Gandhara Art’s Influence on Buddhist Art in Xinjiang, China

The Gandhara region of India was the origin of Buddhist art, and, due to its unique geographical location, it was a place where European and Asian civilizations mingled. The original Gandhara Buddhist art style was largely influenced by the style of Classical Greek sculpture. With the gradual development, its sculpture art and Buddhist stories entered a prosperous period and began to spread eastward, exerting a profound impact on the development of Buddhist art in the early stage of western Regions and later in Xinjiang.

‘Contemporary Classicism’ Copy of a Copy: Appropriating Classical Statues as Conceptual Readymades

Conceptual readymades – a contemporary artist’s use of a classical work selected as a key point of reference taken out of time – have developed in recent years as part of contemporary art’s appropriation of Greco-Roman statuary. This investigation argues that a contemporary artist’s use of the classical does not represent ‘copies’ but cultural readymades. Contemporary digital and sculptural work foregrounding the classical sheds light on the parallel phenomenon whereby Roman re-interpretations of Greek sculpture may have been equivalent to contemporary classicism. Contemporary case studies featuring digital media, generative art, and sculpture are approached both from the perspective of what they can reveal about contemporary art’s use of the classical and what contemporary art’s use of classical sculpture can suggest about Roman reinterpretations as cultural readymades. Remade as part of contemporary art, classical sculpture is uniquely positioned as an accessible point of reference with which to comment on our own time by concurrently reframing the past.

Statues, Stelai, and Turning Posts in Greece, c.565–c.465 BCE

This essay is about Greek sculpture of the Archaic and Classical periods but addresses larger issues of method. It argues that iconography, while indispensable, is a limited way to study sculpture. As an alternative, it addresses some of the ways in which Greek sculptural monuments could intervene in landscapes. It examines the connections between statues, stelai, turning posts and boundary stones in the Greek imagination. A secondary goal is to advocate an approach to Greek epigraphy that goes beyond semantics to include the connotative aspects of visual features such as mise en page and the difference between epigraphic and metrical line breaks. Examples include the class of “Man-and-Dog” stelai, the “Mourning Athena” from the Athenian Acropolis, and inscriptions from Athens, Eleusis, Troezen, and elsewhere.

ANCIENT GREEK SCULPTURE IN THE 20TH CENTURY WESTERN ART

Ancient Greek art and culture had served as a significant guide for Western civilisation for centuries. Greek philosophy, literature and mythology as well as art and architecture had a major impact on artists especially in the periods of Renaissance and Neoclassicism. It is interesting to see that Ancient Greek sculpture has still been inspiring for the 20th century western painters, sculptors and performance artists. This article will focus on the visual representations of four statues -Apollo Belvedere, Venus of Milo, Nike of Samothrace and Sleeping Ariadne- in the imagination of artists working in various styles. Depictions of aforenamed statues and their novel and distinctive interpretations had been the subject of this descriptive research. 20th century creations have been scanned for traces of Ancient Greek sculpture. These timeless paragons of Classical and Hellenistic periods acquired a fresh life thanks to the 20th century art world’s admiration and respect for the Ancient Greek sculpture. It can be concluded that by juxtaposing classical and contemporary imagery, artists created memorable and engrossing works. Keywords: Ancient Greek Sculpture, 20th century, Western Art

Research on the Drapery in Ancient Greek Sculptures

Sculpture in the ancient Greek period has an extremely lofty position in the history of Western art, and the drapery is one of the most important modeling characteristics of ancient Greek sculpture. This article summarizes the style evolution of drapery in ancient Greek sculptures through the performance of ancient Greek costume characteristics and dressing methods in sculptures. And through the drapery produced by the different postures of the human body in the sculptures, it is explored how the ancient Greek artists used drapery to show the dialectical relationship between clothing, the human body and the posture, thereby shaping the beauty model of classical clothing.

A Marble Head of Ares in the Old Archaeological Museum of Chalkis in Euboea, Greece

This study engages with a marble head of Ares, currently on exhibition at the Old Archaeological Museum of Chalkis in Euboea, Greece. The head has been executed according to the finest tradition of Classical-Hellenistic Greek sculpture, creating a figure with theatrical and pathetic expressions, recalling the Skopadic trend. The lack of pupils may indicate that the head of the god is a pre-Hadrianic Roman copy of a Greek original from the 4th-2nd centuries BCE.

Continuity or Rupture? Further Thoughts on the ‘Classical Revolution’ (2500+ Years after Salamis)

In the last half-dozen years, the early fifth-century BC ‘Classical Revolution’ in Greek sculpture and painting has become ‘hot’ again.1 Did it develop gradually, incrementally, and logically out of the Archaic, or emerge quite suddenly (if so, when?), or involve some combination of both? Since chronology drives the debate, as usual in the study of ancient material culture, to restate some basic principles seems appropriate. I. Absolute chronologies, independently derived, should always underpin and guide relative ones. II. In a relative/gradualist chronology, the ‘latest’ feature of an artifact determines its stylistic terminus post quem, and thus its place in the series.2 Nevertheless: III. Such relative dates cannot be turned simply or unproblematically into history.3 IV. Nothing new comes out of nothing (even Athena came from the head of Zeus). Yet: V. Supposed ‘predecessors’ to a revolution on a gradualist chronology often turn out to be hesitant reactions to it when more data emerge.4 In the present case, unfortunately, the Sicyonian, Argive, Aeginetan, and Athenian bronzes celebrated in the texts are all lost, together with all contemporary wall and panel painting; no absolute chronology exists for early fifth-century East Greek sculpture;5 and West Greek sculpture clearly trails that of the mainland. So by default, our spotlight must fall largely on the marble sculpture of Athens, Aegina, and the Cyclades, and on red-figure vase-painting.

East & West: Searching out for the Beauty Ideal

This article describes the results of a comparative analysis of the ancient Greek sculpture Doryphoros in the western and eastern art canons, as well as the selected sculptures of the Bodhisattva Bodhisattva Maitreya from Gandharan, Indian, Nepalese, and Mongolian art. The authors also explore and integrate the aspects of the artistic notion of an ideal beauty, including aspects of oriental philosophy, aesthetics, human body’s proportion and compilation theory. This comparative analysis is based on G. Zanabazar’s sculpturing features and his skills through theoretical aspects. Studies have shown that Zanabazar’s Bodhisattva Maitreya is fully compatible with the classic western proportions and Buddhist strict canon. We show that both western and eastern artistic iconography have been developed to produce perfection in anthropomorphic expression. The classic correspondence was in religious art, as the western mentality seems to be the opposite and the imitation of both nature and the beauty of one’s sense of beauty. Keywords: human body proportion relevance with art, corporeality, Buddhist art, Zanabazar, Bodhisattva Bodhisattva Maitreya, golden ratio, artistic canon

Art and Archaeology

‘An anonymous product of an impersonal craft’: that is how Rhys Carpenter characterized Greek sculpture in 1960, and it's an assessment that has long dominated the field. Carpenter was challenging the traditional workings of classical archaeology, not least its infatuation with individual ‘masters’. While responding to past precedent, however, his comments also looked forward in time, heralding a decidedly postmodern turn. From our perspective in 2020, six decades after his book was first published, Carpenter can be seen to anticipate what Roland Barthes would dub the ‘death of the author’: ‘the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the author’, as Barthes put it.