a Greek workshop in the traditions of Greek sculpture--what if, like Cossutius, he had a Latin name, or an Egyptian or a Syriac name?  We could not tell.  It is from the Greek Cycladic island of Delos, the tiny sacred island where Apollo and Artemis are supposed to have been born, but in the Hellenistic Age a free port, a duty-free zone.  On Delos dwelt Greeks, Romans, Lebanese from Berytos (modern Beirut), merchants and bankers from all over the eastern Mediterranean; excavators found their houses and their portraits, some inscribed with their names (one Latin), this one with only the head surviving now anonymous; the man may be a Greek, but not necessarily.  The portrait is a fine example of Greek Late Hellenistic realism.  The shape of the skull, the way this man's facial muscles relate to it, the subcutaneous fat of a middle-aged, well fed face, all are captured in a masterly fashion; yet the slightly parted lips and the tilt of the head impart some flattering glamor without sacrificing verism.  In 88 B.C., Mithridates of Pontos (see MAP 11) sacked Delos, putting an end to its prosperity, so this portrait is datable ca. 100.

[A 327]  The complete bronze portrait of Aulus Metellus called "L'Arringatore", the Orator, is almost exactly contemporary with the Delos head.  Throughout the last three centuries B.C., to the end of the Republic, members of the Metellus family were prominent in the Roman senate, and Aulus Metellus in fact wears the short senatorial toga of the period when the statue was made; his outstretched arm bespeaks the oration to the senate that he is shown delivering.  His name, inscribed on the hem of the toga, is written in the Etruscan alphabet.  From that, as from the "western" style, we conclude that the sculptor was an Etruscan, an Etruscan, however, diligently portraying Roman ethos.  By "western", as with the Mars from Todi, we mean that the style is dry and lean, with an emphasis on edges; notice, also, that the "speaking" hand of the outstretched arm is disproportionately large, and that we saw such unequal limbs on the Etruscan sarcophagus from Cerveteri, in the painting from the Tomb of the Lionesses at Tarquinia, and in the Mars from Todi itself.  At the same time, the intensely realistic portrait, the easy pose, the artistic but natural drapery make this as much a Late Hellenistic statue as the last two bronzes, of similar date: it is an Etrusco-Roman Hellenistic statue.  Textbooks organized by ethnicity rather than historical periods have no place to put such a statue.

[MG 161]  By the end of the second century B.C., both Etruscan and Roman temples, also, were thoroughly Hellenized.  Religious architecture is profoundly conservative; like the Temple of Jupiter in the Forum of Pompeii, the Ionic Temple by the Tiber in Rome, popularly called the Temple of Fortuna Virilis (which may be incorrect), retains the podium and deep porch from the Etruscan temple that the Romans inherited from the rule of Etruscan kings in Rome in the Archaic period.  Its Ionic Order, however, is not significantly different from the slender Orders of Late Hellenistic temples on Delos or the gate house to the Bouleuterion at Miletos; it has a pediment and a Hellenistic entablature; although it does not have a peristyle, it is given the illusion of one by applying half columns to the cella wall all the way around.  Except in being Ionic (by now becoming a rare Order), this is a typical rectangular Roman temple, and it is the oldest standing temple in Rome.  It is a Roman Hellenistic temple (in political history, belonging to the Late Republic).

[G 89]  The Round Temple near the Tiber, only a few meters from "Fortuna Virilis", probably of the time of Sulla, in the 80s, rather than Augustus, 30 B.C.-14 A.D., looks very odd, and no wonder.  The Middle Ages did not know, as you do, that columns must have an entablature between them and the roof; the replacement roof they gave it, consequently, looks like a coolie hat or a paper parasol.  This temple is interesting; the only really "Roman" thing about it is the use of concrete for the cella wall (stuccoed to look like stone; the stucco you see, however, is a later repair).  Indeed, architectural historians believe that the architect was Greek.  You know enough to discern why: it is built on a stereobate rather than a podium.  Although battered, the slender Corinthian columns are very fine.  Because the Temple of Vesta in the Forum Romanum, where the sacred hearth was, was a round temple, in the early days of archaeology there was a tendency to label "Temple of Vesta" every round temple; in fact, we do not know the name of this one.

[G 95]  At Tivoli (Latin Tibur, but it is safer to say Tivoli unless you can learn to distinguish the river in Rome from the country town, famous for its villas, about 50 miles east of Rome), there is a lovely round temple dating from the time of Sulla.  It too has fanciful names, and Temple of the Sibyl is just as unfounded as "of Vesta", but "Sibyl" is at least used only for this temple, and you may call it that or else The Round Temple at Tivoli.  Here we have an architect who thinks Roman, not because the Corinthian columns are a little less slender, but because it is built on a Roman podium.  The cella wall was once stuccoed, but now you can see the concrete faced with opus incertum, as in the odeum (small theater) at Pompeii and Fortuna  Primigenia at Praeneste.  The opus incertum, in fact, confirms the dating of all three.  The bulls' heads and garlands in the frieze are a motif that we have not seen before in this course, but they are not new and were popular all over the Hellenistic world; they allude, decoratively, to bulls as animals used in religious sacrifices.

