The Main Characteristics of the Late Roman Kunstwollen PDF

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AH100 The Main Characteristics of the Late Roman Kunstwollen Kunstwollen: The Will To Art  Kunst: Art  Wollen: Will Mandorlla: A portal or doorway from heaven to Earth. Christ comes through it to speak to the people. Causes an aura or halo around him Tympanum:  The tympanum of Vézelay Abbey, Burgundy, France, 1130s  Holy figures shown at the top  Unholy figures shown at the bottom o Dwarf with ladder to get on top of his horse  Not fully formed by Christ o Men with big ears  Not created as equal as the men who see Christ  Vézelay Abbey: launching point for the Crusades  Theme: Pentecostal Mission of the Apostles as allegory for the Crusades  Center: Christ revealed and apostles  Upper four compartments: second mission of the Apostles--healing of the sick and the casting out of demons and devils. In one compartment, a pair of lepers is shown with looks of astonishment as they compare limbs that have been miraculously healed.  Lower four compartments: nations that had already received the Gospels including the Byzantines, Armenians, and Ethiopians. 

Lintel: "ungodly" portrayed with pig snouts, elephant ears, as dwarves, etc

Contraposto: Contradicting postures, but they still work together in harmony Review: Four “period eyes”   

Believing eye (Premodern. Faith as dominant value. Two worlds, lower and higher: a profane world that is knowable in conflict with a sacred world that is not.) Analytic eye (Modern. Science as dominant value. One world that is material and knowable.) Alienated eye (Modernist. Art as dominant value. Two worlds, inner and outer: an interior world knowable to the self that is in conflict with the exterior world knowable to science.)

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Market eye (Postmodern. Culture as dominant value. One world that is ever-changing and becoming more and more complex within the ever-same (and thus knowable) global marketplace.)

Belief: 

Belief as subscription to a systemic social principle—a set of rules or ideals governing social life.

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Visual literacy aids in seeing and analyzing the rule or belief.

Vision Determined By Belief:

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Vision as revelation Vision as embodiment (rather than mind)

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Vision as a separation of sacred/profane, powerful/powerless realms

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The Life of Saint Denis, manuscript illumination representing Saint Denis commissioning Saints Antonin and Saintin to write the story of his life, 1317 Alois Riegl  Vienna School of Art History  Helped establish art history as a self-sufficient discipline  Formalism (form as inseparable from and primary to meaning) Riegl’s Historical Argument:   

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“The antique worldview evolved through three clearly differentiated periods running parallel to the three main periods of antique art.” “The earliest period held the view that the existence and the vital expressions of forms were determined by arbitrarily ruling forces.” “Only the second period, which runs parallel with classical Greek art, aimed—as religion gradually gave way to philosophy and science—to establish a necessary, lawful connection among the individual phenomena.” “In the third period …, the (classical) attempt to establish a mechanical, causal connection between phenomena was again devalued; indeed, things had gone so far that individual forms were again put into mutual external isolation from one another … [and tied to] the emergence of a new, positive belief in an extra-mechanical association.”

Kunstwollen:   

“Will to art” Tendency of an age that drove stylistic development without respect to mimetic or technological concerns. Art is not the imitation of reality, but the expression of a will or desired reality.

Greek Archaic Period (ca. 750-508 B.C.E)  Begins with the establishment of the poleis (city-states ruled by citizens)  Greek alphabet developed  Earliest surviving Greek literature  Monumental sculpture and red-figure pottery began in Greece  Hoplite (citizen-soldiers) became the core of Greek armies  Military innovation: phalanx formation 

Ends with the intellectual revolution of the Classical period

Kouros and Kore   

Modern terms for free-standing ancient Greek sculptures which first appear in the Archaic period in Greece In Ancient Greek kouros means "youth, boy, especially of noble rank" Found in the sanctuaries of Apollo (god of music, truth and prophecy, healing, the sun and light, plague, poetry, and more) predominantly but also Hera (goddess of women and marriage), Athena (goddess of wisdom, craft, and war), and Poseidon (god of the sea and other waters; of earthquakes; and of horses)

