A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting the Getty Villa, the Getty Center’s sister museum. The Getty Villa’s collection focuses mostly on ancient works from Greece, Rome, and Etruria. The entire museum is modeled Roman architecture and features gorgeous fountains and gardens in addition to art works. My visit focused mainly in ancient Greek and Roman pottery. The museum organizes ceramics by themes including athletics, war, animals, gods and goddesses. Greek and Roman pottery was hand built, but with incredible precision and technique. This is also reflected in the detailed designs featured on the pots, which usually depict an event. The designs usually feature silhouettes of profiles and extremely intricate detail (some of these patterns could be great inspiration for Design I!). The pottery demonstrated a lot about ancient Greek culture, and they definitely went through a sexist party animal phase. Some of the larger pots were offered as a prize for the winners of athletic competitions, but it wasn’t the spectacularly crafted vase that was valuable…it was the wine contained inside. Also, much of the decorative pottery was meant for the males’ large debaucherous gatherings. The images depicted on cups and plates were meant to be entertaining and humorous for the men and often included themes such as: being really intoxicated, homo-eroticism, and having sex with everyone except for their wives (wives were meant to produce legitimate babies whereas prostitutes and young men were up for grabs). These pots feature a younger man holding a pot while his superior urinates into it and a young man having a sexual encounter with a prostitute…keep it classy Greeks, keep it classy.
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