[A 318] [A 319] [A 306] [A 72] [B 3]  We already saw one kind of classical revival in the pose and Esquiline Venus, chunky and severe as a parody of Early Classical Olympia, with a ridiculous hairdo that no one ever wore (you'd have to make it of acrylic), in a contrived pose, doing up her pony tail, with a face so cold and inhuman it would turn the gorgons to stone--but some aspects of the drapery over the funny vessel that supports her legs could not be pre-Hellenistic, and, of course, nude Aphrodites were not made in the Early Classical period, which is the style that this sculptor is trying to emulate.  There are many of these chilly, stilted, super-severe neo-Classical statues of the first century B.C.; they were fashionable.  The Woman from Vasciano in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, at first glance very Pheidian, very like the Athenian fifth century, is no copy but a neo-classical original work of the Augustan period, the period when the emulation of Athenian Classical of the second half of the fifth century achieved astonishing virtuosity; the drapery here shows remarkable understanding of work like the Nike Parapet and the "Venus Genetrix"; indeed, the style is called neo-Attic, and much of it, probably most of it, was done by Athenian sculptors who had lived with the originals that they are striving to evoke.  TheEndymion Relief in the Capitoline Museum (yes, it was the inspiration for Keats's poem) represents a class of pictorial marble reliefs made to be set into the walls of very fine houses.  They are called pictorial, because they reproduce in carving the illusionistic effects usually rendered in painting; these pictorial reliefs are an innovation of the Hellenistic period, and they present a bewildering assortment of classical and Hellenistic traits.  Just as astonishing is the famous (and influential, because, like the Capitoline Wolf and the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, it has never been buried but has always been on view in Rome, and we see the pose quoted even in the Middle Ages) Bronze Spinario in the Conservatori Museum on the Capitol in Rome.  Never mind the label on the Print (or comparable ones elsewhere); the body is a prettified version of the third-century genre composition known to us in the marble Spinario in the British Museum, while the head, which looks like a girl's head (!), is the same kind of cold, bland neo-classical style, with a similarly linear and decorative treatment of the hair, as we saw in the Esquiline Venus.  True, heads like this were trying to be Early Classical, but they are not copies, or even adaptations, of any real Early Classical head.  The most important thing to understand, because it tells us something about the taste of patrons in the period of, I think, Julius Caesar and Pompey, is the retreat from true genre art.  Evidently, the real street child was too uncouth to be set up in the villa or town house of a wealthy Roman; this one has bland pretty features (the mouth not half open) and combed hair curling at the ends, and his body is not tough but fed on a fine (but non-fattening) diet and frequently bathed, nor are his feet calloused, nor is he intently hunched over (the contours of his body are less interesting than in the real street child in the British Museum), so that you feel, looking at him, that perhaps he is performing his pedicure rather than removing a thorn.  There is a whole category of these neo-classical, and often rather effete, bronzes from the first century B.C.  Finally, I have said that much of the neo-Attic work was actually done in Athens for export or by Athenian artists working in Rome.  The painting in encaustic on marble, made to be set into a wall (like the pictorial relief of Endymion), called the Knucklebone Players from Herculaneum, is signed by the artist who did it, Alexandros Athenaios epoiesen, "Alexander of Athens did it", and the girls have names written in Greek.  This also intends to look Classical, but the high-waisted narrow-shouldered figure proportions are Hellenistic, and this too is a Neo-Classical pastiche.  Of course, it is excellent work, perfectly lovely; it is a very good pastiche.  What I mean to emphasize is that it is almost impossible to eliminate the most basic stylistic assumptions of one's own age from one's work, no matter how hard you try to recapture something earlier, which partly explains why artists trying desperately to revive earlier art sometimes instead succeed only in doing something really original; it also happens because of the very intensity of their attempt and their imaginative engagement with their idea of the past.  These are five works that are neo-classical originals; now, let us turn to copies.

[1523]  The Alexander Mosaic from the House of the Faun at Pompeii is made of very tiny tesserae of colored marble, some only a sixteenth of an inch square; that is a measure of its expensiveness: imagine cutting and fine-sorting by color all those bits of stone.  It has a most harmonious color scheme, remarkably limited in the range of hues.  In fact, it is a copy of a Late Classical "four-color painting", a tasteful limitation guaranteed to avoid gaudiness or unbalanced colors, typical of Late Classical refinement.  Sometime in the last quarter of the fourth century a painter named Philoxenos of Eretria, otherwise unknown to us, made a painting of the battle of Darius V (the last Persian king of that name) and Alexander the Great at the Issus River in 333 B.C.  Judging from the similar compositional principles in the painting of a Royal Hunt from one of the recently excavated tombs in Macedonia, a painting such as the Alexander Mosaic copies would be typical of Philoxenos's generation.  The mosaic, then, very probably is an actual, careful copy of the "Battle of Issus" painting.  Without photographic reproductions to help the copyist, it is a remarkable accomplishment; we are justified in wondering whether the foreshortened figures might have been more clearly conceived in the original, but they work so well, as it is, and the color and tonal gradients are so convincingly like four-color mixtures, that we must bow (mentally) before the extraordinary craftsman who made the mosaic.  A four-color painting contained only mixtures of earth red, earth yellow, white, and black (black, yellow, and white, surprisingly, make an olive green mixture, and cold gray, pure black and white, looks blue when no actual blue pigment is present).  The House of the Faun, originally built before 100 B.C., is one of the finest and oldest houses in Pompeii, too old to have painted pictures on the walls.  Its other mosaics also are very fine, and it looks as if the owner wanted copies of art from different Hellenistic capital cities, with the Alexander Mosaic representing Macedonia itself.  The house surely belonged to a very wealthy, highly educated person, whose name, if it were preserved, we almost certainly would recognize from Roman history.

[MB 40]  In the Naples Museum, there are three "copies" of the same painting of Perseus and Andromeda, all from Pompeii, from different houses.  Doubtless, the original was a famous painting.  But two of the "copies" were made for a special application (we must never forget that these Pompeiian wall paintings are part of the interior design, a hand painted décor used where we would use designer wall paper): after the time of the emperor Augustus, some walls were painted like a solid-colored panel with a small rectangular or round picture (only a foot or so high) painted in the middle of the colored field.  These were painted very sketchily, to be seen as part of the overall design, not examined closely, in a technique sometimes called "illusionistic" or, since the French Impressionist Movement, "impressionistic"; the other two "copies" of the Perseus painting are of this kind, but the large one, painted in detail, is trying to be a copy.  Only, where was the original?  Was the copyist working only from a portable freehand copy he had made during travels to see originals?  Was he even working from his copy of someone else's firsthand copy?  We only know he had nothing like a photograph!  You will recall that Praxiteles had a friend, the famous Athenian painter, Nikias, who tinted his marble statues.  Nikias did a "Perseus and Andromeda", and, by dating the original c. 350 B.C., the person who labelled your Print is thinking of Nikias.  Indeed, the figures and drapery, as well as the very limited "landscape" (real landscape hardly antedates the 1st century B.C.), all support such an idea.  Although it would be unscientific to take this freehand, perhaps secondhand copy as real evidence for the lost masterpiece (we should like to think that Praxiteles' friend could foreshorten arms and hands better than the raised ones here), we must remain impressed by the general sensitivity to a style nearly 400 years earlier and by the real skill of the wall painter; after all, he was probably a mere journeyman wall decorator, so this work testifies to a very high general level of skill and commitment to aesthetic traditions.

