Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com

Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Journal Founding: August 2, 2012

Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year

Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed

Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access

Fees: None (Free)

Volume Numbering: 12

Issue Numbering: 3

Section: E

Theme Type: Idea

Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”

Theme Part: 31

Formal Sub-Theme: Realist Art

Individual Publication Date: July 15, 2024

Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2024

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Word Count: 11,644

Image Credits: Lance Richlin.

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*

Abstract

Lance Richlin is an award-winning Classical Realist painter and sculptor based out of Los Angeles, California. His full resume is here. Richlin discusses: realist art from Mesopotamia to the Greeks.

Keywords: advanced cultures architecture artifacts art, anthropologists study early humanity, archaeological discoveries, elaborate structures early Homo sapiens, Neanderthal DNA Denisovans, prehistoric tools humanity development, Roger Scruton beauty civilization, Stone Age artifacts anthropologists, transitions Mesopotamian Persian empires, visual art Greek Minoans.

On Realist Art 2: Mesopotamia to the Greeks

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s the distinction between anthropologists and archaeologists within art history and sculpting history?

Lance Richlin: This came up because I looked through the last interview and referred to those looking at Stone Age artifacts as archaeologists. I should have used the word anthropologist. An archaeologist studies advanced cultures, architecture, artifacts, and art. Whereas, when you get to the Stone Age, it’s intertwined with the literal development of man.

So, you would have an anthropologist who studies humans. The distinction is that you’re trying to figure out what human beings were capable of thinking, the development of their brains, their reactions to how to survive in the wild, and what they were using to survive. Anthropologists study humanity’s first creations to help them survive and the beginnings of going from an animal to a human.

They say only humans create tools, for example. It’s not exactly true. We know that chimps use sticks to gather insects. They put the stick in the hive. Some birds use little devices. But generally, that’s what an anthropologist is dealing with — the more primitive beginnings of humanity’s development.

As I said, an archaeologist would deal with real, elaborate dwellings. This is interesting: We recently found a hut built well over 100,000 years ago, when we thought humans only lived in caves or had other forms of shelter.

But they found that very early, wildly early, we had huts.  So it’s amazing. It goes with the fact that we keep finding that humanity’s development of culture goes back further and further. We keep finding earlier and earlier examples of stone houses and cities and things like that. So much is lost.

They even found a civilization in the middle of the jungle recently, one in South America and one in South Asia, where the jungle completely took over these gigantic civilizations, and was completely submerged by the jungle. We need to find out who these people were. The cities were vast. The one in South America was long before the Incas and the Olmecs. So anyway, it’s fascinating that we’re finding out how far back humanity goes. It means that when they say that Neanderthals lived for 100,000 years and that Homo sapiens lived for many thousands of years, it only goes to show that they weren’t idle.

We’re Homo sapiens now. But my point is, even early, early, early Homo sapiens were building fairly elaborate structures, they keep finding. They also found that, I believe, Neanderthals lived fairly recently. It’s amazing how long and how recently they lived alongside us, modern humans. They were with us for a long time, even into modern history.

Well, not modern history, but 30 or 40,000 years ago, I think they still had Neanderthals. I can look that up, but they were there. Another thing I want to mention is that this is not strictly related to art, but I’m fascinated by the fact that we now know that there were several different types of humans that all lived simultaneously. Homo Erectus, Neanderthals, there was a type of human called Denisovans. We still find the DNA of Denisovans. That DNA is in Asia, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia.

The Neanderthals were all over because they were very nomadic. Homo sapiens, as we know, emerged from Africa. Then they confronted Neanderthals, especially in the Middle East, and intermingled with them, probably against their will. There was a funny phrase that an anthropologist used. He said that when Homo sapiens met Neanderthals, there was an intermingling, an interbreeding. He said these were probably not the most romantic affairs.

Because the Neanderthals were three times as strong as Homo sapiens, it was probably rape, but we don’t know. I have a theory that one of the reasons that humanity has this fear of the other, a fear of strangers and fear of monsters, is because, for thousands of years in our early history, Homo sapiens had Neanderthals running around who were three times as strong as them. If they got hold of a Homo sapien, he was doomed.

So, having that going around, Neanderthals being as intelligent as Homo sapiens, would have been terrifying. Several other human species lived simultaneously, all of whom would have had no problem eating each other. I’m sure they all viewed each other as potential food. So, that’s the reason that I want to use the term anthropologist for early artifacts discovered by Homo sapiens.

But you had another question.

Jacobsen: The context of this series is about contextualizing the chronology of the development of realism and giving a point of view: Add spice and make it interesting–rather than simply reading something from Wikipedia. What are your more elaborate thoughts on the importance of that?

Richlin: To brush up on my history, I looked at some basic encyclopedia articles on early art. I noticed they all say the same thing: the same sculptures.  They only include a few theories and implications of these artistic works.

And I thought, well, if you only go with “Here are the main sculptures, here are the actual developments,” then you don’t need someone like me to recount them to you. You can see it all in about ten minutes by Googling it. So, I will offer some asides about the related and important subjects. So, that’s my answer.

Jacobsen: We went from the Stone Age to Mesopotamia. What is the next transition past Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt?

Richlin: The next transition was inevitable because of the Persians under Darius. The last great Mesopotamian empire was the Persian Empire, which took over that area and then spread from Turkey to India. They had their eyes on Greece and decided to go west because they had already reached India in the east, or close to India, Central Asia. I don’t know the exact boundary of the Persian Empire to the east, but they didn’t go to war with Indian kingdoms.

The Persians might have been stopped by mountains, desert, or something else, or they might have felt it was unnecessary. It would have been a very strange conflict, though, because the people of India had their empires and ways of fighting. They used elephants, for example, and masses of people. They had huge populations and would lumber out onto the battlefield without organization. The Persians were very disciplined and organized. It would have been an interesting fight. By disciplined and organized, I mean they were organized into archers, spearmen, and symmetrical wings of their armies. They fought in a very organized way. But they decided to go west.

The first empire they came up against would have been the Athenians, who were dotted around the coast of Turkey. They had little settlements — the Athenian Empire. It was a small empire, but the Greeks were seafaring. So first, Darius tried. He was defeated. We have lots of stories about that. Then Xerxes tried again. And, of course, he was defeated as well by the Greeks, who had perfected fighting because they were fighting each other. So, the Greeks were a dangerous military foe. What happened was that it awakened the Greek giant, the sleeping giant. From that point forward, the Greeks decided to go east and attack the Persians.

Before I go any further, I need to take a detour. The reason is that I left out the Minoan culture. Now, the Minoans were the people — they call it the Minoan culture. It’s the culture that existed on the island of Crete. Crete developed at the same time as the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians. So they had their art form, which was lively.

