The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece

The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece
Author: British Museum
Publisher:
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2012
Genre: Figure sculpture
ISBN: 9781883124359

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This book is published in conjunction with the exhibition The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece, presented at the Portland Art Museum October 6, 2012/January 6, 2013.

Defining Beauty

Defining Beauty
Author: Ian Dennis Jenkins
Publisher: British museum Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2015
Genre: Art, Ancient
ISBN:

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Greek sculpture is full of breathing vitality and yet, at the same time, it reaches beyond mere imitation of nature to give form to thought in works of timeless beauty. For over 2000 years the Greeks experimented with representing the human body in works that range from prehistoric abstract simplicity to the full-blown realism of the age of Alexander the Great. The ancient Greeks invented the modern idea of the human body in art as an object of sensory delight and as a bearer of meaning. Their vision has had a profound influence on the way the western world sees itself. Drawing on the British Museum's outstanding collection of Greek sculpture - including extraordinary pieces from the Parthenon and the celebrated representation of a discus thrower - and through a number of themed sections, this richly illustrated book explores the Greek portrayal of human character in sculpture, along with sexual and social identity. In athletics, the male body was displayed as if it was a living sculpture, and victors were commemorated by actual statues. In art, not only were mortal men and women represented in human form but also the gods and other beings of myth and the supernatural world. In a series of lively introductory chapters, written by a selection of academics, historians and artists, it is revealed how the Greeks themselves viewed the sculpture (which was vividly enhanced with colour), and how it was regarded and treated in later pagan antiquity. The revival of the Greek body in the modern era is also discussed, including the shock of the new effect of the arrival of the Parthenon sculptures in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece

Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece
Author: Andrew F. Stewart
Publisher:
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1997
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780521456807

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The body was central to the visual culture of ancient Greece, reflecting an obsession with physical beauty, integrity, dynamism, and power. In this penetrating study, Andrew Stewart analyses the problem of the Greeks' strange preoccupation with nakedness and sketches how artworks filter our understanding of the subject. Exploring selected constructions of gender, ranging from the men of the Parthenon frieze to naked girls on Spartan hand-mirrors, Stewart investigates the Greek body as a microcosm of society, focusing upon figurations of the Athenian body politic; erotica for men and women; and selected representations of the Other, such as Gorgons, Satyrs, Centaurs, and Amazons. A cultural, theoretical and sociological study of this seminal topic, Stewart's analysis offers new insights into the society and mentality of the ancient Greeks.

Beauty

Beauty
Author: David Konstan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2014
Genre: Art
ISBN: 019992726X

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What makes something beautiful? In this engaging, elegant study, David Konstan turns to ancient Greece to address the nature of beauty.

Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece

Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece
Author: Mireille M. Lee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2015-01-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1316194957

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This is the first general monograph on ancient Greek dress in English to be published in more than a century. By applying modern dress theory to the ancient evidence, this book reconstructs the social meanings attached to the dressed body in ancient Greece. Whereas many scholars have focused on individual aspects of ancient Greek dress, from the perspectives of literary, visual, and archaeological sources, this volume synthesizes the diverse evidence and offers fresh insights into this essential aspect of ancient society. Intended to be accessible to nonspecialists as well as classicists, and students as well as academic professionals, this book will find a wide audience.

The Greek Body

The Greek Body
Author: Ian Dennis Jenkins
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2009
Genre: Figure sculpture
ISBN: 9781606060025

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More than any other ancient civilization, the Greeks placed the human body at the center of their culture. To them, the sculpted human figure was both an object of sensory delight and an expression of an intelligent mind. In the modern popular imagination, mention of the ancient Greeks is likely to conjure up an image of idealized and naked youth, and it is true that the ideal nude, both male and female, is a striking feature of Greek sculpture. However, in later Greek art, sculptors and their patrons became increasingly interested in human diversity, experimenting with the representation of ethnicity, age, social standing, and character. The marble, bronze, and terra-cotta sculptures presented in this volume--outstanding highlights drawn from over six centuries of artistic production--demonstrate the diversity of Greek figural forms, from the idealized beauty of the Classical era to the individualized portraits of the Hellenistic period. Large, stunning details testify to the artists' skills in portraying cold, hard materials as warm, human flesh.

The Symptom and the Subject

The Symptom and the Subject
Author: Brooke Holmes
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2010-04-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400834880

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The Symptom and the Subject takes an in-depth look at how the physical body first emerged in the West as both an object of knowledge and a mysterious part of the self. Beginning with Homer, moving through classical-era medical treatises, and closing with studies of early ethical philosophy and Euripidean tragedy, this book rewrites the traditional story of the rise of body-soul dualism in ancient Greece. Brooke Holmes demonstrates that as the body (sôma) became a subject of physical inquiry, it decisively changed ancient Greek ideas about the meaning of suffering, the soul, and human nature. By undertaking a new examination of biological and medical evidence from the sixth through fourth centuries BCE, Holmes argues that it was in large part through changing interpretations of symptoms that people began to perceive the physical body with the senses and the mind. Once attributed primarily to social agents like gods and daemons, symptoms began to be explained by physicians in terms of the physical substances hidden inside the person. Imagining a daemonic space inside the person but largely below the threshold of feeling, these physicians helped to radically transform what it meant for human beings to be vulnerable, and ushered in a new ethics centered on the responsibility of taking care of the self. The Symptom and the Subject highlights with fresh importance how classical Greek discoveries made possible new and deeply influential ways of thinking about the human subject.

Gender, Identity and the Body in Greek and Roman Sculpture

Gender, Identity and the Body in Greek and Roman Sculpture
Author: Rosemary Barrow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2018-10-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1108583865

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Gender and the Body in Greek and Roman Sculpture offers incisive analysis of selected works of ancient art through a critical use of cutting-edge theory from gender studies, body studies, art history and other related fields. The book raises important questions about ancient sculpture and the contrasting responses that the individual works can be shown to evoke. Rosemary Barrow gives close attention to both original context and modern experience, while directly addressing the question of continuity in gender and body issues from antiquity to the early modern period through a discussion of the sculpture of Bernini. Accessible and fully illustrated, her book features new translations of ancient sources and a glossary of Greek and Latin terms. It will be an invaluable resource and focus for debate for a wide range of readers interested in ancient art, gender and sexuality in antiquity, and art history and gender and body studies more broadly.

Hippocrates' Woman

Hippocrates' Woman
Author: Helen King
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2002-01-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134772211

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Hippocrates' Woman demonstrates the role of Hippocratic ideas about the female body in the subsequent history of western gynaecology. It examines these ideas not only in the social and cultural context in which they were first produced, but also the ways in which writers up to the Victorian period have appealed to the material in support of their own theories. Among the conflicting tange of images of women given in the Hippocratic corpus existed one tradition of the female body which says it is radically unlike the male body, behaving in different ways and requiring a different set of therapies. This book sets this model within the context of Greek mythology, especially the myth of Pandora and her difference from men, to explore the image of the body as something to be read. Hippocrates' Woman presents an arresting study of the origins of gynaecology, an exploration of how the interior workings of the female body were understood and the influence of Hippocrates' theories on the gynaecology of subsequent ages.