[MB 45]  The mosaic of Street Musicians by Dioskourides of Samos is as old as the Alexander Mosaic but not nearly so large.  It was made to be set into the middle of the floor of a room as an emblema, an "in-set", in the literal meaning of the Greek; the rest of the mosaic floor, made of larger tesserae, was mere patterns and was made on the spot by locally resident artisans, but the emblema was imported and was made by the Samian either in Samos itself or in one of the major art centers, such as Athens.  It is hard to imagine shipping a piece the size of the Alexander Mosaic, although it is not impossible and, in the absence of any evidence for master mosaicists with workshops around the Bay of Naples, it is even likely that it was imported, but small master mosaics, like the Street Musicians, were all imported.  The usual question, Is it then really Greek art?, receives the usual answer, that we are in a period where the question is not very relevant: in the first centuries B.C. and A.D., most of the artists were Greek, and most of the money was Roman, but it must be added that the Alexander and Street Musicians mosaics, and other work like them, are not made to specifically Roman taste; they might have been bought and equally enjoyed by anyone in the Hellenized world.  The Street Musicians depicts a scene from the Athenian "New Comedy", plays of the period of the comic playwright Menander, and its costumes and masks and artistic style are consistent with other art (such as theatrical figurines) of the third century B.C., so the mosaic probably is a copy of a painting (of which otherwise we know nothing) of that date.  It is exquisite work, one of a pair of New Comedy mosaics from the same house in Pompeii.

[MG 367]  The House of the Silver Wedding in Pompeii, although it was built after the period of mosaic floors with emblemata, belonging rather to the period that put its major pictures on the walls, is a good example of the type of an urban house that was expensively decorated, both in Pompeii and the other towns around the Bay of Naples and in Rome itself.  By the time of the birth of Christ, in the reign of the emperor Augustus, these houses combined the amenities of a traditional Roman house (with an atrium and a shrine for the household gods, the Lares and Penates, quite similar to the Shinto household gods in Japanese homes) with the nicest feature of a Greek Hellenistic house (the peristyle garden court; the houses at Pompeii are in this respect like the houses on Delos).  The word, atrium, comes from Latin ater, which means "sooty black", so the origin of the atrium room must be the ancient Italic hut with a hearth in the center and a smoke hole in the roof; this is a good example of how names persist even when lifestyles change radically (as when we say "dial a number" while using telephones that no longer have dials).  Now the atrium is a room with a rain-collecting roof (compluvium) supported on four columns, with a basin (impluvium) in the center of the floor to catch the water; it is the center of a Roman house, but no Greek house has one.  The peristyle is usually at the rear of the house (away from the street).  It often has a well or fountain or sun dial or statue in the center of its courtyard, open to the sky; around it is a covered colonnade ("peristyle" means "columns around"), and, since it is protected, the back walls of the colonnade are usually frescoed with painted representations of veneer panelling and representations of pictures and masks and the like.  In the photograph of the House of the Silver Wedding, you can look straight through the atrium to the sun-drenched peristyle.  All the best houses of Pompeii have both.  Most Romans, of course, did not have such houses.  In the cities, they lived in well built apartment blocks (we shall study some later at Ostia), and in the country they lived in farm houses, larger or smaller.  Large farm houses provided the prototype for very wealthy suburban villas, like the Villa of the Mysteries just outside Pompeii (see below for its wall paintings); indeed, the word, villa, in Latin designates the house of the owner of a farm, in the center of his holdings; that is why "village" (the settlement of the dependents on the farm) comes from it.  If Louisianans substitute "plantation" and "plantation house" and "plantation-style house" (in a costly subdivision), they will get the idea quite accurately.  A villa might not have an atrium, but it would have courtyards, almost always peristyle courtyards.  The peristyle garden is the ancestor of the cloister in medieval Christian architecture.

[B 5]  Herculaneum was one of the wealthy smaller cities buried by the eruption of Vesuvius.  Some of the finest examples of villa architecture are there (the Getty Museum at Malibu, CA, is a close copy, reconstruction, of one of them), but the very best copies of Greek paintings come from the Basilica of Herculaneum, the major civic building.  One of the copies is of an Athenian painting, one is a copy of Apelles, a most famous painter who worked for Alexander the Great, so representing Macedonia, and the one that we shall study is Pergamene; evidently Herculaneum had a gallery of very impressive copies of masterpieces representing different regions.  Although these are the most competent-looking of all the copies we have, we must still remember that they are freehand and not necessarily first-hand copies, so they are more evidence of what Herculaneum wanted than in any way a replacement for what is lost (we cannot use them to form ideas about the lost originals); they prove that Herculaneum wanted Culture, in much the same way as Dallas-Fort Worth wants the Kimball Museum to rival . . . even the Louvre, if it could (very little of the contents of the Kimball or the Getty were made in Texas or California), so we are in a good position to understand these Romans.  The painting, Herakles discovers his infant son, Telephos, is recognizably Hellenistic in style, and its composition and subject matter "quote" the narrative frieze on the interior of the Great Altar of Zeus at Pergamon executed under Attalos II.  Indeed, our reason for mentioning the Telephos frieze then, when we were studying the Gigantomachy frieze, was to anticipate identifying this painting from Herculaneum as Pergamene: the myth that makes Telephos the founder of Pergamon is of civic interest only to Pergamon (Herculaneum now is basking in the cultural heritage of Pergamon, Macedon, and Athens, just as Pergamon earlier had adopted Herakles' son, Telephos, to make itself a founding myth).  A century ago, some art historians suggested that the way the paint is applied, creating form as well as light and dark in terms of brushstrokes (rather than hard outline) was "typically Roman", but now we have the wall paintings from the tomb of Alexander the Great's father, Philip, who died in 336; these wall paintings are painted in the same way, and in a rapid, practiced manner that suggests that the technique was not new even then, so the "Roman" theory is proven untenable (as many other art historians had always thought, anyway).  In the statue of Eirene and Ploutos by Kephisodotos, ca. 370 B.C., we noted the use of a female to personify an idea, Peace; subsequently such personifications multiplied, and female figures personifying places became especially common.  In the Herakles discovers Telephos painting, the seated female is either Arcadia or Mt. Ida in Asia Minor (not Mt. Ida in Crete), depending on whether the original version or the Pergamene version of the story is intended.

