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Chris Steeples
13 May, 2005
Art History
Professor S. H. Knight
Final Paper (in story form)

The following is a selection from the Journals of Leto Atreides II, God Emperor of the Known Universe. They have not been changed, only translated from the archaic Galach spoken at the time. As a historical note, they were found at Dar-es-Balat on the planet Rakis.
Many a sleepless night in my two thousand years I have spent delving into the molecular memories of my ancient past. The Water of Life, the bile vomited forth by the drowning of a new born Arakis worm was given to me, but I changed the poison as my father Muad’dib did, and gained access to the molecular memories of all of my ancestors. Since that night I have had to learn to live with the memories of those before me. Occasionally I delve into them, to figure out how to deal with a certain situation, or in the case of insomnia, just as something to take my mind off of how tired I am. I have uncovered much I am not proud of, but also some of the greatest accomplishments of their times.
As far as the artists of the family go, one could say that it all started in Sumer. A father in my family, thousands of generations ago was forced to work at the ovens where the mud bricks were baked for the construction of the great ziggurat of Ur. The feeling of accomplishment was great, just as was the awe he felt when the king of Ur descended from the man made mountain to give the laws of Marduk to the people of Ur.
Many years later (many to them, but not to me), another father of my family helped to shape the stone hewn from the earth into one of the great Lamassu of Sargon II, as well as work on other sculptures of the Assyrian Emperor. He then paid homage to Sargon, and complemented him on the fullness and length of his beard.
The first of the great artists of the family would have to be Imhotep, and his beloved wife who inspired him to create such great works for his god on earth Djoser. His stepped pyramid was the awe of the land, as the Lamassu and ziggurats of his ancestors were. I look through the eyes of eldest great grandson and see the majesty of Menkaure, Khafre, and Khufu’s pyramids as their white granite faces and golden cap stones reflect the brilliance of their supreme god Amon-Re, seemingly seated atop one of the pyramids as his Ben-Ben at just the right time of the morning.
I look through the prideful eyes of one of the stone masons as he completes his work on the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut and smile to myself as she blesses his work. The mason nearly faints with the joy of being blessed by the wife of God. His grandchildren help to erect carve the Pillar Statue of Akhenaton, and their grand children help to gild the death mask of Tutankhamen, the man who set their gods blessed nation right after the heresy of Akhenaton.
Distantly I remember the beautiful, if pedantic adherence, to horror vaqui of a pot maker in Minoa, as he stares in awe at the construction of the Palace of Knossos. I enjoy the detail he puts into the fish and octopi he paints on his jars.
Now, after hours of living lives past I reach the ancestor who gave my family its name, Atrius, and his son Agamemnon. I watch through their eyes as their palace is built, their treasures horded, their siblings buried, and their wars won. I watched through the eyes of Orestes as Agamemnon was buried. I watched through the eyes of Orestes children as the Kouros figures were erected and torn down again, as the Polyklietan style of sculpture waxed and waned. I saw the glory of Athena revealed by the statue in the Parthenon of Kallikrates and Iktinos. I stood in bewildered wonder of the Erechthium after completing the day’s sojourn through the Pan Athenaic Procession.
I watched also as the canon of proportion, the preferred manner in which the human form is depicted, was changed by Praxiteles. I must admit, I did prefer his more lithe figures to the heavier sculptures of Polyklietos. His statue of Hermes and Dionysus was my favorite, but then, my family has always enjoyed wine.
I was impressed by Praxiteles’s ability to change with the times, his slightly more emotional statue of Aphrodite arising from her bath perfectly depicts both then and now what a beautiful woman should look like. The emotions of engendered by the art of the Hellenistic period were not surpassed in terms of art palatable to a culture until the Baroque period.
I sat in awe also of the architecture of that the Romans brought after they annexed Greece. Their Temple of the Sibyl was not palatable to the Athenian peoples, but my ancestors from Delphi appreciated the similarities, if not the Corinthian columns and their pathetic attempt to look like trees.
Many members of my family were involved with the construction of the aqueducts, the amphitheaters, and temples of the Early and Late Roman periods; however the Pantheon and the Flavian Amphitheater were by far their greatest accomplishments. No one had ever seen such strings of arches (arcades) or so great an interior space as that of the Pantheon. However my ancestors were perturbed by the Arch of Constantine, with its stolen medallions. They had worked on Divine Roman Emperor Hadrian’s triumphal arch, and thought of him as a much better imperial ruler. After all, he did rule over the largest empire yet on earth.
I must revisit my Greek heritage and watch them as they construct the Hagia Sophia, with its hidden buttressing, and brilliant use of the pendentive to attach a dome to a square base. Their iconography stirs my soul as I see their idea of heaven, present on earth. I compare it to the catacombs of Saint Peter and find it far superior, but then, as the Roman Empire declined, so did its art, they hardly had money for their once dreaded legions much less for frivolous paining in tombs. I see the barbarian hordes flooding into Europe with their garish and seemingly oriental cloisonné, that heavily lined flat colored metalworking that so influenced the later art of Europe.
I appreciate the awe of my ancestors as they look upon the Palatine chapel of Holy Roman Emperor Karl der Grosser. They would have fainted if they had visited Rome, but they hadn’t the means to make the trip. They were stunned by the strength of Karl’s stone architecture, and fought the Vikings tooth and nail to protect it. Others of my family were stone masons in Hildesheim and helped to construct its church of Saint Michael.
A few of my family moved with the Clunaic monks around Europe, they studied with them in Rome and learned the secrets of Roman post and lintel, as well as the arch, vault, and dome. They moved to Normandy and helped build the church of Saint Stephen, where the Gothic got its start. They witnessed the weaving of the Bayeax Tapestry, though not the Battle of Hastings which it commemorated.
Several of my family witnessed the construction San Chapelle and it is here that I burst forth from the memories of my past, of the thousands of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, of the massive tangled lines of lives that were narrowed down eventually to my father and mother, and then to me. I knew what art was now.
Art was not just paintings be they on cave walls or on canvas. Art was not sculpture freestanding or relief. Art was not construction be it the carving of a cave, the man made mountains of Ur that only the king could ascend. It wasn’t the Ben-Ben of Ra over a pharaoh’s grave, or even the houses of God on earth. And yet it was. Art is the physical, psychological, and spiritual manifestation of human endeavor. Some art manifests in the post and lintel of Greek temples, or in the vaulting roofs of Gothic Churches. Some art is in the frescoes of Roman Villas, or the ceiling paintings of Christian catacombs. Some art is in on the tympanum of a church, or in the sculptures of Praxiteles. Some art is in words like the Divine Comedy, or even my own Journals. But regardless the reasons, iconographies, deities, rulers, cultures and canons of proportion. Irregardless of the skill of the artist or the demands of the patron. Without a care to the wants of society or the read of it by the clergy or the aristocracy or the entrenched bureaucracy, art is the same in its purpose, in the reason it exists.
The Orange Catholic Bible states, “All men, indeed all life, is created in the image of God, in his ability to create beautiful things.” So it is that art exists. All the men and women of my past were artists, as all the men and women of everyone’s past, present, and future are artists in their own way. They might paint a painting or sculpt a sculpture that will last a hundred years, or birth and raise a child who’s impact will last millennia. Such is the nature of art.
All of the artists I and my ancestors have seen were problem solvers. They wanted to build a temple, delve a tomb, or pay homage to their gods. They depicted their gods on walls or in stone, and cut the living earth to pieces more manageable to housing their gods in splendor as a form of reverence.
The canons of proportion of the Egyptians and Greeks solved the problem of how to show a ruler or god, or athlete. The realism of the Roman ancestor statues and busts solved the problem of how best to preserve a physical memory of the honored dead. The churches of the Byzantines and Catholics solved the problem of how to show God how much we love him, by how much stone we can pile up and shape in His honor and His name. The tapestries of the Normans solved the problem of how best to honor the lives and victories of their patrons just as art in general solves can solve the problem of finding direction in our lives.

So it was written by Leto II, in

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