Friday, December 11, 2009
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7:14 PM
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STATUARY AND RELIEF
The single modern word sculpture in fact embraces two different arts; similarly, in ancient Greek, words of the ,glyphein family designate any form of carving and words of the grapheiu family any form of drawing. On the one hand we have sculpture in the round: free-standing statues which can be seen from any point of a 360-degree circle. On the other hand we have relief work, in which the sculpted forms are a fixed part of the block or plaque which constitutes their background; possible viewpoints move through only 180 degrees, since after that all we can see is the back of the work. The relief carving may be of greater or lesser depth, and the difference is often described in terms of “high” and “low” relief. However, it might be better to use those terms for a more important technical distinction. In what is called the “sunken relief’ of Egyptian art but might more appropriately be called “low relief” the figures are often on the same plane as the background or carved deeply into it. In Greece, however, the figures were never carved into the background, but projected from it.
Understood in this way, relief includes more genres than are covered by the term “sculpture”; relief comprehends “sculpture”, coins and pottery with moulded or applique ornamentation. We shall not be discussing such genres here, for reasons of space, but this extension of the category of “relief” does point up the technical diversity of the methods used to produce it. Whereas marble relief
was carved with a chisel, relief work on coins was stamped on metal, and ceramic relief was either moulded with the vessel itself or applied to its side later. Applique is found once in marble relief, on the frieze of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens, where figures of white marble were attached to the bluish background of the frieze, in a striking effect of contrasting colours.
Of course, it n their common features that enable us to embrace the two distinct arts of sculpture in the round and relief-work in the single term “sculpture”. These features are fundamentally technical: both sculpture in the round and relief derive from ,glyphein, not graphein. They are carved, not drawn, and exploit the third dimension. Statuary and relief work were also related in their use of the materials and tools; they were carved in the same marble, with the, same kind of chisel, by means of similar manual skills, or they were cast in the same bronze. There may also have been common sociological ground between the two crafts. Unfortunately we are nut well enough informed about the professional organization of Greek sculpture to know whether the men who made sculpture in the round also made reliefs.
There is also a thematic relationship. Our own contemporary art has taught us that sculpture in the round need not represent a human figure. Greek art can easily give us the impression that sculpture and figurative statuary were one and the same thing. It is true that the human figure, as in all Greek art, is dominant. However, the Greek column, for example, although traditionally regarded as architecture, may also be seen as a piece of non-figurative
sculpture in the round when it n carved from top to bottom and left standing in isolation as a pedestal or votive offering. Similarly, relief work is not confined to scenes with human figures, but may present geometrical motifs, particularly on buildings, where such features as the regula, the triglyph and the mutule appear — or sometimes it may be incorporated into the ornamentation of mouldings or door frames with ovolo patterns, roundels, palmettes and rosettes.
The two kinds of sculpture, statuary and relief work, are closely related by their use of the materials as well as by their subject matter. Throughout Classical antiquity, marble statues are found standing on bases also made of marble, the sides of which often bear relief work. Statues and reliefs could also alternate with each other, for instance in pediments: while some architectural pediments had relief decoration, the tympanal frame usually contained statues. Standing over thirty feet from the ground on the front of the pediment wall, however, where no one could observe them from behind, such statues were actually in a position better suited to relief Although at tint they were fully sculpted, for instance in the temple of Zeus at Olympia or in the Parthenon, it is hardly surprising that the unseen back parts of the s came to be neglected in the fourth century BC, as at the temples of Delphi and Tegea.
An interesting relationship between statuary and relief is the transcription of the same subject from one genre to the other. However, transcription from relief to statuary is in fact very rare; far more frequent is the move from statue to relief, as we shall see in those ceramic or numismatic reliefs that illustrate statues now lost. It is not difficult to find reasons for this one-way traffic: sculpture in the round was much more expensive, which encouraged the reproduction of expensive items in the cheaper format, and the iconographic resources of relief were much greater. Relief work can present one or several people
against a background which will accommodate accessories or landscape features, and is suited to showing a very precise scene, such as the centauromachies or Amazonomachies (battles with centaurs and Amazons) from various temples, the Panathenaie procession on the Parthenon, the farewells of a dead person to his family on funerary stelai, as well as less challenging scenes: a god or human at rest. Sculpture in the round, on the other hand, is suited to the depiction of an isolated figure but has very little narrative potential, unless it resorts to the formula of the so-called “statuary group”. This term is an ambiguous expression designating two very different technical procedures: either the same block is sculpted to show two or more figures, whose relation to each other is thus permanently fixed, as in the Laocoon and the abduction of Antiope by Theseus , or separate statues are placed together to form a scene, as in the group of Harmodios and Aristogeiton .
In short, the isolation of figures sculpted in the round and the incorporation of figures in relief work into their background, combined with the different iconographic possibilities that result from this, make for very distinct genres. Nor are the relationships of the two genres with the other arts necessarily the same.
Relief stands firmly with painting from at least two points of view. First, it shares with painting a certain similarity of procedures and iconography. When the sixth- century sculptor of the metope on the Sicyonian Treasury at Delphi depicted a cattle raid and wanted to depict several cattle walking forward in profile, he was faced with a problem that also confronted contemporary vase painters, and solved it as they did. He moved the animals slightly out of alignment so that their legs were not superimposed but formed parallel lines. Also in the sixth century, painted inscriptions on vases identified the characters depicted: the sculptor of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi painted the names of the gods on the marble of the background.
These inscriptions are now obliterated, but a special photographic technique has recently allowed us to read them. Iconographically also, relief work, because it too shows figures against a background, draws naturally on the same repertory as painting: in the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, most of the Labours of Herakles, illustrated on twelve metopes, elicited original designs, but the episode of the Erymanthian boar is shown exactly as in contemporary vase paintings.
Secondly, relief alternated with painting on items such as vases. We think primarily of “painted” vases, which constitute a majority, but we should not forget that ceramic relief had an important role in vase decoration, particularly during the Archaic period (in such works as the vase showing the Trojan horse discovered at Myconos) and the Hellenistic period. Painting also alternates with architectural relief The oldest example dates from the seventh century BC and comes from the metopes of the temple of Thermos, which are plaques of painted terracotta showing Perseus, Orion, Chelidon, etc. All later temples had their metopes in relief work. Alternation was equally common in funerary art: here there are countless reliefs -enough good examples to fill several rooms in the National Museum at Athens — but painted stelai must also have been frequent from the Archaic to the Hellenistic periods. We simply happen to have relatively few of them, for the usual reason that painting can not withstand the ravages of time and is obliterated or very indistinct unless special circumstances have preserved it for us; this is the case with the stelai now in the Volos Museum, which were re-used in a fortification not many years after they were made.
A curious occurrence of painting in relief work occurs in the late fourth-century Macedonian tomb at Lefkadia Naoussis. Here painting is used not to replace but to imitate sculpture, almost certainly because it was less expensive than carving; the metopes are painted in grisaille to create an illusion of marble relief
Relief and painting are related in showing figures against a background, statuary is related to architecture. It was pointed out above that statue and column are basically both rounded plastic forms, one figurative and the other not. In fact statues sometimes replaced columns in the architectonic function of supports for an entablature, under names which became traditional and are known to us from authors of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. They describe masculine statues as “atlantes”, with reference to the myth of Atlas who carried the world on his shoulders, or as “telamons”, meaning simply “supports”, while feminine statues were called “caryatids”, literally “women of Caryae”, a city in Laconia. This term has never been fully explained, and in the fifth century the administrators of the building works on the Acropolis called the caryatids of the porch of the Erechtheion just “korai” (“young girls”).
At least two monuments of the last quarter of the fifth century, one of them the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi, had two caryatids where similar buildings usually had columns, and there were two sets of twelve atlantes in the Temple of Olympian Zeus at Akragas (modern Agrigento) at the beginning of the fifth century. The practice of using such figures was never abandoned, and as we shall see below, it was imitated in the middle of the Imperial period by a caryatid from Eleusis, the tritons of the Odeon of Agrippa in the agora at Athens, and the barbarian prisoners in a monumental facade at Corinth.
