В мире искусства. Ч. 1 (110
.pdfUnit 4
GREEK MYTHOLOGY’S MAGICAL CREATURES
As we move away from Egyptian hieroglyphics to Greek mural paintings, we can see that instead of painting scenes of the after-life, the Greek preferred to paint interesting and exciting scenes from their lives. The art no longer is about controlling reality but rather celebrating and sharing special or exciting moments.
Like the hieroglyphics originally painted on the internal walls of the Egyptian pyramids, the Greek kings demanded that paintings were to be made on the internal walls of their palaces where they lived. The Bull-Leaping Toreador Fresco was painted at the palace at Knosses in 1450–1400 BC. It was painted with the wetfresco technique and very quickly because it dried so fast.
The Minoan culture was also equally fascinated by nature and due to their proximity to the ocean, often depicted sea creatures like this Octopus jar from Palaikastro in 1500 BC. This particular vase is very interesting in the progress of art because it shows how flat drawings go from being two dimensional like the hieroglyphics to have more of a three dimensional and interactive or expanding quality.
Like the Egyptians, who held an incredible love of precision with regard to their hieroglyphic art, early Greek artists also explored Geometric Art on ceramic pots. For example, an Attic Geometric krater from Athens was made in 740 BC and is extremely fascinating when you take a very close look at the patterns and shapes that surround the figures.
Over time, the Greeks took their fascination with geometry and lines from walls and ceramics to buildings. They expanded upon the concepts of Egyptian pyramids to create temples for their gods that had pointed roofs like the pyramids but also had columns like the internal structure of the pyramids and palaces.
Like past cultures, religion and the gods played a very important part in the Greek’s lives, art and stories. The Greeks believed that their gods lived on top of a very big mountain called Mount Olympus. Zeus was the father and Hera was the mother. Athena was smart and Artemis was a hunter. Apollo was the god of the sun while his brother Neptune was the god of the sea.
In these stories, the Greek gods created many mythical and magical creatures. One story tells of the minotaur, a creature that was half man and half bull, who lived in a maze and hurt anyone that went in there. While another story told of Pegasus, a winged horse, that was created specially for Hercules to help him fight battles. The Greeks loved their stories and told them in art, and through word and in plays!
Упражнения к тексту
I.Дайте русские эквиваленты словам интернационального корня
иопределите, к каким частям речи они относятся: hieroglyphics, scene, interesting, control, reality, special, moments, originally, internal, pyramids, to-
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reador, fresco, technique, culture, ocean, creature, vase, progress, expand, artist, geometric, ceramic, line, concept, column, culture, religion, story, mother, mythical, magical, minotaur, Pegasus, specially.
II. Найдите в тексте синонимы к следующим словам: picture, beings, divide, initially, inside, method, turnover, fast, draw, advance, immense, exactness, ancient, investigate, near, structure, idea, hill, struggle, performance, role.
III. Найдите в тексте антонимы к следующим словам: death, dull, science, unreality, ordinary, unlike, external, huts, die, slowly, A. D., regress, less, quantity, hatred, far, present, unimportant, small, ugly.
IV. Ответьте на вопросы:
1.What did the Greeks prefer to paint?
2.What was the purpose of art for the ancient Greeks?
3.Where did the Greeks leave their paintings?
4.What kind of technique was used for their paintings?
5.What creatures did the Greeks depict according to the geographical position of their country?
6.Did the Greeks know the laws of geometry? Why do you think so?
7.Where did the gods live according to the ancient Greeks` beliefs?
8.What stories did the Greeks reflect in their art?
V. Истинно высказывание или ложно?
1.The ancient Greeks liked to paint pictures of their life after death.
2.The Greeks like the ancient Egyptians decorated the walls of temples.
3.Because of their proximity to the ocean, the Greeks depicted many see crea-
tures.
4.Early Greek artists explored Geometric art on ceramics.
5.The Greeks believed that their gods lived in the sky.
6.Zeus and Hera were husband and wife.
7.The ancient Greeks invented many stories about their gods.
8.The Greeks made their stories famous around the world.
VI. Опишите разницу между древнеегипетским и древнегреческим искусством.
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Unit 5
CHRISTIANITY
During the period of the Roman occupation of Judea many Jewish families lived quietly and devoutly, attending the synagogue and bringing up their children to know the Jewish law and the writings of the prophets.
Jesus the Messiah
Little is known of Jesus’s childhood and youth. The story of His visit to the temple in Jerusalem when He was aged twelve shows His interest in religious matters, even at such a young age. When He was about thirty He went to the banks of the River Jordan to receive baptism, a symbol of repentance, from John the Baptist. As He came out of the water He had a profoundly moving experience of the Spirit of God coming down upon Him and there was the Voice of God claiming that Jesus was His Son.