[MB 44]  Boscoreale is the modern Italian name for one of the wealthiest exurban communities on the Bay of Naples.  The Villa at Boscoreale, whose paintings today are shared by the Naples Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, was one of the wealthiest.  The Metropolitan has a whole room, a cubiculum (bedroom), the only room to be studied in this course.  The house dates from early in the reign of Augustus, so in the last third of the first century B.C.  The interior design is in the so-called Second Style of Pompeii; an architectural framework is represented, painted on the wall: ledge, columns, architrave, hanging theater mask, all are skillfully painted to look real.  In such a framework you can put scenes/scenography of various kinds, or megalography (paintings with large figures).  The cubiculum not only has theater masks hanging from the architrave but the pictures in between the painted columns in this case are taken from theater scenography, from the panels for different kinds of plays placed on the wall of the skénê as a suitable background for the action.  Traditionally, tragedies, satyr plays, comedies, each had its own background.  The scene with a town on a hillside, which we have here, belongs to the New Comedy, but the cubiculum contains the other types, too.  Why theater in a bedroom?  Do you know anyone who has posters of actors, musicians, athletes on their bedroom walls?  The Romans were theater-crazy.  The comedies in Latin of Plautus and Terence were nearly exact translations of Athenian New Comedy in Greek.  Notice how cleverly our painter (and doubtless the scenography painters before him) takes advantage of how houses in a town on a hill wind up and around the hill, so are built at different angles; thus, to create a feeling of perspective he did not need to find an horizon and plot vanishing points.  To do so would be exceedingly difficult and futile, since the higgeldy-piggledy stacking actually is more convincing (and will also be used by Renaissance painters); he just uses rule-of-thumb foreshortening on some of the buildings.  Compare [B 96], the next-to-last Print for this course, which is not yet Renaissance.

[MB 34]  The Odyssey Landscapes from the Esquiline, Rome, in the Vatican Museums, are contemporary with the Boscoreale Villa, early in the reign of Augustus (not "I cent. A.D."); they were cut out of the wall they belonged to, long ago, before the importance of the wall as a whole, in the history of interior design, was grasped.  Luckily, enough around the pictures remains to establish that it was a fine wall of the so-called Second Style (when we do have wall paintings surviving from Rome itself, they are, on the whole, finer than those from Pompeii).  The wall had vermilion red pillars dividing it into panels; between the pillars, probably at about waist or chest height, was a painted parapet (as if this was a second-storey; compare the parapet on the Stoa of Attalos); resting on the pillars (which have gilded Corinthian capitals) is painted a "marble" architrave (we see the underside of it, too, black in the shadow, to relate it to our vantage point, standing on the floor of the room).  Now, the best part: above the parapet and below the architrave, painted light and bright to suggest daylight seen from inside a darker room, we have painted scenes from the Odyssey of Homer, like distant landscapes with small figures, as if we were seeing literature happening before our eyes but far enough distant to give us, also, psychological detachment.  The invention of such walls may be Macedonian; in the Pella Museum you may see the wall design of a second-century B.C. house, with the pillar-and-parapet schema and, above the parapet, pale blue for a bright sky.  In the House of the Odyssey Landscape, about a century later, the landscapes with bright sky have been substituted for the plain pale blue.  In fact, to the best of our (limited) knowledge, this kind of panoramic landscape did not exist before the first century B.C.; the rocks and earthen mounds in the Perseus and Andromeda painting or even the Herakles discovering Telephos are rather landscape props than actual landscape.  Where did the pictures come from?  Did the wall painter (who was a Greek, to judge from the Greek writing that names the characters in some of the paintings) make them up?  Did he copy them from an illustrated book?  Since the earliest surviving illustrated manuscript copies of epic literature are much later, we cannot say whether he did or not (but the existence then of Hellenistic illustrated books should be remembered).  Are they copies of a pre-existing set of panel or wall paintings?  We don't know.  We do know, which is most important, that a Roman with a fine house on the Esquiline Hill wanted a fine cycle of the adventures of the Greek hero in one room of his house; quite possibly, like Caesar and Cicero, he had been sent to Athens or Rhodes or Alexandria for the ancient equivalent of a university education (in Greek, of course).  The Odyssey Landscapes prove that by this date ancient painters had a good grasp of what we call atmospheric perspective, suggesting distance by reducing color intensity and linear clarity, while adding white and a blue cast--just what one observes in real atmospheric conditions.  It is the empirical mind-set once again, painting what you see rather than what you know you can expect to see (by "common sense", a distant red boat is the same color as a red boat near by).  Making things get smaller, relating objects to the level of the horizon, and representing atmosphere is the only kind of perspective available for depicting landscapes without buildings or things like railroad tracks in them.

[MB 31] [1511]  The Villa Item, or Villa of the Mysteries (because of the subject matter of the room that we study here) is another house designed in the Second Style and so of about the same date as the foregoing.  In this room, instead of painted columns or pillars, the architectural "support" frame is flat black pilasters (bordered with gold and green: one thinks of onyx and of green marble) level with the pure vermilion red ground, but we notice that there is also a (painted) green ledge, and the large figured scene (megalography) with figures represented moving and in full color, like an architectural frieze come to life, shows the figures standing and moving on that ledge.  The painting is in situ (with a modern waterproof roof); you make a side trip to see it when you go to Pompeii.  Presumably, some or all of this wealthy family were initiates into the Bacchic rites (mysteria), for this room presents all we really know, and do not know (so don't ask me what I cannot answer), of the initiations into the Late Hellenistic cult of Bacchus (Dionysos) that were quite popular, especially in the upper classes, and, indeed, worried conservative Romans, mostly because they were secret.  Bacchus and Ariadne are shown in the center, with Silenus and fauns on one side, the unveiling of sacred objects on the other.  At least one girl of marriageable age is being initiated, and the initiation did include ritual flagellation (as many other now outlawed initiation rites worldwide also do).  Again the question arises, whether this painting was designed specially for this room or is an adaptation of a Bacchic Mysteries cycle earlier and elsewhere.  There is no certainty, but (i) the megalography on a vermilion ground in the Boscoreale villa (we studied only its cubiculum) is almost certainly a copy of a Macedonian palace room, (ii) the clothing and figure types look like Hellenistic of the third or second century B.C., and (iii) the painting is not quite so well executed as it is conceived; the painter who actually executed it botched foreshortenings and drapery in motion as if he didn't quite understand what he was doing.  If it is a copy, it tells us once again how extremely interested educated Romans were in embracing the visual-arts culture, as well as the literary culture, the rhetoric, the philosophy of the Hellenistic world, which, as the "sole surviving superpower" of their time, they had inherited.

All of the preceding, although some of the paintings and the Endymion relief actually date from the early Roman Empire rather that the Late Republic, have been considered together because it all relates back to Greek art, whether copy or pastiche or new kinds of Late Hellenistic.  Now, after a review on the last millennium B.C., we shall turn to Roman art mostly of unprecedented kinds.  Not that the Greek heritage will be forgotten, but that it will be used differently.

The Art of the Hellenistic Age

Paris, Louvre.  I have never liked the nickname 'Rococo' for this kind of Hellenistic sculpture, which I appreciate for its virtuosity, but I can easily imagine it in the gardens of some great estate.

The Hellenistic Age (3rd to lst centuries B.C.), to Augustus.

