Archaic and early classical: East and West Pediments, Temple of Aphaia, Aegina Video Lecture - Humanities/Arts

(lighthearted music)
Man: We're in the Glyphtothek in Munich.
This is an extraordinary museum devoted
to ancient Greek and Roman antiquities.
Woman: That's all thanks to
Prince Ludwig of Bavaria,
who in the early 19th
century, said he wanted
to found a collection of
antique works of sculpture,
because, as he said, "We
must also have in Munich
"what in Rome in known as a museum."
Man: I love that.
Museum wasn't even a commonly used word.
The idea of a public
collection was just coming
into being in Britain, in
France, and here in Germany.
Woman: Ludwig was ambitious
for Munich; he wrote,
"I will turn Munich
into a city of the arts,
so that no one can claim to know Germany
who has not also seen Munich."
Man: Art was a way of really
putting a city on a map.
It spoke to its cultural superiority.
Ludwig put together an
incredible collection.
Woman: We're looking
now at one of the great
treasures of the museum,
the sculptures from
the pediment of the temple of Aphaia,
on the island of Aegina,
just off the coast of Greece.
Man: This is an island
that's visible from Athens,
so it's very close to the Greek mainland;
and we really shouldn't say
'pediment', we should say 'pediments'.
Let's impact that just a little bit.
On a Greek temple, imagine the Parthenon.
This is a long structure, with a gable
at either end that is
above the column head.
At either short end of the
temple there is a low triangle.
Historically, those were areas
that were filled with sculpture.
Woman: On the Temple of Aphaia there was a
pediment on the east side
and on the west side,
on the two short ends of the temple.
The sculptures that filled
these pediments were
discovered in the early
19th century when some
German architects were surveying the ruins
of the temple, and they
were soon put on auction,
and Ludwig was very pleased to
acquire them for his new museum.
Man: The pediment sculptures
were not made at the same moment,
and that makes them even more interesting,
because it helps us see the
evolution of Greek sculpture.
The west pediment [with]
earlier, and we think
that those sculptures were carved
when the temple was actually
built, about 490 B.C.E.
The east side were later,
and what's really intresting
is those older west sculptures are in the
archaic tradition, but the
east pediment sculptures
are just taking on the
characteristics of the style
that we'll come to know as the classical.
Woman: We can say it's an early moment
of the classical for the
sculptures on the east pediment.
Man: It's this moment of transition,
as the style is just
really being invented.
Woman: Now, the subject for both pediments
was the Trojan war, the War
between the Trojans and the Greeks.
Man: Now, this war is really a mythic war,
but we know about it
because it is the subject
of Homer's great epic poem, "The Iliad."
Woman: Some of the
heroes of the Trojan War
were from the island of
Aegina, so it makes sense
that they would make an
appearance on the pediment.
Man: Let's start off by looking at the
sculptures on the western pediment.
In terms of being a space that
gets filled with sculpture,
a pediment is an awkward environment.
Woman: It's incredibly
awkward, because you have
these two narrow areas of the
triangle that are very hard to fill.
One of the ways that you can do
that is to have reclining figures.
Man: That's right. It's
almost as if the sculptures
have to play limbo, they get lower
and lower as you move to the edges.
But, in this case, the sculptor has really
been inventive, and has
found a marvelous solution.
In the very center of
the pediment, on both
the east and the west
sides, we have a standing
figure, noble, looking
outward, the goddess Athena.
Woman: Athena was known
as the goddess of war,
in addition to being
the goddess of wisdom.
Man: On the west pediment, we see Athena
now holding a modern shaft that is meant
to represent a spear that would have
originally been there, perhaps in wood,
more likely in bronze or some other metal.
Woman: When we look at
Athena, we see a figure
who looks typically archaic in style.
She is frontal, she's rather
rigid, fairly symetrical,
and there's a lineal
quality to her drapery.
She has that typical
archaic smile that removes
her from emotion, removes
her from the everyday world.
She seems like a transcendent goddess.
Man: On either side of the standing Athena
are two warriors, and they move outward.
They're actually lunging with the spears.
One has their shield
facing us, one is turned
in the other direction, the
shield is facing away from us;
but they move our eye in
either direction outward
with real energy, real
velocity, and of course,
they are both slightly
lower since their knees
are bent so that they fit
under the eave of the gable.
