The Different Periods of Ancient Greek Art

The Different Periods of Ancient Greek Art As it happened centuries later with a handful of Renaissance painters, ancient Greek art tends to be thought of in vague terms- vases, statues and architecture produced a long (unspecified) time ago. Indeed, a long time has passed between us and ancient Greece, and thinking like this is a good starting point, really. The vases, sculpture and architecture were huge innovations, and artists forever afterward owed an enormous debt to the ancient Greeks. Because so many centuries and different phases encompass ancient Greek art what well try to do rather briefly is to break it down into some manageable chunks, thus giving each period its due. Its important to know that ancient Greek art was mainly comprised of vases, sculpture and architecture, lasted around 1,600 years, and covered a number of of different periods. The Different Phases of Ancient Greek Art There were many phases from the 16th century BC until the Greeks suffered defeat at the hands of the Romans at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. The phases are roughly as follows: Mycenaean Art occurred from roughly 1550-1200 BC on the Greek mainland. Although the Mycenaean and Greek cultures were two separate entities, they occupied the same lands successively. The latter learned a few thing from the former, including how to build gates and tombs. Besides architectural explorations including Cyclopean masonry and beehive tombs, the Mycenaeans were awesome goldsmiths and potters. They raised pottery from merely functional to beautifully decorative, and segued right out of the Bronze Age into their own insatiable appetite for gold. One suspects that that the Mycenaeans were so wealthy they werent satisfied with a humble alloy.Around 1200 and the Homeric fall of Troy, the Mycenaean culture dwindled and died, followed by an artistic phase known both as Sub-Mycenaean and/or the Dark Ages. This phase, lasting from c. 1100-1025 BC, saw a bit of continuity with the previous artistic doings, but no innovation.From c. 1025-900 BC, the Proto-Geometric phase saw pottery beginning to be decorated with simple shapes, black bands, and wavy lines. Additionally, technique in the shaping of pots was being refined as well. Geometric Art has been assigned the years of 900-700 BC. Its name is utterly descriptive of the art created during this phase. Pottery decoration moved beyond simple shapes to also include animals and humans. Everything, however, was rendered with the use of simple geometric shapes.Archaic Art, from c. 700-480 BC, began with an Orientalizing Phase (735-650 BC). In this, elements from other civilizations began to creep into Greek art. The elements were those of the Near East (not exactly what we think of as the Orient now, but remember the world was a lot smaller in those days).The Archaic phase is best known for the beginnings of realistic depictions of humans and monumental stone sculptures. It was during the Archaic period that the limestone kouros (male) and kore (female) statues were created, always depicting young, nude, smiling persons. Note: The Archaic and subsequent Classical and Hellenistic periods each contained separate Early, High, and Late phases just like the Italian R enaissance would further on down the road. Classical Art (480-323 BC) was created during a golden age, from the time Athens rose to prominence to Greek expansion and right up until the death of Alexander the Great. It was during this period that human statues became so heroically proportioned. Of course, they were reflective of Greek Humanistic belief in the nobility of man and, perhaps, a desire to look a bit like gods. They were also the result of the invention of metal chisels finally capable of working marble.Hellenistic Art (323-31 BC)- quite like Mannerism- went a wee bit over the top. By the time Alexander had died and things got chaotic in Greece as his empire broke apart, Greek sculptors had mastered carving marble. They were so technically perfect that they began to sculpt impossibly heroic humans. People simply do not look as flawlessly symmetrical or beautiful in real life as those sculptures portray, which may explain why the sculptures remain so popular after all these years.

