Placed within St Peter's Cathedral, Vatican, this photograph depicts a man walking through the colonnade of the Piazza. Captured to exhibit the Catholic Church, this photograph was taken in 1960 by Edwin smith, an English photographer best known for his unique vignettes of landscapes and Architecture. Edwin Smith always found euphoria in buildings and landscapes, and eventually gravitated towards these themes exclusively. He described himself as, “an architect by training, a painter by inclination, and a photographer by necessity".
From the 1950’s he was commissioned a series of books, which helped refine these subjects. The image I will be discussing was likely to be published under the same circumstances.
Roland Barthes was a French philosopher; critic and essayist who helped establish structuralism from his writings on semiotics, which lead to leading intellectual movements.
Using this photo I will have a discussion of Roland Barthes' program for myth analysis, using his text ‘Myth today’ the second part of his book Mythologies.
What Roland Barthes recognized myth to be was the way in which a culture or place grants meaning to it. As Myth is a system of communication, "Everything can be a myth provided it is conveyed by a discourse". (107)
At the beginning of "Myth Today" Barthes defines myth a speech. Myth is speech in that that it is part of a system of communication in which it bears meaning. By this definition Barthes expands on Levi-Strauss' perception of myth to include every symbol which conveys meaning (be it a spoken or written text, and image, a design etc. and even human actions such as sunbathing). For Barthes every cultural product had meaning, and this meaning is conditioned by ideology, i.e. myth, and there...
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...By adding these hieroglyphs the meaning of the space changes. The monumentality of the grand scale of the columns still remains, giving the space its importance and power. Again there is still no defined point in time, which the photo is set in on observation.
However you now get the impression that the priest is walking through an Egyptian temple or tomb. You no longer jump to the conclusion that the space is associated with religion. It begins to allow the space to control the context with the Priest being at the sidelines to the photographic truth. Because of this, the Myth changes. Before the immense power in which the columns created helped reinforce the power of the Catholic Church. Showing as a large, powerful and wealthy machine with the Priest working within it. As we no longer consider this it is hard to draw a connection between the priest and the space.
The structure of stories, on which Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and Booker’s Seven Basic Plots elaborated, is actually only a portion of the field of study it is under. Comparative mythology not only studies the structure of hero stories, but also origins, themes, and characteristics of myths from various religions and cultures. They study the language, psychology, history, and anthropology in order to identify a common theme or beginning point. Even without delving into religion, many common elements have come to light. For instance, many cultures have tales of people with strange supernatural abilities, others speak of similar creatures that reside in water, air or land, while still others extol the importance of talisman and religious symbols. Despite cultures existing on different ends of the earth and having little contact for much of their existence, they share these common
David, Adams Leening., ed. The World of Myths: An Anthology. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
Seger, Linda. “Creating the Myth.” Rites of passage: A Thematic Reader. Catharine Fraga and Hudie Rae. Heinle and Heinle, Australia 2002. 123-131. Print
Williams Paden discusses the world building character of myths and their capacity to shape time and delineate scared and profane space for the communities that believe and transmit them. In William Paden, “Myth,” in Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion, he explains that within religious worlds, myths set a foundation that advance to shape a person’s way of life. Subsequently, they shape their belief and conscience. His theory relates to an element an indigenous story which is the creation story precisely the story of the turtle island. For the Ojibway and Anishinaabe people, the creation story was used as a grounding prototype to shape their belief and their outlook on how the world was created. The story shows how myth is being
From before the dawn of civilization as we know it, humanity has formed myths and legends to explain the natural world around them. Whether it is of Zeus and Hera or Izanami-no-Mikoto and Izanagi-no-mikoto, every civilization and culture upon this world has its own mythos. However, the age of myth is waning as it is overshadowed in this modern era by fundamental religion and empirical science. The word myth has come to connote blatant falsehood; however, it was not always so. Our myths have reflected both the society and values of the culture they are from. We have also reflected our inner psyche, conscious and unconscious, unto the fabric of our myths. This reflection allows us to understand ourselves and other cultures better. Throughout the eons of humanity’s existence, the myths explain natural phenomena and the cultural legends of the epic hero have reflected the foundations and the inner turmoil of the human psyche.
Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tale as Myth/myth as Fairy Tale. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1994. Print.
There is a great deal of critical influences which John Tenniel brought to the field of illustration and to explore this, one must look into his work and his life to acknowledge how this impacted on Illustration and society in general.
