Art Mystery: Some Things I Learned About in This Class

Post Nine:   Week Eleven

In this class I particularly liked to find out about styles and techniques of art that I didn’t know much about before I took this course.  The first type of art that was new to me was Near Eastern art, which if I had seen before I would have assumed was Egyptian.  Works like Assurnasirpal Killing Lions seem to be Egyptian until one knows what Near Eastern elements to look for.  This work was certainly influenced by Egyptian art but shows less stylization and more naturalism than similar works from Egypt.  The Egyptian (3,000-332 BCE) and the Near Eastern (3,500-334 BCE) civilizations arose separately and existed for centuries as separate entities yet they must have influenced each other’s art and attitudes.  Hierarchy of scale is usually more apparent in Egyptian art and Egyptian artists obeyed conventions such as the gridded proportions of the figures on the stele of the sculptor Userwer that the Near Eastern kingdoms didn’t always use.  They had their own conventions, of course since many figures seem very stout and short compared to Egyptian figures as in Assurbanipal and his Queen in the Garden.  Near Eastern artists didn’t follow the same set of conventions throughout their civilization like the Egyptians did.  Egypt is more isolated by the Sahara Desert on one side and the Ocean on the other.  The Near East is in a better geographic location to be influenced by other peoples from the north, west and east; this may explain why their art is more variable.

I also liked learning about Roman verism.  To go from the idealized youth of Greece to veneration of the somewhat haggard lines of age and experience in Rome appealed to me quite a lot.  Whether a society values youth or experience is really just a fashion of the time.  During the time of the American Revolutionary War (1776) the fashionable were wearing white powdered wigs to imitate their elders who had naturally gray hair.  Fashion at the court of a royal was whatever the monarch dictated and people often imitated the ruler at whatever their apparent age.  Even during the late Roman Empire we could compare the busts of Commodus and Caracalla and see the youth and beauty verses age and experience as approaches to propaganda.  I think when one is younger it seems obvious that youth, energy and beauty is better as a way to be portrayed.  Then as one gets older one can appreciate experience and relate to those who are shown to be elders.  It seems to me that the Greek Civilization represented youth and the Roman Empire used Greece as a starting point, matured as a civilization and then eventually aged and died; a natural process, no doubt, that was shown in the progression of styles used by artists.

I was also interested in the origin and conventions of the Byzantine style.  Actually, all Early Medieval art was a bit of a mystery to me.  It seems most sources I’ve seen are so busy explaining about how creative art died with the fall of Rome that they neglect the entire era.  It’s true that most of the art is not secular but to ignore this era is to ignore all of the inspiration attendant with the first flowering of Christianity.  The elongation of figures continued from Byzantium to the Early Medieval era as part of the artistic conventions of iconic art; becoming less stiff and more graceful as time went on.  We can compare the Mosaics of Emperor  Justinian and Empress Theodore (With Attendants) from 547 (page 240) with the more fluid and emotional  Crucifixion Mosaic from the Church of the Dormition, Daphni, Greece from the 11^th century (page 250).   Both these works are highly stylized but the Crucifixion shows much more emotion, a trend that continued on through the Medieval Romanesque and Gothic styles.  I wanted to compare two mosaics here because as materials used to decorate churches changed from tiles to sculpture to paint to stained glass the emotions portrayed also changed.  The flexibility of paint and, in illuminated manuscripts, line invited close examination and personal contemplation such as the Chi Iota Page of the Book of Kells or the Worcester Chronicle page of Those Who Work; Those Who Fight; Those Who Pray.  Frescoes and paintings can tell their stories in nearly any interior space and mosaics, stone or other sculpture and stained glass seem better suited for larger or more public indoor or outdoor works.

I had also always wondered about how the paint on the glass in a stained glass window lasted for hundreds of years.  Here I found out (on page 497) that the metallic paint was actually heated and fused to the glass so it would last as long as the glass itself.  I also liked some of the pictures that were provided to illustrate how Gothic architecture could allow for such large areas of glass that the interior of these cathedrals looked like the inside of a kaleidoscope such as in the Upper Chapel of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris.