Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The comedy and tragedy masks are a pair of masks, one crying and one laughing, that have widely come to represent the performing arts. Originating in the theatre of ancient Greece , the masks were said to help audience members far from the stage to understand what emotions the characters were feeling.
Nevertheless, the mask is known to have been used since the time of Aeschylus and considered to be one of the iconic conventions of classical Greek theatre. [ 19 ] Masks were also made for members of the chorus, who play some part in the action and provide a commentary on the events in which they are caught up.
He lists 30 different male masks (old age with white or grey hair, the tyrant with thick black hair, a fair, pale masks indicating sorrow or sickness, a boastful soldier, a rustic, servants, a cook, etc.) and 17 female masks (fat and thin old women, two matrons, one virgin, a bawd, a mistress, three courtesans, a lady's maid, etc.).
The sock and buskin, like the comedy and tragedy masks, are associated with two Greek Muses, Melpomene and Thalia.Melpomene, the Muse of tragedy, is often depicted wearing buskins and holding the mask of tragedy, while Thalia, the Muse of comedy, is often depicted wearing the comic's socks and holding the mask of comedy.
Self-mocking theatre: Frequent parodying of tragedy is an aspect of Old Comedy that modern audiences find difficult to understand. But the Lenaia and City Dionysia included performances of both comedies and tragedies, and thus references to tragedy were highly topical and immediately relevant to the original audience. [ 34 ]
Melpomene (/ m ɛ l ˈ p ɒ m ɪ n iː /; Ancient Greek: Μελπομένη, romanized: Melpoménē, lit. 'to sing' or 'the one that is melodious') is the Muse of tragedy in Greek mythology . She is described as the daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne (and therefore of power and memory) along with the other Muses, and she is often portrayed with a ...
Theatrical scene with two comedic actors on a Sicilian red-figure calyx-krater c. 350 –340 BC.. Ancient Greek comedy (Ancient Greek: κωμῳδία, romanized: kōmōidía) was one of the final three principal dramatic forms in the theatre of classical Greece; the others being tragedy and the satyr play.
The so-called 'Mask of Agamemnon', a 16th-century BC mask discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876 at Mycenae, Greece, National Archaeological Museum, Athens The word "mask" appeared in English in the 1530s, from Middle French masque "covering to hide or guard the face", derived in turn from Italian maschera, from Medieval Latin masca "mask, specter, nightmare". [1]