Legacy of ancient civilization. The historical significance of the ancient heritage

The significance of the heritage of antiquity in world culture is enormous. History in Russia Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome has always attracted the attention of scientists and culture.

A.S. Pushkin, V.G. Belinsky, L.N. Tolstoy, N.V. Gogol and other prominent Russian poets, writers, scientists loved and admired ancient literature and art, often turned to ancient stories and sources. L.N. Tolstoy, already the author of War and Peace, was so carried away by Greek literature that he began to study the ancient Greek language in order to read Homer, Herodotus, Xenophon and other poets and writers of interest to him in the original. By the way, the first Russian economic geographer K.I. Arseniev,

V.G. wrote enthusiastically about the significance of ancient culture. Belinsky. “The Iliad translated by Gnedich,” he writes to Stankevich, “is a source of such pleasure for me, from the strength of which I am exhausted in some kind of sweet torment.” “A new world of art opened up before me,” he tells Botkin, reading the tragedies of Sophocles. With him, he shares his impressions of Plutarch's "Biographies":

“This book drove me crazy, I am all in the idea of ​​civic prowess, all in the pathos of truth and honor ... Taking on Plutarch, I thought that the Greeks would shield the Romans from me - it didn’t work out that way ... I understood a lot through Plutarch, what he did not understand. On the soil of Greece and Rome, the newest humanity has grown ... The world of antiquity is charming.

Antiquity showed the world outstanding achievements of art. I.S. Turgenev, seeing the frieze of the Pergamon altar, taken out of Turkey and mounted in the Psrgamon Museum in Berlin, enthusiastically wrote about this masterpiece of Hellenistic art: rings, these outstretched wings, these eagles, these horses, weapons, shields, these flying clothes, these palm trees and these bodies, the most beautiful human bodies in all positions, bold to the point of impossibility, slender to the point of music - all these diverse facial expressions ... this is the triumph of malice, and despair, and divine gaiety, and divine cruelty - all this heaven and all this earth - yes, this is the world, the whole world, before the revelation of which an involuntary cold of delight and passionate reverence runs through all the veins ... How happy I am, that I did not die before the last impressions that I saw all this!” .

Let's try to present a generalized image of scientists of antiquity (with all the difference in their fates, interests and time of activity):

They were the first. For the first time in the history of mankind, they moved from religious myths to scientific knowledge. It was the greatest leap in the intellectual history of mankind.

It is no coincidence that we spoke in detail above about the Gods and myths of Ancient Greece. Great efforts of the mind, the power of the intellect were needed to break the thousand-year tradition of explaining all the phenomena of the universe by the activity of the gods and come to the first scientific hypotheses and discoveries;

• - They worked hard on themselves. Demosthenes on the sculpture of Polyeuctus looks tired, courageous, strong-willed, intelligent. History has preserved some details of his life. This subsequently brilliant, fiery orator, from birth had a weak voice and, in order to learn how to speak in front of large audiences, he went to the seashore and learned to speak, trying to block the sound of the waves. To achieve clarity of speech, he spoke with a ball in his mouth, striving for impeccable diction;
• - it is not true that ancient scientists were not interested in practical matters. Plutarch, referring to the inventions of Archimedes, says that a philosopher, of course, should not deal with such things, but Archimedes justifies the extreme in which his fatherland was. In fact, scientists of antiquity, as a rule, traveled, invented, set up experiments, and solved practical problems.

As for Archimedes, as is known, the system of mirrors invented by him, reflecting the sun's rays, made it possible to burn the Roman fleet that entered the harbor of Syracuse;

• - they were devoted to their science, their beliefs. Socrates accepted a cup of poison (hemlock), but refused to flee from Athens, as he believed that the flight would cast doubt on his loyalty to his beliefs. Archimedes told a Roman soldier who came to kill him, "Don't touch my blueprints!" Opening one of his legendary laws, Archimedes ran out into the street shouting "Eureka!"
• ("Found!") !
• - often the motherland did not indulge its geniuses. Demosthenes, Aristotle were ostracized and died in exile, Socrates and Phidias committed suicide, and so on. A difficult fate often does not spare the prophets in their own country: a gloomy experience that was repeated many times in the future (in Russia - Pushkin, Lermontov, Kapitsa, Landau, Korolev, Sakharov - let's appreciate the prophets in our own country).

The moral image and fate of the first heroes of science are instructive. In the history of geography, the contribution of ancient science is especially important in the following:

• - a gigantic expansion of the geographical horizon and geographical knowledge. Man saw the earth for the first time (at least a part of it) and captured it on the first maps and in the first descriptions;
• - for the first time two directions in geography were born - natural scientific and socio-historical (socio-geographical, regional studies). The humanitarian character and historical approach of many works of ancient science does not oppose, but complements the natural scientific content of other works, and these differences and interconnections that have first emerged are very important. Here is the beginning of many concepts and disputes - about the relationship between society and nature, geographical determinism, the relationship between the general and the regional, etc.;
• - for the first time at the disposal of science there was such a powerful means of research as a geographical map (albeit in its first, very imperfect samples);
• - many Greek and Roman names and names, seemingly long forgotten, constantly come to life in terms of modern geographical science. The Union of Arcadian cities on the island of Peloponnese, headed by Megalopolis (“big city”), gave J. Gottman a reason to propose the term “megalopolis” to designate systems of urban agglomerations merging into large urbanized zones; this term is widely used in modern scientific literature, and "megacities" in modern scientific literature are called cities with a population above a certain threshold (in the official statistics of the UN - over 8 million people). One of the most famous geographical journals of the so-called radical geographers in the recent past was called "Herodotus". This series of examples could be continued;
• - many geographical ideas and concepts in embryo can be found in the works of ancient geographers (as Engels said about philosophy). Breaking the fog of superstitions and myths, they for the first time tried to find explanations for the secrets of the universe, expressed empirically or speculatively justified hypotheses about the sphericity of the earth, its division into latitudinal zones, about the change in time of land and sea spaces, and others; quite accurately measured the circumference of the Earth; understood the most important task of geography - to see

The importance of ancient art as a special link in the chain of the historical and artistic development of society is very great. Of course, ancient art, its artistic and stylistic system are unique and irreproducible, just like the historical conditions that brought it to life are unique. However, humanism, the aesthetic perfection of this art, the discovery in it of a number of artistic conquests that retain their value in the future, and finally, the enormous authority of its system determined the strength and depth of its impact on a number of subsequent civilizations. The impact of the ancient world was especially profound in the history of the peoples of Europe.

ANTIQUE TRADITIONS IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Even in the era of feudalism, which arose on the ruins of ancient slavery and was in many ways the antipode of the ancient world, the authority of antiquity was enormous. It should not be forgotten that the basis of the entire ideological system of the European Middle Ages - Christianity was born in the depths of late antiquity. Polemic and struggling with the foundations of ancient culture or interpreting them in a peculiar way, the European Middle Ages was already successively connected with antiquity. The heritage of the Neoplatonists, the formal logic of Aristotle formed the basis of theological and philosophical thought not only in Western Europe, Byzantium, but also among the Arabs (the latter generally drew very widely, usually through Byzantium, from the heritage of ancient sciences, medicine, geometry. But to a much lesser extent degree than the Europeans, they turned to the artistic heritage) 1 . This is not the place to analyze in detail the difference between those ancient sources that reworked the Western European and Byzantine Eastern Christian worlds. Let us only note that in the West the culture of late Rome served as a direct source of culture. Latin became the language of education, revived after the storms of the migration of peoples and the collapse of the western Roman Empire. Latin in the motley ethnic conglomerate of Western Europe was, along with religion, a force that introduced the beginnings of integrity and unity into the early feudal anarchy. Together with Latin, with the works of the first church fathers who created back in the era of late antiquity, fragments of Roman literature also came from antiquity.

Antique images, symbols, rethought according to the norms of medieval consciousness, took their place in the complex hierarchy of symbols, designations and images of the art of that time.

Great was the charm of famous poets, orators, philosophers of antiquity. So, the authority of Virgil was especially great. The place that Dante gave him in his Divine Comedy could not surprise anyone at that time. However, it should be remembered that the Middle Ages created a different understanding of man and the measure of his value than antiquity. It is equally important that in the West between the end of Roman civilization and the beginning of a new medieval feudal culture, a rather long chronological gap formed. As a source material for the creation of a new culture, along with the ruins of late antique education and art, which had also been quite transformed by that time, the element of “barbarism”, the folklore traditions of the tribes that destroyed the power of decrepit Rome, played a huge role. And yet the emerging culture of medieval Europe used and reworked the type of ancient Roman basilica. She created art filled with dramatic dynamics, inspired by passion, forming a special concept of synthesis, and at the same time, in one way or another, she turned to both the technical experience and the figurative repertoire of late antiquity.

In Byzantium, folding medieval culture directly grew on the basis of Hellenism 2 . There was a predominant development of the traditions of Greek culture. True, for the first time after its formation, along with Greek, the official language of the eastern Roman Empire, Latin remained. However

1 There is one important exception. in architecture Arab peoples In the Middle Ages, the complex alloy of its origins included, along with the Eastern tradition, the ancient tradition. Moreover, the spirit of the clear harmony of the forms of architecture and architectural ornament in its "removed" form included the aesthetic experience of antiquity.
2 The correlation between the late antique and Eastern Christian traditions was deeply and comprehensively developed by D. V. Ainalov, M. V. Alpatov, V. N. Lazarev.

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very soon the dominance of the Greek language is established. It was essential that the formation of a new medieval culture took place in Byzantium through an internal transformation, without the suppression of continuity that prevailed in the West. Therefore, the influence of the ancient tradition in the formation of a new culture was especially tangible. So, in literature for a long time Zeus, Ares, Aphrodite, Eros and nymphs were included in the arsenal of images and metaphors of courtly, love and idyllic poetry. Moreover, poetic meters, tropes, and compositional devices largely either followed antique patterns or deformed them. So, in one of the creations of the Byzantine epic of the XII century "Digenis" ("Twice-born"), ancient mythical images and personifications are intricately woven as the third full-fledged element into that mixture Christian symbols and folklore motifs that make up the complex structure of the poem. Thus, the Christian medieval idea of ​​the frailty of earthly life is expressed as follows: “Joys are fickle in our fragile world. In Hades is their refuge, Charon is their lord." The song of Digenis in honor of the beloved maiden evokes in the poet's memory the scene of the meeting of Odysseus with the sirens: "And they came there in amazement, like Odysseus, that, while on the ship, the sirens heard singing."

A number of scholars and philosophers focus their efforts on studying and commenting on ancient Greek texts. Ancient philology as a science itself was created in late antique and post-antique times, and in particular in Byzantium. True, the comments were usually performed in a typical medieval allegorical spirit. Sometimes poets and scholars sought to supplement the ancients. One of these scientists, John Tsets, set out to capture in the corresponding poems the events following the description of Achilles' anger in Homer's poem. This poem, like any stylization, was distinguished by the rational pedantry of style: “Muse, tell everyone about the disasters of the terrible war of the cruel Trojan, Calliope, in those songs that we composed” 1 . In the coverage of events, it is not antiquity that makes itself felt, but Christian ethics. Nevertheless, Tsets and his contemporaries knew in detail (if not fully understood) ancient culture. It was a tradition - a heritage, an object of careful preservation and imitation, undergoing conscious or involuntary processing. The direct continuity of tradition, the linguistic community ensured greater preservation and greater proportion of the heritage of Greek culture in Byzantium, in general in the countries of the Christian East, than in Western Europe at that time.