After retiring to the desert for some weeks He returned to His home province of Galilee and began to announce that the coming of God’s kingdom was near. As a sign of this He healed many sick people and exorcised those who were possessed by demons. He gathered round Him a group of disciples, of whom twelve were especially close to Him. He taught great crowds about the nature of God’s kingdom and about the conduct and spirit required from those who wished to enter it.
At first the crowds seem to have listened gladly to Jesus, but later they began to fall away. There was much opposition to His teaching from the Jewish leaders, who mistrusted the authority with which He interpreted the Jewish law without respecting Jewish tradition. He was the Messiah, and Peter, leader of the twelve, acknowledged Him to be so. Neither the common people nor the Jewish leaders accepted this claim. When Jesus went to Jerusalem He gave a final challenge to the leaders by clearing the money changers out of the temple, demonstrating again that He believed His own inner conviction and authority to be superior to the Jewish tradition. The Jewish leaders resolved that He must be executed and had Him arrested. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate was persuaded to agree to the execution and Jesus was crucified, the usual Roman method of punishing criminals.
The Early Church
On the third day His disciples learnt that He was alive again, because He had risen from death and later appeared to them.
At the Jewish feast of Pentecost the disciples had an experience of power filling them. They described it as like a violent blast of wind and tongues of flame. They interpreted it as the Spirit of God filling them. From that moment onwards they took courage and began to proclaim that Jesus was the Messiah, or Christ. Like their Master they suffered a good deal of persecution. When one of their num-
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ber, Stephen, was stoned to death by the Jews, many of the little community of Jesus’s followers left Jerusalem and were scattered over Samaria and Judea.
This was the beginning of a division within the Christian movement. On the one side there were those who believed that the new movement ought to remain obedient to the Jewish law. The other side, led by a convert from Judaism named Paul, believed that the new movement ought to be open to all, whether they observed the Jewish regulations or not. Paul was responsible for establishing Christian congregations in Asia Minor and Greece, and finally his view triumphed. The Christian movement began its history as a world-wide community embracing many nations and races.
As the Church spread it developed a distinctive worship and organisation. From the beginning in Jerusalem there had been meetings on the model of the synagogue services at which there was prayer, preaching and the singing of psalms. There was also the Eucharist, the sacrament based on the Last Supper eaten by Jesus with his disciples before his death. This was linked to the belief that by his death Jesus had enabled God to achieve an act of rescue similar to the deliverance of the Israelites from the Egyptians. But this Christian deliverance was not from human enemies but from spiritual ones. By the death of Jesus the Christian was saved from sin and from the power of evil beings. The way of entering the Christian community was by baptism, which was interpreted as being a sharing of the death of Jesus so that one could rise to life as He had done.
The organisation of the Church slowly became more rigid, and by the beginning of the 2nd century AD each congregation was led by a bishop, assisted by elders and deacons.
Упражнения к тексту
I. Дайте русские эквиваленты словам интернационального корня и определите, к какой части речи они относятся: occupation, family, demonstrate, problem, brother, cousin, story, interest, religious, baptism, symbol, special, demons, group, nature, opposition, authority, interpret, repeat, tradition, Messiah, leader, final, arrest, governor, method, criminals, master, climax, courage, community, division, Christian, regulation, congregation, triumph, history, nation, race, discriminative, organization, meetings, model, psalm, ceremonial, base, human, assist, deacon.
II. Найдите в тексте синонимы к следующим словам: time, calmly, adolescence, visit, evidently, recognize, problem, get, belief, native, treat, ill, pupils, want, ordinary, decide, technique, law-breaker, depict, powerful, explain, announce, start, connect, help.
III. Найдите в тексте антонимы к следующим словам: forget, small, old, far, earlier, unification, trust, initial, outer, a few, above, angels, enemy, at last,
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neglect, both… and, opponents, inferior, relieve, unusual, law-obedient people, fail, friends, good, death.
IV. Ответьте на вопросы:
1.Who occupied the Jewish land in the history told in the story?
2.In what way did the Jewish families live at that time?
3.In what river was Jesus baptized?
4.What was the essence of His teaching?
5.How many pupils did Jesus have?
6.Why did the Roman governor decide to execute Christ?
7.What were the miracles that Jesus showed?
8.What is the only way of entering the Christian community?
V. Истинно это или ложно?
1.Little is known about Jesus` childhood and youth.
2.Jesus showed His interest in religious matters at a young age.
3.When Jesus came into the water while being baptized He there was the
Spirit of God coming down upon Him.
4.After returning to His home province Jesus announced that coming of the God`s Kingdom was near.
5.Jesus` pupil Peter was the first to acknowledge Him as a Messiah.
6.The Roman governor Pontius Pilate had some time to be persuaded that Jesus was to be crucified.
