welcome to module 11 western art history part 2 for arh 1000 art appreciation at phsc so in part one of our art history lectures we left off with greece and so today we're going to begin with rome in roman society and in roman art we really have two basic divisions on the one hand we have the republic period where rome is a republic sort of democratic and then on the other we have rome post julius caesar when rome became an empire um you you tend and this is a very broad generalization um to get a lot more of the the gigantic building projects um tend to be kind of either the the dividing line um or a little bit later into the empires when we start seeing a lot of these big building projects um it's not that they didn't build big um in the republic period it's just that um things were really peaceful things were really stable whether they wanted to be or not under the empire period and so you do tend to have more time and energy to put into building projects this is a largely patriarchal society that borrows the aesthetic and sometimes steals directly the art from ancient greece and to a lesser extent ancient egypt so for example this is an egyptian obelisk in rome in front of the building of the pantheon um so the the fountain underneath was actually put in place in the 1700s but the obelisk itself was moved to rome sometime in antiquity um not exactly sure if we're exactly sure when that happened and was placed erected in front of the pantheon which you see behind it that's the building we mark back here that's that building is the pantheon which is a domed structure that we already looked at a bit when we were looking at architecture so we're not going to really pay much attention to it this time but this is an egyptian obelisk this should not be there so rome had a tendency when they went and conquered other people they brought back a few souvenirs sometimes a sculpture sometimes a building sometimes an obelisk it's a little bit more common to find that they copied the art than it is that they actually picked it up and took it with them but you do see that more often than you might expect that they would take gigantic pieces and somehow figure out a way to transport them without breaking them and get them to roam and there are a number of them in in the city so moving on to roman art itself in roman sculpture if you'll notice the statues are almost shiny now if you expect your statue to be shiny that's because we're looking at a lot of times the renaissance aesthetic which borrows from the roman aesthetic that really highly polishes their statues the greeks did not tend to do that now to be fair um there isn't there are a number of greek statues and museums that are highly polished in some cases that was done as part of a restoration project but the original look of ancient greek statues particularly pre-hellenistic art and to a lesser extent pre-classical art does tend to be less shiny if you will so we have here a roman woman and a roman man um these are busts so they're just meant to show the head um and basically if you'll notice you can see it on both of them there's there's a shine there's almost a an iridescence to the marble that is because of how much they have been polished if you'll notice also too both of these have not escaped unscathed time here the man in particular that statue was found buried so even though it has been cleaned there is dirt that lingers but even with that you can still see um how well polished this statue was um typically the eyes are blank in uh roman statuary so that that's not um that's not unusual to see kind of this blank stares pointing out at us in fact roman statues were usually intended to have accessories added after the fact a lot of them were painted the eyes in a lot of cases would either be painted or in some cases there would actually be a an inset um piece of of material that would be added to the sculpture to to add to the eyes they were going for life like they weren't going for a creepy blank stared zombie look um another thing about roman statues the lady here we have youth and beauty but if you'll notice this statue of the man is much older looking this is not the classical period of greece where everyone was young and beautiful and and happy all the time rome excels at appreciating age experience this senate of rome had to be made up of people who were both from the right the right ancestors but in addition to who you were related to it involved people who had already had experience running the government experience in the government so experience and age is a big deal in roman society and so they don't shy away from from age and experience in roman culture um in their statuary and in some cases with some of the emperors they think maybe they were aging them up a little to make it look like they had more experience than maybe they actually did um but this is to give you kind of a an either or um look at roman statues um and and really the amount of skill that it would take to come up with this level of detail um is kind of amazing i'm cheating a little bit here and that these are greek eyes rather than roman but considering that very roman empire roman republic thing to do i don't think they would mind um but this is the kind of thing that would have been put into a lot of their statues now these happen to be pretty big ones from a larger statue um they're made of bronze and obsidian something that's kind of like glass um but can this would this would give a different look to a statue than just the blank-eyed stare if you had something like this staring back at you particularly if the statue were also painted so just when you look at statues from antiquity keep in mind that what they look like now may not be what they look like then another type of roman art is the fresco now all three of these are from pompeii nam this is not the only source of roman frescoes that we have but it is one of the best and the reason is is that a volcano essentially dropped many many tons of ash onto the city and it preserved it literally uh for thousands of years um so we have some different kinds here and i'll be honest i i went looking for the the pg or sort of pg-13 rated in the case of the guy being hacked up