We still have the frescoes that they did. Remember I told you in our last lecture that Mesopotamian and Egyptian art was stiff? The figures were stiff, meaning their arms were at their sides. The legs were only bent a little if they were seated. But the Minoans had amazingly, very lively figures. There is a famous sculpture of a three-dimensional Minoan goddess. Her arms are up in the air — I think she’s holding snakes. That would have been unheard of for an Egyptian sculpture. We found real frescoes in the main capital of Crete called Knossos.

 They’re real frescoes because it’s actual paint that’s been sunk into plaster. When you do that, you create something that’s incredibly durable. It’s not like oil paint on a canvas. Fresco is incredibly durable. The Sistine Chapel is a fresco, but these frescoes in Crete are thousands of years older. The Sistine Chapel was painted around 1500 AD, while the Minoan culture was around 2000 B.C. We still have some frescoes by them. These frescoes depict people in vigorous motion. The reason is that the Minoans were famous for their acrobatic rituals. Let me explain.

They were very obsessed with bulls, so they would take young people, both male and female and put them in arenas where they would jump on and off angry bulls. They’d grab them by the horns, leap over them, and somersault. We know this because we can see it in the frescoes. So, the figures are depicted in vigorous motion. They’re not bad. They don’t resemble Renaissance figures, but we’re talking about realism. This is a big step forward. They still look somewhat cartoony, but their motion is very realistic in that, yes, that’s how a leaping figure would look if it were leaping over a bull.

So, anyway, this was one of their rites of passage or rituals. Nobody knows precisely what the purpose of these acrobatic events was. But we know that the young men and women did it. Maybe they were professional acrobats. It’s not all that different from bullfighting. Today, a bullfighter in Spain or Mexico is an acrobat. It’s not that he’s a killer. He’s someone who can jump out of the way of things quickly.

So, charging bulls started early — man’s fascination with it. The early Greeks, the Mycenaean Greeks, had to give hostages to the Minoans. The Minoans struck fear into everybody. These hostages were said to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, who was killed by a Greek hero named Theseus. These hostages were put into a labyrinth. Inside the labyrinth was the Minotaur, a bull-headed monster, a human with the head of a bull. Now, the reason this relates to the art is that when archaeologists uncovered the palace in Knossos, it was like a labyrinth. It’s an extremely complicated series of corridors and rooms. So they think that’s why the Mycenaean Greeks set their myth in the labyrinth.

Oh, one other thing. There’s a lot that can be said about the Minoans. The Minoans terrified everybody. They were pirates. There’s nothing more terrifying than pirates for early people. There are several reasons for pirates being terrifying. The reason is that they come out of nowhere in great force, and there’s no way to defend against pirates because you can’t guard every village and port. If a vast fleet of armed men appears, you can’t get an army there fast enough. So the Minoans would appear out of nowhere and then sack everything they found. Later, the Greeks did the same thing, as did the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians were a people who lived to the north of Israel in what is now Lebanon, and they later founded Carthage in North Africa. But the Minoans, as I said, were dangerous because they were these seafaring people. We think that the “sea people” referred to by the Egyptians were the Minoans.

Now, we think they were the Minoans. Either way, in their art, the Egyptians depicted people landing from ships who wreaked havoc on the Egyptians. They came out of nowhere and conquered Egypt for a while. Or at least Egypt was defenseless against them. Interestingly, Egypt was also attacked by raiders on land called the Hyksos, who did conquer Egypt. But they were raiders because they knew how to use cavalry very effectively. They were a mounted army. Great mobility was a tremendous danger and made an army very dangerous. The Minoan tactic of raiding continued up into the period of the Vikings in Dark Age Britain and the surrounding areas.

People wonder why the Vikings were so terrifying. Why were the English, the Anglo-Saxons, so terrified of the Vikings? The same thing. The Vikings would show up with a vast armada of ships, and there’d be some tiny little port on the edge of the English coast. It wouldn’t stand a chance. There was no way to fortify every little town. So finally, Alfred the Great of the Anglo-Saxons gathered his fleet of English, lion ships (as opposed to dragon ships) and attacked the Vikings at sea. He also beat them in pitched battles on land. But we’ll get back to the Minoans.

The last thing I want to say about the Minoans is that they had this unusual fashion sense revealed by the sculptures and the frescoes. The men would wear a little loincloth, maybe some bracelets, a little headdress. The women were dressed very modestly in that they had long gowns down to their ankles, except that the gowns would expose their breasts. It’s funny, but you see little emphasis in elementary schools on the Minoans. That’s because every single depiction of a Minoan female shows their breasts. So, the gown would cover every part of their body except their arms, necks, and breasts.

Why did we abandon that fashion? I would support keeping that fashion sense, but for some reason, no other culture did that. Of course, I assume the Egyptians were always naked because of the heat. So, eventually, the Minoan culture was destroyed. It was either a combination of factors. We know they would have had to put up with their Greek pirates coming to get them. We know that there were tidal waves and earthquakes. That could be it if you had a couple of bad earthquakes and tidal waves at that time. That could destroy your civilization. We’re still determining, but we know that eventually, the Minoan civilization could not defend itself, and Knossos was sacked.

“Sacked” meant burned, people captured and put into slavery, and everything was stolen. Many people wonder; I would like to say that I always wonder why, when early peoples attacked each other, they would always burn down or destroy the enemy cities they had just conquered. And I always wonder, well, why destroy it? What’s the point?

Why not just leave it, let it be intact, or use it? But I’ve concluded, it’s my theory, that they had to destroy the cities because those cities were what gave their enemies their strength. You want your enemy to be either dead, enslaved, or wandering around, fighting the elements. So that’s the reason. Later on, there were other reasons for destroying cities, which I’ll discuss.

So, the Cretan civilization ended with the rise of Greek civilization. When we start with the Greeks, there are three Greek art periods. The first is the archaic, which I call archaic. It is generally referred to as the archaic period. It’s funny; I looked up before we started and wanted to refresh my memory of the different periods. And I’ve noticed that modern historians don’t use the word “archaic,” maybe because it has negative connotations. They call that the Hellenic period, which is fine.

The Greek periods of art are archaic, Hellenic, classical, and Hellenistic. Those are important because they have names for the different kinds of realism done by the different periods. Now, I’m going to use the word realism because part of this series of lectures is that I want to promote the fact that the march of human art was a march towards realism. It wasn’t a march towards Jackson Pollock.

Modern art historians are very politically correct or faux sophisticated, where they don’t like to say, “Hey, things got more realistic.” But they did. And I suspect that what I’ve noticed when I talk to art historians is that many of them will wax rhapsodically about ancient, realistic art. But then, when it comes to modern art, they love abstract art because they’re so sophisticated. And that’s funny. It’s a little; it’s not hypocritical; it’s just inconsistent. And so they’re loathe to say that it was a progress towards realism for whatever reason.