Woman: On either side
of those figures, we see
kneeling archers, who are shooting bows.
Man: The archer on the
left, we can actually
identify as Paris, and we
can see his cap is tied in
the back, his weight is on
one knee and on one heel.
The bow is missing, but
we can certainly see
an arm movement that suggests that he was
in the middle of loosing his arrow.
Woman: Behind him, a
striding figure with a weapon
who's attacking a figure
who's falling to the ground.
Man: Look at the complexity
of that group of three
in the way in which they overlap.
There's a real sense of energy.
There's a real sense of dynamism.
Just pretty extraordinary
for the archaic moment.
Woman: On the far left corner, another
wounded figure just fits
into that corner space.
Man: Let's focus for a
moment on the wounded
warrior that is on the right
side of the west pediment.
You can see that he's fallen back.
He's on his left hip and
he's on his left elbow,
and his right hand seems to be clutching,
or perhaps trying to remove
a spear that has wounded him.
Woman: Let me stop you for a moment,
because he doesn't really look like he's
in the position of a wounded warrior.
His knee is bent, it
comes over his left leg,
he's propped up on his left arm, and his
right elbow comes up in
a rather awkward way.
This figure really doesn't seem believable
in terms of what he's
supposed to be doing,
pulling this spear from his body.
Man:That's right, this must
be tremendously painful,
and probably will kill him,
and yet, look at his face;
he still retains the archaic
smile, but for all of this
it's important to remember
that this is not naturalism,
this is not an attempt to render
the feelings of the human body.
This is a highly stylized
[for a schematic] structure.
Woman: In a way, the figure is a
symbol more than a real figure;
a symbol of a fallen
warrior in the Trojan War.
Man: One art historian is likened
this figure to face painting,
where there was an attempt
often to raise torsos up
so that you could see the full musculature
in the entire front; so, this is not about
naturalism, it's about
revealing the body in a way.
Woman: The same art
historian likened this figure
to a reclining kouros, and
that's exactly how he looks.
It's as though a standing kouros
figure has been tipped over.
This is so different than what we see on
the east pediment, which
dates from only about
a decade or two later,
where we see the beginnings
of the classical style.
Man: Let's go take a look.
Now, the east pediment
is much more fragmentary
on the left side, but the
one figure of the fallen
soldier is in great condition,
and it's so different
from what we saw, the
earlier archaic west facade.
Woman: While this figure still
has a bit of that archaic smile,
everything else about
the position of his body
tells us that this is a wounded
figure taking his last breath.
Man: You can see that
he is holding his sword
with his right hand, but
he's also trying to push
himself back up, but he doesn't
seem to be able to do it.
His left arm is still in the shield,
and he seems to be balancing himself.
You know it's just a moment before
that shield falls over with a bang.
Woman: There's a sense that he's propping
himself up, but he's also
falling at the same time,
lowering his body as he dies.
Man: He's looking down at the ground,
and his body is more mature
than the other figure,
it's also much more
naturalistically rendered.
We're seeing that origin
of the classical tradition.
Woman: In the archaic
period, we see the hard
divisions between the
muscles and the parts
of the body, outlines
almost, to parts of the body,
and here, one muscle flows into another,
and there's a real sense of skin
lying over a skeletal structure.
Man: That's right. A
moment ago, you had said
that the archaic sculpture was nothing but
really a set of symbols, and
here it's as if the artist
has actually observed a
human body and thought
about what it must be
like for a figure to fall.
Woman: Instead of having
that back leg coming
over the front leg in
a very unnatural way,
and instead of having
that elbow lifted up,
the right arm of the figure
comes over his torso fully;
there's no attempt to
reveal the whole body tipped
forward to us the way we
had in the archaic figure.
Man: Now look at the torso.
Look at the muscles of the leg.
This is a far, more complex rendering
of the human body in a complex pose.
Woman: Just like on the west pediment,
as we look at the east pediment,
we've got a central figure again, Athena.
Man: To the right of Athena, we have
figures that are much more in tact.
We have a lunging figure, we saw that
on the west pediment as
well, who is in the process
of impaling a man who has lost his helmet,
his shield is falling off
his arm, and he is tottering,
he has lost his balance.
Woman: He looks as though
he's about to collapse.
Man: We know he's lost his helmet because
the young man who's in
back of him who seems
to be trying to aid him
and running towards him,
is holding a fragment
that we know would have
originally been his helmet.