However, deeper than this line in the culture of Byzantium (still based on imitation and adaptation), there was another aspect of the relationship to the Hellenic heritage. It manifested itself in a deeply transformed sense of harmony, grandeur, and synthesizing of the plastic arts. Interest in clear proportional systems, which permeated the most outstanding works of art of the Middle Ages, is the same echo of Hellenism. Of course, such a directly felt connection with antiquity in the 6th and 7th centuries (for example, the Ravenna mosaics) was subsequently almost unrecognizably transformed. And yet, neither the compositions of the mosaics of the monastery church in Daphne, which are strictly proportionate to the architecture and each other, nor the majestic images of the Kiev St. Sophia Cathedral and the Kintsvisi temple, nor the enlightened harmony of Rublev's "Trinity" - this analogue of the Italian proto-Renaissance - would not have arisen in their special, inimitable forms, if not for the distant roots of Hellenism. The artistic cultures of Byzantium, the Balkans, Ancient Rus', Transcaucasia, amazing in their sublime poetry, grew up in overcoming and using ancient traditions. And in Byzantium itself, the compositions of the mosaics of the church of the Kahriye-Jami monastery, for all their opposition to the plastic spirit of antiquity, could not have arisen outside the influence of the heritage of antiquity.

The foregoing does not detract from the significance of the main and unique contribution that the culture of feudal Europe made to world art, associated with Christian ethics and cult and deeply different from the aesthetic and ethical ideals of antiquity (spiritualized drama of images, a different concept of art synthesis). And yet, without antiquity as a predecessor, this culture would have been constructed significantly differently (let us recall, for example, the art of medieval China or India). Without complex interactions with the ancient heritage, the medieval culture of Western Europe also could not have prepared in its depths with such completeness a qualitatively new culture - the culture of the Renaissance.

THE FATE OF THE ANTIQUE HERITAGE DURING THE RENAISSANCE

The ancient heritage had a particularly deep meaning for the Renaissance. Ancient humanism, its heroic conception of man, his earthly, plastically sensual character compared to the Middle Ages, were close to the people of this era.

Originating in the free cities of Italy, the Netherlands, and Western Europe, which were embarking on the path of capitalism, it was not by chance that the culture of the Renaissance received its classical and most harmoniously comprehensive implementation precisely in Italy. There, the free cities were in essence (Florence, Milan) and in form (Venice) independent city-states, a kind of early capitalist policies. Italy was saturated, like no other Western European country, with the monuments of a great civilization, where connections with the ancient tradition turned out to be deep and organic.

The question of the nature of the connection between the Renaissance and the ancient tradition gives us the opportunity to dwell on clarifying our understanding of the dialectical relationship between the concepts of heritage, traditions, on the one hand, and innovation, on the other, as well as continuity and rupture in the history of art. It will help

1 In the Homeric epic, the muse herself sings at the call of the poet, but the reference to the compiler - the creator of the poem (“composed by us”) would have sounded completely unexpected in the era of the formation of the ancient epic.

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to clarify some of the criteria that guided us in determining the significance and value of the contribution of ancient Greece to world art. It is known that the Renaissance was a time of decisive innovative restructuring of the entire system of previous artistic culture, that is, the great culture of the Middle Ages, which had outlived its historical viability. This era is characterized by a new concept of the role of the artist's personality in the creative process, the social and aesthetic function of his art, the very relationship of the artistic image to reality (Renaissance realism). According to Engels, "it was the greatest progressive upheaval of all experienced by mankind up to that time..." 1 . The art of this time was really imbued with the spirit of decisive innovation. That is why it solved the pressing problems of attitudes towards the traditions of the past with fundamental depth.

In the culture of the Renaissance, the pathos of denying the immediately preceding experience was very strong. However, it was organically intertwined with a no less passionate admiration for those old values, for that tradition interrupted by the Middle Ages, which was embodied in antiquity. Her. direct revival seemed to be one of the main goals of the new culture. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that such a feature is inherent not only in the Renaissance. There is no significant era imbued with the spirit of innovation that does not at the same time appeal to traditions, to experience - most often not of its direct predecessors. No less well known is the fact that in fact there was no renaissance in the sense of repetition, a new birth. This could not be - history does not go back. Therefore, any restoration of the once great and in its era organic artistic and cultural systems, any attempts to formally imitate the old style did not give rise to anything but dead forms of stylization or academicism. Most often, the exact adherence to the outer shell of tradition, the declarative admiration for its authority, in reality, turned into its falsification.

The attitude of Renaissance artists to antiquity was not imitative, which was one of the conditions for the flourishing of art and the fruitfulness of its creative appeal to tradition. The point is not only that the masters of the Renaissance did not know antiquity well and were more familiar with Rome than with Greece. The bottom line is that the culture of the Renaissance had its own great aesthetic content. The social forms of functioning of art in the culture of the classical polis or the Roman Empire were different than in the culture of the Renaissance. It has already been noted that the generic universal man of the classics and the individuality of the hero of the Renaissance are not coinciding phenomena. But with this difference, there was still a deep commonality between the Renaissance and Ancient Greece - the central role of man in the artistic image of the world, his heroic concept, affirmed at a new historical stage of development. Therefore, nevertheless, there was an internal connection of the Renaissance with Greek classics. It was organic and spontaneously natural, incommensurably more organic than that of the later classicists, who, for example, like Raphael Mengs, were much more aware of the affairs of antiquity than Raphael and Titian. This is partly due to the fact that problems arose in the cities of the 15th century, similar to the problems of the Greek policy.

The appeal of the Renaissance to the tradition of ancient culture, its transformation turned into an innovative step in the evolution of art, served this innovation no less than the renunciation of the traditions of the previous Middle Ages, to which theorists and practitioners Italian Renaissance were rather negative. However, it would be wrong to take it too literally. Almost never in the practice of art itself has such a rejection of the immediately preceding heritage been absolute. An internal connection with progressive tendencies, even in a generally denied previous tradition, will always take place. Any new artistic culture, for all its antithetical nature, grows out of the old stage, "exploding" it.

The pathos of the denial of the Middle Ages, in fact, was also not absolute. There is no need to refer to the transitional currents of the Renaissance, to its neo-Gothic reminiscences. Let us turn to the classical phenomena of the Renaissance. Thus, the work of Michelangelo includes, in a “removed” form, the dramatic dynamics of the outburst of the human spirit, alien to the classics, but first acquired by the Western European Middle Ages. The passionate connection with the world, the impulse to action and the struggle of "David" were prepared in the Middle Ages, albeit in a mystified form of the impulse of the soul to another world. The connection between the ruthless characteristic of Donatella's Zuccone and the realism of the Middle Ages is even more direct. This connection is especially clear and open in the Northern Renaissance, where the influence of antiquity was less direct and strong. Therefore, the art of the Renaissance is unthinkable apart from its predecessor, it is closely connected with it by the very fact of overcoming it.

In general, the internal connection with the previous stage is also manifested in the national intonation of the culture of the Renaissance in different countries. It is determined not only by the peculiarity of the country's development at this stage, but also by the previous aesthetic experience of the culture of its people and is associated with another, no less important problem of the correlation of the national and global, international principles in the artistic consciousness.

Both Michelangelo and Dürer are born of the Renaissance. Complementing each other, they express within the framework of the unity of the culture of the era its different and essential facets. Dürer's art is unthinkable in abstraction from the powerful life-like character (and not ideal harmony) of the sculptures of Bamberg and Naumburg, from the originality of the realistic tendencies of German Gothic. So, Clouet could only arise as an antithesis and continuation of the specific style of French Gothic painting and stained glass.

1 K. Marx and F. Engels. Works, vol. 20, p. 346.

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FEATURES OF PERCEPTION OF ANCIENT TRADITION IN THE SOCIETY OF THE PAST AND UNDER SOCIALISM

The one-sided attitude of the most consistent representatives of the Renaissance towards their immediate predecessors was a characteristic feature not only of this era (in this regard, I would not like to give a social description of that absolute denial of the values ​​of the artistic culture of the 19th century, which is typical for a number of currents of modern bourgeois artistic thought). Such one-sidedness - either acceptance or denial of the previous one - is rather not an exception, but a typical feature of the evolution of culture and society as a whole at a spontaneous, uneven stage of its development.

The difficulty in the field of art lies in the fact that, in fact, no other effective form of perception of tradition is possible than in the process of organically solving the artistic tasks set by the modern era. It is important that the epoch itself has the ability to self-critically realize both the strength and the limits of each given stage of its development experienced. Obviously, one should strive to ultimate goal development in its real content, embracing and critically processing the totality of real cultural values ​​accumulated by the society of the past.

After all, the socialist revolution is capable of this, just as it is capable of an unmystified understanding of its true tasks. That is why V. I. Lenin already in the first years of the socialist revolution put forward a program of critical development from the standpoint of the interests of building communism of everything valuable accumulated both in the previous stage (the culture of the era of capitalism) and throughout the history of human culture.

To some extent, the innovative development of tradition is a characteristic feature of all historical and artistic eras. However, for modern era have their own qualitative-specific features in solving this problem. After all, in modern world the meaning of the unprecedented leap we are experiencing in the history of society and its culture is defined in different ways. For the ideologists of the notorious neo-capitalism, this is a transition to a post-industrial society. The meaning of the revolution, from their point of view, is accordingly reduced to the technical revolution.

For us, this is the era of the greatest social and social upheaval in history. Our time is the time of transition from class-exploiting public economic formations to a classless society. Be that as it may, only the transition from pre-class to class society, with the accompanying transition from pre-art to art as a separate ideological system, is comparable in its significance to the great turning point that is taking place today at a disproportionately higher level of development of society, the human collective and the human personality.

Of course, the problem of a qualitative leap in art, a deep rethinking of all previous artistic experience, is posed more broadly than ever before. Also, the very patterns of inheritance and innovation, characteristic of past eras, become not only our heritage, but also the subject of critical rethinking. The problem of mastering the heritage and its innovative development is not only quantitatively broader than in the era of unilaterally contradictory progress in the past, but, in addition, to a certain extent, it is posed qualitatively differently.

In general form, this requires a theoretical study of a number of issues of the real practice of art. We are only interested in the question of what are the ways of mastering the tradition in today's artistic life. At the same time, more specific questions arise, what are the fundamental properties of art that make it possible to turn to tradition and its creative rethinking. Which heritage and its innovative development seems to us the most fruitful, and, consequently, which aspects of the heritage retain their vitality, their projection into the future?

