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Welcome to Humanities 1502

• The Humanities: the study of culture, with an emphasis on the fine arts.

What does culture mean?

What does culture mean?

• A whole way of life.

• The way people live their daily lives, what they believe in, what they value, and what they do.

What does culture mean?

• A whole way of life.

• The way people live their daily lives, what they believe in, what they value, and what they do.

• Or, the fine arts; what one needs to know to be a cultured person.

• The best and the brightest that has been said and done.

What are values? What are values?

• The ideas that unite a culture and that are passed on through tradition.

• A culture’s hopes and dreams; its people’s senses of their possibilities and limits.

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Where do we find works of culture? Where do we find works of culture?

• In media. But what is a medium?

Where do we find works of culture?

• In media. But what is a medium?

• Media is the stuff of culture; it is what culture is made of.

Where do we find works of culture?

• In media. But what is a medium?

• Media is the stuff of culture; it is what culture is made of.

• Culture is made in multiple mediums (hence the term “multi-media”).

• Can you name some different cultural media? (think about arts that appeal to the different senses)

Hall of the Bulls, 15,000- 13,000 BCE, in present-day Lascaux, France Venus of Willendorf, 28,000 –23,000 BCE

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Cycladic idol, Aegean, 2500 BCE

Venus of Willendorf, 28,000 – 23,000 BCE

Cycladic idol, Aegean, 2500 BCE

The Legacy of Ancient Greece and Rome

the discovery of realityand humanity

The Mediterranean

Ancient Greece

• We value the Greeks because they invented many of the ideas and techniques that are the basis for modern Western civilization, such as: philosophy, history, realistic art, lyric poetry, and science.

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The influence of Egyptian sculpture (left, 2575 BCE) on the early Greek Kore from Delos (right, 650 BCE)

Greek korai sculptures over time, from left (older) to right (more recent)

Kouros from Attica600 BCE The Calf-Bearer

550 BCEPeplos Kore530 BCW

Kouros from Anavysos530 BCE

The Kritios Boy, Acropolis, Athens 490BCE

The philosopher Protagoras sums up the attitude of Greek intellectual

thought when he writes:

• “Man is the measure of all things, of the existence of those that exist, and of the nonexistence of those that do not.”

Perhaps the most human-centered intellectual work of the Greeks is philosophy.

What is philosophy?

Perhaps the most human-centered intellectual work of the Greeks is philosophy.

What is philosophy?• Philosophy literally means “love of wisdom.”

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Perhaps the most human-centered intellectual work of the Greeks is philosophy.

What is philosophy?• Philosophy literally means “love of wisdom.”

• In the Western tradition it usually refers to inquiries into the nature and ultimate significance of human experience, including such areas as logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and politics.

Perhaps the most human-centered intellectual work of the Greeks is philosophy.

What is philosophy?• Philosophy literally means “love of wisdom” in Greek.

• In the Western tradition it usually refers to inquiries into the nature and ultimate significance of human experience, including such areas as logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and politics.

• Philosophy is not religion. Greek philosophers turned away from religious teachings to study the above topics, using the power of human reason to try to discover how the world came into being and how it works, and to understand the place of humans in it.

The first schools of philosophy: The first schools of philosophy:

• Materialism: the earliest school of Greek philosophy. Sought to explain all phenomena in terms of one or more elements.

The first schools of philosophy:

• Materialism: the earliest school of Greek philosophy. Sought to explain all phenomena in terms of one or more elements.

• Pythagoreanism: mathematical relationships represent underlying order of universe.

The first schools of philosophy:

• Materialism: the earliest school of Greek philosophy. Sought to explain all phenomena in terms of one or more elements.

• Pythagoreanism: mathematical relationships represent underlying order of universe.

• Dualism: there are two worlds, the world around us and an ideal world accessible only through the intellect and reason.

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The first schools of philosophy:

• Materialism: the earliest school of Greek philosophy. Sought to explain all phenomena in terms of one or more elements.

• Pythagoreanism: mathematical relationships represent underlying order of universe.

• Dualism: there are two worlds, the world around us and an ideal world accessible only through the intellect and reason.

• Atomism: reality consists of ultimate, unchangable particles that are not obvious to the eye and also of void (nothingness).

The Greek Classical Ideal

• The belief that the quest for reason and order could succeed.

The Classical Ideal

• The belief that the quest for reason and order could succeed.

• Existence can be ordered and controlled.

The Classical Ideal

• The belief that the quest for reason and order could succeed.

• Existence can be ordered and controlled.

• Human ability can triumph over the apparent chaos of the natural world and create a balanced society.

The Classical Ideal

• The belief that the quest for reason and order could succeed.

• Existence can be ordered and controlled.

• Human ability can triumph over the apparent chaos of the natural world and create a balanced society.

• The aim of life should be a perfect balance: everything in due proportion; “nothing too much.”

The Classical Ideal

• The belief that the quest for reason and order could succeed.

• Existence can be ordered and controlled.

• Human ability can triumph over the apparent chaos of the natural world and create a balanced society.

• The aim of life should be a perfect balance: everything in due proportion; “nothing too much.”

• Individuals can achieve order by understanding the motives for their own action.

