Readings: Walbank, p. 176-197.
· The new court life provided a type of stimulus to the arts.
· Influential schools of sculpture and architecture flourished under the Attalids (Pergamum).
· Under the Seleucids, architecture evolved in forms that would have an effect on Roman architecture.
· The Ptolemies built the famous lighthouse and library (new important sculptural school).
· Other important centers: Rhodes, Macedonia.
· The great cities of central Greece declined in importance (except Athens).
· Ruler-cult gave considerable impetus to the art of portraiture.
· Even private citizens aspired now to some heroic status after death.
· Portrait monuments for tombs and honorific statues became more common.
· The mood in the arts was to intensify and elaborate styles developed by Classical Greece.
· Development of palatial architecture.
· Trade & contact with the East opened up new possibilities for the artist.
· General tendency to elaboration and grandeur.
· Doric forms out of favor.
· This age appreciated the Ionic and the more flamboyant Corinthian forms.
· Hermogenes of Priene codified the Ionic order in his books.
· He popularized new features in plan, notably the broad flanking colonnades (“pseudo-dipteral”).
· For the first time the Corinthian order was used for temple exteriors.
· The two-storied stoa became an architectural form of importance (hotel, emporium, office block, central market, administrative areas).
· Nobles and the nouveaux riches could now aspire to monumental tombs.
· Minor sanctuaries for the heroized dead.
· Painted architectural facade below ground, elaborately furnished vaulted underground chamber.
· Original designs, like:
o the famous lighthouse (Pharos) of Alexandria,
o the library of Alexandria;
o the clock house Tower of the Winds at Athens;
o monumental fountains and assembly halls;
o and a new elaboration of stage architecture for theatres.
· New variety of floral and animal forms enriched the surface decoration of buildings.
· Style that in many respects anticipates the Baroque.
· Exploitation of arch and vault, avoided hitherto by Greek architects.
· Use of grid plan in the numerous new foundations.
· The great buildings of the Classical age had been predominantly religious.
· Those of the Hellenistic age were predominantly secular.
· Predilection for the Corinthian style.
· Many Hellenistic temples were of immense size:
o The oracular temple of Apollo at Didyma.
o Another colossal temple at Cyzicus.
· Some of the theatres were similarly colossal.
· Theatre at Syracuse, Megalopolis and Ephesus accommodated more than 20,000 people.
· Elimination of the chorus from a significant part in the drama.
· Introduction of a high shallow stage.
· All stadiums by definition ought to have the course of a given length, though, curiously, they vary by more than 30 feet.
· The stadium at Athens was built in the shape of a U.
· The great stadiums at Aphrodisias and Nysa in Anatolia are rounded at both ends.
· The one at Aphrodisias seated 30,000 people.
· The palaces of the Hellenistic period have not survived.
· Remaining houses show increasing elaboration and luxury.
· Their structure developed into a peristyle house (e.g. Olynthus, Delos).
· Often spectacular mosaics.
· Atrium (lofty court with an impluvium, or cistern, at its centre).
· Art underwent dramatic transformations and evolved.
· Classical Greek concepts not entirely abandoned, but Hellenistic art era expanded his formal horizons with:
o dramatic posing,
o sweeping lines,
o and high contrast of light, shadow and emotions.
o Time of experimentation and freedom.
· Idealism gave way to a higher degree of naturalism (Praxitelis, Skopas, and Lysipos).
· The subtle implications of greatness and humility of the high Classical era (Charioteer of Delphi) replaced with bold expressions of energy and power (Boy Jockey).
· Hellenistic art shifted from religious themes towards :
o more dramatic human expression,
o psychological and spiritual preoccupation,
o and theatrical settings.
· A rare example of the mastery over the rigid materials and deep understanding of the world.
· Process of suspended animation.
· The imaginary wind that shapes the drapery becomes a physical presence and an intricate part of the sculpture itself.
· It gives form and life into the human presence of Nike.
· The human condition and state of mind became a popular subject.
· In the Venus, Eros, and Pan statue, the voluptuous Aphrodite (Venus) contrasts sharply with the grotesque appearance of Pan.
· Eroticism gained popularity during this period and statues of Aphrodite, Eros, Satyrs, Dionysus, Pan, and even hermaphrodites are depicted in a multitude of configurations and styles.
· Statues of female nudes became popular.