If art were only an aesthetically expressed system of ideological representations that justify and motivate class interest, sanctify the socio-economic structure of a given society, then its spiritual and meaningful significance would be exhausted with the fall of this society. In this case, the history of art would be reduced only to an assessment of the degree of conformity of its aesthetic forms to a social task and to the sociological binding of an artistic phenomenon to the corresponding social stratum. Continuity, however, would be reduced to the transfer of some purely formally understood technical skills in the design of artistic things or to the study of the technique of searching, the necessary methods for solving the ideological task set before art. Empirically, we know very well that our attitude to the Iliad, epics, the works of Sophocles, Greek sculpture, the dramas of Kalidasa, The Tale of Igor's Campaign, Indian sculpture, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin is aesthetically meaningful, it is inextricably linked with the satisfaction of our deepest aesthetic needs.

Artistic activity, embodying the ideas of the era, reflects the level of man's mastery of the forces of nature and society. Lenin's theory of knowledge, which deepens the basic propositions of Marx and Engels in the new historical conditions, organically combines the idea of ​​the ability of consciousness to objectively reflect - to cognize the true picture of the world with the idea of ​​the partisanship of this consciousness. Lenin deeply reveals the desire inherent in human consciousness for objective knowledge and assessment of reality, aimed at changing it in the specific social interests of society - class. In each formation of the past, this function of consciousness as a whole is carried out in the forms of class consciousness in a bizarre interweaving of the true and the false. At the same time, the objective position of the class gives rise not only to its perverse ideological illusions, but also shows the ability, within the limits of its tasks, to objective knowledge of the world, directed

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for its practical change. Therefore, in art, not only transient illusions or particular tasks of time are expressed, but at the same time this or that measure of knowledge of the world by man, achieved at a given stage of his history.

We will not dwell on the analysis of the reasons why the greatest artistic achievements were possible in previous, often undeveloped social formations. Let us only note that these reasons are based on the uneven progress of society and its culture in the past. It remains a fact that in themselves the limited conditions of the development of the society of the past create the prerequisites at one stage of evolution or another for a one-sided, but especially impressive aesthetic embodiment of the significant aesthetic values ​​that we need today. These values ​​are unique, non-reproducible in this particular form at the subsequent stages of society. Therefore, they are the subject of both direct aesthetic consumption and one-sided creative processing in the artistic practice of subsequent eras. Only in the era of socialism does it become possible to overcome the one-sided attitude towards heritage in the form of its nihilistic denial and eclectic stylization of the past. The scope of directly inherited material is expanding enormously.

Modern man finds, for example, in Shakespeare or Aeschylus a kind of ethical-aesthetic catharsis, which, when referring to the works of art of other eras, he cannot receive in this form. Direct aesthetic enjoyment of the art of the past, finding in it unique joys that are not found in other eras in such aesthetic forms, the attitude to the great monuments of the past as living art, enriches the aesthetic world of modern man in an extraordinary way. This direct form of assimilation of tradition by all mankind in its everyday aesthetic practice is its main, most profound form. Mastering and innovative processing of traditions by the artists themselves is largely due to this folk element of mastering the tradition. It is also due to the fact that the artist, like the art historian, is first of all an aesthetically experiencing person, and then the artist himself, creating objects of aesthetic experience, aesthetic exploration of the world.

This very process of artistic consumption of a great heritage is not a passive process. Modern man thinks, feels differently, solves the problems of life at a different level of development of society than his predecessors. Mastering the heritage, he not only develops himself, but also develops, rethinks the old values, rethinks, and does not replace them with other content.

Let's turn to a specific example. In that special form of creative consumption of heritage, which is the new productions of theatrical classics, a new understanding is given by both the artist and the audience of this classic 1 . This is either an in-depth interpretation, or a superficial, modernized distortion, or a dead museum imitation of the past.

Ulanova - Juliet, of course, is unthinkable in the theater of the era of Shakespeare, but the restoration performance "a la Shakespeare" will attract the hearts of the modern audience less than a completely modern Ulanova - Juliet. The apparent paradox lies in the fact that Ulanova, in accordance with the world of modern man and precisely because of her modernity, especially deeply revealed the essential aspects of humanism that are really inherent in Shakespeare's heritage, showed their inner connection with the spiritual world of modern man. Thus, Shakespeare, through Prokofiev and Ulanov, was understood especially deeply and became a participant in the modern struggle between humanistic and anti-humanistic tendencies in culture. Similarly, the appeal to the dramaturgy of ancient Hellas (for example, the production of Medea in Moscow, Oedipus the King in Tbilisi, and especially Oresteia in the Piraeus theater of Rondiris) is an example of the creative development of the ancient heritage, in which the perception of the viewer and the creative are intertwined. artist's effort.

The second and equally important aspect of the innovative assimilation of tradition is associated with the activities of artists in creating new works of art generated by the needs of the life of our society, spiritual, moral and other problems that have arisen before our consciousness. These works can be dedicated to the life and struggle of our contemporaries, stories and legends of the past, images of nature. But all of them are directly or indirectly related to the understanding of the heritage. This is a necessary moment of that intense spiritual life, during which our artist realizes and solves his problems. Naturally, with all the breadth of live communication with the world heritage, the artist in each case solves a certain task set before him by time. Therefore, in his dialogue with the legacy, he refers to that part of the tradition, that specific work that is consonant with the task he is solving. Therefore, the artist, depending on his creative personality, has favorite eras. Depending on the task set at the moment, he refers only to a certain stage of the heritage (for example, the image of Nika in the design of the ballet Icarus by Ryndin or the attraction to certain aspects of ancient Russian art by Petrov-Vodkin). The task is to ensure that the artist does not lose the general breadth of his aesthetic orientation in the heritage, that he is able to critically understand his specific creative task, to see it in the context of a broader whole. Naturally, any regimentation on the part of the critic, and even more so on the part of the faceless fashionable commonality of tastes, can only distort the fruitfulness of the artist's creative act in his appeal to tradition. Nevertheless, in terms of the general direction of art today, two ideological and aesthetic trends in understanding the role of tradition and the range of inherited values ​​ultimately collide. The watershed does not pass along the line of complete rejection of tradition or its acceptance, because even the Dadaists formally had

1 In this case, we digress from the aesthetic "divalence" of such a performance. It is both a form of heritage perception and a creation of new art.

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the traditions they followed. The watershed is determined by the struggle between two ideological and creative concepts of art in the 20th century.

Thus, consistent supporters of modernism believe that in the 20th century the figurative methods and connections of art with the forms of life have exhausted themselves, that the eras of a particular flowering of realism were eras of decline. The belief is expressed that a person is not able to realize the world, to master it in real plastic images. Thus, all realistic epochs and, in general, all figurative phenomena of the art of the past are excluded from the sphere of fruitful traditions. It is replaced by the concept expressed in the title of the famous Brussels international exhibition "50 thousand years of modernism".

But it can also be recognized that figurative imagery and the living integrity of form, an organic connection with the real life problems of the time, that is, realism, each time find new forms and new aesthetic content with the historical change of eras. Then it becomes clear that in the modern historical epoch realism not only has not exhausted its possibilities, but stands on the threshold of a qualitatively new leap. It seems that, relying not only on the experience of Soviet art, but also on a number of trends in the art of the 20th century as a whole, it can be argued that the path of development of figurative, realistic art associated with real forms of life has by no means been interrupted.

We are at the very beginning of the transition to the great era of communist classless society. A few decades of development of Soviet art is a negligible historical period. Nevertheless, to a more or less attentive and unclouded gaze, it is clear that with all the temporary deviations and disruptions, a qualitatively new era is beginning in the affirmation of the realistic and humanistic nature of art. This epoch is also the epoch of overcoming the gap between the mass character and the elitism of art on the basis of the unity of its true nationality and the high aesthetic perfection of artistic solutions. In our epoch, the opportunity arises for a truly comprehensive flourishing of all types and genres of artistic creativity. The qualitative novelty of the new realism that is taking shape before our eyes is also due to the natural consequence of a new stage in the development of society and the natural consequence of the evolution of art itself, the historical development of the possibilities inherent in it.

For such types of artistic activity associated with plastic-visual perception of the world as fine arts (sculpture, painting, graphics), their ability to operate with the visible forms of the world, create recognizable images contains the possibility of a realistic understanding of life, disclosure through the visible forms of phenomena of their typical essence, their interaction with the material and spiritual activities of human society as a whole. With the development of this ability of art (either through the spontaneous manifestation of the realistic basis of art, or through the appeal to realism as a conscious creative method), all the heydays of art in the past are closely connected. Naturally, the great figurative-figurative systems that replace each other are qualitatively different (Egypt, Ancient America, India, China, antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and so on). Their difference was determined not only by a different subject of the image, but also by the evolution of the spiritual world of man.

Just as the poetics of a Gothic statue is different from that of an antique one, and the portrait of Hendrikje Stoffels is not like the Mona Lisa, so naturally the new realism of the socialist era forms qualitatively new features of both its artistic language and its life content. However, this new is another step in the innovative development of the principles of the truth of life, that is, realism, humanism, nationality, forming a direct continuity of progressive trends in the development of the cultures of the past.

In the modern world, the ways in which realistic art is formed are stylistically extremely diverse. Sometimes the humanistic content of such art breaks through into artistic directions that seem to be alien to the realistic concepts of art. Sometimes, in particular in our country, realism and the principle of the nationality of art receive all the conditions for free development. Such art most fully embodies the true face of the culture of the new era. Realism in its best manifestations appears not as an echo of the old stage, but as the path of development of contemporary art, which, from our point of view, the point of view of a socialist society, is the future. In the future, the realistic tendencies of genuine humanist masters of other creative currents of our time will join this stream. The milestones of this difficult and wonderful path of searching for a new type of realism are the names of Kollwitz, Maserel, the masters of the Mexican monumental school and a large group of Italian masters of the progressive direction. One could name many other artists who prove the organic nature of realism and humanism in the art of the 20th century. Since the future belongs to realism, insofar as the appeal to the aesthetic heritage of the great eras of flourishing in the past of nationalism, humanism and realism (both in the sense of the spontaneous manifestation of the realistic basis of art, and in the sense of the conscious assertion of the realistic method) is completely natural for the aesthetic culture of developed socialism. Among these cultures, the culture of ancient Hellas occupies its own special place.

ANTIQUE TRADITIONS IN MODERN ART

Let us return to a brief consideration of the place and role of the tradition of ancient artistic culture in the subsequent history of art. We have already mentioned that in the artistic systems of classicism of the 17th and 18th centuries, the rational-formal and external aspects, despite the better knowledge of ancient archeology and, perhaps, partly thanks to it, opposed the more intuitive and organic assimilation of antiquity by the Renaissance. And yet the charm of the heritage of Hellas has not exhausted itself with the Renaissance.

