Bernard Smith Collection
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Bernard Smith was an Australian art historian, art critic and academic, including at the University of Melbourne. He has been described as the founder of Australian Art History, and his presence and influence in Australian cultural life immense. This is one of many of his lectures given in the Fine Arts Department of the University of Melbourne between 1956 and 1966 and at a time when it was the only art history department in an Australian university. They are lectures in the history of art that range from Palaeolithic to the Romantic Movement. These lectures are presented as originally written and are archival in nature with no attempt to bring them up-to-date. They belong to their time
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ItemEarly Christian and Byzantine art , June 1958(1958)LectureIn order to understand how Christianity slowly fashioned a completely new form of art out of the art of the Roman world, we must appreciate how man's opinion of himself greatly changed from early classical times down to the late Roman Empire. The masterpiece of fifth century Greece, such as the Apollo on the west pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia represent the classical ideal of self-sufficient man. A man capable of both understanding and controlling his environment - it is ideal man - man seen and fashioned as one of the gods.
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ItemEarly Christian and Byzantine art, 1957(1957)LectureIn order to understand how Christianity slowly fashioned a completely new form of art out of the art of the Roman world, we must appreciate how man's opinion of himself greatly changed from early classical times down to the late Roman Empire. The masterpiece of fifth century Greece, such as the Apollo on the west pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia represent the classical ideal of self-sufficient man. A man capable of both understanding and controlling his environment - it is ideal man - man seen and fashioned as one of the gods.
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ItemGreek architecture and temple decoration(1958)LectureNeither the Minoans nor the Mycenaeans of the Bronze Age made a practice of building temples. They used caves or mountain shrines or fitted up one or two rooms in a palace for the worship of their gods. But for the Greeks, temples were important, not as places of worship, but as shrines for the deity. The early temples of the Geometric and Orientalizing periods, that is, from the 10th century down to about 600 B.C., were very simple structures, consisting of timber and sun-dried brick. Several shapes were at first used, but the rectangular temple, which enclosed a cult statue of the god or goddess in its cella, soon became the dominant type. A porch was often added before the entrance, the porch being supported simply by extending the side walls, or by using a few timber posts. Sometimes the eaves of the temple were increased to for a veranda around the whole building, the roof being supported by wood posts or pillars. The verandas served to protect the walls from sun and rain, and also provided shelter. Colonnades were of course widely used by the Egyptians as internal roof supports and the Minoans made use of the colonnaded courtyard, a practice also much used by the Greeks in their market places and gymnasia. A gymnasium, for instance frequently consisted of a colonnaded courtyard which led off to rooms arranged around a square or rectangle. But in the Greek temple the colonnade becomes and important external feature.
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ItemMesopotamian art, Parts 1 and 2(1959)LectureLet us begin, by looking briefly at the development of architecture in ancient Mesopotamia. As in Egypt, each city possessed its own deity, worshipped by the citizens as their guardian, in a shrine which was usually built within the city. The temples were constructed with mud-dried brick. One of the earliest temples excavated is that at Tepe Gawra in the north. The temples were buttressed to strengthen the brick walls especially where they held the rafters to the roof and took its weight. Already there is a tendency to separate the central shrine from other parts by means of an entrance porch and subsidiary offices. Our next slide of Temple VII at Abu Sharein [Eridu] reveals the buttressing of external walls become much more regular. A sense of balance and order appears. Note too the forward thrust of the corner bastions. This affords a close parallel with early temple construction in Egypt. Now the central shrine is surrounded by subsidiary offices, an altar to the civic deity being placed at one end, and an offering table at the other. The temple was entered by means of steps which led up to the platform on which the temple was built, and entered by means of a door in the middle of the long axis. As time passed the platform on which the temples were built increased in size to become a ziggurat or artificial mountain. In Mesopotamia the mountain became an important religious symbol: it produced the rain and the vegetation, from it sprang all forms of life, the great mother-goddess was known as the Lady of the Mountain.
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ItemMinoan art, first term, 1958(1958)LectureThe civilization of Mesopotamia and Egypt never entirely passed out of the living memory of Western people. The civilisation of Ancient Crete, however, certainly did, and has only been recovered by archaeologists in recent years. The excavations of the ancient city of Troy in Asia Minor in 1871 by Heinrich Schiemann, led him to dig in Southern Greece at Mycenae. In the shaft graves which he exposed he discovered a great wealth of treasure much of it gold - as for instance, these gold cups. The style of this newly discovered art was quite unlike the art of Greece as we know it from the tenth century B.C. onwards. Where was the centre of this culture? Speculation led to the island of Crete as a likely centre. And in 1900 Sir Arthur Evans purchased the site of the city of Knossos and began to uncover a culture which he has called the Minoan culture.
