Myths about the heroes of ancient Greece in works of art. View the contents of the document “Myths of Ancient Greece and art What is myth in art

All of you have ever picked up books about ancient civilizations. I'm sure you haven't ignored history of Ancient Greece.
Of particular interest, of course, are the myths and legends of this greatest state. Usually, we first read these tales back in school age

. Unfortunately, the number of people who managed to grasp the very essence of the stories is too small, but re-reading them again is often just too lazy. All biographies of Greek gods and heroes are filled with the deepest philosophical and life meaning. Many ideas and truths do not lie on the surface, and sometimes it is difficult to understand what it is all about we're talking about
, because in legends, ancient authors used a great variety of allegories, allegories...
And really, it’s worth the effort to comprehend the forgotten language of antiquity in search of a magic word that will open the way to the treasury of wisdom.

But understanding the meaning of a particular story is just the beginning.
Why, you ask?.. Myths and legends of Ancient Greece

inspired many creators and became the basis for the masterpieces they created. In my project I would like to introduce you to some of my favorite myths, legends and tales and show you my creations great masters , inspired by these narratives, who embodied in their works the historical, cultural, philosophical significance of deeds and exploits

gods and heroes of ancient Greece.
It is especially exciting to compare paintings by artists who are representatives of different eras, countries and styles. I will try to convey to you the idea that the painter pursued while working on the canvas. And you will also see how different the creators’ views on the same ancient plot are. I think it's worth noting first that inhabitants of Olympus, despite their divine essence, earthly desires and temptations were not alien. The gods fell in love, were jealous, and were at enmity with each other and with mortals. And the entire spiritual life of the people of that time revolved around art and poetry, and to a lesser extent around philosophy. Hellene I could not imagine life without admiring - long and repeatedly - objects of art and contemplation of beautiful buildings. More had for the Hellene the contemplation of human beauty. That is why the gods were depicted in the guise of beautiful, well-built people, similar to mere mortals, but only in appearance. I think it should be clarified that Hellenism is an ancient art last quarter IV - I centuries BC in Greece, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea region, Western Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, in which the traditions of local and Greek culture;

arose as a result of the formation of Hellenistic monarchies and the spread of Hellenic culture in them after the conquest of the Persian state by Alexander the Great in the last quarter of the 4th century BC.
The artists not only tried to convey what the vision of the ancient Greeks was, but also to bring into the canvases something of their own, dictated by a different historical era.

Well, I think you will be very interested to know in more detail what the essence of my research is. Then... read the following pages of my website.

Introduction A person can realize his or her dreams in different ways. creativity

, and the fullness of his creative self-expression is achieved through the creation and use of various cultural forms. Each of these forms has its own “specialized” semantic and symbolic system.
The development of culture is accompanied by the emergence and formation of relatively independent value systems. At first they are included in the context of culture, but then development leads to deeper specialization and, finally, to their relative independence. This happened with mythology, religion, art.

In modern culture we can already talk about their relative independence and the interaction of culture with these institutions.

So what are myths? In the everyday understanding, these are, first of all, ancient, biblical and other ancient “tales” about the creation of the world and man, stories about the deeds of ancient gods and heroes.

For those interested in cultural history, literature and art, familiarity with mythology is absolutely necessary. Indeed, starting from the Renaissance, artists and sculptors began to widely draw themes for their works from the tales of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Arriving at any art museum, an inexperienced visitor finds himself captivated by the beautiful, but often incomprehensible in content, works of the great masters of Russian fine art: paintings by P. Sokolov (“Daedalus Tying the Wings of Icarus”), K. Bryullov (“The Meeting of Apollo and Diana” "), I. Aivazovsky (“Poseidon rushing across the sea”), F. Bruni (“The Death of Camilla, Horace’s sister”), V. Serov (“The Rape of Europa”), sculptures by such outstanding masters as M. Kozlovsky (“ Achilles with the body of Patroclus”), V. Demut-Malinovsky (“The Abduction of Proserpina”), M. Shchedrin (“Marsyas”). The same can be said about some masterpieces of Western European art, be it “Perseus and Andromeda” by Rubens, “Landscape with Polyphemus” by Poussin, “Danae” and “Flora” by Rembrandt, “Mucius Scaevola in the Camp of Porsenna”, Tiepolo or structural groups “ Apollo and Daphne by Bernini, Pygmalion and Galatea by Thorvaldsen, Cupid and Psyche and Hebe by Canova. 1

Target of this work: to show the interaction of art and myth, and to trace the history of the development of myth as a form of culture.