The single modern word sculpture in fact embraces two different arts; similarly, in ancient Greek, words of the ,glyphein family designate any form of carving and words of the grapheiu family any form of drawing. On the one hand we have sculpture in the round: free-standing statues which can be seen from any point of a 360-degree circle. On the other hand we have relief work, in which the sculpted forms are a fixed part of the block or plaque which constitutes their background; possible viewpoints move through only 180 degrees, since after that all we can see is the back of the work. The relief carving may be of greater or lesser depth, and the difference is often described in terms of “high” and “low” relief. However, it might be better to use those terms for a more important technical distinction. In what is called the “sunken relief’ of Egyptian art but might more appropriately be called “low relief” the figures are often on the same plane as the background or carved deeply into it. In Greece, however, the figures were never carved into the background, but projected from it.
Understood in this way, relief includes more genres than are covered by the term “sculpture”; relief comprehends “sculpture”, coins and pottery with moulded or applique ornamentation. We shall not be discussing such genres here, for reasons of space, but this extension of the category of “relief” does point up the technical diversity of the methods used to produce it. Whereas marble relief
was carved with a chisel, relief work on coins was stamped on metal, and ceramic relief was either moulded with the vessel itself or applied to its side later. Applique is found once in marble relief, on the frieze of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens, where figures of white marble were attached to the bluish background of the frieze, in a striking effect of contrasting colours.
Of course, it n their common features that enable us to embrace the two distinct arts of sculpture in the round and relief-work in the single term “sculpture”. These features are fundamentally technical: both sculpture in the round and relief derive from ,glyphein, not graphein. They are carved, not drawn, and exploit the third dimension. Statuary and relief work were also related in their use of the materials and tools; they were carved in the same marble, with the, same kind of chisel, by means of similar manual skills, or they were cast in the same bronze. There may also have been common sociological ground between the two crafts. Unfortunately we are nut well enough informed about the professional organization of Greek sculpture to know whether the men who made sculpture in the round also made reliefs.
There is also a thematic relationship. Our own contemporary art has taught us that sculpture in the round need not represent a human figure. Greek art can easily give us the impression that sculpture and figurative statuary were one and the same thing. It is true that the human figure, as in all Greek art, is dominant. However, the Greek column, for example, although traditionally regarded as architecture, may also be seen as a piece of non-figurative
sculpture in the round when it n carved from top to bottom and left standing in isolation as a pedestal or votive offering. Similarly, relief work is not confined to scenes with human figures, but may present geometrical motifs, particularly on buildings, where such features as the regula, the triglyph and the mutule appear — or sometimes it may be incorporated into the ornamentation of mouldings or door frames with ovolo patterns, roundels, palmettes and rosettes.
The two kinds of sculpture, statuary and relief work, are closely related by their use of the materials as well as by their subject matter. Throughout Classical antiquity, marble statues are found standing on bases also made of marble, the sides of which often bear relief work. Statues and reliefs could also alternate with each other, for instance in pediments: while some architectural pediments had relief decoration, the tympanal frame usually contained statues. Standing over thirty feet from the ground on the front of the pediment wall, however, where no one could observe them from behind, such statues were actually in a position better suited to relief Although at tint they were fully sculpted, for instance in the temple of Zeus at Olympia or in the Parthenon, it is hardly surprising that the unseen back parts of the s came to be neglected in the fourth century BC, as at the temples of Delphi and Tegea.
An interesting relationship between statuary and relief is the transcription of the same subject from one genre to the other. However, transcription from relief to statuary is in fact very rare; far more frequent is the move from statue to relief, as we shall see in those ceramic or numismatic reliefs that illustrate statues now lost. It is not difficult to find reasons for this one-way traffic: sculpture in the round was much more expensive, which encouraged the reproduction of expensive items in the cheaper format, and the iconographic resources of relief were much greater. Relief work can present one or several people
against a background which will accommodate accessories or landscape features, and is suited to showing a very precise scene, such as the centauromachies or Amazonomachies (battles with centaurs and Amazons) from various temples, the Panathenaie procession on the Parthenon, the farewells of a dead person to his family on funerary stelai, as well as less challenging scenes: a god or human at rest. Sculpture in the round, on the other hand, is suited to the depiction of an isolated figure but has very little narrative potential, unless it resorts to the formula of the so-called “statuary group”. This term is an ambiguous expression designating two very different technical procedures: either the same block is sculpted to show two or more figures, whose relation to each other is thus permanently fixed, as in the Laocoon and the abduction of Antiope by Theseus , or separate statues are placed together to form a scene, as in the group of Harmodios and Aristogeiton .
