This article is a series of audio programs produced by "Captain Reading Paintings" "Ten Minutes to Read Western Art", and you are welcome to listen to it.
From the 12th century BC to the 8th century BC, the "Homeric Age" of ancient Greece is also known as the "Dark Age", and the most important work of art left over from this period is, of course, the Homeric epic itself.
However, in the plastic arts, the Dark Ages did not continue and inherit the brilliant achievements of the Aegean civilization. When the barbarians from the north and south conquered Mycenae and Crete, they experienced about two centuries of hibernation. After these barbaric and warlike tribes became "new Greeks", most of the artworks left behind were pottery vases for sacrifice and burial. When decorating these pottery, they often drew patterns or patterns of geometric shapes such as triangles, parallel lines, wavy patterns, and concentric circles.
The first picture you see in the picture area is an ancient Greek pottery vase collected in the National Archaelolgical Museum in Athens, made around 700 BC, which can be seen as a representative of the late maturity of this geometric style. This vessel, which looks like a vase, is not used for flower arrangement, but for a kind of wine vessel used to sacrifice the deceased, and there is a small hole in the bottom of the clay vase, and after filling the sacrificial wine, the wine flows slowly from this small hole to the deceased.
Dipylon Vase
In the abdomen of the clay vase, a group of "mourning the dead" figures are drawn, they use some highly generalized triangles, ovals and straight lines to represent the human body, in addition to the central sacrifice scene, the bottle body is also covered with various geometric linear patterns, birds and animal patterns, forming a symmetrical, simple and solemn style.
The second picture is of a pottery vase (Dipylon Vase) in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which is called a Diplion vase because it was excavated from the dipylon cemetery near Athens. It was made around 750 BC, and its painting style is very similar to the former, and it seems that the "New Greeks" already had a mature pattern of drawing during this period.
Because in the middle and late "Homeric era", from the existing excavated cultural relics, ancient Greece mainly presented this style in plastic arts, so this period in art history, known as the "geometric style period".
In general, the ability to make pottery marks that these tribes have entered the Neolithic period. Their society is evolving from a primitive clan system to a class society. In fact, civilizations in other regions have invariably presented similar highly generalized forms of painting at this stage.
For example, in 1955, the mainland excavated in the Xi'an Banpo site excavated the "faience human face fish pattern pot", in the clay pot with red, black, ochre and other colors to draw patterns and ornaments, of which the human face and fish shape, but also the use of geometric patterns, with concise lines and geometric patterns on the object image for high generalization, refining, has a unique artistic appeal.
The Chinese Yangshao culture represented by the Banpo site is more than 3,000 years earlier than the "Homer period" of ancient Greece, but it is also the work of primitive humans in the late New Era. It seems that primitive humans of this period invariably found a common aesthetic and created a similar, decorative language of painting.
You may find this category of "geometric period" works rather crude, rudimentary, and primitive. Most of these paintings use geometric blocks and lines, and do not depict the details, textures and volume of people and objects in detail. If we compare the Paleolithic people in the Spanish Altamira rock paintings from an earlier period, such as those introduced in previous programs, about 200 million years AGO, we will find that the Greek painters of this period, at the expense of almost all details, colors, vitality, volume, and accurate modeling ability, evolved into a kind of pictogram similar to words.
But if you can think about it calmly, these works that are highly refined natural objects are not lacking in vividness and fun. In fact, since the beginning of the last century, modern painters in the West, represented by Picasso and Matisse, have also begun to get creative inspiration from the works left by these primitive people. This long artistic journey seems to carry a kind of cyclical fate - human aesthetics have developed from the figurative realism of the Paleolithic period 20,000 years ago to the abstract generalized painting style at the end of the new era, however, from the beginning of the last century, when modern humans once again adopted abstraction and expression as a fashionable painting language.
As pioneering masters of modern painting in the West, Picasso tried to break away from the previous painting program formed since the Renaissance and re-examine painting itself. He began to use the simplest lines and color blocks to express all kinds of complex natural objects, and the images he created also had a kind of childish and simple beauty. Art critics have not been able to say exactly how important the influence of primitivism was on Picasso, but it is certain that they, like the primitives of the New Age, found some of the same laws: the basic shape of the depicted object in the most simplified lines and geometries.
Picasso's draft of his Cubist masterpiece The Maiden of Avignon, in which his painting of the upper part of the human body is a simple triangle, how similar to the masterpiece of the "New Greeks" on the sacrificial clay vase around 700 BC.
From the 8th century BC to the 6th century BC, or between the Time of Homer and the 5th century BC of the Hippo-Persian Wars, ancient Greek art entered the so-called "Archaic period".
This period for Greek society was an era of communion between the old and the new, imitation and innovation, as summarized by the modern continental economist Gu Zhun in "The Greek World in the 8th and 6th Centuries BC - The Final Completion of the City-State System", and the Greek society of this period underwent two drastic changes:
One is that the Greeks began to colonize Asia Minor and the mainland, and the result of their expansion was to build a "Greek world on the Mediterranean" centered on the Greek mainland;
The second is that on the Greek mainland, primitive tribes gradually formed city-states. In the Greek world after the Dark Ages, the center of civilization shifted from Asia Minor to mainland Greece. The Greeks established 139 slave city-states throughout the country, the most famous of which were Athens and Sparta.
Because Greece is a trading hub in the Mediterranean, trade with the East and the West is frequent. Greek artists began to learn from and learn from the artistic achievements of Egypt, Babylon, India and other places, but they did not conform to the rules like the Egyptians, and began to break with tradition and make bold attempts, from which they bred their own artistic styles.
The Greek works of art left over from this period were no longer limited to small statues, as in Homer's time, but began to experiment with large human figurines, and they tried to create the ideal image in their hearts. The most prominent human body carving technique in Greek sculpture in the future began the initial exploration from this period, so it is also said that the real history of ancient Greek carving art should begin from this period.
Archaeological finds of some statues from the mid-7th century BC, nearly life-size, mostly modeled after local young people. Male statues of this period known as Kouros were mostly naked, and they believed that men's bodies were sacred. The female statue Kore wears a pleated jumpsheet robe.
Korea
These statues are somewhat similar to ancient Egyptian statues, but they still maintain a positive rate and appear blunt and rustic. If you look closely, you will find that the faces of these statues almost all have the same smile with the corners of their mouths upturned. This smile looks somewhat stylized and even incongruous with facial expressions, and this unnatural smile reveals a mysterious atmosphere.
The Japanese anime designer of the last century, Akira Narita (1929-2002), used this smile when designing Ultraman's face. In his design philosophy, Ultraman's body should be a sense of order with simple, pure beauty. Therefore, this giant of light from the M78 Nebula always has a smile at the corner of his mouth.
This smile makes Ultraman, who represents the order of the universe, look even more powerful. Narita let Ultraman grow such a mouth because he believed that "the real strong should have a smile in battle."
In the history of art, people refer to this smile as the "antique smile".