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Indirectly, it acted through the Renaissance itself, the forms generated by it became the starting point for the development of realism and humanism of modern times in Europe. Hence the deep influence of antiquity on the fate of the artistic culture of Europe. Of course, in the classicizing trends of the 17th century, the phenomena of both cold idealization and empty stylization, devoid of any internal pathos, were very strong. But where the appeal to the classics, with all its utopian illusory nature, was associated with the effort of the intellect, striving to create, based on the classics, a strict artistic system, permeated with the pathos of great ethical and philosophical thought, there arose such phenomena as the art of Poussin. When, driven by the great pathos of the revolutionary struggle, the leaders of the revolution of 1789 "in Roman costume and Roman phrases" carried out the work of their time, the art of David arose there. Then art transfigured the great tragic conflicts of the era, and the ancient "masquerade" was not an empty game. This art, of course, perceived antiquity one-sidedly, but it was a serious, meaningful art, which could not be said later about such antiquity works as Ingres' Apotheosis of Homer or Thorvaldsen's sculptures full of cold abstraction. We should also not forget the appeal to antiquity as the source of sublime truth and civic-aesthetic perfection. Such was the significance of Winckelmann's History of the Art of Antiquity.

And in the 19th century, in the process of mastering the ancient heritage, there was a struggle between different ways solutions to this problem. By the middle of the 19th century, in the activities of various salon trends, an appeal to ancient subjects was widely practiced. This art was a mixture of sugary classicizing idealization with coquettish naturalism. The transition from David's classicism to the academism of salon art was somewhat analogous to the transition in music from Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice to Offenbach's La Belle Elena. The only difference is that Offenbach introduced an element of a joke into the operetta, some mockery of the ancient repertoire of the classicists.

It would be wrong, however, to limit the entire connection with the antiquity of European art after the collapse of bourgeois revolutionary classicism to this alone. In general, realism of the 19th century, together with its direct predecessor, romanticism, was the most aesthetically meaningful and significant phenomenon in the evolution of the plastic arts of the capitalist era. As we know, he was very far from the poetics of ancient art. This, of course, applies to the main realistic trends, based on the concept of realistic typification, based on the reflection of people's real connections, on the artistic manipulation of the very forms of concrete life (Repin, Courbet, Menzel and others). And also artists such as Daumier, who in his painting often turned to a more generalized, more metaphorical language of art. And yet, in the powerful plastically figurative generalization of his images, Daumier is less alien to the foundations of ancient art than his contemporary late classicism.

It should be noted that all the great phenomena in the history of art have, of course, their deep interconnection. In this important sense for us, both Daumier, Surikov, and Delacroix, by their folk spirit, by their heroic monumentality, are internally connected with the fundamental foundations of both ancient and any truly great art in general. However, in this case we are talking about the specific poetics of art, about the artist's conversion or non-reference to the ancient heritage. It should be said that such a direct appeal did exist.

Note that among the artistic movements of the 19th century (especially in Germany) there were other options for the evolution of 19th century art than the typical scheme - classicism, romanticism, realism. In some cases, in these non-classical for the 19th century variants of evolution, quite artistically significant phenomena arose, associated, in particular, with a less external attitude towards the ancient tradition than among the masters of the classicizing salon.

If we take the artistic culture as a whole, then in Germany there was a tradition of admiration for the aesthetic perfection and ethical greatness of Hellas, dating back to Winckelmann, Schiller and Goethe. It was Schiller, in contrast to the "ancient Roman republicanism" of David, who was imbued with a sense of harmonic humanism and the nationality of the Hellenic culture proper. It is embodied in the lines of his "Gods of Greece":

The warrior was waiting for a lofty reward
On the valiant path,
Glorious deeds solemn performer
1 could boldly enter the circle of the blessed.

Here the interpenetration of the world of mortals and the gods, characteristic of the mythical perception of life, is captured. They seem to foresee images of the Parthenonian frieze, almost unknown then in Europe - the procession of large Panathenas, where the image of the festive procession of the Athenians directly merges with the image of the Olympic gods. It should be noted that the concept of antiquity in Goethe and Schiller, although it was not free from some fine-heartedness and devoid of the politically civic sharpness of French revolutionary classicism, was nevertheless distinguished by great aesthetic sensitivity to the real qualities of ancient Greek art. Their work also expresses the desire for the least mystified understanding of antiquity, which could be achieved in the era preceding or immediately following the French Revolution. Moreover, it was precisely in the conditions of Germany at that time, where the intensity of spiritual life, the breadth of the theoretical understanding of the world compensated for the relative impotence of progress in the sphere of social practice, that the possibility of a more direct contemplation of the harmonious perfection of ancient art could arise. Actually, the utilitarian appeal to antiquity as a means of glorifying a specific political struggle did not receive wide implementation. This, of course, was spawned by sad

1 F. Schiller. Selected works. M., 1954, p. 47.

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conditions of the political reality of Germany, and especially in the plastic arts, deprived German culture of that harsh Jacobin pathos that permeated the best works of David. And yet it was in Germany that the aesthetic organicity of the artistic heritage of Greek democracy was the subject of deep reflection. Antica was understood as a realized artistic ideal and at the same time as an ideal goal that could be opposed to the dull prosaism of reality. In the field of philosophy of art, an organic understanding of the artistic charm of the ancient heritage found its highest expression in Hegel's Aesthetics. (The term “philosophy of art” was not used by us by chance. Hegel used the term “aesthetics” only because it was “already rooted.” He himself believed that the exact designation of this discipline is the expression “philosophy of art”, or more specifically “philosophy of fine art”. art.”) It reveals the essential significance of ancient classical art for understanding both the nature of art and the world-historical fate of its development (albeit in a mystified form of self-development of the world spirit). And yet, his concept of art, revealing its possibilities in the process of historical evolution, a deep understanding of the contradictory dialectics of its development (both within itself and in relation to the general historical process), was the pinnacle in the development of classical art. German philosophy of his time. The powerful dissection of the integral structure of the building of Hegelian aesthetics simultaneously resembles the dynamic development of space. gothic cathedral and the forward-return movement of Bach's fugue. It has the same grandeur, complex detail, gradually developing into a clear whole, at the same time preserving all that complexity, outside of which the whole itself does not exist. Aesthetics of Hegel - deep scientific philosophical inquiry, it is a philosophy of art, but still a philosophy of art.

It is not our task to analyze the sometimes monstrous combination of idealistic vicissitudes with deeply meaningful historicism of understanding the fate of the development of world art, which is inherent in Hegel. It is important for us to emphasize two points in Hegel's aesthetic conception that have their permanent value for the historian of ancient art. This is an idea of ​​the historicity of the phenomenon of "Greek classical art" and, at the same time, of its eternal preciousness: "Classical beauty, with its endless volume of content of material and form, was a gift that fell to the lot of the Greek people, and we must honor this people for being created art in its greatest vitality" 1 . At the same time, Hegel saw the necessary inevitability of the historical exhaustion of classical art in the course of world history. We cannot fail to note that the combination of deep historicism with penetration into nature itself, the specifics of art allowed Hegel to reveal the organic connection between the artistic values ​​of the classics and the nature of Greek society, its civil structure. Hegel captured in ancient art a kind of fusion of the particular and the general, the individual and the whole. These are Hegel's words that "the substance of state life was just as immersed in individuals, just as the latter sought their own freedom only in the universal tasks of the whole", that "in Greek moral life the individual was independent and internally free, but did not break away from the universal interests of the real state...» 2 .

In contrast to Schiller, longing for the bright world of Hellenism was alien to him. He saw the inevitability of the onset of the next stages in the development of artistic consciousness, their value. At the same time, having brilliantly guessed the onset of an era alien and to a certain extent hostile to the "art of poetry", that is, the era of capitalism, Hegel came to the conclusion that art was finally exhausted as one of the main forms of spiritual activity that embodies the spiritual world of man, his ideas about the world.

For all the difference in attitudes towards antiquity among Schiller, Goethe, Hegel, it was permeated with humanistic pathos, admiration for the living harmony of the classics, for the fullness of the embodiment of the artistic essence of the era. To some extent, it prepared the concept of Marx - Engels in relation to the ancient heritage.

Only the real practice of moving towards the socialist revolution, socialism and the creation of its theory allowed Marx to see the dialectic of originality and, at the same time, transformed rebirth at a higher level of values ​​of ancient art. Only Lenin's concept of the spiral development of history made it possible, moreover, to overcome the peculiar aesthetic stoicism of Hegel's concept in a real-historical, and not mystified form. The Marxist-Leninist theory made it possible to see the non-absoluteness of the exhaustion of the ancient artistic stage of consciousness and, consequently, managed to break through Hegel's "stop" of the eternal historical dialectic of the development of art, which was so deeply developed in Hegelian aesthetics itself.

In general, it was Marxism that made it possible to rethink the experience of mankind's attitude to its artistic heritage, in particular to the ancient one. At the same time, Marxism also provides the key to organic inclusion, absorption into oneself in a new, broader context and mastering the positive content of the great aesthetic concepts of the past. The question of the fate of the ancient heritage in modern Russia deserves special attention. Here, for the last time, classicism appeared in its guise not only as a “heroic illusion”, but also with individual moments of direct comprehension of the living spirit of antiquity in the architecture of the last third of the 18th - first third of the 19th centuries in the works of Bazhenov, Quarenghi, Cameron, Zakharov, Rossi, Voronikhin, and also in the plastic art of Kozlovsky, Martos and other sculptors of the Russian Empire, connected with its spirit. The bright spirit of Hellenism lives as one of the components of the muse of the great Pushkin. His admiration for antiquity

1 Hegel. Aesthetics, vol. 2. M., 1969, p. 148.
2 Ibid., p. 149.

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expressed in the lines dedicated to the translation of the Iliad. And in the terzes “At the beginning of my life, I remember school,” both a feeling of deep aesthetic charm of the pagan world and, as it were, a kind of fear of it are conveyed:

Other two wonderful creations
Attracted me with magical beauty:
Those were two demons of the image.
One (Delphic idol) young face -
He was angry, full of terrible pride,
And he breathed all the power of unearthly.
Another effeminate, voluptuous,
Doubtful and false ideal -
Magic demon - deceitful, but beautiful 1 .

The contribution of antiquity to the complex alloy of traditions involved in the formation of the poetics of the brilliant Alexander Ivanov is significant and organic in its own way. We are talking not only about the processing of antiques in sketches or about the painting “Apollo, Cypress and Hyacinth”, but also about the general heroic concept of man. Then in Russia comes the times of Bruni, Semiradsky, late classicism in sculpture. In the 19th century there was nothing more alien to the living spirit of antiquity than the then academicism, which appealed to it and at the same time stifled all life in Russian art. Therefore, the "revolt of the thirteen" against the Academy, which laid the foundation for the innovative movement of Russian democratic realism, was not a struggle against the real ancient heritage, but against the pseudo-antiquity of pseudo-classism, with the dead dogmas of late academicism.