We have noted in the previous sections that non-Greeks often availed themselves of Greek artists, when they desired their unique combination of naturalism, sense of form, and excellent workmanship; even before Mausolus of Caria hired Greeks, the Persians and Scythians as well as the Etruscans had obtained both Greek exports and the services, when they could, of the actual artists.  Although the way was thus paved for the Hellenization of the known world, what happened after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the kingdoms of his successors was quite different: the thorough Hellenizing of whole societies, from northern India (or, mostly, Afghanistan and Pakistan) to the Atlantic Ocean, because of which the centuries between Alexander and Augustus are called HELLENISTIC.  This spread of a common culture, with Greek language as a lingua franca, paved the way for the Roman Empire (one evidence of it is that the scriptures peculiar to Christianity are in Greek).  Among the societies that were Hellenized was Rome; the Latin literature of the second and first centuries before Christ testifies to this, and the protests of Republic-minded Roman authors themselves bear witness to the overwhelming effect on Rome of the Greek world as gradually Rome came to rule all of it.

Through the third and second centuries B.C., until Rome took each over, Greece itself was under the Kingdom of Macedon and regional leagues and kingdoms; Asia Minor was largely ruled by Pergamon, which had become independent in 263 B.C. and successfully drove back the Celtic Gauls (Galatians) at the end of the third century; Syria, Palestine, and the Middle East was ruled by the Seleucids (Iran, under the Parthians, broke free in 247), and Egypt was ruled by the Ptolemies.  Rhodes and Delos flourished as free ports where Greek, Latin, and Semitic speakers traded side by side.  Until the Second Punic War, the tyrant of Syracuse in Sicily vied with the Ptolemies of Egypt in luxury.  After Rome sacked Carthage in 149, the Carthaginians were no longer a factor, but Rome ruled North Africa, an important bread basket; after 146, she ruled peninsular Greece, after the death of Attalos III in 133 also Pergamon's territories, then the whole Seleucid Middle East, coming thus into conflict with the Parthians.  Only Ptolemaic Egypt remained independent, until 30 B.C. just before Rome became an Empire under Augustus.  Understanding Hellenistic art, which Rome inherited, virtually, and in which she had indeed participated (to the extent that Romans of the Republic indulged in art--regarding art as an embellishment, rather than a necessity), is therefore essential to understanding Roman art.  Where the Roman Empire did not continue the art traditions of the Hellenistic kingdoms, it seems to have defined itself as over against the Hellenistic world. 

Macedonian Hellenistic art is very important but, after the Tomb of Philip (Alexander's father), not yet well published in English.  Doubtless, Alexandrian art (Alexandria being the capital of Hellenistic Egypt and one of the premier intellectual centers of the ancient world) was extremely important, but it is poorly preserved and not very well understood.  The importance of Pergamon cannot be overrated; not only are their own monuments the most impressive, but they endowed Athens and other cities as well; so did the Seleucids (the Jews emphatically did NOT admire their "improvements" to the Temple at Jerusalem, however).  Pompeii, south of Naples, which had been a Greek colony, was an important Latin-speaking Hellenistic city in the second and first centuries.  The temples and sculpture of the Etruscans and of Rome itself in this period are at once distinctive and part of the art of the Hellenistic world.  Their public spaces and civic buildings are most basically different from those of Greek cities.

Hellenistic art for private consumption is part of the evidence that in these centuries fewer persons were wealthy but those few wealthier, and the concentration of wealth had shifted to cities like Alexandria, Miletus, Pergamon, Rhodes and Delos, and, after c. 150 B.C., to Rome herself.  As the Hellenistic kings aggrandized their own dynasties, so the private patrons tended to indulge personal taste.  Genre art became popular, perhaps the most interesting aspect of Hellenistic art, representing diverse age groups and classes and races for the sake of interest in them as categories; occasionally these verge on sentimentality or pornography, but many are masterpieces and art for art's sake, not in the service of religion or other ideology.  Miniature sculpture to be collected by connoisseurs flourished.  Realistic portraiture became very important.  In sum, the Hellenistic art world was more like that of the Renaissance or our own time than had ever before been the case.  They invented art history, as they began to look back to the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. as a great age; this too was inherited by Roman authors, such as Pliny the Elder and Vitruvius (reading them, in turn, the modern world reinvented art history).  In the first century B.C. this historical attitude gave birth to some remarkable attempts to revive classical, and even archaic, style.  Because of the eruption of Vesuvius, covering them with ash in A.D. 79, Pompeii and Herculaneum provide the best range of taste in pictures and statuary, but a few houses of first-century B.C. date were built over and so survived in Rome itself.  Paintings and mosaics from Pompeii that are copies of Classical or Hellenistic compositions are taught at this point in the course even if they come from houses built after Augustus, i.e., in the first century after Christ.  In fact, the styles of wall decoration in secular architecture were not very much affected by political changes, so houses decorated in what scholars call the first and second Pompeiian styles will be considered here, although the so-called Second Style remained popular well into the reign of Augustus.

A. Art before c. 150 BCE (to the death of Attalos III)

[A 252]  We already have studied art objects that Greeks made for Persians and mentioned their working to Scythian and Thracian specifications as well.  To the north of the Greek heartland, and largely a part of Greece today, Macedonia was already quasi-Greek in the fifth century; that is, its townspeople were Greek-speaking and Greek-educated.  Although the original language of Macedon was not Greek (still less was it Slavic), Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander were much more nearly Greek than educated Etruscans or Romans of the same period, the fourth century B.C., although from the Athenian point of view, especially that of Demosthenes, Macedon's being a kingdom rather than a democracy, at the same time as it was the rising power, overshadowed the Hellenic education (with Aristotle himself as tutor) that Philip was providing his young heir, Alexander.  Macedonian tombs, to be sure, were wealthily furnished and built to resemble houses, suggesting ideas of an afterlife more like those of the Etruscans (and Egyptians) than those reflected in the Athenian grave stelai that we have studied.  The gilded silver quiver, a masterpiece of Greek craftsmanship, with scenes from the Trojan Cycle, is the kind of combined quiver and bowcase that the Macedonians carried.  The style and technique are Greek; the object is not, and the wealth that commanded it (and also drew Lysippos and the famous painter Apelles, not to mention Aristotle, to Macedon) far exceeded that of any central Greek city: Macedon had its own gold mines.  The Derveni Krater also comes from a Macedonian tomb, but it is purely Greek in shape (a typical Late Classical volute krater: compare the Archaic Vix Krater) and style, an object that would have pleased an Athenian or Corinthian--if he had been able to afford it.  It is bronze, with fire gilding; the gold mixed with mercury is fused to the bronze in a kiln, where the mercury vaporizes.  The scenes, extremely beautiful, are Dionysian; the figures seated on the shoulder of the krater are separately cast bronze figures, each a masterpiece in its own right.  Both of these works are Late Classical, but they serve to introduce us to the art world as it was altered by the career of Alexander the Great.  Those unfamiliar with his story can find it in any encyclopædia; see also the Syllabus; it is impossible to complete this course in one semester if one tries to teach all of ancient history, even summarily, as well.