Woman: His body forms a
diagonal in that lunge,
and so it fits nicely into that
triangular space of the pediment.
Behind him is another archer just
like we saw on the west pediment.
Man: Archaeologists think
that archer is actually
the one who has hit the wounded
warrior on the opposite side.
Woman: The one who we
were discussing before.
Man: That's right.
Woman: So, we have this
wonderful unification
of action among all of these
figures on the east pediment.
Man: We have this more complex narrative,
even though the same story is being told.
We have a much more complex musculature,
much more careful attention
to the human experience.
This makes us ask what has changed?
This just been a few years
between these pediments,
and yet they are so different.
Woman: This is always
the questions that art
historians ask as we look at works of art
that are separated not by a very
long period of time, in this case.
What has happened in the values
of ancient Greek culture that has led them
to represent the human
figure so differently.
Man: If you go back in
Greek history, the Greeks
were deeply influenced by
monumental Egyptian sculpture.
You can still get a
sense of a trace of that
in the archaic tradition, but now
there's a sense of self-awareness.
These are mobile figrues out in the world
that are almost enacting human emotion,
human expression, and human experience.
That is so different from
the idea of representation
as symbolic, which it so
informed earlier Greek art.
Woman: In the classical
period, we have figures
who we can believe are part of a story,
it's a story that we can
begin to feel for them,
we can sympathize with
them as we watch them.
This is a moement in ancient Greek history
when the Greeks have just
defeated the Persians
in battle; this is an epic
victory for Greek culture
when many of the Greek city states united
to fight their enemy, the Persians.
Man: Right, this common enemy that really
should have been victorious, the Persians
should have won, it
was a much larger army;
and the Greeks knew it,
and the fact that they
were victorious suggested to them
that there was a kind of
order in the universe.
Woman: There's a sense
now that the world is into
place that just operates
arbitrarily according
to the laws of the gods,
but it's a place that the
human mind, with its sense of
the rational, can understand.
Man: So, there is a much greater burden
placed on the Greeks
with this realization.
They are now responsible
for their own society.
They're not part of a random order,
they are part of an order
that they actually devise.
Woman: Art historians see the origins
of the classical style in
this historical moment.
We have an obligation, even here
in the 21st century, to
try to put ourselves,
even though it's an impossible task,
in the minds of the ancient
Greeks, and to truly
understand these works of
arts from their point of view.
It's really important
ot remember that these
sculptures were painted
just like all ancient
Greek sculptures, and
with very bright colors.
Man: This completely destroys
our image of Greek art.
When we think about
Greek art, we think about
these pristine, brillian,
white marble surfaces,
and they were garish; they were yellow,
they were blue, they were green.
Woman: Art historians and
archaeologists have done
scientific analyses of
these sculptures, and
found traces and residues
of pigments and been able
to determine it pretty
acurately, at least the
red and blues that we find here
in some of the geometric patterns.
Man: It's so jarring
for me to try to imagine
these colors back, and it's
not just that the figures
themselves were painted,
but the architectural
spaces in which these figures
were placed was painted as well.
Woman: There are so many ways that we're
not looking at these the way
that the ancient Greeks did.
First of all, these were
outside in the open air.
They were high up on a
pediment on this island.
Man: Certainly the
color would have made it
much easier to see
these figures, would try
to have been in the shade of architecture.
There's another element
that we can re-imagine,
which is that these figures
not only holding things
that have since disappeared,
they were holding
spears, and bows and
arrows, but they also had
other pieces of metal work
that have since been lost.
There was hair, sometimes actually hanging
like bangs over the
forehead, and also long locks
that came down and framed the faces.
In this case, they were
made out of lead, and we can
actually see little pieces
of the remaining lead that
are still there, and so we
know precisely where they
came out of stone, and
that would have helped,
I think, create not these
figures as single stone
objects the way that we
see them, but as these
much more complex figures
that interact with
their architectural environments.
Woman: Let's not forget,
too, that these are temples.
These are places of religious
worship, and that they
were homes to the gods,
and that the central figure
on both the east and west
pediment is the goddess Athena;
and of course, the Greek idea of gods and
goddesses is entirely different from
our own Judeo-Christian tradition.
These are all important
things to keep in mind as we
look at the Greek sculptures in museums.
(lighthearted music)