#Academy of Athens

[escapismsworld]

📍Academy of Athens, Greece

[2seeitall]

Academy of Athens at night

[gemsofgreece]

Academy of Athens by George Koultouridis.

[postcard-from-the-past]

Academy of Athens, Greece

Greek vintage postcard

[ancientsstudies]

The Academy of Athens by classicist_org.

[lesbianelsas]

How long would you be gone? - Maybe four or five years, or… Maybe a little less, if I study real hard.

Xena: Warrior Princess - 1x13 "Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards"

[feral-soup]

"Have you forgotten the lessons I taught you?"

In honor of the Ocean Saga dropping tomorrow, have a drawing of Athena!

[blueiscoool]

Herculaneum Scrolls Reveal Plato's Burial Place

Researchers used AI to decipher an ancient papyrus that includes details about where Greek philosopher is buried.

The decipherment of an ancient scroll has revealed where the Greek philosopher Plato is buried, Italian researchers suggest.

Graziano Ranocchia, a philosopher at the University of Pisa, and colleagues used artificial intelligence (AI) to decipher text preserved on charred pieces of papyrus recovered in Herculaneum, an ancient Roman town located near Pompeii, according to a translated statement from Italy's National Research Council.

Like Pompeii, Herculaneum was destroyed in A.D. 79 when Mount Vesuvius erupted, cloaking the region in ash and pyroclastic flows.

One of the scrolls carbonized by the eruption includes the writings of Philodemus of Gadara (lived circa 110 to 30 B.C.), an Epicurean philosopher who studied in Athens and later lived in Italy. This text, known as the "History of the Academy," details the academy that Plato founded in the fourth century B.C. and gives details about Plato's life, including his burial place.

Historians already knew that Plato, the famous student of Socrates who wrote down his teacher's philosophies as well as his own, was buried at the Academy, which the Roman general Sulla destroyed in 86 B.C. But researchers weren't sure exactly where on the school's grounds that Plato, who died in Athens in 348 or 347 B.C., had been laid to rest.

However, with advances in technology, researchers were able to employ a variety of cutting-edge techniques including infrared and ultraviolet optical imaging, thermal imaging and tomography to read the ancient papyrus, which is now part of the collection at the National Library of Naples.

So far, researchers have identified 1,000 words, or roughly 30% of the text written by Philodemus.

"Among the most important news, we read that Plato was buried in the garden reserved for him (a private area intended for the Platonic school) of the Academy in Athens, near the so-called Museion or sacellum sacred to the Muses," researchers wrote in the statement. "Until now it was only known that he was buried generically in the Academy."

The text also detailed how Plato was "sold into slavery" sometime between 404 and 399 B.C. (It was previously thought that this occurred in 387 B.C.)

Another part of the translated text describes a dialogue between characters, in which Plato shows disdain for the musical and rhythmic abilities of a barbarian musician from Thrace, according to the statement.

This isn't the first time that researchers have used AI to read ancient scrolls that survived Mount Vesuvius's eruption. Earlier this year, researchers deciphered a different scroll that was charred during the volcanic eruption at a nearby villa that once belonged to Julius Caesar's father-in-law.

By Jennifer Nalewicki.

[girl4music]

I wouldn’t call the brief romantic interactions Gabrielle has with men “relationships”. With Xena you can get away with that. But not Gabrielle.

Let me put it this way… Xena is a show where they’ll show you a male and a female kissing but not allow them to have a long lasting relationship of any kind and then give you a long lasting relationship between a female and a female but won’t show you the kissing.

You have to pick and choose your wins and your losses. What matters to you more? To see an amazingly substantial, in-depth and forever-evolving dynamic or physical intimacy?

Xena literally invented straightbaiting. The opposite of queerbaiting. Don’t worry. The creators were on the right side of history. Xena and Gabrielle are the central relationship in the show no matter which way you want to interpret it. They’re the beating heart.

There’s no relationship made more of a focus than Xena and Gabrielle’s - be it romantic or platonic.

The Man-Inserts mean nothing. Trust me. If anything, they just show you how much more right Xena and Gabrielle are for each other because the show is always fucking awkward whenever a random male love interest is introduced. It doesn’t feel right.

Simply put it down to intentional straightbaiting cause the only reason they’re there is to appease the straight audience. But this show belongs to the gays/queers. The creators made sure of it.

[wgm-beautiful-world]

Statues of Platon and Socrates, Academy of Athens, GREECE

[artistactorathens]

I will be back on the DBDA train shortly but uhhhhh just wanted to check in on the Umbrella Academy fandom…I don’t really go here anymore but are yall doing okay?

[thepastisalreadywritten]

[whatifwekilledgodandwebothgirls]

If anyone even cares i finished a pack of my pretentious little cigarettes while pretentiously staring at the statues of plato and socrates while reading my pretentious untranslated little philosophy books and waiting for the bus . Living the life style philosophy professors DREAM of

[gemsofgreece]

Καλημέρα! I'd like to ask you about the colours of Classical statues and temples. Have you seen any reconstructions you liked? Bless the people investigating them, it seems they didn't wanna assume too hard so they ended up making the statues look somewhat on the very gaudy side. (I sent the same ask to @alatismeni-theitsa just to be sure)

Haha this is a sore spot for me because I really do love the woren all white look!