But that’s what it was. Again, the archaic Greek sculpture was stiff, like the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians. However, an interesting development is that the figures are smiling. So, these are not exactly realistic figures, but these figures have realistic smiles. They knew how to depict a smile. Some art historians will say the smile was there to create a sense of undisturbed harmony and perfection. That is exactly why these figures were smiling; they’re called the Kouroi and Kouros figures. The Kouros were the girls, the female statues. The Kouroi are the male statues. And these are, again, arms at the sides, as in a previous lecture, one leg forward. But they do have smiles. And they look real. Let me say why they look real. They bunch up the cheeks.

 Almost all cultures that know you can turn up the corners of the sides of the mouth. But making a smile look convincing requires bunching up the cheeks, which the early Greeks did, and raising the lower eyelids. So if you’re doing — I used to teach animation, and I used to tell the kids, “Look, all you have to do is have the lower lid cover the bottom of the iris, make the cheeks fuller, and turn up the corners of the mouth, and you’ll get a smile.”

There are other kinds; there are dozens of variations on that. But that’s a simple way of depicting a smile. And the early Greeks did that with these figures. This is called the Archaic Period. It’s the very first Greek sculpture to show they’ve arrived. These sculptures, again, depict the females heavily clothed.

They have covered the breasts, in this case. Most cultures in this period, like Egypt and Mesopotamia, will depict fully clothed females, at least the nobility, covering their chest and legs. Egyptian servant girls were naked, depicted as naked, with little jewelry. But the Minoans exposed the breasts, while the Greeks depicted females fully clothed. The female nude comes about later.

The men in these archaic kouroi figures are depicted in loincloths. They look like athletes, with one leg forward. The difference between these figures and Egyptian figures with one leg forward is the attempt to depict anatomy. They have an attempt to show knees; you can see the six-pack on the abdomen and some of the musculature.

At this period in Greek history, men wore long hair, like women. That’s probably why Achilles, there’s a famous story from the Iliad, didn’t want to help the other Greeks fight the Trojans. So he hid among the women. I always wondered how Achilles convinced anybody that he was a woman, but everybody had long hair. So, with the appropriate clothing, he might have gotten away with it. According to the story, I believe it was Odysseus who hid a beautiful sword among the treasures and gifts they were giving to the women in the city of the Myrmidons.

Achilles was the leader of the Myrmidons. Menelaus was the king of the Spartans. Agamemnon was the king of all Greece. They had gone to try to get the help of Achilles. When they brought the gifts, Achilles, dressed as a woman, became fixated on the sword and started playing with it. That’s how they knew he was hiding among the women because they would have had no interest in the sword.

This leads me to a related topic, which is important to get into, and that is that the Greeks were the first people to make a virtue of aesthetic beauty. We know from the early Greek philosophers that they loved physical beauty. Gore Vidal, the historian, points out that much of Western history is an interplay and conflict between the Greeks, whose highest value, among others, was beauty — physical beauty, the beauty of humans, the beauty of their architecture and art — and the Jews, whose greatest value was virtue, moral virtue. Centuries later, a Roman saying developed by one of their empire builders strikes me as an amazing quote because it’s still the case today.

He said that to handle — somewhat true today, I don’t want to disparage all people I’m going to refer to, but he said the subjects would be impressed by the governor’s courteousness and manners in handling the Spanish, whom Rome conquered. I live in a Black and Hispanic neighbourhood, and I can tell you that you’ve got to be extra courteous to Hispanic people, like way more courteous. More — what’s the word for it? Diplomatic, courtly, when you deal with Hispanic people. And that’s what the ancient Romans said. And then he said that would garner the respect of the subjugated Spanish.

He said that to deal with the French, the Roman governor should impress them with his wealth. To deal with the Jews, the Roman governor should impress the Judeans with his moral rectitude. Just show that you’re a moral person. That’ll impress them and get them to cooperate better. But then he says that to impress the Africans, the Romans should impress them with their dignity. And this is still true today. But the Germans must be subjugated with violence. Only when he’s still reeling from your last blow will the German respect you. Now, I don’t have a problem with Germans anymore, but it’s funny that he would say that.

So anyway, getting back to our original topic, the Jews had an invisible God. And that’s what Alexander discovered when he conquered the Jews: they didn’t bring any gods to show him. The Jews were indifferent to physical beauty. There are references in the Bible to the beauty of King David or the young boy David or Rachel, the beautiful daughter Jacob fell in love with. So yes, the Jews were aware of beauty, but they didn’t make it a value the way the ancient Greeks did.

So, returning to the ancient Greek sculptures, they now depict young men as athletic. They have more depiction of muscles. And I was talking earlier about the Iliad, and there’s an interesting aside. I always thought it was so funny that when Achilles killed Hector, the prince of Troy, the king of Troy, Priam, went to the enemy Greeks’ camp because he wanted Hector’s body. It’s very important to ancient people not to leave the body of a loved one in the hands of the enemy.

So he went to Achilles to beg for the body of his son. It says in the Iliad that Priam could see the beauty, the physical beauty of Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior and the man who had killed his son. That’s so funny to me. The Iliad says that Achilles is physically beautiful enough to impress the king of Troy. By the way, Achilles didn’t murder Hector. He killed him in battle; murder is a crime. There’s a big distinction. That’s one of the distinctions that I should mention in the Bible. One of the Ten Commandments is, thou shalt not murder, not thou shalt not kill, because in battle, in war, you kill. In crime, you murder. So, I shouldn’t have used the word murder.

But the point is that this sense of aesthetics has gone on even today. A strange example that I’ve been giving more and more thought to is that Trump is obsessed with beauty. As we all know, he’s got an eye for beauty and loves to date beautiful women. At one point, he was in charge of the Miss America contest, and God knows what he got up to in that position. But what was funny was when he met Melania, his story was that he was told to go to this party where he would meet this gorgeous woman. He met the gorgeous woman, but next to her was Melania, who he felt was even more gorgeous. So he lost interest in the first one and pursued Melania, which, by the way, I have to hand it to Trump because when you think about it, there aren’t many more beautiful women than Melania.

She’s definitely about as beautiful as you can get, especially at that age and still today. So, he had a developed eye for beauty. And he hires, as his lawyers, beautiful women, deliberately. He thinks that it influences the jury or that they make good spokespeople for him because he knows they’ll be on T.V. So he’s got this gorgeous team of female attorneys and some male attorneys.

But it goes further. He was criticizing Judge Mershon, Juan Mershon, who found Trump guilty of 34 felonies, which I don’t agree with, but that’s a separate issue. In criticizing Judge Mershon, he said the man looks like an angel. But in reality, he’s a terrible person. It’s not an exact quote, but he did say he looks like an angel. I thought, my God, what the hell does Trump care about the physical appearance of his persecutor? This judge. And I looked at a picture of Juan Mershon. Yes, he’s a nice-looking man, but it’s very odd to me.

Not only that, but Trump criticized AOC, the female congresswoman. He said that her husband was ugly. This is the strangest thing in the world. You could criticize AOC’s policies for a million reasons, including her lack of intellect.

