Winckelmann in Nineveh

By the middle of the 19th century, French and British diplomats managed excavations in the biblical land of legendary Assyrian kings, where Nineveh had been buried long before Greek classical era. Here was the opportunity to reconsider the way Winckelmann cristallised the art of Antiquity, but when Assyrian remains entered in museums, they had precisely been evaluated under the reputation of Greek art inherited from the History of the Art of Antiquity, in which few Near Eastern items were said to be the exact opposites of classical beauty: scientists questioned art values of such strange objects, and museums themselves hesitated to exhibit this unexpected heritage so close to Greek "high art" (Edmund Oldfield). However, Assyria had got too many supporters in a few years to be forgotten a second time, and instead of highlighting the value of Hellenic unrivalled items, the « chain of art » principle figured from Winckelmann was used to support how Assyrian remains, at the very end, had influenced the brighter well-known classical masterpieces.

Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach’’: A Depiction of Victorian Doubt and Faith

Dissatisfied with his age Arnold turned towards Greek Culture and literature. Victorian age was an age of doubt and faith. Religious faith were in melting pot. Darwin’s ‘Origin Of Species’ (1859) shook the Victorian faith. Darwin questioned the very basic statement of ‘The Holy Bible’. Arnold considered literature as a weapon to established the broken faith of Victorians. He took Greek literature as reference to write literature. Arnold keenly observed Greek art and culture and find solace in it. He used Greek Art and Culture as the tool of morality and it has the healing power to wounded Victorian faith. Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach is a poetry of vanished past and vanished faith. Keywords: Reflective elegy, Vanished Faith, Victorian Doubt and Faith, Sea of faith.

On the Magnitude of the Gods in Materialist Theology and Greek Art

In this paper, I address one characteristic of Classical Greek votive reliefs that has troubled scholars: the size of the gods. The reliefs depict mortal worshippers approaching gods and goddesses who are, almost invariably, larger in stature than the mortals. Scholars have generally explained the difference in scale to be art historical, rather than theological, in significance. Either the larger scale is a visual expression of the hierarchical superiority of the gods or the images of the gods represent over-life-size statues. In addition, it is widely accepted that votive reliefs are products of unsophisticated religious belief, ignorant of the conceptualization of an imperceptible, non-corporeal deity in Classical philosophy. In this paper, I accept the artistic proposition of votive reliefs at face value: in this genre, the gods are living, visible, material bodies, most often anthropomorphic in form and always larger in magnitude than mortals. I identify one significant parallel for this interpretation within Greek and Roman thought, namely, the conception of gods within the materialist theology developed by the late Classical writer Epicurus and, in part at least, by the fifth-century BC writer Demokritos. In the writings of the Epicureans and, it appears, the atomists, as in the votive reliefs, gods are human in form, very beautiful, self-sufficient, larger than humans in size and known by mortals through visual perception.

Labor X

This chapter examines the sources for Heracles’ tenth Labor, the killing of the three-headed Geryon and the stealing of his cattle. Beginning with Hesiod, it analyzes Stesichorus’ take on the myth with its surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of Geryon, whose home Stesichorus placed in southern Spain; the striking depictions of the clash in archaic Greek art; the accounts offered by the mythographers; and the assertions of settlements such as Saguntum, Alesia, Pompeii, and Rome itself that Heracles visited them on his way back to Greece. The myth proves to be endlessly flexible, appearing in a wide variety of contexts and genres.

The tradition of pottery painting in the Upper Silesian-Lesser Polish regional group of the Lusatian culture in the Early Iron Age. The example of the cemetery at Dobrzeń Mały, Opole district.

The idea of covering pottery with polychrome ornaments adopted from the Greek art of the Late Geometric period spread to almost every corner of Early Iron Age Europe, including some areas in present-day Poland. Painted pottery was manufactured in Middle Silesia and southern Greater Poland. Finds of painted vessels are recorded also in Upper Silesia, and a smaller number still, in Lesser Poland. The presented paper addresses painted pottery identified with the Upper Silesian-Lesser Polish regional group of the Lusatian culture from settlement and funerary contexts (cremation and bi-ritual cemeteries). A closer look is taken at the previously unpublished finds of polychrome vessels from the cemetery at Dobrzeń Mały investigated during the 1970s. Their collection is now displayed and preserved in the Museum of Opole Silesia in Opole.

Potent kings and antisocial heroes: lion symbolism and elite masculinity in ancient Mesopotamia and Greece

In the great kingdoms of ancient Mesopotamia, the king’s power was often evoked by means of lion symbolism. This has led scholars to conclude that lion motifs, and especially that of the lion-slaying hero, in early Greek art and literature were cultural borrowings from the more populous and urbanised civilisations to the east. Yet it is also notable that the Greek tradition, at least from the time of the Homeric poems, tended to problematise the ethics of the leonine man. This article explores the function of lion imagery in narratives of elite masculinity in western Asia and early Greece respectively. It will argue that Greek myth and epic reflect on and problematise any potential equation between lions and kingly prestige, power and masculinity, instead drawing attention to the savagery and social isolation of the lion-like man-of-power, and his difficulty in conforming to the expectations of civilised society.

Periphrôn Pênelopeia

A fine marble torso of a seated woman was found in the ruins of the palace at Persepolis that was burned down by Alexander the Great’s army in 331 BCE. The statue, now in Teheran, has aroused considerable interest as a unique example of a work of High Classical Greek art that ended up at the Persian court. From comparison with fifth-century terracotta reliefs and vases, as well as Roman copies that must go back to a second, nearly identical, and now lost statue, the woman holding her head in a melancholy pose can be identified as Homer’s Penelope. A recent study by Hölscher has proposed an intriguing scenario, in which one of the two statues would have accompanied Kallias, as a diplomatic gift, when he went to negotiate a peace treaty with the Great King in 449, while the other stood on the Athenian Akropolis as Perikles’s monument to that peace. In both instances, the figure of Penelope would have symbolized the longing for peace of women, whether Greek or Persian, who waited fearfully for their husbands and sons to come home. This interpretation raises the question of the reception of Penelope in fifth-century Athens: What was she most remembered for? Was it mainly as the wife longing for her husband away at war? Did Athenian society, as Hölscher claims, increasingly see the burden of war as falling on women as the fifth century wore on? The chapter explores these questions through a combination of literary and iconographical evidence.