Dueling Warriors, ca. 530 BCE. Glazed ceramic.
"We usually think of the Greek gods as figures, as human embodiments, but to the Greek mind the gods were also, above all, states or conditions of being. Poseidon is god of the sea, yes, but he’s really the ungovernable force of natural disturbances — he is tempests and earthquakes. Virginal, woodland-rover Artemis punished the youthful hunter Actaeon (by turning him into a stag that his hounds turned on and killed) not simply because he’d seen her bathing naked but because his trespassing violated virgin wilderness. The gods meddled constantly in human affairs but remained awesomely remote as beings. Greek heroes, though, were closer to the human scheme of things because Herakles, Achilles, Odysseus, and Helen were mortals or semi-mortals; they were implicated in historical time, in the human order and its travails. They’re active presences in our consciousness because we recognize in their tasks, conflicts, and journeys analogies to our own existence and because they possess mortal attributes: Herakles, strength and stamina; Achilles, peerless violent valor; Odysseus, cunning. Theirs are among the oldest stories, and they never get old. The stories are illustrated and elucidated in the San Diego Museum of Art’s Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece. ..."
San Diego Reader
NY Times: Those Greek Heroes, Sometimes Behaving Badly
amazon: Art’s Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece
2016 March: W.S. Di Piero, 2016 December: Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008, Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful, 2017 March: March of time: 20th Century icons from an old art museum in Buffalo are at the Museum of Art, May 2017: In from the cold, 2017 July: Turner set free: Nature as roughhouse theater by W.S. Di Piero, 2017 August: Big Black Sun by W.S. Di Piero
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