But to criticize the way her husband looks is strange. He then criticized various of his opponents, including the female opponents, because of their physical appearance. So, how does all this matter? It does matter because the ancient Greeks were the first to elevate physical beauty to a meaningful level. This has continued down to modern history with Trump. And now you may say, “Well, is this a bad thing?”

Does that show that Trump is a superficial person? I wonder if it does. One of the things that he constantly harps on is that America looks bad. He was at an airport in one of the oil-rich Arab states, which might have been Dubai. He said that the airport looked 100 times better than our American airports. The reason is that he’s a builder.

And the way things look matters. And one of the problems that conservatives have had is that our cities, especially the cities under the control of Democrat mayors and governors, have fallen into complete disrepair and look like ghettos, look like slums. And recently, within a few days of this recording, the Supreme Court overturned an opinion of the Ninth Circuit Court, which said that you should be allowed to sleep, to camp on the streets.

The Ninth Circuit Court’s decision that Americans should be able to camp on the streets is contributing dramatically to the problem of homelessness. If it’s legal, then you can’t even stop it. Even if all the social factors were taken care of, if somebody felt like they wanted to camp on the streets, you couldn’t take them off the streets.

So, many blue cities like San Francisco and L.A. have gone to hell. And the conservatives and Trump are very concerned about this. And now that the law has been changed and we have the right to keep people from camping on the streets, it will affect the look of our cities.

But there’s a certain pride in civilization that comes with this as well. Trump, for example, was the main person, the main representative of the conservatives, to be against the destruction of statues when the leftists were tearing down statues. Not because he believed in the Confederate cause but because he said there were cultural reasons to keep the statues of Lee, for example.

I agree with him. One, it’s part of our history, and you don’t destroy the evidence of your history. Two, it makes the city look better. I’ll tell you a story. Now, this is getting off-topic, but it’s interesting. I was living with a Black woman who told me she used to love walking by the statues in Richmond, Virginia. They have a statue street or a corridor to the University of Virginia. And she loved the statues, and she was Black. It didn’t bother her that they were statues of Confederate leaders.

She wasn’t upset by that. She thought that was childish. She used to have lunch sitting in the shadow of the statue of General Lee. And it’s a beautiful thing that a Black woman could go to the University of Richmond and study in the shadow of a Confederate general. It only shows how far we’ve come. To destroy the statue is barbaric for any number of reasons.

But I can assure you the Greeks would not have destroyed those statues. The interesting thing is that, which is valuable to note right now, the Romans were willing to destroy those statues. The Romans, the early Greeks, we’re talking about the archaic Greeks, and the statues we have from them now that have survived are modelled in clay and carved in stone. But the flower of Greek statuary was bronze. They were masters of the creation of realistic figures. Once they got beyond the archaic period, they moved into creating statues out of bronze that were highly realistic.

But to finish my point before I discuss them, the Romans melted them down. They just wanted the bronze. But only after they made copies in marble. So most of the statues, most of the Greek statues that we know of, are Roman copies of Greek bronzes. We have a few Greek bronzes that they pulled out of the ocean and somehow survived for whatever reason. The Greek bronzes, probably the best that have survived, were two statues, several warriors, and a statue of Zeus.

These warriors are magnificent over-life-size sculptures of male nudes with extremely realistic athletic anatomy. The Greeks would put coloured stones in the eye cavity to represent the eyes. Now, let’s get back to the archaic sculptures. The next period is the classical Hellenic period, where all the sculptures have changed their hairstyle. So, the sculptures have short hair, which is Greek and Roman style. They were the first people to shave their faces. The men’s faces were shaved as their hairstyle. They were the first people to cut their long hair. The Hittites shaved their faces. But the Greek and later Roman look was to clean-shave the face and cut the hair off the back to look more modern, like modern people. So before that, all men had long hair. You can even see in the early Greek vases that the warriors would wear these helmets that covered the whole face.

And they had slits for eyes. Underneath the helmet, you can see they are always depicted on the vases, and the hair comes below the helmet. A couple of Rastafarian-looking NFL football players have that now, too. They wear football helmets, but their braided hair hangs below the helmet.

This is a little dangerous, but they get away with it. Interestingly, prisoners shave their heads in prison because hair is a vulnerability. In combat, hair pulling is very effective, and that’s why, in the early MMA contests, the Gracie brothers, the grapplers, introduced anything-goes combat, and they would grab hair. So, shaving your head became the style in early MMA contests. Hair-pulling now is not legal, but it was in the beginning.

So, in the early Greek period, we now see the advancement into the classical period with shorter hair and more developed anatomy. Now, we’re no longer talking about one leg forward. This period of Greek sculpture has fully moving figures, fully relaxed, and less stiff figures.

The best example of this new period of sculpture is Doryphoros, by Polykleitos. This figure is in full movement, and its limbs look natural. It has one arm bent, one leg forward, and one hip raised. This is called contrapposto, meaning that one hip is raised and one shoulder is raised. So, it is the opposite of stiff. It is a figure that looks natural.

Now, the Doryphoros is a massive revolution compared to archaic Greek sculpture, but it still has yet to achieve the natural look that the later period of Greek sculpture would have. Later, classical sculptures included the sculpture of the Discus Thrower by Myron. The Discus Thrower is as fully in motion as any sculpture.

So this was a huge advancement. They also had much more developed anatomy in this Hellenic period. I’m going to call it the Classical period. So this is the period after the Doryphoros. We go Archaic, and then we have the beginnings of Classical and then the late Classical period. The late Classical period includes sculptures of archers; you have…

You have the Parthenon, which had this giant — well, they weren’t giant. They were about three-foot-tall wall reliefs of very advanced wall carvings, and the figures were completely realistic. You couldn’t ask for more realistic. The anatomy looks accurate. I believe the Parthenon sculptures were done by a sculptor named — believe it was Lysippos, but at this time, the Greeks had their gigantic sculptures several stories tall, but they were destroyed. So they had statues of, we know there was a statue of Athena, we know there was a statue of Zeus, but those were just gone. We don’t know what happened to them. We have statues of archers wearing elaborate armour, scaled armour, in an archer’s pose, kneeling and aiming.

Jacobsen: So we’re running through quite a significant number of periods of history, but different facets of seeing how there are echoes in the historical presentation of realism, whether it’s in crude motion, in bull riding, fighting, how you want to portray it, to individuals who get 34 allegations in court and they’re calling the prosecutor an angel, or individuals who have Achilles kill their son and then calling them also beautiful or being able to see that beauty still. So there are different areas here where we’re looking at an increased fidelity in the presentation or improvement and seeing how people, despite different sorts of agreements, family, killing or murder, political rivalries, and so on, still see beauty. So, regarding that perception of beauty, are you taking this as something intrinsic where people are getting more and more at the modern characterization of realism?

