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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    Early Christian and Byzantine art , June 1958
    Smith, Bernard (1958)
    Lecture
    In 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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Early Christian and Byzantine art, 1957
    Smith, Bernard (1957)
    Lecture
    In 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.