So I'm back at school... taking "The Renaissance Art World and its Classical Origins". In case anyone really likes to read these rants,
Discussion Topic:
How did the Romans incorporate Greek principles to create a unique Roman aesthetic? Please use an example to cite specifics (e.g., the Pantheon) to illustrate your point.
Is art a mimetic process? Does art re-present? Can the artist really be the "idea-maker' today, or does the idea already exist, as Plato claimed?
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Dustin's Overly Verbose Soapboxery:
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I've always been fascinated with the way cultures have appropriated huge swaths of earlier cultures - sometimes due to admiration, sometimes tribute, sometimes conquest. The Greeks were influenced heavily by the Egyptians, the Romans by the Greeks, the rest of Europe by the Romans. The New World has such an amalgam of all of these influences, that it's impossible to pull them all apart - the neoclassical homage of Washington D.C. is technically part of the same culture as the Museum of Modern Art, or Kennedy Space Center. Every culture stands on the shoulders of those that came before, of course, but there is such a lot of respect shown for all that Periclean Athens and the rest of Greece accomplished, that it makes an artistic foundation for most of Roman civilization.
I hate to go right for the example you suggested in the topic, but the Pantheon is a really great example of architecture pushing boundaries and trying to find the future, while being firmly rooted in the past. The acanthus leaves atop the columns, the whole Big White Stone Edifice thing is very Greek, but Rome was beginning to spread its wings. Concrete was more of a revolution than I was ever aware of - the idea of making one piece of stone that is bigger and stronger than any naturally occurring piece of stone really gave the Roman architects the freedom to soar. Building a dome that size out of an unbroken sphere, creating a 1:1 interior space without need for columns or supporting walls, those were huge leaps forward, of which Plato and Euclid would have been awfully envious. The Golden Ratio is a beautiful mathematical idea - but The Sphere is possibly the most perfect form of all. It's what the universe itself naturally sculpts matter into, whether planets or stars. Drops of water form spheres. Our impossibly elegant and complicated human eyes are spherical. The ratio of the rotunda walls to the dome itself might be 1:1, but the ratio of the diameter to the circumference of that space is the almost poetic 1:3.14159265358~. What's better than gold? PIE. :)
On to mimesis...
I feel that art lives in the border between creation and mimicry. We're all trapped to some extent in that twilight zone - where we want to bring something NEW into the world, but we're limited by everything that came before, in the same way we're lifted and enabled by everything that came before. Art has a vast vocabulary - but using that vocabulary means using "words" that someone else invented, if it's going to be recognizable to the audience. We must build from colors that someone else mixed, from materials that someone else mined. We can't help but show some of our influences when we create - bits of inspiration from our teachers and our peers, our heros and our surroundings. The most successful art, perhaps, is that which finds a way to use all of that vocabulary, all of those common materials, all of the things that make up the artist, in an inventive manner that combines all those flavors into a tasty new... pie. (This is what I get for writing during my lunch break.)
I think we all strive for more originality than we'll ever achieve. Any piece of new music is still using tones and scales and instruments that came from other music - but the chords and the harmonies and the dissonance - the COMBINATION can be what is new. We start with the mimetic - and if we work very hard and experiment diligently and dream, always dream - we can push that bubble outward a fraction of a millimeter. That's a good day's work, for a creator.
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Later in the discussion...
In reference to: No Subject posted by Andrew G
I think that the Romans acquired Greek principles must like countries taking spoils of war. Where the winning army recognizes things that they want and that have the possibility of making their craft better, in this case. But the reasoning and ideas behind the creations don't necessarily come along with the mimicry until much later. Rather the information is filtered and manipulated through the mindset and beliefs of the new culture.
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Good thoughts Andrew! I think you're right, that a lot of the difference between Greek and Roman art is that the Romans acquired the techniques and materials, without first acquiring the traditions, and wisdom, and philosophy that informed the Greek artists the first time around. The art was advanced, but also diluted.
It makes me think of books being made into films, in the modern day. When the source material is purchased and appropriated and adapted, the feeling or deeper meaning might be lost, because different creators are taking it at face value and forcing it into another media. On rare occasions, the original author stays involved, with creative input, and can help to make sure that the adaptation keeps some of the spirit of the original.
In the visual art field, another modern-day equivalence might be the fact that a huge variety of tools and techniques and tutorials are available to basically everyone. In the past, such treasures had to be unlocked by apprenticeship, and decades of work, and membership in an academy or salon, and patronage... but now, a technical visual masterpiece might be created by some random 18-year-old that's unaware of any foregoing culture more nuanced than The Disney Channel. This is a double-edged sword - it means that the potential for new work and creativity is exploding... but it also means that we get digital paintings of the Teen Titans that are rendered more perfectly than the Night Watch of Rembrandt. It's an interesting world. Perhaps the decline and fall of the Roman civilization has never stopped declining. :) Or perhaps humanity just keeps rolling along, picking up influences and ideas and randomly cropping up with both geniuses and fools.
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