Inaug.-diss.--Erlangen. / Includes bibliographical references.

The aim of this study is to test the assumption that the depictions of ancient boxing found on Attic Black and Red Figure pottery are accurate. Due to the scarcity of ancient written material and physical evidence, most of our knowledge of the sport must be based on the depictions themselves. / This thesis sets out to discover whether or not our basis of knowledge, the vases and their depictions, are accurate and reflect what truly happened in a boxing match. To accomplish this, two main variables are put to test: the ratio of left- and right-handed boxers, and the occurrence of certain tactics used when right-handed and left-handed fighters face each other. / Primary sources of depictions are drawn from the Panathenaic amphorae together with some other Attic Black and Red Figure vases. Boxing knowledge is that of the author, who has studied in the field for the past five years.

No description available.

Thesis (doctoral)--Odense University, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 230-243) and index.

Examining a group of pictures painted in the early-to-mid 1630s, this dissertation sets out to demonstrate that Nicolas Poussin’s turn to the subject of dance helped him transform his style from the sensuous Venetian manner of his early years to the cool, crisp, relief-like approach that would characterize his mature work and form the basis for French Classicism in subsequent decades. Painting dancers allowed Poussin to work through the problem of arresting motion, to explore the affective potential of the body represented, and to discover a measured, geometric compositional method capable of containing and harnessing that potential. The resulting pictures, painted in Rome, were warmly received in Paris by a group of early collectors that included dancers, patrons, amateurs, and theorists of another modern French art: the ballet de cour. Ballet’s cultivation of a fiercely controlled physicality, its wild Dionysian characters and learned Apollonian conceits, above all, its insistence on a hidden geometric order underlying the chaos of embodied experience primed early French observers of Poussin’s dancing pictures to recognize something of themselves in his new approach. Though Poussin did not set out to define French Classicism, and though his brief service as premier peintre to Louis XIII demonstrates how ill-suited he was to the role of official artist, the fact that his dancing pictures shared so much—on the level of patronage, iconography, even, perhaps, theoretical underpinnings—with the ballet de cour may help explain why these works (and, indeed, Poussin himself) were so eagerly appropriated by France in the Classical Age.

Thesis (M.A.)--Baylor University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 52-55)

Thesis (doctoral)--Odense University, 1990. / Translated from Danish; Danish summary: p. 244-251. Includes bibliographical references (p. 230-243) and index.

From the viewpoint of classical reception studies, I am asking what contemporary British art (by, for example, Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst, and Mark Wallinger) has to do with the classical tradition – both the art and literature of Greco-Roman antiquity. I have conducted face-to-face interviews with some of the leading artists working in Britain today, including Lucas, Hirst, Wallinger, Marc Quinn, and Gilbert & George. In addition to contemporary art, the thesis focuses on Greco-Roman art and on myths and modes of looking that have come to shape the western art historical tradition – seeking to offer a different perspective on them from that of the Renaissance and neoclassicism. The thesis concentrates on the generation of artists known as the YBAs, or Young British Artists, who came to prominence in the 1990s. These artists are not renowned for their deference to the classical tradition, and are widely regarded as having turned their backs on classical art and its legacies. The introduction asks whether their work, which has received little scholarly attention, might be productively reassessed from the perspective of classical reception studies. It argues that while their work no longer subscribes to a traditional understanding of classical ‘influence’, it continues to depend – for its power and provocativeness – on classical concepts of figuration, realism, and the basic nature of art. Without claiming that the work of the YBAs is classical or classicizing, the thesis sets out to challenge the assumption that their work has nothing to do with ancient art, or that it fails to conform to ancient understandings of what art is. In order to do this, the thesis analyses contemporary works of art through three classical ‘lenses’. Each lens allows contemporary art to be examined in the context of a longer history. The first lens is the concept of realism, as seen in artistic and literary explorations of the relationship between art and life. This chapter uses the myth of Pygmalion’s statue as a way of thinking about contemporary art’s continued engagement with ideas of mimesis and the ‘real’ which were theorised and debated in antiquity. The second lens is corporeal fragmentation, as evidenced by the broken condition of ancient statues, the popular theme of dismemberment in western art, and the fragmentary body in contemporary art. The final chapter focuses on the figurative plaster cast, arguing that contemporary art continues to invoke and reinvent the long tradition of plaster reproductions of ancient statues and bodies. Through each of these ‘lenses’, I argue that contemporary art remains linked, both in form and meaning, to the classical past – often in ways which go beyond the stated intentions of an artist. Contemporary art continues to be informed by ideas and processes that were theorised and practised in the classical world; indeed, it is these ideas and processes that make it deserving of the art label.