However, we all have to acknowledge that the preference for the bare white look is largely a bias infliltrating our minds through the presumed superiority of Renaissance Art. The colour of the ancient statues had already faded by that time, making Renaissance artists believe that this was the actual classical prototype that was supposed to be imitated and glorified.

I believe our love for the all-white classical look in sculpture is based on both this bias, but also the aetherealness, distance and solemnity that was believed to be communicated through this lack of colour and the exposition of the work done on the bare luxurious marble. That second reason is what I find beautiful in it too.

Of course, actual Ancient Greek art was coloured. Given that Greek art of antiquity aimed at a naturalistic approach, it is absolutely reasonable that the artists wanted their artwork to have the colours of the real subject / object it was depicting. What you see now are recreations based on whatever colour-tracing methods we have available today, which are not infallible yet. While the general conclusions must be more or less accurate ("this part of the chiton was red and the hair was black" etc), they still remain hypothetical because the methodology cannot perfectly detect hues, paint layers, different pressures on the paint and all those techniques that provide nuance and are integral to art. Having said this, we should also remember that creating paint hues in antiquity was extremely difficult and obviously the paint job done could not be equal to that of the last centuries. Therefore, with our modern criteria, ancient paint job must have often be underwhelming but, again, I believe we also are in a position in which we do not get the precise, fully accurate picture yet.

In a way, this conviction we all have that coloured statues are kitsch is kind of arbitrary, simply because the notion that sculpture reached its peak with the Renaissance is so very deeply engraved to our minds. Think about modern art for a moment: modern paintings, figures and figurines, ceramics with paint... or even sculpture from other cultures of the world outside the Greco-Roman sphere: none of this is considered kitsch, simply because none of this is directly compared to Renaissance scupting. (Although of course other cultures' arts are often viewed derogatorily through this very pervasive presumption that the Renaissance was the peak.)

We also should return back to the considerable probability of poorly made recreations, which lack nuance. Take these examples:

Jesus Christ Superstar

Not the best, right? However, if we see paintings and art from earlier times i.e Mycenaean and Minoan and contemporary ones like rare surviving Classical, Hellenistic and Grecoroman art, we realise that colours were used wisely and there was the concept of layering, shading and creating detail and nuance.

In this art of Alexander (100BC, exhibited in the Museum of Napoli) we can see an extensive use of highlighting, layering and creating shadows, which is very different from the blast of thick paint you will see on these recreations.

There are also recreations which prove exactly that a lot of the responsibility regarding how we perceive them lies on the very quality of the recreation itself.

Source

Honestly, for me this is totally fine. You can find fine modern art - even modern Greek folk art - of similar styles or colouring. The quality of the recreation here is far superior than the ones above.

This one, I am also totally fine with it, especially the last of the colourised ones. It took exactly the same amount of extraneous work for the artist to sculpt plus the struggle of painting it. And it gives us so much additional information about what fashion looked like.

The recreations made for ancient Greek temples prove more how colour could actually be used in good taste:

If I told you this was some late medieval manuscript art, you'd not think of it as kitsch. The idea immediately kicks in when I say it is a recreation of a Parthenon frieze colourised. (Source)

In this recreation IMO the Parthenon looks hella fine!

I confess I struggle with the Caryatids of the Erechtheion:

but I suppose it's partly because to us it looks like you took all the redhead Barbies you had and assigned them to carry the building. Without all the preconceptions we have, which are informed by kitsch cheap art of the last decades and the axiom that Renaissance sculpture is the best, Ancient Greeks were probably astonished by the beauty and realism of six different beauties making the temple stand. For me, who I am influenced by all that I have analyzed, my colour tolerance would go as far as having all of them like the Caryatid in the middle, with the white peplos. Apart from that, the paint in the temple is totally beautiful and elegant. (Source)

The neoclassical Academy of Athens uses paint like in antiquity except it draws the line in the statues (and perhaps it uses more gold). The Academy of Athens is exemplary.

Zappeion also has colour and it's marvelous:

I believe this was the aesthetic ancient artists were going for.

In conclusion, I think ancient artists tried to use paint in the best of their abilities, no differently than how we also almost always add colour to our modern art, except of course there must have been limitations to the qualities and varieties of paint hues that could be produced at the time, which would inescepably sometimes lead to results less than ideal. Regardless of how well or poorly painted any particular ancient artwork was, we are predisposed to view it negatively anyway because we are wired to believe that the Renaissance style set the standards for what is beautiful and what is not and that when it comes to colour in sculpture, less is obligatorily (much) more.

That's all I got to say! From my side, καληνύχτα! (I'm posting this way past midnight lol)

[n1et]

I made myself hot chocolate from scratch today. It was really nice; reminded me a bit of my trips with my godfather.

[rhisardthewizard]

Rewatching season 1 of xena for the first time in probably 15 years and who tf was gonna tell me that Sam Raimi snuck clips from Kubrick's (fuckin terrible) Spartacus movie into episode 13?

Like, I know Raimi loves the history (who doesn't love the third servile war of Rome? They came closest of anyone to bringing the empire to its fucking knees) he made a whole Spartacus tv show on Starz.

But im gonna need a little warning before somebody starts playing a bad movie in the middle of a good show.