[A 257] [A 258] [A 480]  Besides the three kingdoms founded by Alexander's generals after his death in 323 B.C., a fourth, Pergamon, was founded in 265 B.C. in northwest Asia Minor; for Hellenistic architecture and sculpture, it proved extremely important, since its rulers were highly desirous of making a cultural contribution, of making Pergamon a place to vie with Athens, in particular.  But Pergamon had to meet serious challenges.  Just as Rome had had to contend with invading Celtic tribesmen (Gauls) in the fourth century B.C., so had Pergamon in the third (an eastern branch that had come into Asia Minor, the ancestors of the Galatians to whom Paul wrote an epistle).  Attalos I of Pergamon drove them back and saved his kingdom in 235 B.C.; a monument was erected in the city commemorating that victory.  The Dying Gaul in the Capitoline Museum in Rome is a marble copy of a bronze Gaul, probably of one of the Gauls on that monument, made in the Early Hellenistic last third of the third century B.C. for Pergamon--wherever the sculptor was born and trained.  It is a fine example of the kind of closely observed, sharply executed anatomical detail that we see in Early Hellenistic sculpture inspired by Lysippos's rather than Praxiteles' or Skopas's example.  It is much else besides: a splendid composition of the human body engaging the space around it and meant to be appreciated from all sides, a magnificent study of a foreign facial and body type, continuing the genuine interest in other nations' physiognomies that we already saw in the "Mausolos" from Halikarnassos, and a fine illustration of the torque (neck ring), trumpet, and shield of a Gaulish warrior, confirmed by archaeological finds all over Celtic Europe.  It has been pointed out that there are two periods in Greek art that really are intensely, soberly realistic: Early Classical and Early Hellenistic, and the Gaul is maximally realistic.  Not that there is not also Art in the pose and in the rendering of the hair, but the bone structure and body proportions, the hair growth, the rough feet all have been most closely observed.  To many Americans (of northern European ancestry) the Gaul looks exceptionally normal; many an American pickup-truck cowboy, if he fought naked as the Gauls did, would look just like him in the face (note the shapes of nose, brow, jaw, mustache), in the long torso with flattish pectorals and little indentation at the waist, in the shape of the arm and leg muscles.  But his untanned skin, small, shaded eyes (probably pale gray or blue), straight hair (singed and stiffened to look fiercer), and long torso (more like Larry Byrd than like the Doryphoros or the Apoxyomenos) were extremely exotic to a Greek; novel, too; they had known Africans for all their history, but not northerners.  Pergamon did not want to be captured by Gauls any more than Rome did, but they had to admire their bravery, and there is no condescension in this portrayal.  What glory would there be in beating a contemptible foe?  The style of the Dying Gaul and other copies that go with it is sometimes called the First Pergamene School (of sculpture)

[A 280]  In the "Barberini Faun" (Sleeping Satyr) in Munich, we have an extraordinarily fine copy of a sculpture of the same period as the Dying Gaul.  Even the copy reminds us of the great Baroque sculptor, Bernini.  Of course, this is no victory monument but a sculpture made for a wealthy and discerning private patron, one who wanted great sculpture, not merely interesting subject matter and virtuosity.  It is an excellent example for grasping an important principle.  The handling of all the forms, even when we study the shoulders from the back or side, is awe-inspiring; Michelangelo would have admired it; this is truly great sculpture (until quite recently, many art historians thought that it must be an original simply because it seemed too good for a copy; it was a very good copyist, too).  At the same time, even if you read it as a philosophical statement about animal passion, or whatever you please, it is a frankly pornographic statue--the only piece of real porn in this course.  It is true that the older photographs show it with an incorrect hanging left arm and with its right leg restored at not quite the correct angle, even more spread-eagled than it actually was, but with the leg placed correctly, it remains an image of male cheesecake in terms of sexual enervation.  Sometimes some people say that a work with a pornographic subject is too vile to be art.  Others in defending art that others object to may talk almost as if a work must be art just because it is sexy (though they don't really mean that).  In fact, most porn is trash and non-art (just go to the video shop and rent some, and you'll see); in fact, many devotional images (oleolithographs and plaster statues and Sacred Heart nightlights) are non-art and some are trash, too.  On the other hand, some of the greatest art is religious images and some of it, also, is, if not quite pornographic, certainly unsuitable for a living room wall--for most people's living room walls, anyway.  Decency and artistic value are independent of each other.  In this period, it is not impossible that this statue was dedicated in a sanctuary, but it is much more probable that it was made for the garden court of a private house or one of those merchants' and bankers' private clubhouses, lavishly adorned, that were built in mercantile centers.  The Barberini Faun is about the same date as the Dying Gaul, but it is a different kind of style, with powerful exaggerations of the muscles and a more pictorial handling of surfaces.   It is a different kind of sculpture for a different purpose, and in the Hellenistic Age we shall see a bewildering use of different stylistic approaches for different subjects, varying also according to region and, of course, date.  In fact, for this reason and because our written sources fail us, being most interested in writing about Classic art, we often cannot date Hellenistic works nearly so closely as we can Archaic and Classical; sometimes we have documentation, however.

