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wildbrush's art.to.day - you entered my world of art history -

Comparative Advancing Art History     
 of Pigments and Mediums     
in European and Asian Cultures     

PIGMENTS, PAINTING, SCULPTURE IN B.C. HISTORY:
- MEDITERRANEAN CIVILIZATIONS

ITALY

500 B.C., ETRUNIA. Pre-Roman Etruscan art was influenced by Greek art, mostly humans with simple landscapes and flowers. They used the colors of Egypt but were not as far advanced as Egypt or Crete.
Palermo bas-reliefs are stiff in the Egyptian style. Naples has better drapery, more flowing and less stiffness.

146 B.C., ROME conquers Greece. There was a new king now, that other one third of the Mediterranean, Etrunia, had grown into the Roman Empire. This was the time of Caesar, 44 B.C.. They paid big money for the best of the Greek artists to decorate their great vacation paradise, Naples. The other great Mediterranean vacation city was Alexandria, Egypt. Greek artists and Egyptian artists taught school there. Roman artists would come to study and be great artists themselves in a hundred years. 10 B.C., The statue of Agustus from Prima Porta is a good example of great Roman work, after Greece.

100 B.C., HERCULANEUM and POMPEII, high art painting, natural and realistic, fresco figures show solid form without resorting to outlines. Pompeii has a lot of great glue paintings protected by wax, there not encaustic as some historians believe. Art will become scarce again, destroyed for the second Dark Age of painting after the Vesuvius eruption in A.D. 79, until it's resurrected by Cimabue, in A.D. 1300, Giotto, Duccio and finally, the great Masaccio, a hundred years later in 1420. Twelve hundred years of art work was destroyed by the Iconoclasts of A.D. 842.

A.D. 100, Roman vaulted architecture, the Pantheon and Coliseum. The Roman Empire includes from England to Morocco, over to Egypt, Mesopotamia, Armenia and up to Germania.

A.D. 200, Baths of Caracalla, high vaulted.

A.D. 400, Christianity was an oriental cult in Rome, with "mithrac" the Persian sun god being important, but Christianity prevailed. The Apse Mosaic, Santa Pudenziana, Rome, was fired colored glass of a somber nature, grays, green and umber.

A.D. 476, The Last Roman Emperors, are displaced by German soldiers. The Han Empire of China is breaking up. India is being sacked by nomadic invaders. Everything was in regression except East Rome, the Byzantine Empire with their mosaics, wax and mastic and egg painting. They would be the premier artists until Giotto came aboard. Two art periods arose, one before the Iconoclastic Controversy which destroyed most pagan art, and one after the victory of the Pro-image Party in 842. Most of the Byzantine art that remains are mosaics in churches. Byzantine was captured by the Turks in 1453.

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