start as later are going to discover that really run with that the Parthenon was built for the goddess Athena and this is a remake sculpture that's in a museum in Greece but originally her sculpture would have been in the Parthenon and it wasn't built for communal worship like most of our churches and temples are today it was built for the God or I'm sorry for the priests to go recognize the gods it was basically an altar for the different gods here's the three goddesses from the east pediment of the Parthenon some of these are from the Elgin marbles this one is in Britain today and this sculpture shows us our very first art movement exciting so we're gonna talk through a whole bunch of art movements as we talk through a history of art from now to the end of the semester this is our very first art movement what an art movement is is different than a culture and a period and it gets kind of confusing but the culture would be the Greeks the period is known as the Classical period the Classical period is made up of both the Greeks and the Romans we're known as the Classical period the reason being the Romans loved what the Greeks did and how I like to describe the relationship between the Greeks and the Romans the Greeks were kind of going on doing their thing and then the Romans came up put their own name on it but then kept doing sort of the same ideas in there same thing think about the gods any God has a Greek name and a Roman name right they just kind of put their own spin on it and art movement is not always a period or a culture an art movement is a group of artists that are living at the same place at the same time and they end up doing similar things whether it be similar subject matter concepts or in this case aesthetics and so the Hellenistic period is our very first art movement Hellenistic period from the Classical period from the Greeks is our very first art movement and it's easy to remember what the first art movement is about the first art movement is about movement what these artists did is they created sculptures that appear to move look how the fabric flows and moves across these forms believe it or not one of the most important things about this sculpture are these knees okay we're going to talk about this a lot in future art movements and future cultures but the Greeks were had a great pride for the human body right think about the kuro-san warrior a great pride for the human body and even when they would clothe the human body they still highlighted the body underneath and so these knees are important because they're prominent the fabric drapes around the knees the fabric drapes around the breasts and around the shoulders and so the fabric is responding to the body right later what we're gonna see in the Middle Ages is they hate the human body they wanted to hide they're embarrassed by the human body and the fabric magically covers the human body not here though okay so the knees are really important this is another famous piece from the Hellenistic period that you may have heard of her name is Aphrodite of Melos her nickname was Venus de Milo and again you can see this movement I love this contrapposto in this s-curve that's created the fabric sort of drapes across her midsection and you can see the movement of the fabric you can see the knees and the movement of the human body remember this figure because we're gonna see her a lot so the Classical period this was about study and scientific integrity and figuring out sort of the science nature and technology of objects and things and why we are here by looking at arts and all these important events and so throughout history when people want to validate what they're doing during a certain time in a certain place quite often they will show the Venus figure somewhere in their art because she symbolizes the Greeks in Classical period she also symbolizes a lot of the good things in life that we already talked about love beauty sex fertility all the the things that we sustain like for right and so she's used throughout history to sort of validate what people are doing at a certain in a certain place another important sculpture here this is called the Leo kun group the Leo kun group is another sculpture from the Hellenistic period we can see that movement the way the human body in the form moves the story between the about the Leo Kong group this was a priest that lived during the time that supposedly knew about the Trojan horse and what was going to happen to Troy and he wanted to break it up he didn't want it to happen well supposedly the gods wanted it to happen that way you know Troy the Trojan horse was a gift to Troy where there was a giant wooden horse where soldiers were in and they were brought into the the gates of the city and then in the middle of the night the soldiers got out and took over the city but anyway the gods wanted that to happen and so they sent down these serpents to kill Leo kun and his son so that's what we're looking at here well what's so important about this sculpture is originally it was a Greek bronze so the Greeks made this sculpture in bronze the Romans ended up conquering the Greeks taking over Greek culture and turning it in to the Roman Empire Roman culture what they did is they took art pieces like this one here the local group and they melted down the bronze but they remade it in marble okay they made the marble first and then they melted down the bronze so they could see it so it's an exact duplicate but made with different materials and it really highlights what the Romans did the Romans loved what the Greeks were doing they just wanted to put their own spin on it this is a sculpture and what's so amazing is it really showed what the Greeks were able to do when we get from the kuroh speriod wreak civilization all the way up to the end of Greek culture look at how amazing they're able to take stone and turn it into a human being so not only you study the human body like pectorals and deltoids now not only are you looking at him in idealized form but the proportion in shape is exactly I always get drawn to this vein you don't make that kind of stuff up this is a direct study of the human body and the muscle structures and how muscle structures do what they intend to do muscle structures do two things right they tense when you pull one way my bicep tenses and they relax when you pull another way they reflux so they flex and reflux that's the only two things that muscles do and that's how we move the human body well these are muscles that are actually flexing and reflexes