Chapter 2: Roots of Western Culture

Frieze

A horizontal ribbon of relief carvings that circles the cella and treasury at roof level. Because the frieze is located so high up on the building, and because it was further obscured by the columns, some scholars think that it was primarily intended for viewing by the gods themselves

Woodcut

A technique for making multiple original images that was invented in Asia and brought to Europe in the Middle Ages. A flat wooden surface is carved so that the lines to be printed project from a flat background. The projecting or relief lines are inked, then the block is pressed onto a piece of paper and the image is printed. Many saints pictures were created as ____ to be sold in cathedrals during pilgrimage.

Gothic

A time when Western Europe was beginning its move out of feudalism into capitalism, the Catholic Church was confirming its dominance over the continent, and both art and philosophy began their gradual transition from heavenly to earthly focus

Apollo

Athena's younger brother, the god of reason and light, was the perfectly beautiful male. Greek ideal so perfectly embodied: calm, pitiless, and supremely confident in the power of physical beauty.

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

Book VII of Plato's Republic, Socrates speaks to Glaucon of what he calls "the prison-house" of the world of sight in order to explain the contrast between truth and representation. Convinced that reality itself was situated in an ideal realm and everything here on earth was but a corrupted copy of the ideal original

Roger Bacon

Franciscan monk and one of the medieval thinkers who's journals explored the application of Greek and Arabic theories of optics. Manuscript renderings of monks with eyeglasses illustrate some of the practical uses found for these theories during the Middle Ages. Him and his contemporaries began using the camera obscura to study solar eclipses. He also understood that mirrors could be used for projections and described a new kind of art based on the application of geometry (Linear perspective).

Venus

Goddess of Love and wife of Hephaistos-Vulcan, the God of the Forge. The Classical Greek Aphrodite figure was typically rather modestly posed, with her left hand suspended over their genital area became a chaste concealment in the Greek figures.

Athena

Greek goddess, ruled over certain natural and cultural phenomena. Her dominion over wisdom comes from her miraculous birth. One day Zeus, the father of the gods, had a horrid headache. He called upon the God of the Forge Hephaistos (known as Vulcan to the later Romans), who struck Zeus's head with an axe and split it open. Fully grown and fully armed, born from the brain of the divine patriarch, she embodied his wisdom. She won dominion over war at sea when she bested her uncle Neptune, who was Zeus's brother and the God of the Ocean, in a mythic contest

Manuscript

Hand-made books. Most medieval ____ were produced in an arduous fashion: monks and nuns worked in scriptoria, special rooms in their monasteries and convents, fastidiously copying each word, indeed, each letter, by hand from one book into another. The most popular were Bibles and ecclesiastical calendars known as Books of Hours.

Chartres Cathedral

Major cathedral on the road between Paris and Santiago. A common cathedral for pilgrims to see the sights; to socialize; to eat, drink, and spend the night; and to buy souvenirs. Among the souvenirs a pilgrim could purchase were printed images of saints.

Ziggurat

Most important structure of the Sumerian city, the massive stepped pyramidal platform that stood at its center. The sacred structure was heavily fortified, with thick walls protecting concentric rings of higher and higher elevations. A symbolic mountain on top of which was the temple, the house of the city's patron deity, where—on behalf of the people—the Sumerian priests and kings communed with the divine.

Victory of Stela of Naram-Sin

One of the earliest known monuments erected to glorify a conqueror, a function that art takes many times later in history. The belief in divine encounter on a mountaintop.

Cylinder seal

Small stone tubes carved in relief so that, when pressed into the wet clay tablets, they created miniature images narrating the sacred stories of the Sumerians. Cylinder seals may have functioned as official signatures, confirming temple gifts or authenticating elite decrees.

Parthenon

Temple dedicated to the patron deity Athena. The single most important building in Ancient Athens. Sited on a mountaintop, which was fortified to protect the sacred precinct from ongoing military assault. Functioned as a grand ideological statement. A sumptuous declaration of who the Athenians were and aspired to be, it boasted of their status as the preeminent city in Greece.

Ancient Sumer

The ancient culture that developed between the fertile Tigris-Euphrates River beds of Modern-Day Iraq. The early phase of Mesopotamia was a loosely associated group of city-states that began over six thousand years ago. Apparently the first culture to make the leap from village to city. Had massive buildings, and the social organization was based on specialized bureaucracies.

Grotte Chauvet

The cave paintings over 32,000 years old. Discoverd by three French spelunkers—Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel and Christian Hillaire in December 1994. More than three hundred paintings and engravings are scattered over the surfaces of the chambers. The animals, which are depicted moving and often overlapping, include: bears, bison, horses, hyenas, ibex, owls, rhinoceros, and large spotted felines, possibly panthers

Cuneiform

The people of the Sumerian cities developed a writing system done with pointed sticks pressed into wet clay tablets. Most of these tablets are economic and administrative in nature; many document the economic activities of the temple. They provide records of the sheep, grains and other goods brought to the priests in honor of the divine overseers.

Pediment

Triangular roof components. Parthenon: largest sculptural figures appeared on the pediments. Both the east pediment and the west pediment framed complex representations of the patron goddess

Standard of Ur

a large wooden box covered with elaborate mosaic of shell, red limestone, and lapis lazuli. Both sides of the box—which may have served as part of a musical instrument, perhaps a lyre--are organized into three registers. One side depicts war: above, soldiers lead prisoners of war to their king; below, infantry and charioteers do battle with an unnamed enemy. The "Peace" side of the box depicts what may be a victory celebration.