Praxiteles biography of donald

But some of the disorientation among viewers comes from seeing polychromy at all. Østergaard, who put on two exhibitions at the Glyptotek which featured painted reconstructions, said that, to many visitors, the objects “look tasteless.” He went on, “But it’s too late for that! The utmaning is for us to try and understand the ancient Greeks and Romans—not to tell them they got it wrong.”

Lately, this obscure academic debate about ancient sculpture has taken on an unexpected moral and political urgency. Last year, a University of Iowa classics professor, Sarah Bond, published two essays, one in the online arts journal Hyperallergic and one in Forbes, arguing that it was time we all accepted that ancient sculpture was not pure white—and neither were the people of the ancient world. One false notion, she said, had reinforced the other. For classical scholars, it is a given that the Roman Empire—which, at its height, stretched from North Africa to Scotland—was ethnically diverse. In

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Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy, by Donald Kagan

First Citizen

Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy.
by Donald Kagan.
The Free Press. 287 pp. $22.50.

In part a biography of the famous Athenian statesman and general, Donald Kagan’s masterly Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy is also a concise introduction to the political life of Athens in the 5th century B.C.E.—its moment of greatest glory and greatest peril—as well as a sober meditation on the meaning of the Athenian experiment in democracy for us at the end of the 20th century.

As the author of a magisterial four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War,¹ Kagan, a professor of classics at Yale and also dean of Yale College, is well prepared for the task of explicating the career of Pericles. It should be said at the outset, however, that while Pericles of Athens could only have been written by someone deeply immersed in the historical intricacies of his subject, t

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Making It

Vinnie Ream, the sculptor who was once famous for the statue she made of Abraham Lincoln following his death, has not been forgotten. There is a Vinnie Ream Web site, which displays her speeches, photographs, and pictures of statues by her.¹ Half a dozen other sites offer biographical information and describe the collections of her papers. There is a Vinnie Ream Room at the headquarters of the National League of American Pen Women in Washington. A town in Oklahoma, Vinita, is named after her, and it has a Vinnie Ream Cultural Center.

More to the point here, Vinnie Ream’s works have been discussed in twenty-three books published during the last four decades. She has been the subject of an “epistolary novel” for juveniles, Maureen Stack Sappey’s Letters from Vinnie, and of an excellent short biography, again for young people, Dawn Langley Simmons’s Vinnie Ream: The Story of the Girl Who Sculptured Lincoln. In 1971 the authoritative Nota