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at long last, an entry about (ancient) art
Aug. 9th, 2006 06:18 pmThe sense of uneven, back and forth, often accidental development and devolution in art has been reinforced in me by a couple of recent news stories and a touring exhibition that just opened in Atlanta (at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, for those of you who care about such things).
On the developmental front, a couple of website stories about the so-called Bradshaw paintings in Australia left me gasping in amazement. Nobody pays much attention to these paintings because they were apparently done by some now-extinct group who inhabited the continent before the Aborigines arrived. It would require too much revisionist history to incorporate them into the narrative properly.
The paintings, one of which had been overlaid (so we’re told) by a 17,000-year-old wasps’ nest so we know they weren’t faked a few years ago, are astonishingly fluid figural renditions of people and animals. The people seem to be wearing a few characteristic articles of highly decorative clothing. This is what human civilization could accomplish in a resource-rich climate before the seas rose, rainfall patterns changed, and basically all hell broke loose.
And of course we know the other stories of archaic art already: the tale of the superbly rendered paintings in the European caves, for example. And we know the stories of the rise of art in the Fertile Crescent and the Nile Valley.
Then we pick up the story with the Etruscans, whose earliest known paintings have just been discovered courtesy of the arrest of some very resourceful tomb robbers. To our naïve eyes, fixed in what the phenomenologists call the “natural attitude,” these sketchily rendered birds and lions don’t look dignified enough for a royal tomb. Representational skills that were commonplace in Europe ten thousand years previously have been discarded for some reason. But whatever happened during the various intervening migrations and climate changes, it wasn’t necessarily a simple devolution. Cultures seem to move back and forth between representation and abstraction.
Which brings me to “In Stabiano,” the touring exhibition of Roman wall painting from the luxury villas of Stabiae, wiped out in the eruption of Vesuvius. Stabiae was the high-end suburb of the resort towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. In antiquity, just as now, the movers and shakers would blow in from Rome in the hot summer months, spend a couple of weeks at a time entertaining clients at the seaside villas, and decamp again for the capital.
It was then as it is now, too, in that these movers and shakers employed artists to paint murals on every available surface, and the murals were meant to be decorative. Dining rooms carried mythological painting programs that echoed the composition of now-lost serious paintings, but the choice of topic and arrangement was intended to be a spur to witty dinner conversation. This was not the world of Socrates and Plato’s Symposium; the token intellectual might be invited, at most, as the low-end guest known by the technical term of “parasite,” among the dinner guests conducting serious business.
It was even possible to rent dinnerware for use at these dinner parties in villas that were shut up and disused for most of the year.
So, as has been pointed out often, we know the heritage of Roman painting only through copyists and content creators working on commission as incidental decorators for status-hungry aristocrats, who also collected the panel paintings that haven’t survived. These painters were not like the fresco artists of the Italian Renaissance, inventing a new world while meeting patrons’ commissions. They were more like the artists I know today who eke out a living by painting loosely approximate copies of Baroque or Renaissance themes on the ceilings of McMansions. Some of these latter-day artists insist on producing serious art, in spite of having no control over the subject matter and creating for a public consisting entirely of admiring dinner guests, on a surface likely to be painted over or demolished within a few years.
That sort of intentionally transitory thing is what we have left of classical painting, and it’s still dazzling enough. Let us hope for sufficient funding for the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation to excavate more of the never-investigated villas and establish an archaeological park in which many of the wall paintings would be left on site. Others, like the ones now touring, will be removed for museological conservation.
By the way, we have the remnants of astonishingly ambitious painting programs from the farthest corners of the Roman empire, such as the Jewish synagogue at Dura-Europos in Syria. And we have a haunting little wall painting of water nymphs from a villa in Lullingstone, Kent (a little ways up the lane from the Shoreham precincts that Samuel Palmer found paradisal eighteen hundred years later). One wonders if, then as now, any of those itinerant mural painters of the Empire dreamed of hightailing it down the excellent road network, to have a go at making it in the capital of their world.
On the developmental front, a couple of website stories about the so-called Bradshaw paintings in Australia left me gasping in amazement. Nobody pays much attention to these paintings because they were apparently done by some now-extinct group who inhabited the continent before the Aborigines arrived. It would require too much revisionist history to incorporate them into the narrative properly.
The paintings, one of which had been overlaid (so we’re told) by a 17,000-year-old wasps’ nest so we know they weren’t faked a few years ago, are astonishingly fluid figural renditions of people and animals. The people seem to be wearing a few characteristic articles of highly decorative clothing. This is what human civilization could accomplish in a resource-rich climate before the seas rose, rainfall patterns changed, and basically all hell broke loose.
And of course we know the other stories of archaic art already: the tale of the superbly rendered paintings in the European caves, for example. And we know the stories of the rise of art in the Fertile Crescent and the Nile Valley.
Then we pick up the story with the Etruscans, whose earliest known paintings have just been discovered courtesy of the arrest of some very resourceful tomb robbers. To our naïve eyes, fixed in what the phenomenologists call the “natural attitude,” these sketchily rendered birds and lions don’t look dignified enough for a royal tomb. Representational skills that were commonplace in Europe ten thousand years previously have been discarded for some reason. But whatever happened during the various intervening migrations and climate changes, it wasn’t necessarily a simple devolution. Cultures seem to move back and forth between representation and abstraction.
Which brings me to “In Stabiano,” the touring exhibition of Roman wall painting from the luxury villas of Stabiae, wiped out in the eruption of Vesuvius. Stabiae was the high-end suburb of the resort towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. In antiquity, just as now, the movers and shakers would blow in from Rome in the hot summer months, spend a couple of weeks at a time entertaining clients at the seaside villas, and decamp again for the capital.
It was then as it is now, too, in that these movers and shakers employed artists to paint murals on every available surface, and the murals were meant to be decorative. Dining rooms carried mythological painting programs that echoed the composition of now-lost serious paintings, but the choice of topic and arrangement was intended to be a spur to witty dinner conversation. This was not the world of Socrates and Plato’s Symposium; the token intellectual might be invited, at most, as the low-end guest known by the technical term of “parasite,” among the dinner guests conducting serious business.
It was even possible to rent dinnerware for use at these dinner parties in villas that were shut up and disused for most of the year.
So, as has been pointed out often, we know the heritage of Roman painting only through copyists and content creators working on commission as incidental decorators for status-hungry aristocrats, who also collected the panel paintings that haven’t survived. These painters were not like the fresco artists of the Italian Renaissance, inventing a new world while meeting patrons’ commissions. They were more like the artists I know today who eke out a living by painting loosely approximate copies of Baroque or Renaissance themes on the ceilings of McMansions. Some of these latter-day artists insist on producing serious art, in spite of having no control over the subject matter and creating for a public consisting entirely of admiring dinner guests, on a surface likely to be painted over or demolished within a few years.
That sort of intentionally transitory thing is what we have left of classical painting, and it’s still dazzling enough. Let us hope for sufficient funding for the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation to excavate more of the never-investigated villas and establish an archaeological park in which many of the wall paintings would be left on site. Others, like the ones now touring, will be removed for museological conservation.
By the way, we have the remnants of astonishingly ambitious painting programs from the farthest corners of the Roman empire, such as the Jewish synagogue at Dura-Europos in Syria. And we have a haunting little wall painting of water nymphs from a villa in Lullingstone, Kent (a little ways up the lane from the Shoreham precincts that Samuel Palmer found paradisal eighteen hundred years later). One wonders if, then as now, any of those itinerant mural painters of the Empire dreamed of hightailing it down the excellent road network, to have a go at making it in the capital of their world.
