Beginning with the representation of age in extremis in the nature morte or still life, a depiction of aged artifacts and representations of vanitas, artistic representations particularly in painting associate woman and death. Looking at artistic allegories for age and ageing, raising the question of aura for Walter Benjamin along with Ivan Illich and David Hume, this essay reflects on Heidegger on history together with reflections on the ‘death of art’ as well as Arakawa and Gins and Bazon Brock, both (...) as artists ‘at your service,’ as Brock would say, contra death, and including a brief discussion of wabi sabi and kintsugi. The ‘ageing’ of art includes a review of the (ongoing) debate concerning Michelangelo’s forging of the Laocoon as well as ancient views of age together with contemporary philosophic reflections (Simone de Beauvoir and Michel de Certeau). The figure of Baubô in ancient Greek sculpture and cultic context can make it plain, as Nietzsche shows (as Sarah Kofman follows him on this), that laughter and death are connected (along with fertility cults in antiquity). Satire preserves the Greek tradition of laughing at death and the essay closes with Swinburne. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Esthetic Basis of Greek Art of the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B. C The bibliography of my subject is very nearly negligible. One debt (outside of Greek archaeology altogether) is, however, a heavy one; and I wish to acknowledge great obligation to the keen and serious dialectic which distinguishes Geoffrey Scott's of Humanism. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction (...) of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Greek art and literature follow parallel courses through the long period from Homer to Euripides. Homer and Euripides, Dipylon vases and the latest white lekythoi are as far apart from each other as it is possible for works in the same medium to be. The distance can only be explained by a similar change in the views of artists, writers, and their public.

The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art. By S. Rebecca Martin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. 282, illus. $59.95.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the critical interpretation of Greek art and religion provided by Hegel in the “Religion in the form of art” section of Chapter VII of his Phenomenology of the Spirit. The study will, thus, commence with an overview of the role played by art in the religion of ancient Greece, and then examine the reasons for the historical decline of this special phenomenon and the rise of Christianity, a religion referred to by (...) Hegel as a “visible religion” as it is required to “disclose” and manifest its contents: the spirit. Having focused special attention on the relationship between the people of ancient Greece and their gods and the role played by the concept of the ethical life, the paper will then proceed to investigate the relationship between the individual, the population and the ancient polis or Greek State as illustrated in the early works of Hegel and in the Phenomenology of the Spirit, in which Hegel develops his theory of ethical relations in ancient Greece as exemplified in the model of sibling relations within the family. The paper continues with an examination of Hegel’s criticism of Greek rituals and the inability of the modern world to understand such practices from the perspective of the life of the time, concluding, in line with Hegel, that our experience is now an external process as we no longer embrace the interiority of the ethical life of the past. Indeed, as Hegel considers the “spirit of destiny offered by those [ancient] works of art” to go beyond the ethical life of a nation, the fact that those works of art are no more considered useful and important is a tragic event, even though this destiny has shown us the spirit within them, and thanks to this tragic end, we have finally been able to reunite all the Greek gods in a single Pantheon in which “the spirit is conscious of itself as a spirit”. (shrink)

Dem umfassenden Führer zu den mittelalterlichen Denkmälern der griechischen Inseln wird zunächst eine Karte sowie eine kurze historische Einführung vorangestellt. Es schließt sich der Hauptteil an, der die einzelnen Inseln in alphabetischer Reihenfolge abhandelt. Dabei wird für jede Insel eine kleine schematische Karte beigefügt. Ein Glossar, eine Liste der byzantinischen Dynastien, der lateinischen und byzantinischen Kaiser in Konstantinopel, der Dogen und Grafen sowie Herren der veschiedenen Inseln runden zusammen mit einigen ausgewählten Literaturhinweisen den Führer ab. Dieser läßt sich über einen (...) Personen-Index über die topographische Ordnung hinaus auch von diesem Aspekt her gut erschließen. (shrink)

The Greek city-state has traditionally been viewed as an entity that was divided into two distinct spheres and governed by two distinct arts. The a...