Style
The Meidian style has variously been called florid or mannerist and might owe something to the Rich style of 5th century BCE Attic sculpture. His compositions are “Polygnotan” in that they do not have a single ground line but instead are arranged in tiers of friezes across the belly of the vase. The favourite shapes of Meidias Painter and his followers were hydriai amongst the larger forms and squat lekythoi, choes and a variety of pyxides and lekanides preferred for smaller pieces. Meidian figures are recognizable by their long profiles, large eyes, small mouths, rounded chins and the frequency of the three-quarters portrait. His women are slim and long-limbed, his men incline to plumpness, and both enjoy tapering fingers and toes. He pays particular attention to the details of clothing, jewellery and hair; all his women wear earrings, necklaces, hair ornaments and bracelets, their hair rendered with individual locks and elaborate coiffure and their dress usually a diaphanous, multi-pleated peplos, which billows with a flourish. His subject matter favours the mythological over the historical (the birth of Erichthonios is a recurring theme) and given that he worked at the height of the Peloponnesian War have the air of escapist fantasy.
The Meidias Painter’s name vase and chef-d’œuvre belonged originally to the first collection of Sir William Hamilton. This vase featured prominently in his portrait by Joshua Reynolds and proved to be a significant influence on the neoclassical movement. It also took pride of place in d’Hancarville’s folio album Collection of Etruscan Greek, Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the Honourable William Hamilton, vol. I, 1766 (plates 127-130). It was reproduced on Wedgwood jasperware, on furniture and in paintings, and extravagantly praised by Winckelmann as “the finest and most beautiful drawing in the world”. It was acquired by the British Museum in 1772.
Read more about this topic: Meidias Painter
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“The difference between style and taste is never easy to define, but style tends to be centered on the social, and taste upon the individual. Style then works along axes of similarity to identify group membership, to relate to the social order; taste works within style to differentiate and construct the individual. Style speaks about social factors such as class, age, and other more flexible, less definable social formations; taste talks of the individual inflection of the social.”
—John Fiske (b. 1939)
“The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see around them so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their childrens futurefear that theyll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectualsand I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this waysome of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (19081973)