Egyptian Greek and Roman Sculptures Term Paper

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Egyptian, Greek, and Roman Sculpture

Different cultures see the world in different ways. Religion, society, and even politics, shape our views, and give form to our human environment. Architecture, music, literature, dress -- all are visible manifestations of a people's values. This is no less true in the realm of sculpture. A religious people will create works of art that express its most deeply held spiritual beliefs; a cerebral people, sculptures that capture humankind's highest ideals, while the politically minded turn out statues and busts that represent their world's movers and shakers. Styles can range from the formal and the symbolic, to the ideal and the real. Each serves its cultural purpose. As all peoples have done, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans produced sculptures that testify to the beliefs of their respective societies.

Ancient Egypt was a fundamentally religious society. The axis of its world turned around the will of a god-king who endlessly re-enacted the drama of his father the sun's journey across the sky and through the underworld. Life after death was central to Egyptian belief, as was the necessity of preserving the body intact. A world so regulated and repetitive required an art that expressed order and stability. The canons of Egyptian society and its art are aptly displayed in the towering Colossi of Rameses at Abu Simbel. Here as in all depictions of the king, individual characteristics count for little. "The greatness of the Egyptian gods [is] represented by the images of the divine king and his family.

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" (Schulz and Seidel p.214) In each of the four identical statues, the Pharaoh is represented as a majestic giant, his hands resting calmly by his sides as he sits motionless on his eternal throne. His enormous size is a reflection of his importance, his wife but a tiny doll-like figure at his feet. Fixed eyes, slightly muscular chest, clenched fists, and narrow waist: his form is the same as those of the pharaohs before him. Nor has the costume been varied, for he wears the same short royal skirt, beard, and crown of his ancestors of centuries before. (Shaw, p.299) It is the pose and the insignia of royalty that mark him as king. The mammoth figures are as one with the rock from which they were carved - the god-king is as much a part of the natural order of things as the cliff itself.

In contrast to the Egyptians and their almost timeless world, the Classical Greeks valued rational inquiry. Their sculptures reflected the highest ideals to which man should aspire. Hermes and the Child Dionysos by Praxiteles shows two gods as human beings in normal proportion. Rather than being symbolic representations of all-powerful, unchanging gods, they are images of two seeming real, if very perfect individuals. It is this perfection of the human form and its application to both gods and men that is the hallmark of Greek Classical….....

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