Still, it cannot be argued that the struggle for realism and nationality, associated with the struggle against academism, has always been accompanied by a fairly consistent distinction between dead dogma and the true living value of the great heritage. This was due, firstly, to the fact that the pathos of the majority of the great Russian realists was the pathos of criticism, "the sentence of life." A positive hero was more often a hero who fought against the untruths of modern society, or opposed it, or at least did not fit into its laws and norms. Secondly, by the fact that the nature of the development of social reality, social struggle and, accordingly, the very nature of aesthetic tasks required in Russia a deep socio-psychological analysis of specific social situations, the creation of socially typical and, at the same time, concrete personal characters. All this was too far from antiquity. Living forces that move art forward simply could not, remaining themselves, solving the real and artistic problems of the time, widely rely on the heritage of antiquity, stylistically appeal to it. It is difficult to imagine the author of "They Did Not Wait" in the role of Poussin or the creator of "The Morning of the Streltsy Execution", resorting to the revolutionary metaphors of David or to the classical language of Raphael. In addition, the monumental synthesis of plastic arts and architecture, so characteristic of the heyday of antiquity, was necessarily associated with the flowering of architecture, which Russia did not know in the second half of the 19th century. The principle inherent in ancient synthesis of embodying the idea of ​​a harmonious transformation of the environment according to the laws of reason and beauty, in continuous connection with the aesthetic affirmation of the way of life prevailing in the polis, was directly opposite to the main pathos of the advanced Russian artistic culture of that time.

And yet, no matter how far the Russian realists of the 60s-80s were from ancient poetics, in some deep properties of their work they were closer to the great heritage with its humanistic traditions than the salon-sentimental, formally imitating the antique academic classicism. Such, for example, is the choral tragedy of Surikov's Boyarina Morozova. But the main thing is that humanism, that faith in the dignity and beauty of a free person, for which the revolutionary democrats fought. Under a special set of circumstances, this deep successive connection between the humanism of modern times and antiquity could be recognized by representatives of Russian realism in the second half of the century.

The foundations of this continuing influence of antiquity on Russian democratic culture were already being laid in the 1940s. Belinsky deeply felt the civic, and through it the aesthetic value of the heritage of the ancient world. In a letter to V.P. Botkin, he wrote: “The newest humanity has grown on the soil of Greece and Rome. Without them, the Middle Ages would have done nothing. I understood both the French Revolution and its Roman pomp, which I used to laugh at. I also understood Marat's bloody love for freedom... The world of antiquity is charming. In his life, the grain of everything great, noble, valiant, because the basis of his life is the pride of the individual, the inviolability of personal dignity. Some of Belinsky's statements reflect ideas about the antiquity of his time, for example, in emphasizing the category of personal principles. However, not only the opposition of the Russian feudal state to the civil-free culture of Hellas and republican Rome, but Belinsky's deep understanding of the world-historical value of the conquests of ancient culture - its democratic beginning - are close and understandable to us. The next and higher stage in the appeal to the Hellenic heritage is represented by the views of Herzen. The Russian revolutionary-democrat possessed a rare combination of deep historicism with genuine artistry, a sense of the plastic beauty of art and its spiritual and moral value. In the Letters on the Study of Nature, Herzen noted the great progressive role of the culture of the Greek world, seeing it precisely historically, and not through the prism of the classical absolutization of antiquity in the spirit of the late academicians: This is the West, this is Europe. The Greeks were the first to sober up from Asiatic intoxication and were the first to look at life clearly, found themselves in it. And further: “The Greek world, in a certain outline, from which he could not leave without crossing himself, was extremely full; he had in his life

1 A. S. Pushkin. Collected works, vol. 3. M.-L., 1949, p. 203.
2 V. G. Belinsky. Selected Philosophical Works, vol. 1. M., 1948, p. 581, 582.

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some kind of fusion, that elusive combination of parts, that harmony of them, before which we bow, contemplating a beautiful woman... : they despise the Greeks for the fact that the Greeks enjoyed life at a time when it was necessary to shrink and torment themselves with imaginary suffering ... "The earthly, material basis of the Greek consciousness is dear to Herzen:" The view of the Greeks seems to us material in comparison with scholastic dualism .. . in essence, it can rather be called realism (in broad sense words) ...” 1 However, for Herzen, the flowering of Hellenism is only a step in the historical movement of culture. When he moves on to the Middle Ages, it may seem that the new stage overcomes and decisively goes beyond antiquity in all respects. In a letter to the Scholastic, he wrote: “An infinite distance has opened up, which the world of harmonic proportion did not even suspect; its foundations seemed shallow in this vastness, and the face of a person, lost in the civil relations of the ancient world, grew to some unattainable height, redeemed by the word of God ... The personality of a Christian became higher than the combined personality of the city ... "2 It would seem that Herzen behind romanticism saw authentically strengths medieval, mostly Gothic culture, absolutized these features, asserting the complete superiority of the next stage over the earlier one. If this were the case, then Herzen's historical and cultural concept would be close to the liberal-bourgeois idea of ​​the consistent improvement of culture, of the consistent nature of its development, which Marx so caustically ridiculed. Then Herzen would have to regard bourgeois civilization as the highest stage of development. However, Herzen soon came to a sharp rejection of the pseudo-culture of the bourgeois world. The true attitude of the writer not only to the strength, but also to the weakness of the spiritual culture of the Middle Ages is revealed in his statements about the Renaissance. This era, according to Herzen, seems to be a transformed resurrection of the ancient world, but “absorbed” what the Middle Ages carried in itself, a thought that was often later not perceived by the pragmatic thinking of other specialists: “At this time of excitement, energy, people from all over sides protested against medieval life ... scholasticism resolutely saw its own inconsistency against the pressure of new ideas, that is, the ideas of the ancient world. Science, art, literature - everything has changed to the antique way, as the Gothic church again gave way to the Greek peripter and the Roman rotunda ... the ancient writers humanized the unnatural people of the medieval ... "3 And at the same time, this is not simple, as we have already noted a return, albeit at a new stage, to the old. A little earlier, Herzen noted that “Italian painting, developing Byzantine, at the highest moment of its development renounced Byzantism and, apparently, returned to the same ancient ideal of beauty; but a huge step was taken; in the eyes of the new ideal shone a different depth, a different thought than in the open eyes without sight of the Greek statues. The Italian brush, bringing life back to art, gave it all the depth of the spirit...» 4 . Leaving aside almost non-existent in the Renaissance "Greek peripters" and "open eyes without sight" (Herzen could not see a number of then unknown originals), it should be recognized that he deeply comprehended the enormous role of the ancient heritage in world culture.

However, the views expressed by Belinsky and Herzen date back to the middle of the century. As already noted, the situation in Russian culture has changed dramatically since 1861. That new realism is asserting itself, the highest expression of which was the work of Nekrasov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, the art of Repin and Surikov. How was it with the direct recognition of the treasures of the ancient heritage? Direct recognition of the greatness of ancient art took place, and it came precisely from the masters of realism of a new type. The fact that Turgenev was able to appreciate the universal aesthetic and ethical value of the beauty of Aphrodite de Milo is not yet so surprising. We know that in the story "Enough" he threw words that were then incomprehensible in their true depth: "Venus de Milo, perhaps, is more undoubted than Roman law or the principles of the eighty-ninth year" 5 . This was the recognition of antiquity by Turgenev, precisely as a heritage, as an object of aesthetic experience, ethical and aesthetic education. It was by no means about the applicability of style techniques, the artistic language of antiquity, in artistic practice.

Two aspects intertwined in Turgenev's brief phrase. First, there was a certain lordly intonation of enlightened aestheticism - as if art and its principles were more eternal and undoubted than political activity and its principles. For this shade, the gentleman liberal democrat often got it, and moreover from people who looked at their tasks differently, like Shchedrin and Dostoevsky. At the same time, in the heat of controversy, it was somehow forgotten that Turgenev wrote such a thing directly related to the fundamental problems of Russian society as “Fathers and Sons”. Of course, the social struggle for "principles" determines the fate of social life, including the fate of art. But over time, "Roman law" and the Aristotelian principles of "politics", where, together with moderate democracy, its then base - slavery - is praised and justified, are accepted by us less undoubtedly than the great art of those times. In addition, the "principles of 1789", that is, the well-known declaration, are somehow less frequently read by the general public than, for example, Stendhal's "Red and Black" or the fieryly beautiful words of the "La Marseillaise". To the modern student of democracy, along with "liberty, equality and fraternity", it declares the "sanctity and inviolability" of private property, which opens the way to capitalism, so it may well seem that there is less "certainty" in the declaration than in Rude's Marseillaise or "The Death of Marat" by David.

1 A. I. Herzen. Works, vol. 2. M., 1955, p. 147-149.
2 Ibid., p. 229, 230.
3 Ibid., p. 241.
4 Ibid., p. 36.
5 I. S. Turgenev. Collected works, vol. 7. M., 1955, p. 47.

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Here, when assessing Turgenev's phrase, another, most important side of the matter matters. Turgenev, like any honest artist of that time, saw little visual appeal in the results of the implementation of the principles of the bourgeois declaration (it should not be confused with the heroic utopias of the plebeian revolutionism of 1793). He realized that the ethical, aesthetic, generally spiritual content of the Greek classics (the Hellenistic echo of which was Aphrodite of Milos) is immeasurably wider and more meaningful, closer to the future than the principles of the bourgeois-capitalist way of life with its bourgeois democracy, which seemed very doubtful. and people like Herzen and Shchedrin.

One of the essential values ​​of antiquity was especially deeply revealed by Gleb Uspensky, a writer who, it would seem, is so far from the beauties of antiquity in his work. But the fact of the matter is that it was people who in those years were inclined to move away from the painful questions of life into the realm of eternal beauty, were unable to understand the inner ethical pathos of ancient culture, its belief that harmony and order in ethics and in art express high effort of the will and mind of man. The fact that it was the author of The Morals of Rasteryaeva Street who rose to an understanding of the ethical and aesthetic charm of antiquity, an understanding of the connection between antiquity and the real goals of the social struggle of the time, which was infrequent in those years both in Russia and in the rest of Europe, seems very remarkable. In addition, Uspensky's view of Aphrodite de Milo contains a number of provisions that indicate the value, proximity of ancient culture to those ultimate social and ethical values ​​for which the democratic movement is fighting in the modern world. The complexity and multidimensionality of Uspensky's story "The Straightened One" also lies in the controversy that he leads in it with Turgenev and Fet (more precisely, with his poems, which are not the best in the poet's legacy, dedicated to the famous statue). The most important thing, however, is that Ouspensky, who acutely perceived the aesthetic intonation of Turgenev's phrase, apparently, in the tension of his struggle with the then Russian way of life, did not catch some shades of his thought. It is significant, however, that Ouspensky, leading his Tyapushkin through Paris and London, with brilliance, malice and sharp-sighted accuracy, exposes the bourgeois way of life, which crumples and disfigures a person. Moreover, it is in the meeting with the "Venus de Milo" that he acquires a visible idea of ​​the true and undoubted beauty of a person, his possible greatness and strength, and he himself, as it were, straightens up. So, in fact, the polemical beginning of the story is removed.