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ItemMinoan art, fourth lecture, first term, 1957(1957)LectureThe civilization of Mesopotamia and Egypt never entirely passed out of the living memory of Western people. The civilisation of Ancient Crete, however, certainly did, and has only been recovered by archaeologists in recent years. The excavations of the ancient city of Troy in Asia Minor in 1871 by Heinrich Schiemann, led him to dig in Southern Greece at Mycenae. In the shaft graves which he exposed he discovered a great wealth of treasure much of it gold - as for instance, these gold cups. The style of this newly discovered art was quite unlike the art of Greece as we know it from the tenth century B.C. onwards. Where was the centre of this culture? Speculation led to the island of Crete as a likely centre. And in 1900 Sir Arthur Evans purchased the site of the city of Knossos and began to uncover a culture which he has called the Minoan culture.
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ItemThe art of Ancient Egypt(1957-1959)LectureThe art of our times is connected by what we might call a chain of tradition to the art of Egypt-Mesopotamia. Beyond Egypt the chain is broken. The archaeological record which stretches back from Egypt to Lascaux and Altamira contains far more gaps than it does links. But from Egyptian times onwards, technical methods of working materials, style of drawing, and habitual ways of seeing, or modes of perception, and traditional graphic images which enable men to communicate their ideas and feelings to one another, have been passed down through Western Civilization from one artist to another. The art historian is concerned very largely with tracing the history of these technical methods, modes of perception, and accepted graphic images. He can only work where there is a continuous tradition of visual material and of written documents, for art history, like history itself is concerned very much with the study of written documents. We may say then that our study of the art history of Western Europe really begins with the art of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Prehistoric and primitive art are really the concern of the professional archaeologists and anthropologist.
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ItemThe Emergence of Greek art(1957)LectureIn the years between 1200 and 1000 B.C. the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean was convulsed by wars, invasions, and the movement of large groups of people. The period witnessed the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, and we may take 1,000 B.C. as a convenient date which to begin our study of Greek art. But I must say one or two words very briefly about the period before 1,000 B.C. Greece, had, of course, been populated before 1000 B.C. The culture of mainland Greece and the adjacent islands between 3,000 and 1,000 B.C. (the culture, that is, of Bronze Age Greece, has been called the Helladic culture) and it has been divided into early, middle and late Helladic, corresponding roughly in time with early, middle and late Minoan. I cannot deal with Helladic art here, but I want to point out that in Late Helladic times, that is, between 1,500 and 1,000 B.C. a civilization known as the Mycenaean flourished in Southern Greece and the adjacent islands. Great palaces were built at Tiryns and Mycenae, and the Late Helladic period is also known as the Mycenaean Age. Mycenaean art is closely affiliated with Minoan art, and the Mycenaean ousted the Minoans as the main maritime and commercial nation of the Eastern Mediterranean.
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ItemThe origins of the Romantic Movement, 1958(1958)LectureThe Romantic Movement, which I shall deal with today, is also virtually contemporary with the neo-classical and the picturesque: although we could say that in England the tide of neo-classicism is at full flood about 1770, the picturesque at about 1790, and the romantic not until about 1800. But we must remember that the neo-classical, the picturesque, and the romantic are closely interrelated movements: and we cannot understand the texture of later eighteenth and early nineteenth century art unless we see them as almost contemporary movements representing three different facets of a complicated situation. After the decline of the Rococo, we can no longer speak of a style which covers the whole field of the visual arts. Style becomes a much more self-conscious, and personal affairs, the rights of the individual, and the desire for originality assert themselves in art as in life. The Romantic Movement is of the greatest importance in the history of literature and ideas. But I must emphasise at the outset that it is not an artistic style like Gothic or Baroque - we should talk about the romantic temperament rather than the romantic style, an attitude to art and to life, which is not easily defined by may be best understood, as a temperament opposed to the dominance of rules and reason; above all classical rules in the arts.
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ItemThe Picturesque, Parts 1 and 2(1959)LectureToday I want to talk about quite a different kind of beauty which took its rise not from the theories of Greek philosophers, but from the practice of Italian painters - that is, picturesque beauty. It was observed that some painters like Titian and Giorgione painted things not as they were known to be in reality, but as they appeared to the eye. The simplest example of this is the painting of foliage in broad masses instead of leaf by leaf, as in say, Giorgione's Tempesta. So it was that the word pittoresco was coined, meaning 'after the manner of painters'. Painters, it was realised, had a special way, a highly visual way, of looking at nature. From becoming a mere description of some painter's methods the word pittoresco, picturesque, gradually established itself as a new canon or standard of artistic values ad judgment; quite distinguishable from the classical and neo-classical notion of ideal beauty. The OUP give its first appearance in England in 1703. During the 18th century the idea of the picturesque as a kind or mode of beauty gained increasing importance as the century progressed: poetry, landscape gardening, architecture and the way people looked at nature and the theory of art all came to be effected by landscape painting.