7-12: The Parthenon, a Doric temple, is the architectural high point of Golden Age Athens.
The Ionic order (refer to Figure 7-11) is more elaborate than the Doric. The main difference is that the columns are elongated, the capital (top of the column) is capped by a scroll, and the entablature features a continuous frieze or sculpted band. There are no metopes or triglyphs as in the Doric order.
The most elaborate order is the Corinthian (refer to Figure 7-11), which has slender columns capped by overlapping acanthus leaves.
Greece without Borders: Hellenism
Alexander the Great (356 BC–323 BC) was Macedonian, but he learned to think and feel like a Greek from the greatest Greek of the era, Aristotle. After the death of his father in 336 BC, Alexander became king. In the next eight years, he overran and Hellenized (made Greek-like) most of the known world, planting Greek libraries and Greek city-states in every vanquished kingdom. But when Alexander conquered, he didn’t try to shut down the native culture; instead, he fused it with Greek models. He himself married, among several other women, a princess from Bactria (a country near modern-day Afghanistan) and ordered his officers to take Persian wives to unify the diverse cultures.
After his early death, Alexander’s generals divided his empire three ways:
Seleucus I Nicator ruled Persia, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia.
Ptolemy I Soter governed Egypt.
Antigonus I Monophthalmus controlled Macedonia and Greece.
All these regions eventually fell to the new power rising on the Italian peninsula, the Romans. The last holdout was Egypt, which collapsed in 31 BC when Queen Cleopatra took her own life after Augustus Caesar defeated her and Marc Antony in the Battle of Actium. The Hellenistic period died with a snake bite — Cleopatra’s suicide MO.
Sculpting passion and struggle
The greatest achievements of Hellenistic culture were in sculpture. Hellenistic sculptors replaced the serene beauty of classical sculpture with powerful emotionalism and sometimes brutal realism. The Nike of Samothrace (on the left in Figure 7-13), is a Hellenistic victory statue often attributed to Pythokritos, the great sculptor of the Greek island of Rhodes (second century BC). Nike looks like she’s just landed with her Air Jordans on the prow of a ship, the wind still gusting in her wings and gown. You can feel victory in the folds of her garment and uplifted wings. Also, the sculptor has learned to create art that charges the atmosphere around it. Instead of being self-contained, the statue radiates energy beyond itself into the surrounding space.
Gloria Wilder(left) Takashi Images / Adobe Stock (right)
FIGURE 7-13: Nike of Samothrace and Laocoön and His Sons radiate the energy and realism of Hellenistic sculptures.
Hellenistic sculptors also probed the depths of human suffering for the first time in the history of art. The agony of death was never before so vividly portrayed as it is in these two works:
The Dying Trumpeter, carved in the third century BC in Pergamon (in modern-day Turkey), is a moving depiction of an enemy Celt warrior wounded in a battle with the Greeks who colonized Asia Minor. The statue is carved in a way that enables the viewer to feel the death pains that the man faces with quiet dignity.
Laocoön and His Sons (on the right in Figure 7-13) is a Hellenistic sculpture from Rhodes, which may have been carved by three sculptors — Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydoros — all highly skilled copyists. Laocoön and His Sons captures the mythical life-and-death struggle between a father, his boys, and two vicious sea serpents. Laocoön was punished by the goddess Athena for trying to expose the Trojan Horse as a fraud to the Trojans, who viewed it as a gift and sign that the Greeks had quit their siege of Troy. This first-century BC statue was discovered in 1506 in the ruins of the Emperor Nero’s famed “Golden House” in Rome. Actually the Trojan Horse concealed a squad of Greek kings waiting to pounce on the Trojans when they dragged the giant wooden horse into their unsuspecting city.
Honoring the classical in a new world
Part of the intense expressiveness you see in The Dying Trumpeter and Laocoön and His Sons was no doubt due to the assimilation of so many foreign cultures, and part of it to a new worldview. The self-confidence of classical Greece had proved to be self-delusion. Life was gritty and unpredictable, not serene, changeless, and otherworldly.
But the serene beauty of Greek classicism didn’t fade away completely. The Venus de Milo (or Venus of Melos), shown in Figure 7-14, is a throwback to fourth-century Athens, though it was carved between 150 and 125 BC. With her unflappable calm, Venus could have been sculpted by Praxiteles. The fact that her clothes seem to be slipping off enhances the goddess’s potent sexuality. Yet her musing gaze takes the viewer beyond her sensuality to a place of timeless beauty and mystery.
Gloria Wilder
FIGURE 7-14: Venus de Milo is one of the most celebrated Hellenistic statues.
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