Richlin: Let me clarify one little thing. Trump says that Judge Murchon ‘looks like an angel.’ Not that he was an angel. But he gave a damn about the looks of the judge. I’m saying that the greatest philosopher of this is Roger Scruton. He’s an English conservative, and he talks about how beauty matters. So, beauty, which is why I’m not critical of Trump for having such an eye for beauty; it shouldn’t be superficiality. Roger Scruton says that the love of beauty helps drive civilization forward. So, it’s one of the things that makes life more interesting. There are many advantages to having a beautiful civilization over an ugly one.

It’s interesting because a lot of modern leftists are very upset with fashion, with people needing to look good. In the Soviet Union, beauty standards, architecture, and products were terrible. In the West, we constantly compete to create things that work better and look better. This does tie in with early art. We find out that the early Greeks wanted to make things look better and be more real. In other words, it’s a simple example. If all you wanted to do was depict the God Hermes, you could have him standing up stiff with one leg forward and his arms at his sides, but he could be wearing winged sandals and a little conical headdress, which would stand for Hermes. But they decided we could make him look much better if he relaxed.

My favourite sculpture of this period is a statue of Hermes by Praxiteles, and it’s Hermes holding the baby Dionysus. It’s the most relaxed, natural-looking male sculpture imaginable. Why did they have to do that? There was no reason to make that advance, but what looked better was also more realistic. They came hand in hand. By the way, I need to correct myself. During the break, I looked up the sculptor of the Parthenon, and I’m sorry it was Phidias; at least he was the director of the sculpture. I said Lysippos. Lysippos was a sculptor during the period of Alexander the Great. He was the sculptor of Alexander, the one who did the portrait of Alexander.

The Greeks took it even further by idealizing all their figures. Because they idealized so much, we’re unsure if these sculptures looked like the people they depicted. So, there is a sculpture of Alexander. We are curious to know if it looked like him.

But the Greeks did a variety of things. If you look at ancient Greek sculptures, all the faces look almost alike. They could all have been done by the same person. So we know they had an idea of what they thought was beautiful. People say, well, no, that’s the way Greeks looked. Well, Greeks don’t all; for example, in the ancient Greeks, the nose would not indent before it came to the forehead. It comes straight down without a dent at the level of the eyebrows. That’s not a human characteristic. That’s just something that the Greeks liked. They thought it was aesthetically more appealing.

Do you have any point you want to make or question?

Jacobsen: Not simply the human form, but any mathematical principles or principles of symmetry within those types of figures, which are stark and either come more to the fore or have been there the whole time.

Richlin: Well, as a matter of fact, there are. Now, I know that there are mathematical ratios that the Greeks and I would assume other early architects put into their buildings. They involve certain numbers and proportions. But what those mathematical numbers are, I’m not a mathematician or an architect. The Greeks considered their sculptures, buildings, and architecture a form of sculpture. They didn’t think of it as a dwelling as much as a work of art.

But strictly speaking, I do know exactly what the proportions were regarding the figures. The Greeks developed something called the heroic figure. Now, if you were to measure 90% of the people that you meet, the halfway point from the ground to the top of their head would be around the area of the crotch, OK, on a normal person. Some people’s legs will be a little shorter or longer.

I remember I had a bodybuilder modeling for me. The poor guy had an incredibly muscular physique, but he was a little on the short side, and I measured him. His legs were a little short compared to his upper body. So, the area from the crotch down to the ground was shorter than from the crotch to the top of his head, and he was mortified. I gave him a complex he never got over. There’s nothing worse than having short legs.

I say this because the ancient Greeks were the first to develop a proportion standard where the legs are two-thirds of the body. This is called heroic proportions. So instead of the body dividing from the hip, from the great trochanter and crotch, which are on the same level — the great trochanter is a bump on the side of the thigh, it’s on the side of the femur — from that point to the ground, on a Greek sculpture, it will be much longer than on a normal human. So what they would do is divide the body. The Greeks would divide the body into thirds. They would say one-third ended at the knees, one at the great trochanter/crotch, and the torso and head would take up the top third.

There could be variations close to that. Long legs were considered ancient Greek proportion. Also, the average person is about seven heads tall, but Greek figures are eight heads tall. So, small head to large body. In the Renaissance and the period of the Mannerists, when the Italians elongated the body, elongated the figure, and idealized the figure, they could make a figure that was ten heads tall or nine heads tall. Michelangelo would always use very small heads. Raphael didn’t.

So, the Greeks started changing the body’s proportions just for what they considered aesthetic beauty. Now, this is not unusual among modern humans. I had an Olympic athlete in one of my classes, a hurdler. He was all leg. Most people, when they sit down, are the same height. I’m 5’9″, and I was the same height as this guy, who was 6’3″ when we were seated. But when he stood up, he had these long legs, which is very common for tall people. For very tall people, they get it in the leg. So, by the way, I knew people who were 6’2″ and still had very short legs. They had legs that were shorter than their upper body. So it’s not a perfect rule, but the long leg is considered more beautiful, and the small head is considered more beautiful. That goes for male fashion models as well as female fashion models.

Jacobsen: What is it for male fashion models? So, how do the smaller heads and proportions of female models differ from those of male models? And what ones are similar in those ratios that we’ll consider?

Richlin: Well, male and female heads are roughly the same size. A football player will have a bigger head than a small woman, but we’re not so different in size of our heads. I know that eight heads tall is for fashion. That’s the rule. So I’ve heard that fashion illustrators, drawing figures, would draw the males and the females eight heads tall. I don’t know the actual fashion models, but it’s close to that.

I can see men and women modelling clothes as a standard. I will say this: it’s unrelated, but it turns out that they don’t like men to be too tall. You’d think that if a guy were 6’5″, he’d be an ideal male model if he was good-looking enough, but it turns out they prefer a man who’s not much more than 6’2″ because they want clothes to fit more naturally. So, extra height is unnecessary for a male model, although nobody wants to be shorter than average, either male or female. For some reason, they like tall females, but I think that’s because so many fashion designers are gay men. There are many things they want the female body to look like that are more common to males. The extreme height, the extreme lack of breasts and butts, they say it’s because it makes the clothes look better, but it may also be a sexual preference. So, do you have any more points you want to raise?

Jacobsen: Is the larger culture another factor to consider alongside many fashion designers being gay men in terms of the choice of tall people, men and women, around 6 feet, 6’2″, and things like that?

Richlin: Well, they’ve done studies, and they found, this is related to your point, they found that men prefer a woman that is two or three inches shorter than them, whereas women prefer a man that’s six or seven inches taller than them.  That’s their choice. Height is also a symbol of better nutrition.

Like the Italians, for example. If you look at how Italians are depicted in the 1930s, they’re shorter because they had bad nutrition. And now your modern Italian, Italian American, is not known for being short. Asian cultures, Asians are on the short side, but now they eat more dairy, which helps height. So, every generation of Americans has gotten slightly taller. The early Americans were on the tall side. The colonial Americans were taller than their English counterparts across the Atlantic.