In this work, I put tasks:

1) Expand the concept of myth;

2) Show the role of art in the development of culture;

3) Show the history of the development of myth in art;

4) Outline, from our point of view, the most significant relationships between modern art and myth.

5) Show the development of mythology and art in the 19th – 20th centuries.

Relevance of this work is that art and mythology are an integral part of culture, for which a person, with all his desire to distance himself from the myth and destroy it, at the same time has a deep need for it. Likewise, in modern art this need to acquire myth is very strong.

………………………………………………………………………….

1) Andreev G.L. History of Europe vol. 1., M., 1988, p. 21

1. What is a myth.

Myth is not only historically the first form of culture, but also changes the mental life of a person, which persists even when myth loses its absolute dominance. The universal essence of myth is that it represents the unconscious semantic twinning of a person with the forces of immediate existence, be it the existence of nature or society. If myth acts as the only form of culture, then this twinning leads to the fact that a person does not distinguish meaning from a natural property, but a semantic one (associative relationship from cause-and-effect). Everything becomes animated, and nature appears as a world of formidable, but related to man, mythological creatures - demons and gods. 2

In parallel with myth, art existed and operated in the history of culture. Art is an expression of a person’s need for figurative and symbolic expression and experiencing significant moments in his life. Art creates a “second reality” for a person - a world of life experiences expressed by special figurative and symbolic means. Involvement in this world, self-expression and self-knowledge in it constitute one of the most important needs of the human soul. 3

Art produces its values ​​through artistic activity and the artistic exploration of reality. The task of art comes down to the knowledge of the aesthetic, to the artistic interpretation by the author of the phenomena of the surrounding world. In artistic thinking, cognitive and evaluative activities are not separated and are used in unity. Such thinking works with the help of a system of figurative means and creates a derivative (secondary) reality - aesthetic assessments. Art enriches the culture of ideas about the world, through a system of images symbolizing meanings and

spiritual values ​​through artistic production, through the creation

……………………………………………………………………

2) Ryazanovsky F.A. Demonology in Old Russian Literature, M, 1975, p. 16

3) Vygotsky L.S., Psychology of Art, 2nd ed., M., 1968, p. 75

subjective ideals of a certain time, a certain era. 4

Art reflects the world and reproduces it. Reflection itself can have three dimensions: past, present and future. Accordingly, there may be differences in the types of values ​​that art creates. These are retro values, which are oriented to the past, these are realistic values, which are “exactly” oriented to the present, and, finally, avant-garde values, oriented to the future. Hence the peculiarities of their regulatory role. However, what all these values ​​have in common is that they are always addressed to the human “I”. 5

The role of art in the development of culture is contradictory. It is constructive and destructive, it can educate in the spirit of lofty ideals and vice versa. In general, art, thanks to subjectification, is capable of maintaining an openness of the value system, an openness of search and choice of orientation in culture, which ultimately fosters a person’s spiritual independence, freedom of spirit. For culture, this is an important potential and factor in its development. The constant interaction of art and myth occurs directly, in the form of “transfusion” of myth into literature, and indirectly: through the visual arts, rituals, folk festivals, religious mysteries, and in recent centuries - through scientific concepts of mythology, aesthetic and philosophical teachings and folklore. This interaction takes place especially actively in the intermediate sphere of folklore. Folk poetry According to the type of consciousness, it gravitates towards the world of mythology, however, as a phenomenon of art, it is adjacent to literature. The dual nature of folklore makes it a cultural mediator in this regard, and the scientific concepts of folklore, becoming a fact of culture, have a great influence on the processes of interaction between literature and mythology. The relationship between myth and literary fiction can be considered in two ways:

………………………………………………………………………………………

4) Bogatyrev P. G., Questions of the theory of folk art, M., 1971, p. 51

5) Vygotsky L.S., Psychology of Art, 2nd ed., M., 1968, p. 79

aspects: evolutionary and typological.