And yet we dare to say that the irritably suspicious Tyapushkin, who clearly took Turgenev’s thought somewhat one-sidedly, understood the problems of the relationship between beauty and life, the role of the ancient heritage more broadly or socially more concretely than the great master of the Russian word. Naturally, we are not talking about comparing the story as a whole with a single phrase, but about the general ideological and aesthetic pathos of the two writers. For Ouspensky, it is unacceptable to bring Venus and any phenomenon of art beyond the limits of life into the sphere of pure beauty (note that this does not follow directly from Turgenev's phrase). How does Tyapushkin understand the connection between life and beauty? The answer is contained in the part of the story where the author shows through the dirt and horror of Russian reality the beauty of a man from the people in those few minutes when he can find a harmonious expression of his vitality in work. This is the description of the woman at the hayfield: “... all of her, her whole figure with a fitted skirt, bare legs ... with this rake in her hands, with which she threw dry hay ... was so light, graceful, so “lived”, but did not work, lived in complete harmony with nature, with the sun, the breeze, with this hay, with the whole landscape with which both her body and her soul were merged ... that I looked at her for a long, long time, thought and felt only one thing: "how good!" 1 . This place is the key, the vital basis of the emerging ethical and aesthetic experience from his encounters with antiquity. The writer felt the sublimely natural truthfulness of the plastics of the ancients, who knew how to see and generalize exactly the movement in which the beauty and harmony inherent in a living person were most fully revealed.

Thanks to his strong connection with life, his painful desire to help a person realize his right to happiness, Uspensky-Tyapushkin managed to see in Venus not an ideal in general, but something immeasurably greater. Ouspensky completely brushes aside the admiration for “pathos passion” and sensual veneration that Fet sang in Venus:

How much bliss is proud
Spilled in the heavenly face!
So, all breathing pathos passion,
All dazzling with sea foam
And all-conquering power,
You look into eternity before you 2

This creation of Fet, of course, is distinguished by the spirit of joyful major and rhythmic energy that is not characteristic of him. Obviously, the poet did not remain a stranger to the "heroic charm of the Hellenic spirit." There is undoubtedly less "coquetry" in him than it seemed to Tyapushkin. And yet, the pathos of, so to speak, pure aesthetic pleasure that dominates Fet's lines only very indirectly conveys the ethical and aesthetic greatness of ancient art.

Gleb Uspensky's understanding of the figurative greatness of Aphrodite of Milos is both deeper and more adequate to the original. Ouspensky, by the way, is absolutely right, reasonably noting that all these lovely female beauties are more associated with the later Roman-Hellenistic Venuses: “There, female features are highlighted with great care and climb into the eyes first of all; these (also famous) Venuses really match and shrink, and boil, and flaunt a laughing body, and eyes, and pens, “in a sort of” pathos manner depicting gestures of modesty” 3 .

For Uspensky-Tyapushkin, the meaning and purpose of the Venus de Milo is completely different: “And no matter how carefully you analyze this great creature from the point of view of

1 G. I. Uspensky. Collected works, vol. 7. M., 1957, p. 236.
2 A. A. Fet. Poems. M., 1956, p. 152.
3 G. I. Uspensky. Collected Works, vol. 7, p. 252.

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"feminine charm", you will be convinced at every step that the creator of this work of art had some other, higher goal. ... He needed the people of his time, and all ages, and all peoples to forever and inviolably imprint in the hearts and minds the tremendous beauty of a human being, to acquaint a person - a man, a woman, a child, an old man - with a sense of happiness to be a man, to show everyone us and make us happy with a visible opportunity for all of us to be beautiful.” And further: “... he created that true in a person, which is the meaning of all his work, that which now, this very moment is not in anyone, in anything and nowhere, but which is at the same time in every human being , at the present time it looks like a crumpled glove, and not a straightened one ... Your thought, grieving about the endless "vale" of the present, cannot but be carried away by a dream into some infinitely bright future. And the desire to straighten, to free the crippled present person for this bright future, even without any definite outlines, joyfully arises in the soul.

Here is one of the deepest thoughts expressed in the 19th century, proving the great "certainty" of ancient art, its inner closeness to our ultimate ideals. And it seems that in an era when a bright future has not only acquired its definite outlines, but is also becoming a reality, the lively charm, the modernity of the ancient heritage seems to be more and more obvious. And it should also be noted that Ouspensky’s ability to understand the relevance of the image of Aphrodite of Milo, moreover, through the comprehension of precisely her artistic properties and qualities that are really contained in the many-sided figurative richness of the statue, is all the more precious because, from the point of view of the immediate reality of Russian reality, it would seem that there was no to Venus. A new stage in relation to antiquity comes at the beginning of the 20th century. This is a time of extraordinary flowering not only of Western European, but also of Russian antiquity. Along with the sculpture of the Parthenon, discovered to mankind at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, the world of the Aegean and Mycenaean cultures began to unfold from the last third of the 19th century. Excavations at Olympia have yielded a new series of originals from the 5th century BC. BC e. Excavations on the Acropolis have shown a subtle charm of mature archaic sculpture and early classics. In Russia, archaeological discoveries of ancient civilization were made in the Black Sea region. This contributes to a wider knowledge of the true Greek culture. More importantly, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, in Russian culture, for a number of reasons, there was an increased interest in the more direct poetry of the artistic language. At the same time, an objective need arises and, as it were, the possibility of reviving monumental-synthetic and monumental-decorative forms of art. This trend affected all European art in different ways, leading to the emergence of the Art Nouveau style at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, especially characteristic of architecture and applied arts. The transition of capitalism to the highest stage of imperialism, under which and in connection with which this artistic process was outlined, also determined its narrow boundaries and very early led to its ugly modernist deformation. However, it was precisely during this period that in Russia, in the struggle against the emerging modernism, the process of bright development of humanistic realistic trends in art was going on, the foundations of a new qualitative stage in the history of Russian and world art were being laid. One of the aspects in this process was the revival not only of interest in ancient tragedy and poetry (translations by Zelinsky, Veresaev), but also in a new understanding of the pictorial embodiment of the images of the ancient world, for example, “Odysseus and Navzikaya”, “The Abduction of Europe” by Serov, “Nike” Konenkov, Bakst's somewhat theatrical Terror Antiquus. This process of reviving interest in antiquity is associated not only with a passion for ancient themes, but also with the search for that monumentality, that content of the image, its special poetic capacity, which naturally attracted many artists to the art of ancient Hellas. In search of new synthetic forms of art, artists, painfully looking for new ways to the flowering of culture, turn to the choral beginning of the Greek theater and the strict monumental tension of the archaic, trying to guess the secret of the eternal charm of the great ancient classical culture.

In the West, the beginning of the 20th century is marked by the emergence of anti-salon and anti-academic sculptors who, at the same time, creatively pose problems of interpreting antiquity as one of the essential traditions for the further development of art. It is enough to refer to such names as Maillol, Bourdelle, Despio. We are talking not only about such works as "Hercules" or "Sappho" by Bourdelle, but about a deep rethinking of the principles of ancient plasticity in the nude figures of Maillol and Despio. In general, the problem of attitudes towards the ancient and, more broadly, towards the classical heritage is once again becoming one of the essential problems in art.

The modern development of culture in the middle of the 20th century sharply raises the question of the revival of large forms architectural ensembles, about the new flourishing of mass forms of arts and crafts in the art industry. Just as urgently, life poses the problem of a new synthesis of the plastic arts, a new flourishing of monumental forms of fine art. All this makes the question of our attitude to the ancient heritage one of the key problems not only in the field of cultural history, but also in the development of contemporary art in general. The victory of socialism in the USSR, the struggle and clash of two world social systems (capitalism and socialism adapting to the new conditions of social reality, victoriously marching through the complex contradictions of its development to the final victory) give this struggle for the ancient heritage a special urgency.

For all the originality of intermediate directions and solutions in this matter, we are mainly opposed to the line of pseudo-civilization of imperialism. Bourgeois culture refuses to develop great traditions

1 G. I. Uspensky. Collected Works, vol. 7, p. 253, 254.

41

nationality, humanism and realism, which are adopted precisely by socialist culture. The reactionary culture of the modern capitalist world, refuting the cold academic classicism of the 19th century, as well as the genre and anecdotal art of the late salon, does this from a reactionary position. It falls on the great realists of the 17th-19th centuries, on the Renaissance 1 , on the great classics. The main flaw of the ancient heritage is the fact that it was in it that the foundations of that realism and humanism were laid, which supposedly distorted the actual creative and aesthetic values ​​of art.

In essence, today the study of the ancient heritage, methods and determination of the measure of its aesthetic value are becoming an organic part of the irreconcilable struggle that goes on between the two concepts of art. According to one of them, art is revered as the bearer of the principles of truth, reason and beauty; according to another, the value of art is seen in its irrationality, phantasmagorism, or cold, formal abstraction from life.

The struggle for the ancient heritage is an important aspect of the struggle of the new socialist humanism for the salvation and development of the humanistic foundations in the spiritual heritage of mankind. At the same time, the study of the ancient heritage should help to better understand its value as an object of direct aesthetic pleasure, to understand the reasons why even today ancient art is a living art for us, continues to excite us, gives us pleasure, spiritually shapes the world of a person in a socialist society.

Indeed, in solving a number of big problems posed to artists by the development of communist culture, the ancient heritage acquires extraordinary relevance. This, of course, is not about the fact that the creations of antiquity retain for us the significance of certain perfect standards and models for external copying and imitation. But the fundamental principles in understanding the humanistic dignity of man, the enormous organicity of including the image of man in that mighty monumental synthesis that ancient art has given us, are of great value. Antique becomes the subject of study when solving new artistic tasks set by the time: affirming the greatness and rationality of man, creating an unprecedented synthesis of art, transforming the environment of our existence according to the laws of reason and beauty. Therefore, one cannot but admit that the monumental-synthetic, folk and heroic character of Greek art is in tune with some of the tasks facing Soviet artistic culture, to a greater extent than the heritage of a number of other artistic eras.

For a Soviet artist, as well as for every Soviet person, the ancient heritage has the significance that it helps to shape his spiritual and aesthetic world, to deepen his understanding of beauty. In addition, the experience of the very principles of the formation of monumental folk art is of great importance. The social and civic character of ancient art of the archaic era and its classical heyday makes its experience close to the masters of Soviet art. No less important for many searches related to the further development of the art of socialist realism is the direct content, the mighty power of the plastic form of mature archaic and classic art, its universal breadth and, at the same time, amazing concreteness of images. The creative transformation of this experience in relation to the new artistic tasks set by the time is one of the conditions indicated by V. I. Lenin for the formation of a new communist culture.

It is impossible to pass over in silence one more aspect of mastering the ancient and generally classical heritage of the past. We emphasized that the literal copying of the creations of the past, the imitation of their method, is directly opposite to its creative assimilation and development. Nevertheless, we must not forget that realistic art is fundamentally inseparable from the unevenly developing, historically accumulating corresponding professional mastery of sculptural materials (if we talk about sculpture), from the experience of knowing and mastering the technique of reproducing the forms of the surrounding world, the method of their truthful depiction in accordance with our idea of main and important in the life of nature and human life. There is a professional skill, there is also a school of realistic skill, on the basis of which the artist is free to create his own creative method in all its originality. Of course, the skills given by the school are not immutable. They are inextricably linked with the aesthetic positions of the time, with the psychological world of the artist of this era. And yet, the ability to master the accumulated centuries-old experience of professional knowledge as a special initial, initial stage of mastery, the ability to learn both from nature and from the experience of realistic art is an important condition for training a full-fledged artist. And in this respect, the heritage of antiquity has an enduring value for us.