as a gladiator but there are a lot of there were a lot of brothels in pompei i'll leave it at that um but there's also fast food um restaurants that have frescoes you've got garden frescoes but the frescoes can tell us a good bit about how people dressed um they're not they're not photo realistic but neither are they unrealistic and what i mean is they're not abstract you can see what what's going on here the woman at the top she's got some kind of a stylist it looks like she's been writing something the one over here on the side these are the gladiators which you can't see their faces but again it's stylized but it's not what i would call abstract i mean it's very clear what's going on that these are people they seem to be fighting um this is a sacrifice to one of the gods um so you can see what an altar would have looked like you can see what was being sacrificed you can see what people wore to this kind of thing so it does serve as a very interesting artifact the colors are still pretty vibrant considering how old these are and it does give us a good look at roman art at least from this one particular place and again a fresco is plaster paint is applied while it's still wet and as i mentioned before once it dries as long as the wall survives in a lot of cases the fresco will automatically survive and that's in a lot of ways what you see in rome the walls were protected therefore the frescoes were protected therefore we we have a time capsule here in a lot of ways to what roman society's art would have looked like now a lot of the the structures in rome are going to be highly decorated and so these are reliefs from the column of trajan um and it basically celebrates his life celebrates his accomplishments um i went with one here that was just a little bit clearer than um than some of the others um but notice how well detailed the reliefs are again um somewhat stylized but you know the people who are older look older the people you're some younger people the children don't look like miniature adults they look like children that'll become relevant when we start talking about the middle ages um but it's it's a very detailed and and very uh well put together relief um i would say that some a lot of this is it's kind of a combination of high and low relief on this one um i wouldn't really try to classify it because some of it's a little more out from the the background than others um but here you again you can see that the amount of detail that was put um in roman sculpture a little bit static but for example this woman here looks like she's in the process of moving um that doesn't really look like a resting posture completely the children in particular are a little dynamic they look like they're moving around um the way their legs are placed um it seems that this isn't just a you know we're making a bunch of statues standing there it's meant to be people they're meant to look like they're living and a lot of roman sculpture they added the eyes they did the paint um the intent was to make it look like they were living one of the reasons that there was so much art in rome is because there were people that that took their money and their time and their power and tried to make sure that there would be art in rome and some of the patrons of the arts in rome were women now first of all olivia the wife of augustus was a well-known patron of the arts people talked about her in her own time they talked about her after that and this is actually a fresco that was in her house so again now this one didn't have the benefit of the volcano dropping on it but we can still see the amount of detail the vibrance of the vibrancy of the colors because it is a fresco it has allowed it to survive in in very good shape you know way past what what you might have expected um you also had plancia magna who was actually a wealthy city a wealthy citizen of a city in turkey who was a patroness of architecture and priestess of artemis um and then you had saint helena who was constant them for constantine's mother and she was a patroness of christianity and she actually went through the middle east and identified a lot of the christian sites for the first time she then would build churches on them so we get a lot of architecture as well as the preservation of a lot of sites on thanks to her so from rome we move now to the middle ages which begin essentially with the fall of rome the medieval period is essentially the european world between the fall of rome and the renaissance now the end date to this is a little bit fuzzy because there's some question is should the middle ages go straight up to the renaissance should they keep going while the renaissance is happening in italy so just kind of you know take that one as is maybe um but it's called the middle ages by the renaissance to denote that there was a dark period between the light of the classical world and the light of the renaissance in other words essentially it's marketing the renaissance is great it's wonderful it's light filled it's a rebirth so for it to be a rebirth there had to have been something bad that followed something good and so we we may be reading too much into the darkness that the renaissance has given us um as an idea of the middle ages so the middle ages are made up of the early middle ages the high middle ages and the late middle ages and i borrowed these um next couple of slides um from another class just to kind of give you an idea when we talk about the early middle ages what do we mean um do we talk about the the high middle ages the late middle ages um but the the fall of rome essentially starts the middle ages this is if anything was the dark ages this was the dark ages the short version is people moved away from the cities and europe reorganized itself the high middle ages is the 10th to 13th century you see a reurbanization and the development of the universities and then the late middle ages is the 13th century to the 16th century this is where you get the black death which to me would be reasonably dark you get a lot of warfare you get protestant reformation so you've got other stuff happening and this is what's going to overlap with the renaissance one thing that you'll notice in the middle ages