· Venus de Milo (ideal proportions).
· The Hellenistic sculptor strives to express their inner world, by the depiction of physical characteristics and postures that betray inner feelings, thoughts, and attitudes.
· In portraiture, the imperfections of the subject are often included (individual personality).
· Example of the statue of Hygea.
· Hellenistic sculpture is notable for its variety.
· Alexander's yearning for something unattained, was a mood that became expressed in the art.
· Apoxyomenos (“The Athlete, Scraping Himself”): the viewer has to move around it because no single viewpoint is satisfactory.
· “The Punishment of Dirce”: very complex sculpture.
· “Laocoön,” is bursting with dynamism and energy.
· Sculptural groups such as this were novel (palatial or sanctuary setting).
· Far from the one-view pedimental compositions of Classical age.
· One of the great centers of sculpture.
· Attalus I commemorated his victory over the Gauls with a huge monumental group.
· The altar of Zeus at Pergamum (frieze 364 feet long, battle of the gods and giants).
· Use of the genre subject (boy with a goose).
· Terra-cotta figurines from Tanagra and Myrina: scenes from ordinary life.
· Production of accurate copies of earlier works (demand from the Roman West).
· It helped to determine the Classical atmosphere of early imperial art.
· Also creation of original works deliberately in the style of the late Archaic, early Classical, or full Classical periods.
· Kind of reaction against the more exuberant Hellenistic sculptural styles.
· Response to the new interest in the Classical past.
· Examples: Venus de Milo, the Belvedere Torso.
· Sensual treatment of the female nude.
· Careful surface working of the marble.
· Accentuation of femininity by the incorporation of sloping shoulders, tiny breasts, and high full hips.
· New realism: portrayal of old age, decrepitude, disease, low life, the grotesque.
· Babies rendered as other than reduced adults.
· A natural accompaniment of the courts.
· Rulers finely portrayed in statues and on coins.
· The portraits do not always flatter…
· Portraits were not confined to rulers (Demosthenes in Copenhagen).
· Philosophers often depicted (typical).
· Romans familiar to Hellenistic art from the work of the western Greeks in Italy and Sicily.
· They formed a closer acquaintance with it in the court of Alexandria, and through diplomacy and warfare.
· The classical styles of early imperial Rome are exactly those of the late Hellenistic Greek world.
· The Roman Empire ensured the continuity of Hellenistic art in the Western tradition.
· Macedonians and Greeks composed the new governing class of the eastern world.
· Greek became the language of administration (the Koine).
· The traditional city-state, in its traditional form, was in a kind of decline.
· Artistic creation now came under private patronage.
· Compositions intended for a small, select audience (taste for erudition and subtlety).
· Founding of the Museum with its enormous library at Alexandria.
· The chief librarian was sometimes a poet as well as tutor of the heir.
· Task of accumulating and preserving knowledge.
· The researches of the Alexandrian scholars helped to preserve texts of ancient authors.
· Combination of novelty and commonplace
· New Comedy at Athens (Menander): the theme is no longer fantasy but real life.
· The plays are filled with quiet good humour.
· Other playwrights: Herodas and Theophrastus.
· Apollonius of Rhodes wrote an epic on the Argonauts (psychology of Medea at her first experience of love).
· His sensitive and romantic rendition influenced the Roman poet Virgil (Dido and Aeneas).
· Theocritus, examined in his second idyll the love-hate relationship of a girl to her unfaithful lover (the details are exquisitely noticed).
· Alexandria famous for its learning: Callimachus (immensely influential) wrote poetry of polished craft and allusive scholarship.
· His great work Aetia (“causes”) is a rare miscellany, a long poem made up of short sections.
· The major contributions to prose literature fall in the Roman period.
· But the novel developed earlier in Alexandria.
· Ingenious and exciting plots are combined with stereotyped characters.
· Longus' Daphnis and Chloe: perhaps the best of such works of prose fiction.
· Dion of Prusa, Herodes Atticus, Polemo, Aelius Aristides, Maximus of Tyre.
· The Greater: the Syrian Lucian, a satirist and brilliant entertainer, who spared neither gods nor humans.
· To be mentioned too:
o The geographers Strabo, Ptolemy and Pausanias.
o The historians Diodorus Siculus of Sicily, Arrian, Appian and Dio Cassius.
o The Jewish writers Philo Judaeus and Flavius Josephus.