It is no coincidence that among our artistic intelligentsia there are widespread disputes around the ancient heritage. It is no coincidence that for a number of our major masters the ancient heritage has played and is playing a huge role in shaping their creative individuality. In this regard, one of the objectives of this study is an attempt to contribute to the definition of the significance that the ancient heritage has for our developing socialist culture.

1 This idea, widespread in modern bourgeois art history, was associated with the vulgar sociological reduction of Renaissance realism to the expression of the ideas of the bourgeoisie. This idea is especially "popularly" expressed by the revisionist Garaudy.

ancient heritage

Ancient heritage... What do we imagine when we hear the word "antiquity"? Bright blue sky. A warm, shiny sea merging with the sky somewhere beyond the horizon. Snow-white clouds, slender rows of columns of temples directed towards them and beautiful white marble sculptures… Harmony and beauty. Or maybe the word "antiquity" gives us a different image? A red fluttering cloak, a helmet gleaming in the sun, a shield and a sword. The emperor on a chariot passes under the triumphal arch. And on seven hills there is a city: narrow streets resembling corridors, temples, arches, aqueducts… What ancient states were called antique? These are Ancient Greece and Rome. There were many tragic and cruel things in the history of these states. But, at the same time, they left a rich legacy for all mankind. With its "echoes", "traces" we meet in everyday life.

We live in the European part of Russia, on the European continent. For the first time the word "Europe" appeared in the myths of ancient Greece. At night we see stars in the sky. More than 2500 years ago in ancient Greece, scientists observed them. In the XI century BC. e. in Alexandria, a catalog of 1022 stars was compiled. Their names remind me of ancient gods and heroes.

When a person is sick, the doctor writes out a prescription for medicine in a language born in ancient times. And who was the first to understand the need to educate children, to educate people? Ancient Greeks. The words "alphabet", "school", "notebook", "pencil case" came to us from the distant ancient world: "alpha" was the first letter Greek alphabet, the word "penna" meant "pen", and "pencil case" - a box for pens, the Greek word "tetra" means "four", and a notebook in Ancient Greece was called a fourfold folded sheet, the Greek word "school" meant "leisure" - rest from physical labor.

The ancient world gave me the words "vacation, physics, mathematics, history, barbarian, citizen, teacher, museum, library, theater, hymn, diameter, credit, August, July" and the expression "a healthy mind in a healthy body." The architecture and sculpture of ancient times became a “model” for the world - a “classic” and served as an example for some St. Petersburg architects, sculptors and painters.

Questions and tasks:

1. In what ancient (as they say, dead) language does a doctor write prescriptions?
2. Which stars and planets are named after ancient gods and heroes?
3. Based on the content of the article and your knowledge of history ancient world, compose a cinquain on the theme "Ancient World". Write it down in your workbook.

On the topic: methodological developments, presentations and notes

Grade 8 MHK Antiquity. stages of antiquity. Cretan kingdom. Mycenaean civilization

presentation for the MHK lesson in the 8th CLASS is designed for 2 lessons. according to the material of the book for teachers of the Moscow Art Theater, lesson plans for the 8th grade (author-compiler Yu.E. Galushkina) + the simplest survey is literally not ...

This manual is a collection of presentations for lessons on the topic: "Heritage of Europe and the heritage of St. Petersburg." The materials of the collection comply with the requirements of the State Educational ...

Lesson on the history and culture of St. Petersburg Grade 6 Topic: "Keepers and repositories of the ancient literary heritage"

Methodological development using game technology...

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Study of the formation, development, flourishing and decline of Ancient Greece through the prism of cultural heritage. Development periods Greek mythology. Periodization of ancient Greek art. Cultural ties between Greece and the East. Philosophy, architecture, literature.

Trofimova Anna Alekseevna

State Hermitage Museum, Russian Federation, Ph.D. Division ancient world

In the 20th century, antiquity and its influence on the culture and art of subsequent centuries became one of the main topics of art history. This movement of thought affected not only particular examples of the influence of antique samples on the images of European art. The concept of "classical", essentially always inextricably linked with antiquity, has become the key to understanding the development of Western European art from the Renaissance to the present day. In the historiography of the past century, this category was invariably present in the concepts of leading art theorists (G. Wölfflin, E. Panofsky, G. Sedlmayr, G. Kashnitz von Weinberg, E. Gombrich, and others).
In modern art history of antiquity, the problem of the influence of the ancient heritage, its transformation in time and space, sets the direction for many studies. The expansion of the "classic" to the periphery of the ancient world, to the Greek colonies of the Northern Black Sea region, southern Italy, Asia Minor, the Iberian Peninsula, Africa, the adaptation of Greek culture and art in the Hellenistic era to the culture of Asia and the East, became the subject of study of scientific schools of foreign and Russian ancient studies second half of the XX - beginning of the XXI century. Close attention to the neoclassical currents of ancient art, such as, for example, the neo-Attic style, which was described in the works of a number of ancient scholars. Finally, the history of collecting antiques took shape as an independent section of science, while historical restorations became an obligatory part of the scientific publication of the monument.
A step forward in the theoretical development of the problem was made in monographic works that explore the artistic ideas and concepts of classical antiquity, which were of decisive importance for Western European culture. Nudity in art, the body as the main pictorial motif, the essence of the classics, the style and expression of the ideology of the state, epiphany (God and man), myth-making in fine arts - this is not a complete list of such topics, the interest in which is growing rapidly.
The report does not pretend to be a complete review of contemporary problems of historiography within the framework of the conference theme. This is a brief introduction, the task of which is to give an idea of ​​the main directions and milestones, and to tell in more detail about the significance of this topic in the scientific activities of the Department of the Ancient World of the State Hermitage.
As you know, already in the era of archaic Greek civilization spread across the Mediterranean. The Greeks founded their cities over a vast territory; the world of ancient culture has become a model for many peoples - in Africa, Sicily, in the lands of the Gauls and Thracians.
The problem of the interaction between the ancient tradition and the culture created by the local population was a key one for several generations of researchers in the Northern Black Sea region, a traditional area of ​​Russian and Hermitage science. The ratio of Greek and barbarian elements was in the center of attention of M.I. Rostovtsev (1914), B.V. Farmakovsky (1914), O.F. Waldgauer (1924), in the post-war period - V.D. Blavatsky (1961, 1962), A.P. Ivanova (1955, 1961), T.N. Knipovich (1955). Beginning in the 1960s, the topic of Greek colonization attracted the attention of foreign scholars. Important theoretical propositions about the penetration of Greek civilization into the barbarian environment were expressed in the works of J. Boardman - about the interaction of Greeks and peoples at a lower stage of development, about the mutual influence of the parties on each other (J. Boardman, 1964, 1994). In the Russian science of the last four decades, works have appeared that summarize knowledge on the history, archeology of individual centers and areas (M.M. Kobylina, 1972; G.S. Sokolov, 1973, 1990; D.S. Herziger, 1973; A.P. Mantsevich, 1987; Ancient sculpture of Chersonese, 1976; L.I. Davydova, 1990,), on the other hand, there has been a transition to the creation of new models and methods for studying the art of the northern Black Sea periphery (E.A. Savostina, 1999, 2001, 2004; M .Yu. Vakhtina, 2005). Of great importance for further discoveries were the development of methodological aspects of the problem of interethnic contacts (Yu.V. Andreev, 1996; Greeks and barbarians of the Northern Black Sea region in the Scythian era, 2005), namely, a systematic, comprehensive study of ancient and barbarian societies. Now they began to be considered as "closely interconnected links of a single pano-cumenical system of interaction between ethnic groups located at different levels of historical development and belonging to different socio-economic formations" (Andreev, 1996).
The development of research on the culture of the Greeks and barbarians in the south of Russia is carried out in various forms. For ten years, the international conference "The Bosporan Phenomenon" has been gathering scientists from Russia and Europe for discussion. From 1950-60s. post-war period, excavations of archaeological expeditions are being carried out with publications of the results of research: Berezan (S.L. Solovyov, Ya.V. Domansky, D.E. Chistov), ​​Chersonese (G.D. Belov, Yu.P. Kalashnik), Nymphaeum (N L. Grach, O.Yu. Sokolova), Myrmekia (Yu.A. Vinogradov, A.M. Butyagin). Currently, six archaeological expeditions of the Hermitage Department of the Ancient World are working in this region. At the same time, work is underway to study the ancient monuments of the Northern Black Sea region, stored in the Hermitage. These are fundamental publications devoted to Greek gold (Yu.P. Kalashnik), articles on ceramics (A.E. Petrakova, Yu.I. Ilyina), plaster decoration of sarcophagi (N.K. Zhizhina), sculpture (L.I. Davydova ). Ideas and discoveries of recent years are presented in a figurative and expositional form at a new exposition in the halls of the Bosporus (2007-2009)
An important milestone in the creation of a unified artistic and historical picture of the art of ancient cities in the South of Russia was the Hermitage exhibition "Greeks on the Black Sea Shores" (P. Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2006). Essays on the history, historiography and art history of the North Pontic Greeks were published in the scientific catalogue. Separate articles were devoted to the most characteristic artistic groups (sculptural portrait, Kerch vases, jewelry, wooden sarcophagi). The work formulates the main distinctive features Black Sea version of ancient art, the patterns of its development are analyzed (Greek on the Black See. Ed. A. Trofimova, 2006). It is obvious that the art of the colonial cities was based on Greek, which belonged to the Mediterranean ancient foundation. Greek were religion and way of life, social structure and architecture. Art was an important part of the life of the Black Sea people, accompanying everyday life, ritual, and the public sphere. Many objects were imported, some were created on the spot by migrant artists, and over time, their own production developed.
As much as the similarity is obvious, the features of the difference are so clear. First, we note the lag behind the general artistic evolution of ancient art, not a complete coincidence of chronological periods. Such a delay is quite natural to meet in a region remote from the central part of the ancient world; a similar phenomenon is generally characteristic of "colonial" culture - in the cities founded by the Greeks in Italy, Africa, Sicily.
The second feature is the simplification and schematization of forms as a result of the adaptation of a tradition transferred to an alien environment. This phenomenon is known in a large expanse of the outskirts of the ancient ecumene, where "barbarian cultures lose their original originality and turn into provincial barbarized elements of Greek or Roman culture" (Andreev, 1996).
And, finally, the main difference is the appearance in art and culture of features that were the result of the contact between the Greeks and the local tribes of the Northern Black Sea region. The consequences of these contacts were varied and affected both sides. Here, on the northern Pontic shores, two alien worlds came into contact - the world of the Hellenic polis culture and the world of nomads. The contrast between their worldview, way of life, social values ​​turned out to be very large. The artistic systems of these ethnic groups were also difficult to match.
Despite their striking dissimilarity, the Greek forms took root and gradually began to coexist with the environment. In the course of this process, an exchange of artistic elements (images, forms, plots) took place, which led to the emergence of original art trends that are typical only for this region. The exchange mechanism could be varied. Thanks to the amazing flexibility of the Greeks' thinking, their art forms easily adapted to different semantic systems. Thus, for example, Attic artistic production changed quite quickly - over the course of several decades - under the influence of the local tastes of the Bosporan people, as the Kerch vases show. On the other hand, the Greek handicraft tradition, being transferred to the Black Sea soil along with the migrant artists, was filled with new content, as happened in the production of toreutics.
Despite the gradual strengthening of local influence, the Greeks acted as cultural traders - from the beginning to the end of the existence of the North Pontic cities. Having introduced the main forms of art, the colonists fruitfully used what the alien environment could provide them, which, according to V.P. Kallistov, "nutritional soil". Within the framework of a single ancient line of development, there were regional differences. This circumstance reflects the historical originality of the colonies founded at different times, in different geographical conditions and ethnic environments. Olbia, Berezan and Chersonesus throughout history retained the Hellenic appearance with a touch of archaism that is usual for the province. The assimilation of barbarian elements in Olbia was sporadic and rather eclectic, Chersonese was even less affected by local influence, the city remained almost completely isolated. A different situation developed in the Bosporus, where the symbiosis of cultures and art forms acquired stable forms. The syncretic fusion of elements of the two traditions determined the bright originality of the appearance of Bosporan art.
Interest in the transfer of individual, portrait became one of the specific features of the Bosporan art. This phenomenon can be traced in painting, sculpture, small plastic and even in images on vases. Expressive individual faces are often found in the Bosporan tomb reliefs, in the paintings of the tombs. parallels with the funerary monuments of North-Eastern Macedonia, in the tendency to simplification and elements of "folk realism" - a typological analogy to the works of the Western Roman, in particular, Gallo-Roman provinces. This coincidence of forms, techniques, and features of interpretation in the monuments of provincial art, located in opposite corners of the ancient world, raises the question of finding common patterns in the development of peripheral areas. The cultural isolation and isolation of these territories probably predetermined the stereotypes of the perception of the ancient tradition. Its penetration took place according to the principle of "scheme and correction", when the ancient structure of the image gradually changed until it reached a fundamentally new quality, and, therefore, a new stage of artistic evolution.
The peculiar features of the art of the region, which developed as a result of the adaptation of tradition, found a productive continuation in the art of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The medieval art of Ancient Rus' and the Mediterranean zone is yet to be determined.
The second area of ​​research that studies the transformation of the classical tradition is the study of the art of Hellenism. The main feature of the Hellenistic era is the rapid spread of Greek culture to the East, beyond the Aegean basin.