Statues:  Perseus and Medusa, Temple C at Selinunte, late 6th B.C.E. (Perseus is cutting off Medusa’s head with Athena standing by, while Pegasus, the winged horse, is born from Medusa’s blood.)  The Doryphoros "Spear-Bearer"; The lost bronze original would have been made at approximately 450-400 BCE. o The Greek sculptor Polykleitos designed a work, perhaps this one, as an example of the "canon" or "rule," showing the perfectly harmonious and balanced proportions of the human body in the sculpted form.  Aphrodite of Milos (Venus de Milo). Created sometime between 130 and 100 BCE o On permanent display at the Louvre Museum in Paris  

The left hand group of surviving figures from the East Pediment of the Parthenon, 447432 BCE. o Exhibited as part of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum

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Sarcophagus depicting the Adoration of the Magi, San Vitale, Ravenna, 5th century CE. Adoration of the Magi. Panel from a Roman sarcophagus, 4th century CE. From the cemetery of St. Agnes in Rome

Greek Classical Period 508-322 B.C.E     

Athenian democracy formalized in 508 BC under Cleisthenes “Cradle of Western Civilization” and the “birthplace of democracy” Plato's Akademia and Aristotle's Lyceum statues begin to depict real people First time we know the names of individual sculptors: Phidias oversaw the design and building of the Parthenon. Praxiteles made the female nude respectable for the first time

Galen of Pergamon 129-200  

Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher in the Roman Empire Influenced the development of anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, neurology, philosophy and logic.

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“Chrysippos holds beauty to consist not in the commensurability or "symmetria" of the constituent elements, but in the commensurability of the parts, such as that of finger to finger, and of all the fingers to the palm and wrist, and of those to the forearm, and of the forearm to the upper arm, and in fact, of everything to everything else, just as it is written in the Canon of Polyclitus. For having taught us in that work all the proportions of the body, Polyclitus supported his treatise with a work: he made a statue according to the tenets of his treatise, and called the statue, like the work, the 'Canon.’”

The Adoration of Magi 

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Name traditionally given to the subject in the Nativity of Jesus in art in which the three Magi, represented as kings, especially in the West, having found Jesus by following a star, lay before him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and worship him. Bible, Matthew 2:11: “On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another path.”

Late Roman / Early Christian period (ca. 100-600)  During the persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire, Christian art was necessarily and deliberately furtive and ambiguous  Initially Jesus was represented indirectly by pictogram symbols such as the Ichthys (fish), peacock, Lamb of God, or an anchor  Later personified symbols were used such as "The Good Shepherd" 

Edict of Milan, 313: agreement to treat Christians benevolently

The Late Roman Kunstwollen: 

“The late Roman Kunstwollen, however, differs from that of earlier periods—and differs ever more sharply with increasing temporal distance—in that it was no longer content to see the individual form presented in two-dimensional extension. Rather, it wanted to see three-dimensional, fully spatial, and self-contained form. This entailed a liberation of the individual form from the universal optical plane (the ground) and an isolation of the form from this ground plane and from other individual forms.” (88)

Theology and The Late Roman Kunstwollen 

“In Augustine's view, the purely beautiful is only to be found in God. On the other hand, there is nothing in creation that does not contain traces (vestigia) of the beautiful. Even ugly things are not excluded. It is the task of the visual arts to bring those traces of the beautiful, through the imitation (imitatio) of objects in nature, to heightened expression. … Augustine concludes that the task of the artist consists in nothing other than the effort to bring forth through imitation, to the greatest extent possible, everything in the natural object that makes its individual formal containment evident.” (p. 91)

Four Types Of Art Historical Analysis   

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Formal analysis (color, shape, texture, scale, line, shadow, space, composition and other physical properties of the work itself) Iconographic analysis (story, theme or subject presented by the work including any symbolism or veiled meanings) Sociohistorical analysis (social, political, economic and cultural context in which the work is produced) Aesthetic analysis (sensuous and psychological impact that the work has on you and others)...