The evolutionary aspect involves the idea of ​​myth as a certain stage of consciousness, historically preceding the emergence of written literature. Literature, from this point of view, deals only with destroyed, relict forms of myth and itself actively contributes to this destruction. Myth and the art and literature that replace it in stages are subject only to opposition, since they never coexist in time. The typological aspect implies that mythology and written literature are compared as two fundamentally different ways visions and descriptions of the world, existing simultaneously and in interaction and only manifested to varying degrees in certain eras. Mythological consciousness and the texts generated by it are characterized, first of all, by the non-discreteness and unity of the messages conveyed by these texts. 6

Mythological texts were distinguished by a high degree of ritualization and narrated about the fundamental order of the world, the laws of its origin and existence. Events in which gods or the first people, ancestors and similar characters were participants, once accomplished, could be repeated in the constant cycle of world life. These stories were fixed in the memory of the collective with the help of ritual, in which, probably, a significant part of the narrative was realized not through verbal storytelling, but also through gestural demonstration, ritual play performances and thematic dances, accompanied by ritual singing. In its original form, the myth was not so much told as acted out in the form of a complex ritual performance. As myth evolved and literature developed, tragic or divine heroes and their comic or demonic counterparts appeared. As a relic of this process of fragmentation of a single mythological image, a tendency has been preserved in literature, coming from Menander and through M. Cervantes, W. Shakespeare and the Romantics, N.V. Gogol,

……………………………………………………………………………………..

6) Shakhnovich M.I., Myth and contemporary art, St. Petersburg 2001. – 93 p.

F.M. Dostoevsky, which reached the novels of the 20th century, is to provide the hero with a double companion, and sometimes with a whole bunch of satellites.

Conclusions: So, myth is the most ancient value system. It is believed that in general, culture moves from myth to logos, that is, from fiction and convention to knowledge, to law. In this regard, in modern culture, myth plays an archaic role, and its values ​​and ideals have a vestigial meaning. I think that the development of science and civilization often devalues ​​myth and shows the inadequacy of the regulatory functions and values ​​of myth, the essence of modern sociocultural reality. However, this does not mean that the myth has exhausted itself. Myth in modern culture creates means and methods of symbolic thinking; it is capable of interpreting the values ​​of modern culture through the idea of ​​the “heroic”, which, say, is inaccessible to science. In the values ​​of myth, the sensual and rational are given together, which is little accessible to other means of culture of the 20th century. Fantasy and fiction make it easy to overcome the incompatibility of meanings and content, because in myth everything is conditional and symbolic. Under these conditions, the choice and orientation of the individual becomes liberated and, therefore, using convention, it can achieve high flexibility, which, for example, is almost inaccessible to religion. Myth, humanizing and personifying the phenomena of the surrounding world, reduces them to human ideas. On this basis, a person’s concrete sensory orientation becomes possible, and this is one of the simplest ways to organize his activities. In early and primitive cultures, this method played a leading role, for example, in paganism. But in developed cultures, such phenomena are more likely to have the nature of a relapse or are a mechanism for the implementation of one or another archetype, especially in mass culture or mass behavior. Mythology is often used in the 20th century as an amplifier of values, usually through their exaggeration and fetishization. Myth allows us to sharpen one or another aspect of value, to exaggerate it, and, therefore, to emphasize and even stick it out.

Myths and legends of the peoples of the world. T. 1. Ancient Greece Nemirovsky Alexander Iosifovich

Myth in fine arts

Myth as a word (this is the meaning of the Greek “mythos”) was born along with painting on the walls of Paleolithic caves, along with the singing and dancing of their inhabitants as part of the ritual. The development of the Greek myth takes place in different conditions - caves have long been replaced by huts, houses, palaces and temples, stone tools - metal, instead of fingers, artists began to use a brush, even hard rocks of stone became available to the chisel, dishes made using potter's wheel, was not only durable, but also perfect in shape.

Myth provides themes for ceramics, sometimes used in funeral rites. Homer's contemporaries had huge vessels decorated with geometric paintings; some researchers found a discrepancy between Homer's high technique of versification and the “primitivism” of geometric paintings. However, this is not primitivism, but symbolism, far from a primitive illustration of a mythological plot. Let us remember that Homer was not a simple reteller, but a transformer of myths.

