I'm not entirely sure if Winckelmann has affected our modern perception of Greek art or not. I say this because I've never heard of him before, and I doubt that most of the general population has as well. Most people are only exposed to pictures of these statues, and what they see in those pictures is what they think of when they think about Greek art.
They think of welly sculpted, white marble, figures (unless of course they have seen articles in the news about how they were painted). And I do not believe that they think of, “good taste” or “pure” or “simple” when looking at the statues. However, Winckelmann might of affected how other art historians or artists in general view these Greek statues. But, that being said I do not think that art today would be produced differently if Winckelmann hadn't promoted his ideas. This is because of the wide variety of art styles that you can find in sculpture, some are painted, and some are not. I believe that it's up to the artists to decide on how art is produced.
The first time I saw painted Greek statues was a few months ago, and back then I wasn't sure what to make of them. It took a long time to get over what I used to consider Greek statues (white marble) and to be honest the painted statues reminded me of hummel figurines, or something that I would find in my grandmother's house. However, now that I'm looking at them again I can see just how much detail went into these statues to make them as life like as possible. Not only were the Greeks masters at sculpture, but they were also masters at painting. The Archer on page 113 demonstrates this, with how the patterning applied to the Archer's legs changes in size in accordance to the size and shape of the body beneath it. This change in size gives a more 3 dimensional and naturalistic appearance to the figure.
3 comments:
When I was writing my blog post about this topic I felt the same way, not really sure if Winckelmann had actually affected art. Then I started thinking back to the 18th century and the fact that he was basically an advocate of these unpainted Greek statues, he must have had to affected the artists in that time. I think Winckelmann's ideas made it so people didn't think about the possibility of the statues being originally painted.
You have a good point about how we see white Greek statues today, so we naturally have that association with Greek art. I don't necessarily think it's problematic that today we think about Greek art as being "white." But I don't think we should assume that the Greeks wanted to have white sculpture to make a "pure" and "simple" statement, since we can tell that isn't the case.
Nice thoughts!
-Prof. Bowen
This is Jennifer. I feel that he has affected peoples minds at least alittle because when seeing statues the could have had a picture of what they looked like and what they looked like now. I do however agree that art isnt really based off of his ideas and thoughts because like you said each artist has there own idea of art to them.
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