Classical Renditions

An exhibition of paintings by Maureen Jaggard and photographs by Brian Donovan

Tuesday April 20th – Friday May 14th
The Governors’ Gallery, Old Government HouseAuckland University
Gallery Hours: Mon to Fri 11.00am – 5.30pm

I attened the opening last night and both artists work are worth much more than a glimpse.

Maureen Jaggard
About the Bassae Frieze – C420-400 B.C.
The Bassae Frieze was carved in marble for the Temple of Apollo Epikourios [The Helper/Saviour]. Measuring .640 metres high by 31 metres long, it mainly depicts Greeks in battle
with Amazons, and the battle between the men of Lapith and centaurs.
Centaurs are best known for this fight, which they lost, in which they attempted to carry off and rape Hippodamia, bride of the Lapith king Pirithous, and other Lapith women after drinking too much wine at the wedding banquet. According to folk legend, they were wild inhabitants of the mountains of Thessaly and Arcadia, combined with savage spirits of the forest in half human, half animal form. Their weapons were rough branches torn from trees. Amazons were women warriors who lived in the Black Sea region. They are believed to have cut away one breast in order to shoot arrows better [from ‘a’ and ‘mazon’ – ‘without breasts’] but it may be an Armanian word meaning ‘moon women’.

The Temple of Apollo was built by the Greeks as a thanksgiving to Apollo who they believed saved them from a plague of C429-427 B.C. It is sited at 1,131 metres above sea level on a narrow terrace of Mt Kotylion at Bassae in S.W. Arcadia. Owing to this isolation and inaccessibility it remained well preserved until Roman times.

The temple was discovered accidentally in 1765A.D. by J.Bocher, a French architect, and the frieze was eventually removed by a group of British antiquaries around 1812 and shipped to England.

It was in the British Museum in 1995 that I first came across these intricately carved relief works. During this and further visits I set about drawing some of the less shattered images and taking colour slides. These recent paintings stemmed from a need to further connect with the creative consciousness of ancient Greek times. When the Greeks created their temples and other works of art they were able to make the ancient gods and goddesses come down among them, thus providing them with a dwelling place. Sculptors identified themselves with all the soul-forces of the universe and were thus able to work without models, connecting with the creative forces to create their forms ‘consciously’ from within, filling them with life, movement and harmony in a way that has never been surpassed.

In the Bassae Frieze paintings most of the cracks and breakages have been retained as evidence of the passage of time. Only where I felt the smashed areas detracted from the overall flow of composition have some parts been reconstructed, for example, the head of the standing Amazon in ‘Two Amazons, [one wounded]’.

Painting and drawing have been a life-long and passionate pursuit for Maureen.

Maureen attended Elam School of Fine Art as an adult student, graduating B.F.A. in 1987. Since then she has had a solo exhibition and participated in numerous group shows, taking time out to visit major art galleries and museums in England, Scotland, France and Italy.

Her painting habit has been funded by various jobs including stained glass window commissions, tutoring of adults in life drawing and secondary school relief teaching.

Brian Donovan

Churches on Temples: Panoramas of the Temple of Concord, Agrigento, and the Cathedral at Syracuse, Sicily
Although widely separated geographically within Sicily, these two extraordinary buildings share a compelling history of more or less continuous use as sacred places since ancient times. Indeed, it would have been fascinating to have been a Sicilian ‘fly-on-the-wall’ at either of these sites throughout their roughly 25 centuries of existence, and to have witnessed the series of events that have led to their present forms.

At the Valley of the Temples at Agrigento (ancient Akragas) the temple known today as the Temple of Concord was built around the middle of the fifth century BC. That it is now one of the very best-preserved temples of the ancient Greek world (together with the Heraion at Paestum and the Theseion at Athens) is thanks to its conversion into an early Christian basilica, and – about a thousand years after it was constructed – its dedication to Saint Peter and Saint Paul in the late sixth century AD. The attribution to Concord derives from a Roman inscription found in the vicinity, but it is not known to which divinity the original temple was dedicated; the Christian dedication to two saints is suggestive of an ancient dedication to two gods – perhaps the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux) – but there are no finds to support this conjecture. Among the modifications made to adapt the structure for early Christian use which remain visible today are the rounded arches cut into the wall of the ancient inner chamber (cella) and tombs placed in the floor. The spaces between the columns of the temple would also have been largely filled in to create walls so that the ambulatories could function as side aisles. Renovation and restorations since the eighteenth century have resulted in the structure as we see it today.

At Syracuse, in Piazza Duomo at Ortigia, the cathedral was built in the seventh century AD on the site of an ancient temple dedicated to Athena (said to have been originally constructed to commemorate a victory over the Carthaginians at Himera in 480 BC – and itself built upon an even older temple). As the Doric columns of the temple of Athena remained visible, the cathedral (maintaining its dedication to a female divinity) was called Santa Maria delle Colonne. As with the Temple of Concord, arcades were created in the cella walls and the spaces between columns filled, transforming the ancient structure into a triple-aisled basilica form, with the central aisle forming the nave. The whole building has also been ‘reversed’ with the ancient eastern entrance to the temple closed; this is where the chancel is now situated. The modern entrance is from the west. After severe earthquake damage in 1693 the Baroque façade and portico that we see today was constructed, designed by Andrea Palma. More recent restorations have removed some later additions, ensuring that the ancient temple still ‘shines through’ in this fusion of styles.

All of the images displayed here are derived from spherical photographic panoramas which span 360° x 180°, that is, the entire visible scene around the camera’s viewpoint. Such images were practically impossible – and nearly inconceivable – in the era of film-based chemical photography before the advent of digital photographic imaging around the turn of the century. They are most often used in interactive, immersive computer-displayed ‘virtual reality’ applications, where the viewer can ‘look around’ a scene by panning and tilting the view (an example is Apple Computer’s QuickTime VR technology). Unlike ‘normal’ photographs they do not selectively crop elements of a scene, but, by showing everything around the camera’s position, allow the viewer to see objects and places in context. This, as well as the sense of ‘being there’ that they allow, can be useful for students or researchers otherwise unable to visit a location, and, by linking multiple panoramas together, enable them to better explore and understand a building or an archaeological site for instance. But such images present certain problems when the objective is to display them as ‘flat’ printed pictures. A sphere cannot be flattened without distortion, a fact which has long exercised the minds of cartographers, where a three-dimensional world must be projected on to a two-dimensional surface (try peeling an orange and flattening its skin without tearing it…). Some of these projections have been adopted here, while others (such as the rectilinear and fisheye projections) derive from photographic lens optics. So a secondary theme of this display is to demonstrate some of the options available to the panoramic photographer making images for printed output. There is certainly no ‘ideal’ projection – each has its advantages and limitations. The photographs were made during a 2009 visit to Sicily as part of a wider University of Auckland architectural research and teaching project.

Brian Donovan is a photographer at the University of Auckland’s Centre for Academic Development.
Previous exhibitions at the Governors’ Gallery which have featured work by Brian Donovan have included Hilandar Panoramas (2003); Pompeii, Insula I.9 (2003); Gallipoli Panoramas (2005); Roman Sculpture (part of the Disiecta Membra exhibition, 2007).

His work is also included in the interactive displays of a current exhibition A Day in Pompeii at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (originally developed by Melbourne Museum).