[A 254] [A 284] [MA 69] [A 298]  Genre (< genus, Latin) is the French word for a kind of thing, generic rather than specific, such as bimbo or street person or old fisherman or bag lady or any other type that can be characterized generically.  Art historians use the word for artistic subject matter that deals with human types; these ordinarily are infants and children, the elderly poor, and occupational categories.  Genre art is made for patrons in a position to be sentimental about such subjects; statues of fishermen or drunken market women are made for patrons who find them quaint and charming.  Its existence is always evidence of considerable private money being spent on art, enough that the class of collectors is large enough to include persons more interested in anecdotal subject matter than in artistry as such.  Genre art is one of the hallmarks of the Hellenistic Age.  Consider that in the fifth century privately purchased art, apart from painted vases, was largely votive or funerary, set up in public sanctuaries or cemeteries.  Much of the genre art now (as it will be in Rome later) was for private delectation.  Boethos of Chalcedon's Boy and Goose was famous and popular in antiquity; we have many copies of it.  The original was bronze; a bronze cast of it adorns a park, not far from the Railway Station, in Basel, Switzerland, which is so successful that it suggests that the statue originally was used in the same way: as a fountain figure.  The narrow pipe comes up through the bird's tail, and, as the child squeezes his pet goose, water issues from the goose's beak with enough force to arch slightly as the stream falls into the basin.  Delightful.  The bronze cast also can omit the central pillar.  It is a triangle-based composition, hollow in the center, rising and twisting to the child's head (the statue records how small children's forelocks were gathered in a topknot until long enough to be fastened back), the same kind of composition as the Dying Gaul, also designed to enclose space.  By now Greek sculptors were masters of infantile proportions, partly because babyhood was more interesting to this later society.  The Spinario is genre art of the purest kind; a street urchin, unkempt and naked, wholly self-absorbed, finds a place to sit so that he can remove a painful thorn from his foot.  The Italian title, which means Thorn Boy, really belongs to a later variant of this composition [A 72].  We know that the composition was created in the third century B.C., because a clay figurine from Priene (in the Berlin Museum, currently still in the West collection) testifies to the composition and comes from a dated archaeological context, but we don't know who created it.  The British Museum marble copy (of what was certainly an original bronze) is excellent work: every line of the tough little body is expressive of his un-self-conscious concentration on his task, every closely observed detail is subservient to the whole, the composition is wonderfully interesting from every side--because the sculptor has thought through the three-dimensional implications of every line and angle; although it is complicated, the composition reads clearly from any side and from above as well as below.  Like the Dying Gaul, it is a masterpiece of true realism wed to abstract form.  Another shipwrecked bronze original from Cape Artemision, the Bronze Jockey in Athens, may be later (second century rather than third); it is now exhibited on its great horse (reassembling the bronze fragments took years to complete).  It too is truly realistic, studied with intense attention to his wiry anatomy and half-starved face (what price a light jockey?), though there is a little dramatic exaggeration in the flapping scraps of drapery, not to mention the great contrast between the tiny boy and the huge horse.  Many genre subjects appear in statuettes; most of those that we have are terracotta figurines (Tanagras, Myrinas), some of which were made in molds taken off of master bronze statuettes.  A few of the master statuettes survive, and the Baker Dancer in the Metropolitan Museum, NYC, is one of the loveliest.  These are collectors' pieces of the highest order, true connoisseurs' treasures, works of art not for admirers of the colossal but for educated taste.  The veiled dancers, silk over heavier cloth, exist in terracotta, too, but the beautifully finished bronze's great virtuosity in showing thin folds over heavy folds and the rhythm of the dance conveyed from every angle in the Baker Dancer are Hellenistic art at its best, doing something that Classical art did not do at all.  Frivolous subject matter, art of very serious importance.

[A 202] [A 291] [A 491]  The Venus dei Medici is one copy (the Metropolitan Museum has another one, less restored) of a Hellenistic Aphrodite, probably of the third century.  Since the Medici acquired it in the Renaissance it has been most influential in European art, although it can be difficult to be sure whether this type, or another called the "Capitoline Venus", actually inspired the Renaissance, and later, Venus types.  Only in the sense that all Hellenistic nude, nominally modest, standing Aphrodites are variants of Praxiteles' famous Aphrodite of Knidos is it related to Praxiteles.  Her more self-conscious pose, coy rather than surprised, her high, small breasts and high waist, and the style of her head and face all point to a third-century date.  The Metropolitan Museum copy is very lovely in the way the torso bends and leans as the goddess looks up, and the long shapely back is downright seductive.  The even more famous "Venus di Milo", properly the Aphrodite of Melos, in the Louvre, belongs to the second century rather than the third, and it is an original marble statue from a Greek island, rather than a later, Roman Empire period, copy.  It is an eclectic pastiche, but it is not a copy; the composition is borrowed from a Late Classical half-draped type of Aphrodite, the round face with small eyes and mouth is Hellenistic, of the date of manufacture, and the rendering of the drapery, with its emphatic ridges, probably attempts to recreate the drapery style of the Parthenon pediments.  The second century B.C. was indeed an eclectic period; there was a lot of interest in Pheidian art.  The Aphrodite of Melos, in its turning pose and semi-nude body and its academic feeling, is typical of the advent of Late Hellenistic.

And here is the right hand, outstretched and holding nothing, of the Victory, found later in the 20th c. excavations at Samothrace and exhibited near the statue as Rodin knew it.

[A 303]  More dramatic drapery with emphatic ridges, probably earlier than the Aphrodite of Melos and a little earlier than the Gigantomachy frieze of the Great Altar [A 266], is seen on the Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre, magnificently placed at the head of grand staircase.  Commonly called the "Winged Victory", she is as famous as the Aphrodite of Melos and a much more important sculpture.  The fragments of a stone prow of a ship on which she stands in the Louvre belong to her; she was set up at Samothrace (MAP 2, south of the coast of Thrace=modern Bulgaria) on the ship's prow set on a high base, magnificently.  The foundations of the base have been excavated, and part of her outstretched empty right hand was found (the reason that old publications, before these excavations, dated her "about 300", over art historians' protests on grounds of style, was a coin commemorating a victory in 307 showing Victory (Nike) on the prow of a ship holding a huge trumpet--naturally, there were numerous victory monuments in the Hellenistic world).  Of course, we always think of her as headless and armless, like Rodin's "Iris".  Ancient societies and their sculptors, however, never contemplated making incomplete bodies.  Whether we like it or not, and wonderful as she is in statu quo, she had a head as well as arms.  The mention of Rodin is relevant, though; this great trunk of a statue, which he knew very well, encouraged Rodin to eliminate limbs inessential to his statues.  The style of the Victory of Samothrace, powerful and dramatic, is not exactly like but is easily related to that of second-century Pergamon (see next); the drapery is less academic, more truly exciting; the pinions of her mighty wings show scientific knowledge of the wings of great birds of prey.  In Classical art one does not see so convincing a fusion of anthropoid shoulders with realistic birds' wings (after all, arms and wings are anatomical doublets)

