How Does the Art of Christianity Differ From That of Greece and Rome?

Introduction

Classical Antiquity (or Ancient Greece and Rome) is a flow of about 900 years, when ancient Greece and so ancient Rome (first as a Republic and so as an Empire) dominated the Mediterranean surface area, from well-nigh 500 B.C.E. – 400 C.East. We tend to lump ancient Greece and Rome together because the Romans adopted many aspects of Greek culture when they conquered the areas of Europe under Greek control (circa 145 – thirty B.C.Due east.).

Gods and Goddesses

For example, the Romans adopted the Greek pantheon of Gods and Godesses just changed their names—the Greek god of war was Ares, whereas the Roman god of war was Mars. The ancient Romans also copied ancient Greek art. Notwithstanding, the Romans frequently used marble to create copies of sculptures that the Greeks had originally made in bronze.

A Rational Approach

The ancient Greeks were the showtime Western culture that believed in finding rational answers to the great questions of earthly life. They causeless that there were consistent laws which governed the universe—how the stars move; the materials that compose the universe; mathematical laws that govern harmony and beauty, geometry and physics.

Both the Ancient Greeks and the Aboriginal Romans had enormous respect for human beings, and what they could accomplish with their minds and bodies. They were Humanists (a frame of listen which was re-built-in in the Renaissance). This was very different from the menstruation following Classical Antiquity—the Center Ages, when Christianity (with its sense of the body as sinful) came to dominate Western Europe.

When you imagine Aboriginal Greek or Roman sculpture, you might recall of a figure that is nude, athletic, young, idealized, and with perfect proportions—and this would be true of Ancient Greek art of the Classical period (5th century B.C.E.) also as much of Ancient Roman art.

Roman Copies of Aboriginal Greek Art

When we study ancient Greek art, and so often nosotros are really looking at ancient Roman art, or at least their copies of ancient Greek sculpture (or paintings and compages for that thing).

Basically, merely about every Roman wanted ancient Greek art. For the Romans, Greek culture symbolized a desirable way of life—of leisure, the arts, luxury and learning.

The Popularity of Ancient Greek Art for the Romans

Greek art became popular with Roman generals began conquering Greek cities, and returned triumphantly to Rome not with the usual booty of gold and silver coins, simply with works of art. This work so impressed the Roman aristocracy that studios were set upward to run across the growing demand for copies destined for the villas of wealthy Romans. The Doryphoros was one of the most sought afterward, and most copied Greek sculptures.

Bronze vs. Marble

For the well-nigh part, the Greeks created their free-standing sculpture in bronze, only considering statuary is valuable and can be melted downwards and reused, sculpture was often recast into weapons. This is why so few ancient Greek statuary originals survive, and why we often have to await at aboriginal Roman copies in marble (of varying quality) to try to understand what the Greeks achieved.

Why Sculptures Are Often Incomplete or Reconstructed

To brand matter worse, Roman marble sculptures were buried for centuries, and very oft we recover simply fragments of a sculpture that have to be reassembled. This is the reason you will ofttimes see that sculptures in museums include an arm or paw that are mod recreations, or that ancient sculptures are simply displayed incomplete.

TheDoryphoros (Spear-Bearer) in the Naples museumis a Roman copy of a lost Greek original.

The Canon

The idea of a canon, a rule for a standard of beauty developed for artists to follow, was not new to the ancient Greeks. The ancient Egyptians also developed a canon. However, it was the Greek catechism of beauty that has endured for centuries in the West. During the Renaissance, for case, Leonardo da Vinci investigated the ideal proportions of the human being body with his now famous drawing of the Vitruvian Man:

The ideal male nude has remained a staple of Western art and civilization to this day, see, for case, of the piece of work of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Polykleitos's idea of relating beauty to ratio was subsequently summarized past Galen, writing in the second century,

Beauty consists in the proportions, not of the elements, but of the parts, that is to say, of finger to finger, and of all the fingers to the palm and the wrist, and of these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the upper arm, and of all the other parts to each other.

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Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-sac-artappreciation/chapter/reading-ancient-greece-and-rome/

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