The Art of Archaic Greece

This course will familiarize students with the painted pottery, sculpture, and metalwork of Archaic Greece from the first millennium to the early fifth century B.C.E. When the Mycenaean culture collapsed around 1200 B.C., this ushered in a period of time historians call the Dark Ages, in which virtually everything that had distinguished the Mycenaeans was forgotten: building techniques, metallurgy, writing systems, and refined artworks of ivory and gold. This course opens with those Dark Ages and the Submycenaean Period, which saw centuries pass with virtually no trace of the artistic ideas which appeared for earlier peoples. This utter dearth of spirit expressed as visual idea perhaps reflects the great destructions, migrations, material poverty, somewhat self-conscious ignorance, and extreme insecurity which was the experience for many. Surviving pottery from this time gives the impression that those who lived in Submycenaean Greece had utterly forgot all of the technical and conceptual refinements of Minoan and Mycenaean civilization. The narrative changes with the advent of Geometric and Orientalizing styles of art, and soon after the first Greek sculptures in stone. The Archaic "kouros" and "kore," two forms of human representation with which students will become familiar, are our last glimpses into the early phases of a distinctively Greek approach to artwork which would become fundamental to so many aspects of representation in the western European tradition. However, this period in Greek art history was ended by conflict with the Persian Empire and the sweeping destruction that war brings of temples and the old style of sculpture. Nevertheless between 1200 and 480 B.C.E. the foundations were laid for a tradition of Greek artwork which would quickly outpace all prior ancient civilizations’ modes of representation, naturalism, and the human psyche.