On an Attic crater of the 8th century. BC e. depicts a forty-oared ship with figures of oarsmen sitting in two rows and two figures of a man and a woman located outside the ship, whose height is more than five times higher than the figures of those sitting. The drawing was called “Boarding the Ship” by the first explorers. But there is no room left on the ship for these giants. Was this amphora an offering for the cenotaph given to the sailors of the sunken ship? In this case, the large figures are the mourning gods.

By the first quarter of the 7th century. BC e. refers to the largest vessel of the geometric style, signed with the names of Clytia and Ergotima, called the “queen of vases” or, after the name of the discoverer, the Francois vase. It is an encyclopedia Greek mythology. Six belts of images depict the Calydonian hunt, games in honor of Patroclus, Achilles' pursuit of Troilus, the battle of pygmies with cranes and many other subjects.

The François Vase, created by Greek artists, was found in an Etruscan monumental tomb. In Etruria, Greek myth found fertile ground. Regardless of who the artist was - a Greek settler or a native Etruscan, the interpretation of the same myth in Etruria and in Greece proper differs not so much in that Greek names were transmitted by their corresponding Etruscan names, but in a special focus, taking into account the environment in which the images had to have circulation, the mood of society as a whole and its individual layers - the aristocracy, the common people, as well as local predilections for certain heroes.

In the V-IV centuries. BC e., when various artistic types of painted ceramics existed in Greece, the myth widely penetrates into Greek life. The gods and heroes depicted on the walls of the vessels become participants in Greek feasts and the favorite game of kottab. Along with drinking and food, vision, imagination, and spirit were enriched. The Greek recognized his gods and heroes by sight and got used to their new realistic appearance.

At the same time, on the plots Greek myths Monumental paintings were painted by Polygnotus, Parrhasius, Apelles and many other artists, which were exhibited in public places. None of these works have survived. But they reached us detailed descriptions in the work of Pausanias “Description of Hellas” and the book of Philostratus “Pictures”, allowing us to imagine not only the skill and manner of the artists, but also various options myths. Monumental painting influenced the depiction of mythological subjects on vases.

The creation of a new polis era was the temple, a conceivable habitat of the deity and the cosmos in miniature. Its columns, originally wooden, were seen as many goddesses and gods like nymphs, curetes, and corybantes. Yes, and the statues of the gods were preserved for a long time columnar shape. The triangle formed by the outermost logs of the roof, the pediment, began to be used to express certain mythological ideas and motifs through the means of art. The pediment of the Temple of Artemis at Corfu shows a Gorgon surrounded by smaller panthers. With her repulsive appearance, she was designed to scare away death and all evil from the home of the gods. The pediments and metopes of archaic temples were decorated with images of episodes from Greek myths - the abduction of the bull by the Dioscuri, the Gigantomachy, the exploits of Hercules and Theseus, etc. In the temple itself, a place was allocated for statuettes of the deities who lived in them. In the second half of the 5th century. BC e. Grandiose stones of marble, gold and ivory appeared, creating the majestic appearance of Zeus, Athena and other Olympian gods, comparable in the power of influence on believers with the works of Homer.

The graphic fund of Greek mythology is colossal. These are cult statues and figurines that served as offerings (votives), mythological scenes reproduced on friezes and pediments of temples, vessels, funerary steles, mosaics, frescoes, mirrors, carved stones (gems), coins and many items of artistic craft. Throughout the centuries-old history of the ancient world, mythology provided art with ideas, themes, images, regardless of whether they believed or did not believe in gods, whether society was primitive or developed.

Of course, artists, sculptors, and engravers who created works on mythological themes were influenced by classical mythological texts. But in the event that they did not create objects of ancient “consumer consumer goods”, but worked for temples, palaces, public buildings, for wealthy customers, they gave the myths their own interpretation. They created great works that rivaled literary works on mythological themes.

This raises a number of complex problems when using works of art as a source for the study of myths. It is very difficult to say whether the discrepancies between works of art on mythological themes and literary presentations of myths are explained by the imagination of the artist, the freedom of his approach to his tasks, insufficient awareness or the use of a version of the myth that has not reached us. In each individual case, contemporary art criticism has to answer these questions. These answers, in turn, depend on the researchers’ affiliation with one school or another and on their training.

5. Treatises on art The aesthetics of proportionality took on increasingly complex forms; we find it, in particular, in painting. All treatises on the fine arts, from the Byzantine texts of Athonite monks to the Treatise of Cennino Cennini (XV century), testify to