And it’s because Americans have always had better nutrition. It turns out that the Native Americans that the early American settlers encountered were very tall. You don’t expect early people from back then to be tall, but they were. They were well over six feet. The Mohicans, the Iroquois. So, being tall is considered an advancement. Modern Americans’ height is going down because so many Hispanics and people from the third world have entered the country in the past 40 years. The average height of Americans is going down. Does that address your point?

Jacobsen: Yes, so how does this art continue to develop throughout time?

Richlin: Well, there are so many examples of the great classical art of the Greeks. They were the first people to depict people in… OK; I will not say that they were the first people to depict people in average everyday activities because we know that the Egyptians did that, too — plenty of pictures of wall reliefs of Egyptians playing and enjoying time together and hunting. However, the classical Greeks went beyond the depiction of gods and ritualistic depictions of humans, and they started to depict people in natural activities.

For example, there’s a famous Greek sculpture of a boxer. We know he was a boxer because he had wraps around his hands. By the way, the Greeks, when they boxed, it wasn’t violent enough to use bare fists. They wrapped metal around their fists so that they could probably kill somebody. This boxer has a broken nose, but how would he survive getting hit hard with a wrapped hand with their version of brass knuckles?

But there’s also a depiction of a boy taking a thorn from his foot, a woman putting on her sandals and sitting elegantly, and, surprisingly, this is the first period where they’re also including female nudes, so male nudes and female nudes. By the time of Alexander, the Greeks also had magnificent realistic paintings, and we don’t have any examples of their paintings that have come down to us. They were proud of the realism in their paintings. A famous painter of that time, and the painter of Alexander the Great, was called Apelles. They say he painted a bunch of grapes so realistically that a bird came down and tried to peck at them.

So, we know it was valuable for the Greeks to paint realistically. We also have, I believe, a mosaic of the great victory that Alexander had over the King of Persia, Darius — not the Darius that invaded, but a later Darius. I believe it was the Battle of Issus. I should look that up to be more precise, but we do have a depiction of Alexander, who has dark hair and looks like a typical Greek. He looks like a modern Greek. He has dark hair, a dark beard, and a prominent nose. He wasn’t blonde. The mosaic is Roman, but it may have been a copy of an earlier Greek piece.

For some reason, Alexander has come down to us depicted as having blonde hair. He may have been described as having blonde hair, but the mosaic of him that we still have has him with dark hair. I want to look up that battle with the Persians. Let me look that up to get that right.

Jacobsen: Battle of Issus. I-S-S-U-S or I-S-S-O-S in southern Anatolia, November 5th, 333 BC. I got it right. So I got it right. Twenty thousand people died in that battle.

Richlin: Was it against, was the Persian emperor Darius, another Darius? There were several Dariuses.

Jacobsen: Let’s check in the online Britannica. King Darius III. He was defeated by Alexander the Great in an invasion of Asia, which defeated the Persian army. There’s a link to King Darius. He’s from Bactria and was part of the Achaemenid dynasty.

Richlin: Well, the point is that the Persian emperors were, at that point, the Persian Empire collapsed, and that’s considered the end of the rise of Mesopotamian civilizations and their dominance. The funny thing is that even though Alexander defeated the Persian Empire, Persia rose again later on and was a big danger to the Roman Empire. They managed to keep the Roman Empire at bay and even fought until the Arabs and the Muslims finally overcame them. Persia was a powerful threat to the Roman Empire and to the Byzantine, the later Byzantine Empire that was the successor to the Roman Empire, and it existed until 700 years after Christ. The Muslims eventually took it over, and it exists today, but with the Islamic religion.

Alexander defeated Persia, but they never went away. Alexander is an interesting historical point because that’s also the end of classical Greece. This is the golden age of what we consider the Athenians, the Spartans, a solely Greek culture, a golden age of Greece. Because before Alexander, his father, Philip, conquered all of Greece. He died and left Alexander in charge of all of Greece. Alexander decided it was time to get even with the Persians who had invaded Greece. Even though Alexander was a Macedonian, he considered himself the leader of Greek culture. So he’s the one that turned on Persia and went east. But Victor Davis Hanson makes an interesting point. The low point of Alexander’s life is his treatment of Thebes.

Thebes was the greatest city in Greece during this period. Athens was always a rival, but there were Thebes and Athens as two of the leaders of Greek culture. Alexander was a very, very learned man. His teacher was Aristotle, who was Greek. Alexander was very learned. But Victor Davis Hansen recently wrote a book on how — he’s an American historian — Alexander not only did he defeat Thebes, but he wiped them out. He ended the city.

His point was that because Alexander was learned, because he was a very educated, learned man, the Thebans didn’t think he would destroy them completely. But he did. His point is that just because somebody is an intellectual, it doesn’t mean that they won’t use genocide. It doesn’t mean they won’t use the complete annihilation of an enemy.

The circumstance is that Alexander had conquered all of Greece and was planning on invading Persia. Thebes revolted, so Alexander went back and made sure to annihilate Thebes. That means he killed all the men, enslaved all the women, and ended the city. The city was just literally left as corpses and enslaved people.

We don’t know why the whole line of Theban culture was destroyed, but I believe I know why he did this. I have yet to read any of the historians’ explanations. I have my theory. That is, if you are going to take your army into Persia, and Alexander makes it into India and penetrates India, you cannot have people in your rear revolting back in the homeland of Greece. You can’t have it.

So if he had a normal reaction to the Theban revolt, which was to take a few hostages, impose some strict penalties, take some enslaved people, disarm them in some way, and break down the walls of their city — other Greek cities might have said, well, it’s worth it to us to rebel because we’re not going to be annihilated. We’ll be treated with humanity. I think Alexander settled that there would be zero tolerance for rebellion once he was off invading and thousands of miles away, which he planned to be. So, there were no more rebellions after what he did to Thebes.

Now, why am I talking so much about Alexander the Great? Because Alexander affected art. One of the things that happened is that up until now, we know that Greek art was influenced — the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians influenced early Greek art — but Alexander brought Greek art to Afghanistan and India. So, there’s a break at this time, and the Asian cultures start sculpting more realistically.

This is very interesting; Realism was considered a good thing. If you’re a modern, sophisticated art historian, you hate realism, but the truth is that once the Indians and the Hindu sculptors saw Greek art, they started to get more realistic. So they were smart. Even in the modern era, we talk a lot about how Japanese art affected the French Impressionists like Lautrec because it had come to France in the form of prints. However, the Japanese artists in the 19th century were impressed by the Western understanding of anatomy. So they started to change their art. Again, it’s still a move towards realism.

This is why I will never be embarrassed or think realism is somehow less than an idealized or abstract art form. Now, I need clarification on how Alexander affected Greek art. I need clarification, but the Hellenistic period is the final form of Greek art that came after Alexander and extended into the period of the Romans. The best example of Hellenistic art is the Laocoön or the Laoöcoon — how it’s pronounced — L-A-O-C-O-O-N. This is a sculpture that’s now in the Vatican. It was discovered in the Renaissance, and thank God nobody knows who sculpted it. I’d have to remember that Greek sculptor’s name. No matter what happens, I wouldn’t.