when you look at the art is that there's a lot of religious artwork and that the religion that is being celebrated in that artwork is nearly always christian christianity is the last remnant of the roman empire because at the end of the roman empire christianity was the official religion of rome and by that point even within the roman empire there was a move to get rid of paganism and so sometimes voluntarily and sometimes less voluntarily during the middle ages during the roman empire essentially europe becomes christian and so that christianity is often the only thing that unifies the former romans and the germanic barbarians that had come into europe and made up the vast majority of the people who are now in europe um and so you're going to have this back and forth between the latin the roman versus the german um or the germanic and so christianity does offer um something that is they have in common something that is um ties them together um in addition to this you are going to have a lot of um of the money is going to be in the church and so since the church has the money the church is who is ordering the artwork and so here we see a religious work this is an altarpiece and a couple of things to point out here first of all again religious very very ornate very very expensive looking and this is the hallmark of a lot of the religious artwork of the middle ages notice too that the faces are um and i don't mean this as a dig but they are far more cartoonish than what we saw in rome so this is far less about realism and far more about a particular style and so in middle ages art you get a far more germanic sensibility a far more stylized and again kind of cartoony look to the the images far less of the the roman and the greek realism or idealized realism the celebration of a realistic form you don't really see that very much in middle ages art that's something you'll see far more in the renaissance another thing that you'll see a lot of actually several things you'll see a lot of in middle ages art one children be it jesus is in this case or in any child it essentially looks like a shrunken adult so if you see a small adult on a woman's lap that is intended to be a child even though that does not have childlike features this is something that you'll see a lot of again in middle ages art you also get what i tend to refer to at with all due respect um to catholicism and in catholicism catholicism art um the dinner plate halo effect um you will get later in the middle ages you will get into the renaissance still will have halos but they'll be far less of a plate behind the person's head and far less distracting from what you're looking at another thing that you'll see some of in middle ages art um is the idea of love um in in the middle ages um you have love which is kind of what you felt for people the knights and the ladies it wasn't necessarily a big part of marriage and so just because you see two lovers together or two people together thinking well of one another um it doesn't necessarily mean that they were married but you do get a lot of romantic um with a small r art um and the literature you'll get a romance um which is not what we think of it's just it's a long story um sometimes there would be what we think of as traditional love um and the way in romance sometimes not um and this is just one of the the other pieces i have seen um from the middle ages because the idea of chivalry was that these people who were not married to one another would think well with one another with and not really think about consummating this this union um unless there she's hoisting him up to her balcony in order that they may you know calmly discuss the latest work of literature this does seem to to go kind of against the the idea of chivalry um and this completely um no idea of consummating they just are going to think well of one another maybe hold hands maybe get a kiss on the hand or open a door this seems to be a bit more of a of a carnal relationship that is being shown through this particular piece of artwork again you can see the more sort of cartoonish look to the art there's not a real attention paid to scale in middle ages artwork there's not real anything about proportion that it's not something that they terribly are concerned with so what we were just looking at came from a book you could tell it by the the script you could kind of see in the background and eliminated manuscripts or something that you see a lot of in middle ages now unfortunately or fortunately in the 19th century there was a a trend to collect pieces of manuscripts unfortunately that was the fortunate part that they saved them the unfortunate part is that very often they would chop them up into pieces discard the book and keep the illumination keep the illustration so there's entire people who they collected initials out of illuminated manuscripts so we've got letters individual letters from illuminated manuscripts in some cases we just got the pictures and fortunately we still have some of the entire books the decorated manuscript often glowed because of the gold and the silver leaf that were put into the actual artwork and keep in mind that when you look at pages like this one here everything had to be copied and decorated by hand some of them were christian and theme this one's a little bit more secular woman looking into the mirror and depending on the particular part of europe that you were in they were either viewed as either more or less than frescoes as far as the kind of hierarchy of artwork at first they were created only by monks and nuns but eventually a commercial profession was created both because of demand and because people realized that there was money to be made in doing this you can see here the um the amount of books that that were made keep in mind all hand written hand lettered hand illustrated um and this is an example on here of the book of kells and here of the black book of hours or the book of black hours and it's just because the pages instead of on kind of a vellum colored you've got a black color first and then they painted on top of that it gives a really striking image but again the detail of the illuminations you can see some of the writing here um i mean