7.The Christian movement made his way in the whole world.
VI. Обсудите в парах понятие «Поцелуй Иуды».
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Unit 6
THE TERMS OF THE ARTIST
When talking or writing about art we use certain words that help explain how a painting, a piece of sculpture or a building looks. Learning the meaning of these words is important. Being able to use them saves long, complicated explanations each time we try to describe a work of art.
One of the most important of these words is proportion. To understand it, imagine that a man you have not met before comes into the room where you are sitting. At once you know whether he is tall or short, fat or thin. How can you tell? Because, almost without thinking, you have considered the proportion of the man’s height to his width, and compared his height and width to that of the door and furniture in the room. As we look at the world around us we are constantly comparing one shape with another in this way, and so forming our judgement of proportion.
Since the time of the ancient Egyptians artists have tried to create perfect proportion – that is, proportion completely satisfying to the human eye. If you take several pieces of paper and draw a line on each of them, and then ask some friends each to divide a line in a way that looks pleasing to them, you will find that most of them divide it in almost the same way – so that one part of the line is nearly twice as long as the other. The ancient Greeks worked out this proportion mathematically. The artists of the Renaissance also used it, calling it the Divine Proportion, and today we call it the Golden Section, or Golden Mean. This proportion, which the Greeks felt was in harmony with the universe itself, does not belong only to works of art. Plants, shells, crystals and many other forms in nature, including the human body, are based on the Golden Mean.
Another word that has to do with measurement is scale. This describes actual size. For instance, you may have seen a map with a scale of one inch to the mile, meaning that every inch on that map represents one real mile. Works of art are often measured by comparing them with the real size of the people or objects they represent: this real size is called life size. The scale of a statue, therefore, might be given as three-quarters life size.
Besides having proportion and scale, every work of art is made up of a number of different things. To begin with, each one has a complete, or outside, shape. If we look at a building or a piece of sculpture we would call this outside shape its mass. The terms of geometry, such as sphere, cube or cone, are often used to describe mass. Mass can have space inside it, or it can be solid — but either way, whatever is inside is called the volume.
In a painting or a drawing, such an enclosed space is called the area. This might be quite irregular, or it might be possible to describe it with other geometrical words like square, circle or triangle. An area is enclosed, not by mass, but by line, and this may be a fine stroke, a broad band, or simply an edge.
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A work of art also has a structure (which is its basic framework, or skeleton), and it has surface. A completely flat surface is called a plane. Threedimensional works, such as buildings and statues, have mass, volume and planes. Two-dimen- sional works, such as paintings, drawings or prints, have only a plane. However, although a plane has no depth, many paintings and drawings do seem to have depth. Any system of drawing which gives this appearance of depth is called perspective.
Finally, every surface has texture – in other words, it may be hard or soft, rough or smooth, dull or shiny. The best way to learn about texture is, of course, to feel it. But even if this is not possible, the way light strikes a surface often tells us something about its texture, so that we can imagine what it feels like.
Proportion and scale, mass and volume, area, line, structure, texture – all these things put together give a painting or drawing, a building or a piece of sculpture what we know as its form.
Упражнения к тексту
I. Найдите русские соответствия словам интернационального корня и определите, к какой части речи относятся их английские эквиваленты.
Sculpture, proportion, furniture, form, artist, human, line, mathematically, Renaissance, section, harmony, scale, universe, crystal, object, cube, nature, mile, represent, real, cone, objects, quarter, mass, term, geometry, area, circle, structure, skeleton, plane, prints, system, perspective, finally, texture, line, form.
II. Найдите в тексте синонимы к представленным ниже словам: painter, employ, assist, house, compensate for, difficult, immediately, high, old, Golden Section, actual, thing, eventually, composition, shape, difficult.
III. Эпизодически пользуясь словарем, найдите антонимы к ниже-
следующим лексемам: unimportant, easy, less, permanently, enemy, unite, different, modern, finish, incomplete, inside, seldom, liquid, regular, impossible, narrow, initially, bright, dull.
IV. Ответьте на вопросы по тексту:
1.What does the author think by the words “the terms of the artist”?
2.What does the concept of proportion mean?
3.Who were the first to create the idea of perfect proportion?
4.What are the synonyms of the word combination “the Divine Proportion”?
5.What things around us are based on the Golden Mean?
6.Why does the notion of scale play an important role?
7.How is a completely flat surface called?
8.What are the intrinsic properties of texture?
V. Истинно или ложно?
1. Using terms saves long, complicated explanation.
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2.The term of proportion is often neglected by professional artists.
3.Proportion always satisfies the human eye.
4.Scale describes an actual size of the object.
5.In painting an enclosed place is called a square.
6.Three dimensional works have mass, volume and plane.
7.The texture of the objects is detected only by a microscope.