Greek sculptors’ names are tricky. By the way, I left out a great classical sculpture called the Apollo Belvedere in the Met in New York. Again, it’s a Roman copy in marble, and Leochares sculpted it. Anyway, that was considered a high point. I like the Hermes by Praxiteles better. There were a variety of great Herculeses. The Farnese Hercules, I believe, was done by a man named Glykon.

The Laocoön was dug up during the Renaissance. It was discovered in Renaissance Italy. I think it was in Rome. It was a marvel. The Renaissance Italians were just devastated by it. It was a great challenge for Michelangelo to try to equal the Laocoön.

It’s a sculpture of a man attacked by serpents and his two sons. Laocoön was a prophet who had — or Laocoon — angered the gods. I think he took the wrong side in the Trojan War. So Poseidon… Poseidon was on the Greek side. In the Trojan War, the different gods took different sides. Naturally, the gods were always quarreling. But anyway, he was killed with his two sons by a serpent. So, a Greek sculptor sculpted this during the very late Greek period.

And it is unsurpassed. Nobody’s ever done a better sculpture. It’s completely realistic, a slight idealization, but humans could look like that. The anatomy is spectacular. Not only is there no stiffness, but it’s miraculously real and idealized simultaneously.

All the forms are beautiful and correct. So Michelangelo considered it a great challenge to him.

And so they wondered, the first thing that the Renaissance Italians wondered was whether it was all carved out of one piece of marble. Michelangelo was called upon to examine it. He found that the pieces were stuck together. Many must learn this. You can carve marble into several pieces.

It doesn’t all have to be carved out of one block. But you’ve got to be very clever when doing that. You have to be able to hide the seams. You can even chop something off by mistake, as I have, and patch it. So you can patch marble. There are ways of adding. Some glues have always been known, where you powder a little piece of the marble, attach it to it, mix it up with glue, and patch marble here and there with it. People don’t know that, but you can.

Another thing I want people to understand about the Greek sculptors and their greatness is that making a sculpture by patching clay is easier than carving something out of wood or marble. When patching things with clay, you can carve, tear the clay off, and add more. If you don’t like something, you make a mistake, you can easily fix it. So, all modern bronzes are made that way.

You throw together some clay, cover it with a mold, pour bronze into the mold through a series of steps, and get a bronze. So, bronze is easier to do than marble, and it is easier to carve out than marble. But let me tell you how great the Greek sculptors were. In my lifetime, they found microscopic pieces of wood inside Greek bronzes.

Jacobsen: Wow.

Richlin: Do you see the implications? This means the Greek sculptors carved their pieces out of wood and poured bronze over them. So they were so good that they didn’t use additive and subtractive methods. They carved the piece out of wood. It was all subtractive. They couldn’t make any mistakes. Do you see what I’m saying? They were so good they didn’t have to make a mold. That is exactly how you would create a bronze over a wood sculpture without making the rubber mold. It’s fair to say right now that you make a bronze sculpture by sculpting something in clay. That’s water-based or oil-based clay. The oil-based clay stays wet longer. That’s why it’s made with oil instead of water, whereas the water-based clay dries in a few days or weeks.

You can add and subtract to get it just how you like it. When it’s done, you pour liquid rubber onto the clay and then get a mold. You tear apart the liquid rubber, and you have an empty mold. Then, you pour liquid wax into the mould. And you get what is known as a positive. You get a wax version of your clay sculpture. But then, you have to make a second mold by adding liquid ceramic to the wax. What ends up hardening is the ceramic material onto the wax, and the reason is that the ceramic can withstand heat. Because you’re going to pour liquid bronze into the top of the ceramic, it will force out the wax through the bottom. Then you’ll have a bronze, a finished bronze. That’s how you get a bronze.

Jacobsen: Do you think the Greeks were a major inflection point, a phase change in the development of realism based on the sophistication of techniques, the care, the distance of the limbs from the core body so they’re separated? The sculpting can be done, the realism of the motion, and things like this, where more principles, precision, and care are given to a realistic portrayal. Do you think that culture was one of the first major inflection points?

Richlin: Well, I should mention this. Do you know what Socrates’ profession was besides being a philosopher?

Jacobsen: Was he a painter and sculptor?

Richlin: He was known as a stone carver.

Jacobsen: Interesting.

Richlin: Now that’s an ambiguous title. So he might’ve been a sculptor. What the Greeks brought to sculpture was scientific inquiry. They sought to understand anatomy, facial expression, and movement in a way that the other cultures we discussed were not interested. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Greek sculptors were looking for repeatable principles, meaning an arm will always look a certain way when it’s bent, an arm has a certain range of motion, and a face has a certain range of expression that’s repeatable. So, the Greek sculptors tried to analyze the body scientifically.

Aesthetically but also scientifically. At the same time, the Greeks were trying to understand repeatable patterns and what was truth. It was as if the Greeks were developing science and the idea that there were repeated principles. Things didn’t happen because of random magic thrown at the world by gods. The Greeks were looking for the underlying principles in everything. As they developed the beginning of science, they also developed more realistic sculptures and art. Does that sound significant? Because I think it is.

Jacobsen: It sounds as if, noting your expertise compared to my own here, that Greek culture, in terms of its art and looking for foundational principles of beauty, was in a way looking for an ontology of aesthetics through principles that they could discover through an epistemology and then systematize and then apply in their art. In that way, there wasn’t a distinction between artistic methodologies, and there wasn’t a distinction between science and technology. There was the discovery, then mastery of the application. That distinction from the fickleness of the gods to looking for rational intelligibility of the world might have been another big leap in philosophical discourse that manifested in art and science.

Richlin: That manifested in, yes, well, that manifested in art and science. The point I was trying to make earlier was that I’m still determining, was that development of more realistic art could have influenced Greek science and philosophy instead of the other way around — the two things developed simultaneously. The development of realistic art might have come first and influenced philosophy. At the very least, realistic art, noticing patterns in nature and science, and the development of Greek logic all came together simultaneously. It was hand in hand. So realism was, at the very least, a natural outgrowth of the Greek search for truth.

This search for truth is one of the bases of Western civilization. There are a variety of cultures and movements on Earth that don’t value truth very highly. For example, Marxists will say and use propaganda. They say whatever they have to say. They propagandize because they’re all about power. In Islamic culture, they are encouraged to deceive when conquering an enemy.

That’s a very effective technique in war, that you can lie to your enemy. So, the Greeks’ search for truth and creating the first realistic sculpture are significant breaks in human development. Also, it’s important to say that the Jews, the other important founders of Western civilization at this time, don’t have any artistic tradition. People say it may have been because of the biblical precept not to create graven images of anything on Earth or heaven in the Bible.