in a more natural way look at the guy's rib cage here and the muscle structures that they go over the ribs his iliac crest that they're amazing the way they're able to take stone and really study the human body and look at his face he had enough time to do his hair and his beard but not wear clothes but look at the anguish on his face you can see the difference between early Greek civilization and now one that shows more movement of the Hellenistic period not only movement but more emotion within the figures so the Greeks were able to do amazing things this is the height of the Roman Empire and what the Roman Empire did is they spread themselves all throughout Mediterranean and one of the things that you'll see when you look at a lot of pieces from the Roman Empire is this is what we think of as Rome sort of the center Italy and it was the center of the Roman Empire okay definitely remember that but a lot of artifacts from the Roman era went all the way up through France through Spain and all the way throughout Africa for instance the pont du gard the pont du gard is a Roman structure from the first century that is in nimes France so it's it's way up here okay it's way up in France one of the things that the Romans bring to the table so they continue their study with mass science art theater athletics same thing that the Greeks did that's why they lump them together in the Classical period but the one thing that the Romans bring to the table is engineering okay this is the rounded arch that we talked about during architecture this is a structure that constantly wants to collapse on itself but what's amazing is that it's lasted this long with this amazing engineering you can thank the Romans for your city systems oh your sewer system you're talking let's thank the Romans they came up with that a lot of engineering involved in civilization and the structure of civilization the Romans brought to the table this was a dome that they also the Romans used in the Pantheon don't confuse the Parthenon with the Pantheon ok the Parthenon is a Greek temple the Pantheon is the Roman dome they built the entrance the same as the Greeks with their Greek order but then when you walked in you saw this beautiful dome in this big open space that no one had ever seen before do you remember what the opening and the dome is called that's the oculus also nicknamed the eye of the gods so it led in light but it also gave a sense of this temple of looking into the heavens another major structure built by the Romans is the Colosseum the Colosseum was actually built in a three-part system you can kind of see the three structures here it was the three Greek orders that it was built under and the Colosseum originally was built for different athletic events I know a lot of us associate the Colosseum where were gladiators went to fight to the death that actually happened only in a really small period in Roman culture when there was an emperor who was probably one of the most evil men to ever walk this earth I know it's really big right now is you know movies about killers and these evil people in the world there is no one that ever walked the earth that was more evil than the Emperor Nero this guy was crazy this guy enjoyed watching humans fight to the death and mutilate and destroy each other and so that's what happened in the Colosseum during his time period I'm sure you've seen the movie the gladiator and there's the whole let him live or he will die you know that kind of thing that Nero did that was a really small time period Nero also liked seeing humans getting eaten by animals like lions so he would have gladiators attack lions a lot of the early Christians were also sent fight to the death but the the Coliseum and the structure that he had built was absolutely amazing it's actually duplicated today a lot of your sports arenas are built in the same structure you had the arena part and then you had the box seats these were where the wealthy would be and then all the way in the top in the back you'd have the poorer people and that sat up in the the grandstands in the back so the structure was amazing true story one day Nero woke up and he said I'd like to see a lion fight a shark make it happen and so his engineers got together and they flooded the Colosseum and then somehow they got sharks from the sea and they put him in the Colosseum and they were swimming around and then they threw these Lions in there to fight them were lying there cats right they're not gonna go swim around in water and so the Lions just tried to get out and you can't really tell a shark to fight a lion but so they didn't really fight but the amazing part of the story is yet the engineers these Roman engineers actually made it happen and built the structure so what we're looking at here this is a photo that I took when I was at the Colosseum this is what's underground the Colosseum there's all these catacombs and originally this is another shot that I took you can see it a little better they've now built this little wood piece so you can see what it was originally like but the wood would have covered the whole thing that was the floor where the gladiators would fight and where all the athletes would be and what they would do sometimes is there to have a horse and carriage and on the wood floor was covered in sand and dirt and the horse and carriage would run around the circle and kick up all this dust and then the gladiator would like magically appear out of the dust what they built are these sort of elevator systems where they would kind of pull up from underground so the engineering of this building was absolutely amazing for its time the underground catacombs go all the way across the street because gladiators were slaves right and so they were imprisoned and so they didn't want to go walking into the front door like a spectator would do they would have to go in way down the street down the town and they would go underground and they were basically chained and they would do their little workouts before would go up to get killed in these little catacombs here later after Nero this was used for sporting events they would do horse-and-carriage races here they would do jaws here they'd held the Olympics here and so this was an amazing athletic arena all right so Classical period Greeks and Romans Greeks started to ask why we were here using Discovery Science all the in the invention of all the classes that you take in college the Romans took over carried along a lot of the same ideas and then brought engineering to the table