8.The form of an object includes knowing its volume, area, line, structure and texture.
VI. Прочтите мини-лекцию для учеников школы искусств о терминах, знание которых необходимо для художников.
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Unit 7
THE RENAISSANCE
Part I. Michelangelo
The Italian sculptor, painter, and architect Michelangelo is considered one of the greatest artists of all times. He lived during the Italian Renaissance, a period known for its achievements in science, literature, politics, and, most of all, in art. Michelangelo dominated the field of art, particularly in sculpture.
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was bom on March 6, 1475. His birthplace, Caprese, was a small town near Florence, in central Italy. A few months after Michelangelo’s birth, the family moved from Caprese to Florence. At that time, Florence was the center of artistic activity. It produced the best painters and sculptors in Europe.
When Michelangelo was 13, he began an apprenticeship, or a period of training under a master. Michelangelo’s master was Domenico Ghirlandajo, a leading painter in Florence. However, Michelangelo left the apprenticeship after a year. His talent brought him to the notice of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler of Florence.
Lorenzo surrounded himself with poets and scholars. Michelangelo may have benefited from their company. He was able to study the Medici art collection. He may also have received some instruction from the sculptor Bertoldo. The sculptor was a friend of the Medici family and looked after their art collection.
At that time Florence did not offer artists many work opportunities. Many of them moved to other cities. Moreover, in 1494 the Medici family was overthrown. This led to political disturbance in Florence. Michelangelo left for Bologna, a city north of Florence.
By 1496 Michelangelo was in Rome. In 1498 he was given the project of carving a pieta – an artwork that shows the Virgin Mary supporting the body of Jesus after his death. Michelangelo’s Pieta is a large sculpture carved from one block of marble. It is now in St. Peter’s Basilica, a cathedral in Rome. The sculpture made Michelangelo famous.
In 1501 Michelangelo returned to Florence for his second major project, to create a huge statue for the city. In 1504 Michelangelo completed David. It is the figure of a young man holding a slingshot. David was a king of ancient Israel who is said to have used only a slingshot to kill the giant Goliath. David is one of the world’s greatest statues. It represents the Renaissance ideal of perfect humanity.
In 1505 Michelangelo was called to Rome. He was to work on a giant tomb for Pope Julius II. The tomb was to have some 40 statues around it. However, the pope soon became disturbed by the cost of the project. Michelangelo left Rome, but the pope had him brought back.
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Michelangelo was put to work painting the vaulted ceiling of the pope’s own chapel, the Sistine Chapel in Rome (now in Vatican City). Michelangelo thought of himself as mainly a sculptor.
He was not happy to begin the project. Between 1508 and 1512 Michelangelo covered the ceiling of the chapel with majestic frescoes, or paintings created on wet plaster. The main scenes show biblical stories and Hebrew prophets. Perhaps the best-known fresco shows God creating Adam.
Michelangelo worked perched on a platform about 60 feet (18 meters) above the floor. His paintings covered 10,000 square feet (930 square meters) of ceiling area. Most of the time he painted lying on his back. Each day fresh plaster was laid over a part of the ceiling.
Michelangelo then had to complete that portion while the plaster was still wet. He could not undo mistakes.
After finishing the ceiling frescoes, Michelangelo returned to work on the tomb of Julius II. In about 1513–1515, he carved Moses, an enormous marble statue of the Hebrew prophet.
In 1534 Michelangelo started another fresco for the Sistine Chapel called the Last Judgment. The large painting covers the end wall. It shows the biblical story of the judgment of humankind by Jesus at the end of the world.
In his later years Michelangelo was more involved with architecture, painting, and poetry than he was with sculpture. He designed the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica and the Capitoline Square in Rome. These are now among Rome’s most impressive sights. However, Michelangelo did not live to see them completed.
Michelangelo died on February 18, 1564, in Rome. He was buried in the church of Santa Croce in Florence.
Упражнения к тексту
I. Найдите русские соответствия словам интернационального корня и определите, к какой части речи относятся их английские эквиваленты.
Sculptor, architect, artist, Renaissance, period, literature, politics, dominate, central, family, centre, activity, master, leading, talent, poet, scholar, company, collection, instruction, city, project, block, cathedral, statue, represent, ideal, humanity, fresco, scene, platform, area, portion, biblical, impressive.
II. Найдитевтекстесинонимыкпредставленнымнижесловам: artist, especially, studying, governor, well-known, main, large, finish, prize, church, glad, probably, new, finish, nevertheless.
III. Эпизодическипользуясьсловарем, найдитеантонимыкнижесле-
дующим лексемам: die, large, far, below, worst, enemy, outskirts, place, south, servant, modern, floor, unhappy, dry, old, before, layman, birth, minor, tiny.
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