The Jewish religion did not want people to develop sculptures that they would worship, graven images that they would worship, like the people around them. They wanted their God to be invisible because, well, for various reasons, an invisible God is everywhere at once. He’s omnipotent, omnipresent, all-powerful, omniscient, and of the spirit, which the Jews distinguish from the flesh. But we don’t have any Jewish sculptures from this period. The Jews had to get the Phoenicians to build their great temple. The Phoenicians designed the Temple of Solomon. So they had no aesthetics and no developed aesthetics. Arguably, it’s because they were an agrarian people who had difficulty developing cities and everything. But they had time to develop art if they wanted to; they just didn’t.

Jacobsen: These enjoyments of realistic aesthetics. In Greek times, was it more for the rich, the poor, or everyone?

Richlin: There is a distinction, of course. That’s a good point. When we talk about the Greeks, by the way, we’re leaving out the Spartans. The Spartans had a limited amount of art. The Spartan male was a warrior only. They didn’t have a profession in sculpture. I imagine they had sculptures, but they would have been done by somebody other than the Spartans. The ancient Greeks used sculptures of gods and goddesses, depictions of battles they had on the Parthenon, and reliefs for everyone.

But, this gets on to what we will discuss next: the Romans. The Romans would decorate the houses of the nobility and rich people with sculptures. I assume that both cultures decorated their homes with sculptures. The Romans and the Greeks decorated their homes with sculptures. But Greek art was public art. Romans also had public art but were famous for having art collections in rich people’s homes. So, the Romans had art galleries where they would buy art. They had decorative art that they were very proud of. I can’t resist telling you this.

After the Romans conquered the Greeks, it was the Battle of Cynoscephalae. The Roman maniples, or soldiers, defeated the Greek phalanx. Now, it wasn’t the Battle of Ctesiphon against the Persians, excuse me, where the Persians ultimately defeated the Romans. But anyway, when the Romans conquered Greece, the Greek sculptors had a field day because the Romans wanted those sculptures. So, they brought Greek sculptors over to Rome.

And I’ll bet you that the Greek sculptors were happy about that because I’m a sculptor, too. If somebody conquered California and said, “Well, we need what you do, Lance,” and brought me over, took care of me, and bought my work, I could probably live with that. So, what happened was that the Romans highly valued and worshiped Greek culture, and they brought the Greek sculptors over. Yes, it was for ceremonies, public monuments, and also to adorn the rich people’s homes.

Did they invent? As I mentioned earlier, the Romans melted down a lot of bronze. Many people did, and they copied the Greek sculptures in marble. That’s how we know a lot of the Greeks. That’s how many Greek sculptures came down to us: exact copies by the Romans in marble.

Jacobsen: So there was a minor loss from the Greeks to the Romans. It was more of a copy and paste into a different substrate. Is there loss in marble, for instance? And that is the major transition there. It was a minor loss of culture from the Greeks to the Romans.

Richlin: No, no. The Romans preserved Greek culture. It’s not easy, but a qualified sculptor can make an exact copy of a bronze in marble. Even today, it can be done. So we’re sure that these sculptures were faithful to the Greek originals. I want to say something about bronze. So, the bronze was valuable. It’s the funniest thing.

When the Turks conquered Greece, even up to the 19th century, they used marble from the Parthenon to build. They would take big pieces of Greek marble and build with them, which is one of the reasons that the Greek sculptures from the Parthenon, called the Elgin Marbles, were taken to Britain. Lord Elgin, an Englishman, saved the Greek marble.

Phidias’ sculptures at the Parthenon. Elgin brought them to what ended up being the British Museum. So they’re called the Elgin Marbles. But just as the Turks used marble from the great art of the Greeks, many cultures used bronze from the Greeks and melted it down. It turns out.

Many people think that we went from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age because bronze was less, couldn’t hold up to iron weapons, and the iron would bend and cut through the bronze weapons. Recent scholarship has shown that the bronze was just as good. The problem was that it took more work to get. Iron is a lot easier to get. If you’ve got a giant army, and you depend on mines scattered around the ancient world — they had one in Britain, they had one in Greece — and it’s hard to get, then it’s hard to equip your army. 

Even in the Iliad, this is a related issue, but there’s much talk about taking the armor of your dead foe, his bronze shield and his bronze and stripping him of his armor, which has been done until today. Armies will strip the corpses of the dead. But it turns out that iron was easier to obtain when they figured out how to make and use it. So, people switched to iron, and we entered the Iron Age under the successors of the Greeks, who used iron weapons and armor.

We discussed whether the Romans destroyed Greek culture by melting the bronze. No, they made sure to make exact copies. They were practical people, very intelligent. That’s a big difference in a lot of history, even modern history, where there is an innovative culture and works of art, some several thousand years old.

Jacobsen: Most people, most of the time, consider these crimes against human civilization because there’s a long history.

Richlin: The greatest destruction of bronze was done by the Nazis when they took over France.] Mid-20th century, the Nazis, Paris was a city alive with bronze sculptures. There are photographs of giant pits of monumental French bronzes. Just hundreds and hundreds of monumental French bronzes that would have been all over the cities that the Nazis gathered up and melted down. It was an act of inconceivable barbarism that modern people could do that to French art. They didn’t make any copies or molds of this art. They could have. But they stripped France of bronzes that were high points of Western civilization, and they’re gone forever. And again, they wanted to destroy French culture, but apparently, the bronze was of some utilitarian value to the Nazis as well, just as the Greek bronze was of value to the Romans.

There was also another tremendous destruction of art in the Baroque period. When the Protestants and Catholics of Europe went to war with each other, it was very common for unbelievable paintings to be destroyed by both sides. The Protestants were famous for destroying Catholic paintings. There was a great French painter, one of the greatest, named Georges de La Tour, and a significant portion of his art was destroyed by Protestant French because they considered the Catholic fascination with painting idolatry and an indulgence that was not spiritual.

So they destroyed, during what was called the Reformation, much Catholic art was destroyed. This period was the greatest period of art. A lot of artists, including myself, believe this. This was the period of Rembrandt, Velázquez, Vermeer, Caravaggio. The wars of religion destroyed a lot of it.

Bibliography

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Footnotes

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Citations

American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. On Realist Art 2: Mesopotamia to the Greeks. July 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/realist-art-2

American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, July 15). On Realist Art 2: Mesopotamia to the Greeks. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).

Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. On Realist Art 2: Mesopotamia to the Greeks. In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.

Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “On Realist Art 2: Mesopotamia to the Greeks.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/realist-art-2.

Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “On Realist Art 2: Mesopotamia to the Greeks.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (July 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/realist-art-2.

Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘On Realist Art 2: Mesopotamia to the Greeks’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/realist-art-2>.

Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘On Realist Art 2: Mesopotamia to the Greeks’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/realist-art-2>.

Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “On Realist Art 2: Mesopotamia to the Greeks.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/realist-art-2.

Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. On Realist Art 2: Mesopotamia to the Greeks [Internet]. 2024 Jul; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/realist-art-2.

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