keep in mind again hand done this this is amazing that someone could take this kind of time um to put this together and both of these are religious books um again this is the more common kind of illuminations that you will find as in religious books although yes you do find it in secular books as well um here we have saint anne teaching the virgin to read again the illumination now this one honestly it's still wonderful but it looks a little more hand done because the lines aren't completely straight notice here it kind of foes inward then those back outward down here the same thing um so the fact that that isn't perfect to me shows off the the hand made quality a little bit more um notice here though with the virgin mary as a young girl she looks the facial features don't really look like a child um it's not as noticeable in the young children as it is in the babies um but but there really is an idea that this is instead of it being a you know however old you are when you learn to read four five six seven um this this looks like a an adult that was shrunk um rather than a um a small child and so that that is something you do see a lot of in medieval artwork in the middle ages you see a lot of embroidery um as well as tapestries or i should rather say they did a lot of embroidery and made a lot of tapestries uh we do not always have examples of as much as they they made um so this is not something that necessarily survives intact to current day so medieval embroidery was usually a function of noble women and nuns at least until again money was to be made and then you would see people doing this as a commercial exercise this image here is from the bayou tapestry which we've already talked about in our tapestry section in our applied art section but be aware again this is embroidered this is not a woven tapestry so technically a tapestry should be woven um but this is one of the best preserved and longest um examples of embroidery in existence so if it wants to call itself a tapestry i am perfectly fine with that um i highly suggest you take a look at the bayou tapestries website or the museum of the bayou tapestries website because it will let you look at the whole thing unfortunately it is so long i i've come up with ideas to try to show it to you um in this particular format it's just it's not working so go to the website take a look um now usually they would have someone would draw it for them then they would they would actually put it on they would probably draw it onto the cloth and then they would come back later and embroider it but look at the stitches and how small they are so if anyone you know you look at this and you think well it's not very detailed yeah if it's embroidery it's plenty detailed um because this is is it sincerely impressive amount of embroidery and sincerely impressive quality of embroidery and here we have another scene from the value tapestry but again go look at the whole thing it's really amazing and a little bit more this is another example of embroidery this is called the scion cope a cope is a ceremonial cloak that is worn in church services and this particular one is an example of something called opus anglicanum which means english work and this was these were very very very expensive garments to make um so basically it's linen but the the entirety of the linen has been embroidered um now what made these things expensive is the fact that they used real silver and real gold thread in them now in this particular example all of the red is red silk all of the green is green silk then in the figures and in the geometric designs is where you actually get the gold and the silver thread and what they would actually do to get this gold and silver thread is they would actually take very very very very thin pieces of silver thin strips of silver and wrapped them around silk thread for one of a better term um and then basically they would sometimes gild that so you have silver under the gold and then sometimes they would use plain silver plain yeah plain silver thread for other details and so it's a little bit rare to see both techniques on the same cope and in this case you have both there's a lot of gilded thread as well as then some plain silver in the middle particularly with christ in the middle um but again this is an absolutely amazing example of a cope um end of embroidery so of the applied arts can be absolutely magnificent in the middle ages so let's take a quick peek at architecture we already did gothic architecture we already talked about the different arches so i'm not going to belabor it again but i can't really do a medieval um art history lecture without at least reminding you of some of the the structures that we already looked at so here we have notre dame de paris before the fire this is again an example of both romanesque architecture in the the lower level so that's why some of the arches are not pointed um the walls are thicker and then they they have um the pointed arches as it continued onward the gothic style was created and so they they end up part of it's built in one style and part of it is built in another um and remember again um the rounded archer romanesque the pointed arch or gothic lens sets um allow you to go higher and wider and then the flying buttress is what gives you the thin walls here we have on the ends i already showed you these but these are the flying buttresses coming out so this is the flying part of the buttress and then this is the buttress pier or the buttress itself the buttresses could be up against the wall if they wanted to be but then you wouldn't be able to have those really big windows so easily and here again we have the ribbed vault of notre dame before the fire so i think that is where we will leave off this time in our second of three lectures on art history next time we'll begin with the renaissance and move our way into modern art so if you have any questions as always please let me know but otherwise i hope until i virtually see you again um you have a wonderful rest of your week a wonderful weekend and thank you for joining me this time and i look forward to getting to share more about art history with you next time thank you and have a wonderful rest of your day