Alexandria (200 BC): * see EndNote<A>

In the 3rd century BC Alexandria was the commercial, intellectual & cultural hub of the Apollonian world.  It became rich off the back of the East-West commerce (trade with the East Indies & Arabia).  In less than a generation it was larger than Carthage & within a century, the largest city in the world & for many centuries second only to Rome.  The Ptolemys were great patrons of the arts & learning & fostered the Library of Alexandria & Musaeum.  The city became renowned for its learning & wise men.  Luminaries associated with the Musaeum included Euclid; the astronomer Hipparchus & Eratosthenes..  Under Ptolemy II, the writers Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Theocritus & poets including the “Alexandrian Pleiad” turned the city into a centre for Hellenistic literature. 

 

Alexandria (200 BC painters):

Few paintings from Alexandria survive but from funerary monuments we can draw some judgements.  Painters of the early Hellenistic periods developed 3 new revolutionary methods of representation: 3D perspective, use of light & shade to render form, and trompe l’oeil realism.  These developments were closely related to advances in the materials & techniques.  Wooden panel paintings were prepared with a lead white ground to create a flat, uniform & brilliant white surface; an outline of the composition was incised in this ground layer, then delineated with extensive preparatory drawing using carbon black. The painting process involved building subtle colour values & tones through overlapping applications of both pure colours and subtle mixtures of colours to maximum effect.  Greek painters developed a wide variety of pigments and organic colorants to provide the technical means for representing the expressive ideas of their paintings.

 

Faustian sculpture (Assyrian, Egyptian & Mexican): * see EndNote<B>

Artists early in the century were turning away from Greco-Roman sculpture towards alternatives inspired by Egyptian, Assyrian & Mexican art.  One advocate of this was Roger Fry (1866- 1934), an English painter & art critic, who promoted  the recent developments in French painting which he called it Post-Impressionism.  He was one of the first to raise public awareness of modern art.  In 1920 he published Vision and Design where he wrote that modern artists had started to look to Aztec and Maya sculpture for inspiration.  This was a result of the general aesthetic awakening following the revolt against the tyranny of the Graeco-Roman tradition.  The English sculptor Henry Moore was heavily influenced by Fry.  He developed a view of world sculpture in which the Greco-Roman tradition took a marginal role.  Moore was responding not only to Fry but also to a number of sculptors working in Britain before the first WW I, above all Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska, the latter who championed a new and inclusive approach to sculpture.  In his 1914 Vortex manifesto Gaudier-Brzeska had surveyed sculpture from the Palaeolithic to the contemporary and across the globe.  He dismissed Greece.

 

grand Ornamentation:

A deep metaphysical concept of Spengler; it is the expression through art work of the Soul of the Culture, it represents the general destiny of a culture; ornament (in contrast to imitation) is ego conscious, restricted to man.  It detaches itself from imitation, establishes motives & symbols, works to impress upon the Alien, to conjure.  It uses language, possesses duration, it is outside Time, it is pure extension.  It has rules, laws, types, grammar & syntax that reflects causality of the Macrocosm as interpreted by a particular man of a given Culture.  It is inorganic, death.

 

Sanskrit (dead):

lingua franca of ancient & medieval India, primary liturgical language of Hinduism & Hindu philosophy & principal texts of Buddhism & Jainism.  In the early 1st millennium AD, along with Buddhism and Hinduism, Sanskrit migrated to Southeast Asia, East & Central Asia, becoming the language of high culture & of ruling elites.  It declined after the 13th century with the beginning of Islamic invasions of India & expansion of the Muslim rule (the Sultanates & later Mughal Empire).  With the fall of Kashmir (a centre of Sanskrit literature) in the 13th century, Sanskrit literature there disappeared.  Its literature once widely disseminated out of the NW regions of the subcontinent, stopped after the 12th century; as Hindu kingdoms fell in east & south India so did Sanskrit.  There were exceptions& short periods of imperial support for Sanskrit.  Some Muslim rulers patronized the Middle Eastern language & some Hindu rulers reversed the process, by re-adopting Sanskrit.  However Western & Indian authors argue Sanskrit is a dead Indian languages.  After the 12th century, the Sanskrit literary works were reduced to “re-inscription and restatements" of ideas already explored, creativity was restricted to hymns and verses.