In short, the isolation of figures sculpted in the round and the incorporation of figures in relief work into their background, combined with the different iconographic possibilities that result from this, make for very distinct genres. Nor are the relationships of the two genres with the other arts necessarily the same.
Relief stands firmly with painting from at least two points of view. First, it shares with painting a certain similarity of procedures and iconography. When the sixth- century sculptor of the metope on the Sicyonian Treasury at Delphi depicted a cattle raid and wanted to depict several cattle walking forward in profile, he was faced with a problem that also confronted contemporary vase painters, and solved it as they did. He moved the animals slightly out of alignment so that their legs were not superimposed but formed parallel lines. Also in the sixth century, painted inscriptions on vases identified the characters depicted: the sculptor of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi painted the names of the gods on the marble of the background.
These inscriptions are now obliterated, but a special photographic technique has recently allowed us to read them. Iconographically also, relief work, because it too shows figures against a background, draws naturally on the same repertory as painting: in the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, most of the Labours of Herakles, illustrated on twelve metopes, elicited original designs, but the episode of the Erymanthian boar is shown exactly as in contemporary vase paintings.
Secondly, relief alternated with painting on items such as vases. We think primarily of “painted” vases, which constitute a majority, but we should not forget that ceramic relief had an important role in vase decoration, particularly during the Archaic period (in such works as the vase showing the Trojan horse discovered at Myconos) and the Hellenistic period. Painting also alternates with architectural relief The oldest example dates from the seventh century BC and comes from the metopes of the temple of Thermos, which are plaques of painted terracotta showing Perseus, Orion, Chelidon, etc. All later temples had their metopes in relief work. Alternation was equally common in funerary art: here there are countless reliefs -enough good examples to fill several rooms in the National Museum at Athens — but painted stelai must also have been frequent from the Archaic to the Hellenistic periods. We simply happen to have relatively few of them, for the usual reason that painting can not withstand the ravages of time and is obliterated or very indistinct unless special circumstances have preserved it for us; this is the case with the stelai now in the Volos Museum, which were re-used in a fortification not many years after they were made.
A curious occurrence of painting in relief work occurs in the late fourth-century Macedonian tomb at Lefkadia Naoussis. Here painting is used not to replace but to imitate sculpture, almost certainly because it was less expensive than carving; the metopes are painted in grisaille to create an illusion of marble relief
Relief and painting are related in showing figures against a background, statuary is related to architecture. It was pointed out above that statue and column are basically both rounded plastic forms, one figurative and the other not. In fact statues sometimes replaced columns in the architectonic function of supports for an entablature, under names which became traditional and are known to us from authors of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. They describe masculine statues as “atlantes”, with reference to the myth of Atlas who carried the world on his shoulders, or as “telamons”, meaning simply “supports”, while feminine statues were called “caryatids”, literally “women of Caryae”, a city in Laconia. This term has never been fully explained, and in the fifth century the administrators of the building works on the Acropolis called the caryatids of the porch of the Erechtheion just “korai” (“young girls”).
At least two monuments of the last quarter of the fifth century, one of them the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi, had two caryatids where similar buildings usually had columns, and there were two sets of twelve atlantes in the Temple of Olympian Zeus at Akragas (modern Agrigento) at the beginning of the fifth century. The practice of using such figures was never abandoned, and as we shall see below, it was imitated in the middle of the Imperial period by a caryatid from Eleusis, the tritons of the Odeon of Agrippa in the agora at Athens, and the barbarian prisoners in a monumental facade at Corinth.
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