I love this illustration of Eurystheus being frightened by creatures from Hades. It was drawn over 3,000 years ago by a Greek artist from a workshop in Caere.
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| When have you seen a better illustration of "Yikes!" ? |
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| The flesh tones are as modern as Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon or Jenny Saville |
The subsequent 3,000 years brought all the advantages this artist never had: vastly improved art tools, digital or analog, delivered to his door; his global choice of art teachers accessible 24/7 through the internet; artificial light to expand his work day, air conditioning and a soft chair to enable him to work in comfort; a vast library of high resolution images to help him find inspiration in 3,000 years of precedents; regular meals to keep his belly full; glasses for when his eyes weakened and health care for when his hand began to shake.
Yet, look at illustrations in today's publications and tell me what those 3,000 years of progress have added to the quality of our pictures.
17 comments:
Fascinating. The question is why -- laziness, ego, self-deception? No doubt many artists today would say, "My stuff is great; it's the critic who doesn't get it." Or maybe the illustrator says he's on-board with the latest hot trend, or is delivering the correct cultural or political message, and that's what counts. Or maybe she says she's doing it well enough to please today's viewers., and maybe she is right about that. Or maybe the editors of the media in which the work appears are unsophisticated or are motivated by objectives other than artistic excellence.
Niggle - Is it Cerberus (singular) rather than creatures ?
Bill
Bill-- A worthy point. Yes, this illustrates the time when Cerberus (the three headed dog of hell) is unleashed by Herakles on Eurystheus, but here Cereberus seems to have arrived with 9 additional serpents of hell. Visually, I like the suggestion of Robin Osborne (professor of ancient history at Oxford) that the wall of heads "replicate the impression of many separate jaws received by anyone faced by a hostile dog."
This drawing is on a piece of pottery, with other drawing circling around.
Anonymous ("Fascinating. The question is why.") -- Agreed, that is the question. Your list contains lots of good contenders (although, of course, the ancient Greeks were no strangers to "ego."). The ancient Greeks did not have what we call "fine art" or "art for art's sake" the way we do, so they didn't have illustrators aspiring to that, and as far as I know they didn't have what we call "conceptual art." In fact, they had just one word (techné) which combined art, craft and skill. Perhaps that kept the ancients from becoming too self-absorbed.
Another possibility is that today's artists have to earn income to buy food, while the ancients could just catch and slaughter a goat.
Excellence has fallen off across the board. The American empire is in decline and people are struggling to make ends meet while their shameless "leaders," so called, loot the country in a hurry for the last scraps before it's all gone. I know an educated professional doing real, high-end work (not teaching diversity seminars for the HR department) who can't afford more than a tiny, cramped apartment for his family of three. Boomers may not realize it because most of them did well for themselves, but it's bad out there. The outlook of young people is bleak, and with good reason. They see the open-air drug markets, the dirty, crime-ridden cities, the crumbling infrastructure, the crippling debt, the ever-rising food prices, the incalculable waste and fraud, and they also see their government sending billions of dollars overseas and stirring up shit that will inevitably slingshot back onto our shores in the future. These conditions are not conducive to a Renaissance in the arts. Maybe things are stirring in some other corner of the globe, although it seems like nobody is unaffected by the present turmoil.
The best of Ancient Greek decorative amphora art is so elegant and advanced in pattern design I find it hard to believe its age. Stunning in its freshness, to the point of feeling as modern as ancient. Where has the progress been? To think it took thousands of years to rediscover what they had known, only to have it go into eclipse again in short order. Surely so much more insight has been lost and is yet to be rediscovered, if we collectively could ever care enough again.
Kev, are you familiar with the writings of David Ramsay Hay (1798-1866)? He is probably best known as an interior decorator for Queen Victoria, but for most of his adult life he was deeply interested in re-discovering what he believed were the lost, mathematically derived (and thus objectively true) "laws of beauty" by which Greek art attained its unmatched excellence. He published several books expounding the results of these investigations. They are filled with tables of harmonic ratios and illustrations of those ratios applied to, variously, architecture, decoration, the ideal human figure, the human head, and color. Some of those illustrations (as of the figure) are filled with a dizzying array of criss-crossing guidelines that caused some contemporaries to dismiss his efforts as impractical for artists. Still, I think his work is admirable, and it's unfortunate that no one has picked up the torch.
David, Cerberus is canonically covered in snakes, a fact rarely pointed out. Ancient Greeks did overdo many of their mythical creatures.
I think a good chunk of the good design is in how the image is cropped, with the hand right in the middle.
again forgot to login, that's me
xopxe-- That's a new one on me. I didn't realize Cereberus was accompanied by snakes. I grew up on the Gustave Doré version. But can we get a tip of the hat for the way this Greek artist chose to stylize those polka dotted snakes?
The drawing is cropped as best I could, in view of the fact that it's on a round surface. If we kept turning it, we'd see Herakles turning Cereberus loose. But the artist clearly intended that any particular perspective would show an independent design.
I've been through Hay, but briefly. Jay Hambidge's Dynamic Symmetry more extensively. And other mad diagrammers besides; who think they've discovered the secrets of all creation via protractor and ruler.
I take the position of George Inness, as I understand it. Namely that Geometry alone, while perfect, is stultifying, stiff and inhuman. And pure expression, while wild and fun, is also slovenly, chaotic and unbeautiful. But in the tension between geometry and expression, we skim the cream of both worlds.
I think the 'snake-parts' - on Medusa, the Chimera, and here - are attributes manifesting from (rather than just combined in as 'parts') the being. So the characteristics that make up the serpent would be present in and expressed in these (but not as a visual or ther allegory any more than snakes are).
(Semi-speculative disclaimer applies)
Bill
Bill, I think the snakes (and dogs and birds and etc) were pretty literal for Greeks. Had to check my memory of Cerberus genealogy being composed of half-snakes of sorts by visiting wikipedia, and found this:
Plato (c. 425 – 348 BC) refers to Cerberus' composite nature, citing Cerberus, along with Scylla and the Chimera, as an example from "ancient fables" of a creature composed of many animal forms "grown together in one"
Yes, literal in that they weren't metaphors and were actually part of the creature, but as an emodiment of (part of) the nature of that animal, in the way centaurs emodied wildness in their human part rising up out of the animal lower. Well, what I was trying to get at, anyway.
Bill
Against this, though, as early as at least the third or fourth century BC there's the 'rationalising' principle already there in Palaephatus;
"They say that the Centaurs were beats that had the overall form of a horse except for the head, which was that of a man's. Now, in case anyone believes such a beast existed, it is an impossibility. The natures of horse and man are inharmonious, and it is impossible for a horse's food to pass through a human mouth and throat. Besides, if there had been such a form then, it would also exist now."
And then goes on to give a hypothetical story about their real origin as mounted riders with an invented etymology for centaur to back it up.
"They would burn and pillage and then run off into the mountains...those looking at them from afar could only see the backs of the horses, not their heads, and the upper part of the men, not their legs...From this image was fashioned the unbelievable myth, that a horse-man was born from the cloud on the mountain".
Bill
( '....Centaurs were beats' < beasts)
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