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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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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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.