 

Church Latin (dead):

aka Ecclesiastical or Liturgical or Italian Latin, initially developed to discuss Christian thought & later used as a lingua franca by the Medieval & Early Modern upper class of Europe.  It includes words from Vulgar & Classical Latin re-purposed with Christian meaning.  It is less stylized or rigid than Classical Latin, sharing vocabulary, forms & syntax, while incorporating informal elements excluded by the literary authors of classical Latin. Its pronunciation is based on Italian.  It was the language of liturgical rites in the Catholic Church, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist Churches .Today, it is primarily used in official documents of the Roman Catholic Church & is still learned by clergy.  Latin remains the official language of the Holy See and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church.  However, the liturgical use of the vernacular has predominated since the liturgical reforms that followed the Vatican II (1961).  The use of Latin in pedagogy & theological research, has likewise declined.  It’s use in seminaries & pontifical universities has dwindled to the point of extinction.

 

Alexandria (Pre-Raphaelite comedians):

a reference to New Comedy a 3rd century BC phenomenon (born 323 BC & popular until 260 BC).  It is situation comedy & comedy of manners.  The playwrights abandoned the grotesque & mythological for greater representation of daily life and the foibles of recognisable character types.  A famous playwright of the New Comedy from Alexandria was Machon.  Born in Corinth, lived in Alexandria; taught the grammarian Aristophanes of Byzantium.  Only fragments of his plays survive, along with 462 verses from a book of anecdotes about the words and deeds of notorious Athenians.

 

symbolists:

symbolism, late 19th -century art movement of French, Russian & Belgian origin in poetry & other arts.  A reaction against naturalism & realism, it favoured spirituality, the imagination & dreams.  It worked to depict not the thing but the effect it produces.  Origins in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (1857).  The aesthetic developed during the 1860s & 1870s.  In the 1880s, it was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. 

 

naturalists:

aka realism, French art movement, born around the 1848 Revolution; attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality while avoiding artistic conventions, the implausible, exotic & supernatural.  Rejected Romanticism, dominant in French literature & art since the early 19th century. Revolted against the exotic subject matter & exaggerated emotionalism & drama of the Romantics.  Instead, it sought to portray real and typical contemporary people and situations with truth and accuracy, not avoiding the unpleasant or sordid.. The movement aimed to focus on un-idealized subjects & events previously rejected in art work.

 

expressionists:

movement, initially in poetry & painting, originating in Germany around 1905.  Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.  Expressionism developed as an avant-garde style before the WW I & remained popular during the Weimar Republic, particularly in Berlin.  It extended to a wide range of the arts, including architecture, painting, literature, theatre, dance, film & music.

 

Rome (Graeco-Asiatic):* see EndNote<C>

This is a reference to Hellenistic style imports from Asia Minor (from city states such as Pergamon Alexandria & Antioch.) after 27 BC.

 

Rome (Graeco-Egyptia):

The conquest of Egypt in 30 BC by Augustus & its incorporation into the empire inaugurated a fascination with its culture.  Obelisks and Egyptian-style architecture and sculpture were installed in Roman fora.  The cult of Isis, the Egyptian mother goddess, had an immense impact in Rome & throughout the empire.  

 

Rome (Neo-Attic):

a style which became hugely popular in 2nd Century AD Rome.  First produced in Athens by Neo-Attic artists who specialized in works for Roman connoisseurs,. Greek artists in Rome then adopted it.  It has roots back to 2nd century BC in Hellenistic sculpture & vase-painting.  Neo-Attic artists would adapt or closely following the style found in 5th–4th centuries reliefs & statues.  A reaction against the baroque extravagances of Hellenistic art & demonstrates how self-conscious the later Hellenistic art world had become.  Neo-Attic style emphasises grace and charm, serenity and animation, correctness of taste in adapting a reduced canon of prototypical figures and forms, in crisp, tamed and refined execution. Workshops in the style became mainly producers of copies for the Roman market, which preferred copies of Classical rather than Hellenistic pieces.

 

relief sculpture (19th Dynasty versus Old Kingdom): * see EndNote <D>

One of the great monuments of the New Kingdom was Karnak.  Although construction of Karnak started in the Middle Kingdom (in the XII dynasty,1971-1926 BC), the surviving temple is mostly from the New Kingdom.  Its Great Hypostyle Hall is one of the grandest of such halls, also the most richly decorated.  The XIX dynasty Pharaohs Sety I, Ramesses II & successors covered its walls and columns with hundreds of religious scenes, acres of relief carvings, scenes of historical & religious significance.  Every space on the columns, base of the walls, gateways, all exposed surfaces are covered with hundreds of decorations, dedicatory texts, royal titles.  Many of these inscriptions are highly repetitive and stereotyped, particularly the endless royal cartouches and strings of kingly titles added by Ramesses II & Ramesses IV.  Intended to glorify the king’s role in warfare, many portray Pharaoh as a larger-than-life superhero singlehandedly defeating his foreign enemies. This monumental propaganda is highly bombastic.  Adding confusion, Seti I, Ramesses II & their successors (the 20th dynasty pharaohs) disregarded any balance between inscribed & blank surfaces which would allow inscriptions to be seen to advantage.  Instead they applied bandeau texts listing strings of their royal titles and formulaic dedication texts on gateways and at the base of the walls.  It was overkill.  Especially tedious is Ramesses IV who systematically embellished large portions of most of the 134 columns with bandeau texts and friezes of his royal cartouches, all repeated endlessly. Indeed, his cartouche names appear literally thousands of times!

