John Onians
John Onians is professor and director of the World Art Research Programme in the School of World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia.
Onians, John
Onians, John
United States of America
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Description: Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00026
For all those interested in the relationship between ideas and the built environment, John Onians provides a lively illustrated account of the range of meanings that Western culture has assigned to the Classical orders. Onians shows that during the 2,000 years from their first appearance in ancient Greece through their codification in Renaissance Italy, the orders — the columns and capitals known as Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, and Composite — were made to serve expressive purposes, engaging the viewer in a continuing visual dialogue.
Print publication date January 1990 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691002194
EISBN 9780300252910
Illustrations 213
Print Status in print
Description: Classical Art and the Cultures of Greece and Rome
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00031
In this highly original inquiry into the foundations of European culture, John Onians argues that the study of classical art provides a unique window into the minds of the Greeks and Romans for whom it was produced. Onians provides a sweeping account that ranges from the Greek Dark Ages to the Christianization of Rome and that reveals how the experience of a constantly changing physical environment influenced the inhabitants of ancient Greece and Rome. Tracing the imaginative life of these peoples through their responses to and their relation with the material world, the author shows how an examination of their artistic activity offers an especially insightful approach to their ideas and attitudes.

The book begins by explaining how the early Greeks—exposed to a rocky landscape, dependent on craft activities, and involved in warfare—saw themselves as made of stone and metal and represented themselves in statues of marble and bronze. Later, in the Hellenistic period, as the awareness of the individual’s power increased, so did the sense of physical and emotional weakness, while, with the rise of Rome, art came to be seen less as representation and more as sign, to be experienced less as a lever on the feelings and more as an aid to memory. By the end of the Roman Empire, Onians contends, inhabitants acquired an unprecedented sense of unstable inner life that enabled them to represent themselves not as solid sculptures but as thin marble slabs, their surfaces animated by veins suggestive of hidden spiritual vitality.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date August 1999 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300075335
EISBN 9780300234350
Illustrations 239 illus.
Print Status out of print