Preface

Onians, John

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Preface

John Onians

Classical Art and the Cultures of Greece and Rome

~There is no recent extended single-author study of Classical art in the English language. Some will feel that this is a good thing. For one person to write intelligently and responsibly in one book about a topic that potentially embraces hundreds of thousands of artefacts produced during a thousand years over an area of several million square miles is not...

Author

John Onians

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00031.003

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15990

Preface

There is no recent extended single-author study of Classical art in the English language. Some will feel that this is a good thing. For one person to write intelligently and responsibly in one book about a topic that potentially embraces hundreds of thousands of artefacts produced during a thousand years over an area of several million square miles is not easy, and the welcome growth in the awareness of the variety, complexity and ambiguity of Greek and Roman art in recent years has only increased the risk that any study of it might simply not be worthy of its subject. Describing, let alone explaining, the art and ideas on which, for better or worse, much of later European art has been founded could well be thought an impossible enterprise.

Against this depressing conclusion, though, stands the very stubbornness and coherence of that later influence. The power of Greek art over Rome, and then of Greek and Roman art over later generations, resided less in the multiplicity or complexity of that art than in its embodiment of a limited number of traits, traits such as the hardness, mathematical regularity, lifelikeness, uniformity, physical energy and emotional expressiveness of Greek art, or the memorability, monumentality, personality, material and formal richness, flexibility and simplicity of that of Rome. Emerging and fading away, sometimes more than once during a period of ten centuries, these and other traits – often sets of traits – shared by tens of thousands of objects, are the attributes that came to define a tradition now known as Classical. Each trait, or group of traits, developed in a particular place or area in particular circumstances. To analyse these traits and the circumstances in which they came to prominence is more difficult than to classify and survey the works in which they are embodied, but it is also potentially more valuable, since it may help us to understand not only Classical art, but aspects of the art and culture it later affected. Whatever the reasons why much of the later art of the European continent shares features with that of Greece and Rome, whether it is because its makers recognised the Greeks and Romans as exemplary, and imitated them, or simply because it developed in similar circumstances, a knowledge of how and why those features came first to be manifested is equally desirable. To understand the nature and the origins of the principal features of ancient Greek and Roman art is also to begin to understand both their survival and their re-appearance.

The goals of this book are thus limited. It does not deal with all of Greek and Roman art, but concentrates on what many would consider its most characteristic forms and the environments in which these developed, especially Athens, the Hellenistic cities, such as Alexandria and Pergamum, and Rome. Among its principal themes are: the distinctiveness of early Greek art, and the way it, and early Greek society and culture generally, were formed by a unique ecology; the independence of lifestyle of Alexander’s artist contemporaries, their and their successors’ personal relationships with both patrons and models, and the new psychological engagement elicited in the viewer by works created out of such relationships; the distinctively Roman skills of memory that made possible their conquests, that gave stability to their empire and that underlay the reduction and compression so frequently found in their art and architecture; the elasticity of the imagination that was generated in the Romans by their unprecedented domination of the world’s resources, and the flexibility and abstraction of sculpted, painted and built form that such a mental capacity allowed and encouraged them to produce; and, finally, the dependence of both the triumph of the Christian religion and the effectiveness of its art on a conjunction of new needs with the maturing of habits of mind developed over the preceding period. As can be seen from this summary, not only are the properties of Classical art that this book addresses limited in number, so too are the explanations offered here for their appearance. Out of the multiplicity of factors that might be invoked to explain the genesis of any individual work there is here a concentration above all on the few whose underlying importance appears so profound as to determine the overriding characteristics not just of large groups of art objects, but of whole categories of what is often called culture.

This term, culture, is, however, here used more broadly than usual as a way of suggesting a more open approach to the definition and explanation of the properties discussed. Its use in the volume’s title and in its chapter headings is designed to remind us that what we frequently celebrate as a high ‘cultural’ achievement is often best understood, not just as it might be by an anthropologist, as part of a community’s complex of ways of doing and thinking, but as it might be by a biologist, as the natural product of the nurturing influence of a limited set of environmental factors on a living organism capable of reproduction and adaptation. Culture, from colere, ‘to cultivate’, ‘tend’, here draws attention less to the high status of particular human behaviours and more to the process by which they come to be established. Having said that, in each chapter the word has a different emphasis. In the first and last chapters, on the Greek Workshop and the Christian Church, its use draws attention to the extent to which two very different physical and psychological environments each fostered a distinctive way of thinking and of making art. In the Conflict and Competition chapters what is at stake is the way particular social conditions, themselves largely determined by the environment, as was described in the first chapter, produced such concentrations of energies and interests that many different social groups, from craftsmen to philosophers, tended to create, over time, sequences of products that could readily be seen as moving in a limited number of directions. In the Character chapter the focus shifts, throwing into relief new tensions. While Alexander’s actions in enlarging the Greek world encouraged people to attribute a new importance to the active role of the individual, whether in history or in art, the experience of that enlargement also increased in many the awareness of their passiveness, and ultimately of their vulnerability. In the Memory and Imagination chapters the focus is on the way two distinctively Roman mental aptitudes were each so strengthened by the intensification of the conditions in which they thrived, that they came in turn to nurture new and specific behaviours, behaviours which were important for both the making of art and the response to it. Throughout there is the implication that in the field of culture, almost as in that of agriculture, different life-forms at different stages of their development in different environments are associated with different yields. The real, if obscure, process this last analogy implies is, in a sense, the underlying theme of the whole book.

The paradox is only that this process seems from the start in the Greek workshop to partake less of the organic and more of the mechanical, with men and women becoming the product of an ever more controlling social and educational formation and with visual art the mirror of the transformations of body and mind in which this resulted. The resolution of this paradox lies in the recognition that this process is itself a natural one. It was above all because the people who adapted to the stony landscape of Greece relied so much on the use of hard metallic tools for its exploitation that they came to think of themselves in ways that no one had done before. It was thus because the Greeks came to imagine themselves as made of stone and metal that they represented themselves in life-size statues of marble and bronze. More importantly, it was because they thought of themselves in this way that they were so successful when confronting other peoples who did not. Greek art, then, is a powerful testimony both to a core Greek experience and to the disturbing secret of their success.

Those Europeans who for two and a half thousand years imitated the Greeks in their rigorous education and in their mineral self-representation came to share both that secret and its benefits, regardless of the costs. Today those same benefits are now available to people anywhere in the world, with similar, albeit lower, costs. To some of these benefits and costs of so-called western civilisation this book might eventually serve as a brief accountant’s guide. Such is the importance claimed here for an understanding of Classical art and the cultures of Greece and Rome.

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