 

The Old Kingdom (2686–2181 BC); aka the "Age of the Pyramids as it encompasses the reigns of the great pyramid builders of the 4th Dynasty.  This was Egypt’s first sustained civilization.  Wall-sculptures and the hieroglyphs executed in low-relief were typically finely carved.  The glory of Old Kingdom mural decoration is the low-relief work in the royal funerary monuments of the 5th dynasty, in the private tombs of the 5th and 6th dynasties in the Memphite necropolis.

 

Horus-temple of Edfu:

temple, west bank of the Nile in Edfu, Upper Egypt; one of the best preserved shrines in Egypt, built during the Ptolemaic Kingdom 237- 57 BC.  Its wall inscriptions provide important information on language, myth and religion during the Hellenistic period.  It was1 of several temples built during the Ptolemaic Kingdom . Its size reflects the relative prosperity of the time.  The present temple initially consisted of a pillared hall, 2 transverse halls, and a barque sanctuary surrounded by chapels.  The temple is very complete, including a pylon that was built by Cleopatra’s father in the first century BC, which leads into a peristyle court and then a hypostyle hall that precedes the sanctuary of Horus, the final most important part of the temple; it replicates the standard layout of a New Kingdom pylon temple found at many ruins around Luxor& along the Nile Valley; it is the most complete example of this architectural style.

 

Ramses the Great (appropriates temples):

The 2 most common cartouches in Egypt are those of Ramses II, his name can be found virtually everywhere.  He was the most prolific builder in Egyptian history.  He built temples (i.e. Abu Simbel, the Ramesseum) on a monumental scale to ensure that his legacy would survive time.  He used art as propaganda, to advertise his victories over foreigners (as depicted on numerous temple reliefs).  He erected more colossal statues of himself than any other pharaoh.  His cartouche is found all over Egypt and he was not afraid to usurp existing statues by inscribing his own cartouche on them.  Midway through his 67 year reign, Ramesses II added hundreds of new inscriptions to the columns and nave of the temple of Karnack Hypostyle Hall, sometimes erasing the names of his long-deceased father Sety I in the process.   Many temples in Thebes were transformed, so that each reflected honour to Ramesses as a symbol of his putative divine nature and power.  To eternalize himself in stone he ordered changes to the methods used by his masons. The elegant shallow reliefs of previous pharaohs were easily transformed, their images and words easily be obliterated by their successors.  To insure this fate did not befall him he insisted that his carvings be deeply engraved into the stone, making them less susceptible to later alteration & more prominent in the Egyptian sun, reflecting his relationship with the sun deity, Ra.

 

Constantine (arch of): * see EndNote<E>

last of the existing triumphal arches in Rome, erected by the Senate to commemorate Constantine’s victory over Maxentius at Milvian Bridge in 312; dedicated in 315 AD.  Much of the decorative material incorporated earlier reliefs from 2nd century imperial monuments, from the time of the emperors Trajan (98–117), Hadrian (117–138) and Marcus Aurelius (161–180).  Thus it is a collage.  It is the only arch to make extensive use of spolia.   These older works contrast with the sculpture newly created for the arch.  

 

Classical craftsmanship (copying old masterpieces):

The flood of artwork taken from conquered Greek city states (211 to 136 BC) changed Roman tastes & led to a demand for “Greek art” in Rome.   By the second century A.D. this demand was enormous.  Besides their domestic popularity in private collections, the numerous public monuments, theatres, and public baths throughout the Roman empire were decorated with niches filled with marble and bronze statuary.  Many Roman sculptures are carefully measured, exact copies of Greek statues, or variants of Greek prototypes adapted to the taste of the Roman patron. Some are a pastiche of more than one Greek original, while others combine the image of a Greek god or athlete with a Roman portrait head.  To meet this demand, Greek and Roman artists created marble and bronze copies of famous Greek statues.  Molds taken from the original sculptures were used to make plaster casts.  These were shipped to workshops all across the empire, where they were then replicated in marble or bronze.  Artists used hollow plaster casts to produce bronze replicas. Solid plaster casts with numerous points of measurement were used for marble copies. Since copies in marble lack the tensile strength of bronze, they required struts or supports, which were often carved in the form of tree trunks, figures, or other kinds of images.