Greek Sculpture and the Parthenon

In his book On Creativity (1998) the theoretical physicist David Bohm argues that the purpose of a ‘world view’ is ‘to help organize man’s ever-changing knowledge and experience in a coherent way.’ Since these are constantly changing, however, ‘different world and novel world views have continually to be created to keep up with man’s ever-changing knowledge and experience.’

The same is true of great works of art and architecture. In this lecture we examine a transition between Egyptian and Greek world views in the Athenian Parthenon, which, built to house the icon of a human-like God, narrated myths that gave naturalistic movement to abstract representations of former Egyptian deities.

Richard Read is Emeritus Professor and Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, Perth. He wrote the first book on the British psychoanalytic art critic Adrian Stokes and has published extensively on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, nineteenth and twentieth-century art, film, art theory and complex images in global contexts. His anthology of essays on Colonization, Wilderness and Other Spaces: Nineteenth-Century American and Australian Landscape Painting, co-edited with Kenneth Haltman, was published in 2020 and The Heritage of Molyneux’s Question in Landscape Painting and Aesthetic Thought was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. In 2019 he had Visiting Fellowships at Yale Centre for British Art, The British School at Rome and NES Artists Residency at Skagaströnd, Iceland, while later this year he will be a Visiting Fellow at King’s College, Cambrdige. He has also lectured extensively in Australia and internationally, particularly on his long-term book project, The Reversed Canvas in Western Culture.

Hosted by Tresillian Arts Centre. 

Image: The Parthenon, Athens Greece