[G 66] [A 265] [A 266]  We already have mentioned the Kingdom of Pergamon in connection with the Dying Gaul.  The acropolis of the city, on its great irregular hill, was complete between 180 and 150 B.C. in the reign of Eumenes II and Attalos II: palaces, stoas, temples, and, a little lower on the acropolis, the Great Altar of Zeus, larger than the temples, a great architectural enclosure of the platform on which the altar, proper, stood; at this level, facing inward, it was adorned with a frieze telling the story of Telephos, son of Herakles and the legendary founder of Pergamon (Hellenistic cities' founding myths were modelled on those of ancient cities that went back to the Bronze Age when myths of this sort had some plausibility).  The more famous frieze, on the exterior below the Ionic colonnade, which is in a different style, melodramatically heroic rather than narrative and pictorial, presents the Gigantomachy, the Battle of Gods and Giants, which we already saw in the north frieze of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi.  The Pergamum Museum in Berlin, which was built to house the Great Altar and the Ishtar Gate, reconstructs the front access to the altar (compare [G 66] with [A 265]), and you enter a reconstruction, more or less, of the interior when you climb the steps; there the Telephos frieze is exhibited.  The Ionic Order is very handsome but a little stiffer than Pytheos's on the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos.  In the Gigantomachy, Zeus is made to recall the Zeus in the East Pediment and the Poseidon in the West Pediment of the Parthenon; Athena rushes with windblown drapery somewhat more formulaic than that of the Victory of Samothrace; she is attended by Nike (another Athenian touch) whose wings are almost (not quite) as convincingly scientific as those of the Victory of Samothrace.  Zeus's giants writhe, Athena's (Alkyoneus, as is traditional) poses: it is an Hellenistic pose, but one can't help recalling the Pan Painter's Aktaion balletically dying from Artemis's shafts.  Gê rises, as it were from the earth, or the base of the altar; Gê is Earth, the mother of the giants, who cannot prevent their demise.  The drapery betrays study of Parthenon drapery, but (i) it is exaggerated for dramatic effect, and (ii) it is executed with free use of the running drill, and to make the figures sharply distinct from their background there is a drilled outline all around their contours.  The Attalid kings of Pergamon were deeply motivated to emulate Athens, as well as to keep up with other Hellenistic kingdoms in endowing libraries and adorning ancient cities.  Americans and Australians can understand how they felt.

[MG 221]  It was Antiochos IV Epiphanes (ruled 175-163 B.C.) of the Seleucid Kingdom that endowed Miletos with a new Bouleuterion (Council House).  If we did not study Classical civic buildings, it is partly because they are poorly preserved, but it is in the Hellenistic kingdoms that public buildings develop forms that continue into Roman architectural practice.  The Bouleuterion at Miletos, for example, has applied orders; its Doric half columns and frieze are not structural but forms borrowed from temple architecture used to articulate what without them would be a blank-walled box.  The amphiprostyle gate into the enclosed forecourt, similarly, is shaped like the Temple of Athena Nike on the Acropolis, but this gate is in the Corinthian Order.  The whole complex is a design for a complete space, and indeed the entire agora area at Hellenistic Miletos is carefully thought out and framed by stoas so that the main buildings are not just placed each on a block or two of the pre-existing fifth-century grid plan of the city (the way the Guggenheim Museum is in New York) and crowded by structures of unrelated design.  Inside, as the plan shows, the Bouleuterion had seating arranged like the seating of a small theater, an odeion (concert hall).

By the time that I came with a digital camera, the blue paint (modern latex or acrylic, as I recall)  that is so important on the balustrade (else it looks too, too sold) had faded somewhat, but this photo still shows its effect, and you can see the sky right through the lion-head waterspouts open mouths.

[MG 218]  Attalos II of Pergamon, who completed the Great Altar, gave the city of Athens that he and his dynasty admired so much a new stoa, closing off the agora (market place) on its east side.  His predecessor, Eumenes II, had built (i.e., paid for) a stoa on the south slope of the Acropolis.  In 1953-6 a Rockefeller gift helped rebuild the Stoa of Attalos as the Museum of the Agora Excavations.  It was an opportunity to study ancient stone masonry and construction techniques and to train a generation of skilled craftsmen for this kind of work.  Stoas are not new; they go back to at least the seventh century and had become handsome buildings designed in Orders in the fifth century.  A primitive stoa is nothing more than a roof supported on posts in front of a back wall, providing shade.  Hellenistic stoas like that of Attalos are in two stories (upstairs rooms over ground floor rooms at the back, an interior colonnade in two stories in front of the rooms, and the exterior colonnade making a façade).  The main Order is Doric, but with Ionic in the upper storey; the interior Order is Ionic on the ground floor, Pergamene above (the "Pergamene" capital is a Hellenistic capital patently borrowed from the Egyptian palm capital).  The Stoa of Attalos makes us who live in warm climates wish that we built city centers with stoas today; step into the marble stoa on a broiling afternoon, and it feels about 20° cooler.  The reconstructed Stoa of Attalos also has working lion's-head water spouts, which, with pipes in their mouths, spew rain water from the roof clear of the face of the building.  The basement storey is poros limestone, like the base of the Monument of Lysikrates; Greek architecture is quite consistent in its use of the language of materials.

[G 54] [MG 219]  The Temple of Olympian Zeus had been begun under Peisistratos, who wanted to vie with the huge Ionian temples in the Ionic Order in the Greek east, in the sixth century; construction halted with the Persian threat, not to be resumed until Antiochos IV Epiphanes provided funds to complete it, even as he gave Miletos a new Bouleuterion.  Peisistratos pretty surely meant to build in Doric; now the Order was to be Corinthian.  The standing group of columns at one corner, tall in the great open space of its sanctuary area, is one of the more awe-inspiring sights in Athens.  Here you see very clearly that except for the Corinthian capitals, the Order is similar to Ionic, but Ionian Ionic, with plinths under the turned column bases.  We know the architect's name, Cossutius; that is Latin, and he was Roman, but his architectural design is indistinguishable from what a Greek-named architect of the time would have done: the Hellenistic world is an international world, already like the world that St. Paul travels in.  The Corinthian capital is much leafier than at Late Classical Epidauros, and the flutings are very deep, to create very strong shadows.  Even at this date, the temple was not finished.  It remained unroofed until, in the second century after Christ, another lover of Athens, the emperor Hadrian (117-138) had it finished.  All that remains today is Hellenistic.  The long, narrow dipteral plan of the temple is the Archaic part; the Hellenistic temple was built on Peisistratos's fine foundations.  An important footnote: this Corinthian design is important to Rome for more than the nationality of Cossutius.  When the old sixth-century Etruscan-period Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol of Rome burned, the dictator Sulla, who sacked Athens in 86 B.C., took columns from the Temple of Zeus Olympios for the porch of the new Temple of Jupiter, doubtless considering that Zeus and Jupiter are after all the same god and that these were perfectly splendid columns--and there were no Seleucid kings any more to object, either.  Thus it happened that Cossutius's capitals became the model for Roman architects' Corinthian, and Corinthian is the favorite Order in Roman architecture.

*******