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The Classical Ideal informs every aspect of Greek culture:

• Greek philosophy

• Greek architecture

• Greek sculpture

• Greek drama

• Greek history

The Parthenon, a temple built for Athena atop the Acropolis, Athens

The Classical Style:

ideal beauty represented in realistic terms

Chrysippus writes: “beauty consists of the proportion of

the parts; of finger to finger; of all the fingers to the palm and

the wrist; of those to the forearm; of the forearm to the

upper arm; and of all these parts to one another, as set

forth in The Canon of Polykleitos”

This statue by Praxiteles (copied many times) represents the discovery of the female body as an object of beauty in itself.

It is also one of the first attempts to bring the element of sensuality into the portrayal of the female form.

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Athenian Drama• Athens the center of dramatic production in Greece; plays

produced for the festival of Dionysus, god of wine and song.

• The Athenian tragic dramatists: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Tragedy is the art of hamartia and catharsis.

• The Athenian comedies (Aristophanes): mocked the constantly warring culture of Greece.

Philosophy in the Late Classical Period: Platonist and Aristotelian

• Socrates: proponent of the Socratic method of questioning of traditional values through dialog

• Plato: Socrates’s student; wrote down the dialogs of Socrates; founded The Academy (the first univesity); proposed concept of ideal societies and forms in works such as The Theory of Forms and The Republic

• Aristotle: Plato’s student; founded the Lyceum in competition with The Academy; known as the great systematizer; rejected in works such as The Metaphysics and The Rhetoric Plato’s other-worldly idealism in favor of the analysis of the essences of the material and mental world as directly experienced; inspiration for modern science.

Rome, circa CE 320

Rome conquers Greece in the second century BCE

• And in the process Rome assimilates and adapts many parts of Greek culture, including:

• Philosophy

• Literature

• Sculpture

• Architecture

• Religion (same pantheon of gods as the Greeks, but different names)

The Greeks idealized their figures. Thus, all the humans and horses below look realistic but they also look similar. They all have ideal muscular builds and wear the same contemplative expression—even when rushing into battle as they are here in this sculpture from the Parthenon.

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Roman sculptors worked in the classical Greek style, but with a difference:

Polykleitos’s Greek Spear Bearer (left)

The Roman orator Cicero (below)

Roman emperor Augustus (right)

Roman architecture

The column (Greek) The arch (Etruscan) The dome (Roman)

The power of the arch: massive

basilicas and aqueducts

The dome creates huge buildings with open interior spaces such as

The Pantheon

The interior of the Pantheon

The Middle Ages

About 1000 years:

From the fall of Rome: 476 AD

to the Florentine Renaissance: 15th century

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Medieval Art

10th Century Russian Icon (left) and 14th Century Florentine Passion (right);Medieval Art emphasizes Christian symbolism over physical realism

A Medieval Book Cover

Carved in Ivory

Note the highly symbolic arrangement of the figures.

Inside a RomanesqueCathedral (St. Sernin,Toulouse)

Note the unadorned interiors (this picture is illuminated by a camera flash; otherwise, the interior is very dark)

There is no dome in the cathedral, and it is supported by barrel arches, so there are not many windows.

Because Romanesque churches are so dark inside most sculpture is located on the outside of structure.

Illiterate worshippers would learn the Bible by ‘reading’ sculptures above church doorways. What do they learn here? Paris: center of western civilization in

the 13th century• The annual trade

fair of Paris was famous throughout the Western world and beyond

• Paris is where gothic architecture was developed

• Paris saw the rise of the educational method known as “scholasticism”

• Paris is home to the world’s first university

• Chartres Cathedral (Gothic style)

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The Essence of the GothicCathedral:

The pointed archandThe flying buttress

Using these technologies, huge stained glass windowscould be created, filling thecathedral with light

The Abbey of St. Denisis the first Gothic Cathedral.

It was built around 1140.

Note the pointed arches,which lift the ceiling tonew heights

Amiens Cathedral

Verticality and Light

Inside Chartres

It is luminous. Note how the mosaics of Byzantine cathedrals have been replaced with stained glass windows to create a similarly spiritual--although qualitatively different--light inside.

This is quite different from the huge but dark Romanesque cathedrals the early middle ages.

The winemaking guild helped pay for Chartres Cathedral so they got their own stained glass window in return.

A rosette window and the “mysticism of light”

Abbot Suger, who pioneered the use of stained glass in cathedrals, had a Neo-Platonic theory that justified its use: all of creation exists under the category of light; as light becomes more pure, one gets closer to pure light, which is God.

To quote Suger:“Bright is that which is

brightly coupled with the bright, and the bright is the noble edifice which is pervaded by the new light”

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The stained glass windows contain many meanings and were meant to be read likethe Bible.

Thus stained glass windows were called the Bible of the Poor

What is to be read here?

Interpreting Stained Glass

• The window honors the Virgin to whom one prays in time of need

• The Virgin is also depicted as the seat of wisdom

• And the fact that Mary is depicted in glass is a moral example as well: Christ was born to a virgin, passing through her as light passes through glass

Medieval Art in the

Medieval Art in the

International Style

nternational Style

Note the bright colors, crowded composition, and rounded figures

Everyman

Medieval morality play