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In this wide-ranging study, Richard Neer offers a new way to
understand the epoch-making sculpture of classical Greece. Working
at the intersection of art history, archaeology, literature, and
aesthetics, he reveals a people fascinated with the power of
sculpture to provoke wonder in beholders. Wonder, not accuracy,
realism, naturalism, or truth, was the supreme objective of Greek
sculptors. Neer traces this way of thinking about art from the
poems of Homer to the philosophy of Plato. Then, through meticulous
accounts of major sculpture from around the Greek world, he shows
how the demand for wonder-inducing statues gave rise to some of the
greatest masterpieces of Greek art.
A groundbreaking study of the interaction of poetry, performance,
and the built environment in ancient Greece. Winner of the PROSE
Award for Best Book in Classics by the Association of American
Publishers In this volume, Richard Neer and Leslie Kurke develop a
new, integrated approach to classical Greece: a "lyric archaeology"
that combines literary and art-historical analysis with
archaeological and epigraphic materials. At the heart of the book
is the great poet Pindar of Thebes, best known for his magnificent
odes in honor of victors at the Olympic Games and other
competitions. Unlike the quintessentially personal genre of modern
lyric, these poems were destined for public performance by choruses
of dancing men. Neer and Kurke go further to show that they were
also site-specific: as the dancers moved through the space of a
city or a sanctuary, their song would refer to local monuments and
landmarks. Part of Pindar's brief, they argue, was to weave words
and bodies into elaborate tapestries of myth and geography and, in
so doing, to re-imagine the very fabric of the city-state. Pindar's
poems, in short, were tools for making sense of space. Recent
scholarship has tended to isolate poetry, art, and archaeology. But
Neer and Kurke show that these distinctions are artificial. Poems,
statues, bronzes, tombs, boundary stones, roadways, beacons, and
buildings worked together as a "suite" of technologies for
organizing landscapes, cityscapes, and territories. Studying these
technologies in tandem reveals the procedures and criteria by which
the Greeks understood relations of nearness and distance, "here"
and "there"-and how these ways of inhabiting space were essentially
political. Rooted in close readings of individual poems, buildings,
and works of art, Pindar, Song, and Space ranges from Athens to
Libya, Sicily to Rhodes, to provide a revelatory new understanding
of the world the Greeks built-and a new model for studying the
ancient world.
In the fifth century BCE, an artistic revolution occurred in
Greece, as sculptors developed new ways of representing bodies,
movement, and space. The resulting 'classical' style would prove
influential for centuries to come. Modern scholars have
traditionally described the emergence of this style as a steady
march of progress, culminating in masterpieces like the Parthenon
sculptures. But this account assumes the impossible: that the early
Greeks were working tirelessly toward a style of which they had no
prior knowledge. In this ambitious work, Richard Neer draws on
recent work in art history, archaeology, literary criticism, and
art theory to rewrite the story of Greek sculpture. He provides new
ways to understand classical sculpture in Greek terms, and
carefully analyzes the relationship between political and stylistic
histories. A much-heralded project, "The Emergence of the Classical
Style in Greek Sculpture" represents an important step in
furthering our understanding of the ancient world.
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