If earlier its influence took the form of colonization and trade, now, as a result of Alexander's campaign, there was a military expansion that affected the ancient civilizations of the Middle East from the Mediterranean to India. Greek culture became international; everywhere the Greek language and writing, art, religion, mythology and way of life were perceived.
Hellenic traditions were especially stable in the Mediterranean - both in the West (in Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa) and in the East (in Anatolia, Syria, Egypt). On the Apennine Peninsula, Greek forms remained viable until the 6th century BC. n. e., in Anatolia - up to the Middle Ages. Having given a powerful impetus to the development of the culture of many countries, Athens - even during the life of Alexander - lost its former glory. Macedonia in northern Greece, Pergamum in Asia Minor, Antioch in the Middle East, and Alexandria in Egypt became new centers of influence.
Art historians of the Hellenistic era often talk about the fusion of Eastern and Hellenic traditions, about the symbiosis of two cultures. The process of Hellenization seems to have taken place in different ways in different regions and cannot be described in such a straightforward manner. Hellenistic monuments rarely provide examples of harmonious fusion; on the contrary, they demonstrate the incompatibility of ancient (i.e. Greek) and eastern art systems (Egyptian, Iranian or Middle Eastern). However, if in the countries of Central Asia it is, according to the figurative expression of D. Schlumberger, about the "transplantation" of ancient elements, then in the Mediterranean - about a new impetus to the development of their own culture. From the archaic era, the remote Mediterranean regions were the territory of contact - the contact of Greek colonization and the local (eastern or barbarian) environment. Here the process of Hellenization of the ruling elite began long before Alexander's conquests. So, according to M.I. Rostovtsev, "Hellenism before Hellenism" existed on the territory of the Bosporan kingdom. In Asia Minor, as early as the 5th and 4th centuries. BC e. Greek craftsmen, commissioned by local rulers, created heroon complexes that anticipated the creation of the Pergamon altar.
The essence of Hellenism consisted in the creative processing of the classical tradition, the creation of a new artistic culture on its basis. Hellenistic innovations include the emergence of various genres, the development of expressive possibilities, in particular, in the depiction of emotions. It was then, in the Hellenistic period, that many discoveries were made, without which it is already impossible to imagine the history of art in Western Europe. Individualization in the portrait, the creation of the image of the hero-ruler, genre realism, drama and ecstasy, the language of allegories, the depiction of passion and suffering were first embodied in the work of artists who combined the Greek genius and the greatness of the East.
The definition of the Hellenistic era as an independent stage of ancient art took place during the second half of the 20th century. In the works of G. Kramer, J. Charbonneau, P. Levekk, D. Schlumberger, M. Bieber, B.S. Ridgeway, E. Stewart, R. R. R. Smith established stylistic phases, described regional schools and leading genres, identified the main features. For the Hermitage science, Hellenistic studies have been among the traditional ones since the 1960s-70s. This interest, of course, contributes to the composition of the collections - collections of ancient Greek glyptics, sculpture, jewelry, monuments of Egypt and Central Asia. The latter became widely known as works of Eastern Hellenism thanks to the works of B.I. Marshak, G.L. Semenov. Mediterranean Hellenism is presented in the collection of articles of the Department of the Ancient World (scientific editor E.N. Khodza 2004), studies of glyptics by O.Ya. Neverov, studies of portraits of Alexander and their influence on the Hellenistic iconography of heroes and gods (A.A. Trofimova, 2010). The exhibition “Alexander the Great. Way to the East”, held in St. Petersburg, Amsterdam and Sydney (scientific editor A.A. Trofimov, 2007, 2010, 2012). The theme of the exhibition is the campaign of Alexander and its consequences, Hellenism as a global process of interaction between civilizations and cultures. The exhibition showed how the great civilizations met - the Greek world, the ancient empires of the East and the world of nomads; as everywhere where Alexander went, the process of Hellenization began. The eastern campaign of Alexander intensified the process, the movement was given a vector and a historical scale. It was then that the contours of Western European culture took shape, the ways of developing the arts from the Renaissance to the present day. The main discovery of the Greeks - art as an imitation of nature - remained alien to the Eastern worldview, but it formed the basis of the Western European artistic language. In the Hellenistic era, the Greek artistic style became universal - it was adopted by various peoples, regardless of their religion or political system.
The youngest area of ​​research directly related to the theme of the conference is the field of history and restoration. Initially, such studies were related to the history of collecting, or were a technical part of the descriptions of objects in collection catalogs. The monograph "Taste and Antiquity" (F. Haskell, N. Penny, 1981) has largely changed the usual views on antiques. The history of taste became an important factor in the art history of antiquity; Today, interest in imitations, copies, and restorations of antique objects is a current trend in the study of ancient art. Intensive accumulation of information also occurs due to archival research, the development of methods of technical and technological expertise, as well as collective research by restorers and art historians. Among the milestone works, we note the materials of the symposium on the history of the restoration of ancient stone sculpture (History of Restoration of Ancient Stone Sculpture. Ed. J. Grossman,
J. Podany, M. Treu, 2001), catalog of an exhibition held at the Louvre dedicated to the collection of J.P. Campana (Trésors antiques. Bijous de la collection Campana. Ed. F. Gaultier, C. Metzger, 2005). Today, the historical, cultural and artistic value of restorations is generally recognized, although until recently, in the 1960s and 70s, the approach that cultivated an antique fragment prevailed in museums in Europe, England and the USA. Now names have appeared in the history of restoration, among them - J-B. Piranesi, F. Pacetti, B. Cavaceppi.
In the scientific programs of the Department of the Ancient World, this direction is actively developing, especially in connection with the publication of collections in the catalogs of international series - the Corps of Antique Vases and the Corps of Antique Sculpture. Collection curators and restorers are working on a study of restorations of a collection of vases from the collections of J.P. Campana and Pizzatti, (A.E. Petrakova, N.G. Bukina), sculptures from the collections of J-P. Campana and Laid Brown (L.I. Davydova, I.I. Nikulina, E.V. Andreeva, S.L. Petrova). The peculiarity of the Hermitage collection is that historical restorations have been preserved in their places, unlike many European and American museum collections.
The art history of antiquity in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries is marked by great changes. They include the development of new topics and entire areas, the development of research methodology. The problem of ancient tradition plays an important role in the development of modern thought, since, according to E. Panofsky, “The classical element in our culture met with opposition ... but could no longer disappear. /... /. Since the Renaissance, whether we like it or not, antiquity has always been with us.”

In the 20th century studies in Classical antiquity and its influence upon art and culture of subsequent centuries forward to hold one of the major places in art history. Not only did the trend concern around the exact cases of such influence of Classical models upon European art, but it was the notion of “classical” proper that in its very essence was and remains tightly connected with Classical antiquity, and became a key-concept in comprehension and understanding of the development of West-European art from the Renaissance to nowadays. Historiography of the previous century this category would occur in the ideas of the leading theorist of art (H. Wölfflin, E. Panofsky, H. Sedlmayr, G. Kaschnitz von Weinberg, E.H. Gombrich et al.).
Today’s research of the history of Greek and Roman art in numerous studies meet the problem of its influence, its chronological and spatial transformations. In the second half of the 20th — early 21st century “classical” expansion to the periphery of œcumene — Greek colonies of the North Pontic area, South Italy, Asia Minor, Iberian peninsula, and Africa, draw art intellectual groups and traditions in Russia and abroad to search into the problem of conformation between Greek art and culture and Oriental cultures of Asiatic countries during Hellenistic times. Special attention is paid to neo-classical trends like, for instance, neo-Attic style described by several scholars. Finally, the history of antique collecting rarities grew into a separate scholarly sub-discipline, while studies in historical restorations became a necessary part of publication for any piece of art.
A theoretical step forward was made in monographic books on artistic thought and concepts of Classical antiquity that were crucial for West-European culture. Nudity in art, and body as a principal pictorial motif, the essence of Classicism, style and presentation of a state ideology, epiphany (God and human being), mythological creativity in fine arts — this is an incomplete list of topics, which rapidly draw great interest nowadays.
The report is not an exhaustive review of today’s problems in historiography that are touched within the general theme of the conference. It is just a brief introduction, which aims to give an idea of ​​main trends and milestones in art history about Classical antiquity and its legacy, It also aims to tell in details about the Hermitage scholarly activity, especially in that of the Department of Greek and Roman antiques.
Great changes in art history about Classical antiquity of the second half of the 20th — early 21st century include not only new themes and trends, but also the development of research methodology. The problem of Classical tradition plays an important role in modern scholarly thought, because, as it is put by Erwin Panofsky, “Classical element in our culture used to meet opposition… but could not escape. …Since the Renaissance, do we like it or not, Classical antiquity always remained with us.”