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Six famous women hold up the Porch of the Maidens of the Erechtheion, a temple on the Acropolis of Athens. These statues are admired for their graceful poses and drapery, but who notices the hair? An Art Historian who specializes in the sculpture of the Acropolis, Katherine Schwab, has studied the hairstyles and made a project of it for her students at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Here's a summary of a presentation she gave last night at the Greek Embassy in Washington. In the New Acropolis Mus eum, Athens --which was just built a few years ago -- one can see the statues from the back with their beautiful long braids of hair, falling in fishtails followed by more curls. In fact, the hair of the statues is in better condition than the faces and bodies whose arms are completely missing. (Caryatid is the name given to a feminine statue which acts as a column to hold up a building; Kore is a statue of a maiden. ) These six caryatids are labeled Kore A - Kore F. Every ha...

P aul Gauguin was impressed with the sincere, unspoiled piety of women from Brittany, where he painted in 1887. He placed the Yellow Christ , 1889, in a Breton landscape. Paul Gauguin, an early modern rebel against western culture, is influenced by religious culture like his French forebears who painted for kings and churches 400 years earlier. After seeing the Art Institute of Chicago's exhibition of Early Renaissance Art in France , I saw the Gauguin exhibition at the National Gallery. Many of Gauguin's subjects also had religious themes. He put the Crucifixion in a setting of yellow and ocher pigments, and blended it into the landscape of Brittany, a region he respected for its piety and cultural backwardness at that time. The standing woman in Delectable Waters , above, has the shame of Eve being expelled from the garden of Paradise. We don't know her relationship to the other women, although they also seem to live in a lush tropical place, much like a Garden of Eden Ma...

This Crucifixion from the Getty Museum is the center of a 3-part altarpiece which can be seen at the Art Institute in its original format until May 30th. The unknown master used saturated colors in oil paint, while packing an incredible amount of detail into a panel 19 x 28 inches. Click on the photo to see an enlargement. The Art Institute of Chicago is currently showing a major exhibition of French Renaissance painting, Kings, Queens and Courtiers . To me, the most impressive and interesting piece is by an unknown painter, the Master of Dreux Budé. It dates to about 1450. One of the values of this type of scholarly exhibition is the opportunity to find and gather lost or separated parts of paintings. Here, we view the original pieces of what was once formed a triptych, three panels connected by hinges to tell a concise history of Christian Salvation. The largest painting was in center; it's a Crucifixion from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Resurrection , from the Musée Fab...

In the huge Villa Romana del Casale in Piazza Armerina, Sicily, a girl is can be seen through the corridor....................not one, but the room has 10 of these bikini girls engaged in some athletic activities. They are made of pieces of finely cut stone, set into mortar for a smooth finish on the floor. Mark Schara took these photos of the largest series of floor mosaics in the Roman Empire. Their games include the discus throw, weight lifting and ball tossing. One with a palm and crown may be a winner. From the mosaics in ancient Sicily we can trace the art of stone floor mosaics, backwards. Villa Romana del Casale in Piazza Amerina, covered by a landslide in the 13th century but now uncovered, has the largest group of extant mosaics from the Roman world. The cut marble stones decorated floors, not walls, of the palace. It is not known who built or owned the huge villa in the early 4th century, but it may be connected to the emperors, or gladiators in the late Roman Empire. ...

In Selinunte, Sicily, the remains of several Greek temples from the 6th- 5th century BC can reveal much about temple construction, although they fell to Carthaginian invasions and earthquakes not long after their building.                     Architect Mark Schara, with his good eye for detail, took almost all of these photos.  Temple E has most of its outer colonnade, the peristyle , restored . Classical harmony is apparent in the rhythm of fluted columns, continuing up into the triglyphs raised to the sky. . But many of the capitals have fallen. On the ground level, we can appreciate their large scale. Temple F was badly damaged . Much of the white stucco facing for the fluted limestone column on right is still visible. Tem ple G, below, was the largest of the 7 temples of Selinunte, the ancient city of Silenus. This temple had columns about 54 feet tall. Here, we see the c...

(Thanks to Mark Schara for the use of his photographs) The North Baths of Morgantina, in east central Sicily, date to the 3rd century BCE and may in fact represent the earliest dome that has been excavated in the ancient Mediterranean world. Like everything in the buried settlement of Morgantina, it was built before the Roman conquest in 211 BCE. This new evidence suggests that Hellenistic Greeks, not Romans, invented the first dome. However, unlike the concrete used by Romans to make domes, the construction material would have been terra cotta tubes found on the site; the sizes and formation of these tubes suggest they were used to make a domed space. Public baths were a staple of the ancient towns and cities. Morgantina was a small settlement and the dimension of its baths are modest. Yet the roofing of the North Baths structure appears very significant. Two oblong rooms and one circular room were found to have curved ceilings made of these interlocking tube...

This tall elegant Charioteer of Mozia or "Giovane of M ozia," was excavated in 1979. It brings up problems of identity, meaning and dating in Greek Art. A life-size statue was dug up in 1979 in Mozia, ancient Motya, a tiny island adjacent to the west coast of Sicily. The slightly larger than life-size Youth of Mozia demonstrates why it is necessary for art historians to constantly re-evaluate conceptions of style, meaning and dating in art. Everyone agrees it belongs to the 5th century BCE, and, based on exact location of the find and the layer in which it was buried, it cannot be later 397 BCE. Yet Mozia was a Carthaginian settlement and the Carthaginians were constantly at war with Greeks who controlled most of Sicily. The questions are: * Who is the subject? * What is the date? * Where was it made? * Why did it end up in Mozia? This statue has physical beauty, elegance, grace and transparent drapery. Feet and arms are missing but remnants of one hand dig into the correspo...