Audience in Rhetoric and Composition

Audience in Rhetoric and Composition In rhetoric and composition, audience  (from the Latin- audire: hear),  refers to the listeners or spectators at a speech or performance, or the intended readership for a piece of writing. James Porter notes that audience has been an important concern of Rhetoric since the fifth century B.C.E., and the injunction to consider audience is one of the oldest and most common suggestions to writers and speakers (Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition, 1996). Examples and Observations Your readers, those people you are trying to reach with your writing, constitute your audience. The relationship between your audiences needs- based on its knowledge and level of expertise- and your own selection and presentation of evidence is important. Much of what you say and how you say it depends on whether your audience is a group of experts or a more general audience consisting of diverse people interested in your topic.Even the way you organize your writing and the amount of details you include- the terms you define, the amount of context you provide, the level of your explanations- depends in part on what your audience needs to know.(R. DiYanni and P. C. Hoy II, Scribners Handbook for Writers. Allyn, 2001) Knowing Your Audience Knowing your audience means understanding what it is that they want to know, what they are interested in, whether they agree with or oppose your central arguments, and whether they are likely to find your subject matter useful. You also need to keep in mind the diversity of the audience- some of them might want knowledge while others want to be entertained.(David E. Gray, Doing Research in the Real World. SAGE, 2009)In short, knowing your audience increases your ability to accomplish your purpose for writing.(George Eppley and Anita Dixon Eppley, Building Bridges to Academic Writing. McGraw-Hill, 1996)Writing a book is a solitary experience. I would hide from my own family in a tiny room next to our washer/dryer and type. To keep the writing from being too stiff, I tried to imagine I was having a conversation with a friend.(Tina Fey, Bossypants. Little, Brown, 2011)Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesnt exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person- a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.(John Steinbeck, interviewed by Nathaniel Benchley. The Paris Review, Fall 1969) How to Increase Your Awareness of Audience You can increase your awareness of your  audience  by asking yourself a few questions before you begin to write: Who are to be your readers?What is their age level? background? education?Where do they live?What are their beliefs and attitudes?What interests them?What, if anything, sets them apart from other people?How familiar are they with your subject? ​(X.J.  Kennedy, et al.,  The Bedford Reader, 1997) Five Types of Audience We can distinguish five types of address in the process of hierarchical appeals. These are determined by the kinds of audiences we must court. First, there is the general public (They); second, there are community guardians (We); third, others significant to us as friends and confidants with whom we talk intimately (You which internalized becomes Me); fourth, the self we address inwardly in soliloquy (the I talking to its me); and fifth,  ideal audiences whom we address as ultimate sources of social order.(Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Communication and Social Order. Oxford University Press, 1968) Real and Implied Audiences The meanings of audience...tend to diverge in two general directions: one toward actual people external to a text, the audience whom the writer must accommodate; the other toward the text itself and the audience implied there, a set of suggested or evoked attitudes, interests, reactions, [and] conditions of knowledge which may or may not fit with the qualities of actual readers or listeners.(Douglas B. Park, The Meaning of Audience. College English, 44, 1982) A Mask for the Audience [R]hetorical situations involve imagined, fictionalized, constructed versions of the author and the audience. The authors create a narrator or speaker for their texts, sometimes called the persona- literally the mask of the authors, the faces they put forward to their audiences. But modern rhetoric suggests that the author makes a mask for the audience as well. Both Wayne Booth and Walter Ong have suggested that the authors audience is always a fiction. And Edwin Black refers to the rhetorical concept of audience as the second persona. Reader-response theory speaks of implied and ideal audiences. The point is that the author has already begun to craft the appeal as the audience is envisaged and assigned to a position...The success of the rhetoric  depends partly upon whether members of the audience are willing to accept the mask offered to them.(M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Appeals in Modern Rhetoric: An Ordinary-Language Approach. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005) Audience in the Digital Age Developments in computer-mediated communication- or the use of various forms of computer technology for writing, storing, and distributing electronic texts- raise new audience issues...As a writing tool, the computer influences the consciousness and practice of both writers and readers and changes how writers produce documents and how readers read them...Studies in hypertext and hypermedia point out how in these media readers contribute actively to textual construction in making their own navigation decisions. In the realm of interactive hypertext, the unitary notions of text and author are further eroded, as is any notion of the audience as a passive receiver.(James E. Porter, Audience. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Communication from Ancient Times to the Information Age, ed. by Theresa Enos. Routledge, 1996)