Myths relate to events, conditions, and deeds of gods or superhuman beings that are outside ordinary human life and yet basics to it” ("Myth," 2012). Mythology is said to have two particular meanings, “the corpus of myths, and the study of the myths, of a particular area: Amerindian mythology, Egyptian mythology, and so on as well as the study of myth itself” ("Mythology," 1993). In contrast, while the term myth can be used in a variety of academic settings, its main purpose is to analyze different cultures and their ways of thinking. Within the academic setting, a myth is known as a fact and over time has been changed through the many different views within a society as an effort to answer the questions of human existence. The word myth in an academic context is used as “ancient narratives that attempt to answer the enduring and fundamental human questions: How did the universe and the world come to be? How did we come to be here? Who are we? What are our proper, necessary, or inescapable roles as we relate to one another and to the world at large? What should our values be? How should we behave? How should we not behave? What are the consequences of behaving and not behaving in such ways” (Leonard, 2004 p.1)? My definition of a myth is a collection of false ideas put together to create
Exhibit Overview and Rationale. The “The Myth And The Reality” exhibition is intended for the visitors who are interested in historical, religious, human behaviors, mythological material, nature of animals, and the world we live in. Mythical creatures are created by people’s imaginations, hopes, fears, and most importantly, their own imaginations. passionate dreams.
One modernist author, Herman Broch, discusses his approach to mythology in his essay “The Style of the Mythical Age.” His focus is on understanding and using archetypes as a way of analyzing mythology. He says, “Myth is the archetype of every phenomenal cognition of which the human mind is capable,” (102). For Broch, Modernist literature is a return to the mythic; myth is the only way in which the world may be understo...
The artists of the Baroque had a remarkably different style than artists of the Renaissance due to their different approach to form, space, and composition. This extreme differentiation in style resulted in a very different treatment of narrative. Perhaps this drastic stylistic difference between the Renaissance and Baroque in their treatment of form, space, and composition and how these characteristics effect the narrative of a painting cannot be seen more than in comparing Perugino’s Christ Delivering the Keys of the Kingdom to St. Peter from the Early Renaissance to Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul from the Baroque.Perugino was one of the greatest masters of the Early Renaissance whose style ischaracterized by the Renaissance ideals of purity, simplicity, and exceptional symmetry of composition. His approach to form in Christ Delivering the Keys of the Kingdom to St.Peter was very linear. He outlined all the figures with a black line giving them a sense of stability, permanence, and power in their environment, but restricting the figures’ sense of movement. In fact, the figures seem to not move at all, but rather are merely locked at a specific moment in time by their rigid outline. Perugino’s approach to the figures’themselves is extremely humanistic and classical. He shines light on the figures in a clear, even way, keeping with the rational and uncluttered meaning of the work. His figures are all locked in a contrapposto pose engaging in intellectual conversation with their neighbor, giving a strong sense of classical rationality. The figures are repeated over and over such as this to convey a rational response and to show the viewer clarity. Perugino’s approach to space was also very rational and simple. He organizes space along three simple planes: foreground, middle ground, and background. Christ and Saint Peter occupy the center foreground and solemn choruses of saints and citizens occupy the rest of the foreground. The middle distance is filled with miscellaneous figures, which complement the front group, emphasizing its density and order, by their scattered arrangement. Buildings from the Renaissance and triumphal arches from Roman antiquity occupy the background, reinforcing the overall classical message to the
Mythology is an essential part of all cultures. Through myth, ancient cultures attempted to explain the world and make sense of their daily lives. Myth helps us to live in the minds and time period of people who lived many centuries ago with no technology, no running water, and a basic education. Greek myth is possibly the most commonly recognized myth simply because it is likely the most developed and best recorded. Modern Greek myth originated around 1000 B.C. in the writings of the famous Greek poet Homer in the Odyssey and the Illiad. Although early Greek myths are often vague and contain many primitive elements regarding their understanding of death, sacrifice, and fate, later myths show Greek culture developed and changed over time.
Campbell, Joseph, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, (Edmund L. Epstein, ed.), Novato, California, Joseph Campbell Foundation - New World Library, 2003.
In The Sacred & The Profane: A Nature of Religion, Mircea Eliade attempts to define the sacred by stating it is “the opposite of the profane” (pg. 10). Through out the book he tries to explain this statement through the concept of hierophany (the idea that one can experience, sensorily, the manifestation of the holy/sacred), however his main explanation of the sacred being “the opposite of the profane” is the comparison of a modern religious man and a modern non-religious man (a profane man). Eliade compares the two by explaining how each would react to space, time, nature, and life. This essay will explain the idea of sacred space, how a religious and a profane man would experience it, and how the idea of sacred space might be applied to the study of medieval art and architecture.
Murray, Roxane Farrell. "The Lord of the Rings as Myth." Unpublished thesis. The University of Georgia, Athens, GA, 1974.