Monday, December 21, 2009
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HOW STATUES WERE USEDIf every work of sculpture was the result of a commission, either public or private, it was because the patron who commissioned the work had a use for it. Only at a late date, and even then sporadically, was a statue simply 10 be displayed for admiration as if in a museum. Monumental and architectural sculpture was obviously intended to furnish images for parts of temples and other notable buildings which would otherwise have remained bare. The same applies to most reliefs, whose imagery dearly conveys the purposes for which they were made: funerary, votive, etc. It is the purpose of the isolated statue which calls for special attention.
We need not expect much information from studying the Greek words for Statues. About ten of them have come down to us in literary texts, but their archaeological relevance is limited. Sometimes the actual meanings of these words are uncertain: kolossos, for instance, was not always used for what we now call a colossus, and the most famous specimen of the genre, the Colossus of Rhodes, not necessarily owe its name to its enormous dimensions. Rather, it was the other way round. Kolossos was a ‘Western Asiatic word for a statue, and was used by the Dorian Greeks from about 1000 BC. It was applied to the statue of Helios the sun god in Rhodes harbour (the Colossus of Rhodes), and subsequently came to denote any gigantic statue. We must even beware of words with an obvious etymology but a specialized sense, such as eikon, “image”, a term which we know was applied in Roman Imperial times to busts of the emperor. This last example shows that we can hope to circumvent such obstacles, but there is always the difficulty of synonymity, resulting from the fact that the same thing may be seen from different viewpoints. The same imperial busts were also called protomai, a term which instead of emphasizing human resemblance indicates that the head is parted from the body; similarly xoanon “carved [piece, especially of wood]” refers to the technique of manufacture, while andrias “human [image]” describes configuration, and
agalma means primarily a “set of ornaments” reserved for
, kings and gods. In the circumstances, the Classical terminology for statuary may well supply useful information on individual points, but the semantic distribution of concurrent terms is not systematic enough to give us principles for classifying either the configurations or even the uses of statues.
Since we cannot expect much help from the terminology, we must rely on an examination of the statues themselves to discover what they were for. However, a distinction should first be drawn between two questions which are often confused.
The first and easiest is the thematic question: what are the sculptors showing, who or what do statues depict? Primarily they show the human body, images of which constitute an overwhelming majority. However, Greek art never distinguishes between deities and mortals by those artifices found elsewhere, such as the animal heads of many Egyptian gods, which prevent us from confusing Horus and the Pharaoh, or the halo of Christian iconography. Also, there is no equivalent in Greek art to the mediaeval gisant. Thus the same young man carved in marble could be a god or a living or a dead mortal. Only the environment (sanctuary, cemetery or public place) and the inscription accompanying the statue allowed the viewer in ancient times to recognize the statue for what it was and the same as true for the viewer today. For instance, if the kouros from Anavysos and the statue of Phrasikleia had not been found with their inscribed bases, we could not know that they were funerary statues.
Greek statuary was extremely anthropomorphic, but not wholly devoted to the human figure. It sometimes showed animal. Myron’s Heifer, a bronze now lost, was so famous that we know about at from some fifty texts, including dozens of epigrams composed centuries later and retrospectively serving at as dedications. The lions of Delos (p. 34) are equally famous today. Statues of lions were also placed on tombs, so particular those still visible today on the mass graves of the soldiers who died at Ghaeronea and Amphipolis.
No statues depicting the vegetable kingdom have been preserved, but literary texts and inscriptions at Delphi and Delos mention palm trees in bronze. Then there are the images of monsters: sirens and an partacular sphinxes, the latter found principally in the Archaic period. Finally, there are more startling subjects: the hermaic pillar, usually just called a herm, which consists of a squared column surmounted by a head and with a penis, often shown erect; or omphaloi (omphalos -navel), images of a large stone surrounded by a wide-meshed net; or sculptures of an isolated phallus. A fragment of a marble phallus of enormous dimensions still stands on a tall pedestal at Delos, and according to its votive inscription was offered to Dionysos around the year 300 by a victorious chorus- leader. Similar phalluses, carved for similar occasions, have been found at Athens.
Naturally, we find such works unexpected, and seek their raison in our second question: what were the statues for? What advantage dad the patron expect? Why did he agree to the expense? Here we encounter a basic misunderstanding which still impedes the layman ‘s appreciation of Greek statuary. In his book Laocoon, Lessiug claimed that there was no Greek art except where the imagery of sculpture had cast off religious constraints. In fact those constraints were relaxed only very late and to a very partial extent, so that the reasons ancient Greeks had for going to the expense of commissioning a statue in the round were by no means those we think of as presiding over the sculptor’s “creativity”. Greek statues were hardly ever uncommissioned work made solely for aesthetic reasons of the kind that we now call art. It is not that the works discussed here had no aesthetic purpose, nor even that Greece ignored the aspects of form or value (including commercial value) in works of the past which we see as components of art, but the most famous works were made for purps3ses which were pragmatic and specific certainly not initially for the admiration of enlightened art-lovers.
Above all, and in a manner remote from our modern concept of art, those purposes were religious. Famous as the chryselephantine Zeus of Phidias was throughout antiquity, so famous that at was counted as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, it was made to be the idol inhabiting the main temple at Olympia; the same sculptor’s Athena Parthenon was made for the Parthenon. The Greek temple was not like a church where the faithful gather; it was the house of the god, that is, of the statue in which the god was thought to reside, and whose main role was thus to ensure the god’s presence. There are plenty of indications that this belief was very real, at least in early times. The word hedos expressly designates the statue as the divinity’s place of residence; authors such as Pausanias in his “Description of Greece” tell us that certain very old statues of gods had no feet, or had their feet chained down to prevent the divinity from escaping and ‘ thus removing its protection from the city; conversely, there was the transfer or even theft of cult statues, a subject which constitutes the plot of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris, where Orestes and his sister steal a statue of Tauric Artemis to take it home to Attica. Of course belief in the presence of the god so the statue must have faded after the century, with the rise of rationalist criticism and atheism. And in any case the people of the ancient world treated cult statues in a way which strikes us as cavalier, in terms of religion and aesthetics, but which did not seem them impious. At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, for example, Thucydides credits Pericles, who is anxious to reassure the Athenians, with the idea that in are need the city always had the “garments in gold of the [chryselephantine] statue of Athena, amounting to forty talents of refined gold, which could be removed”.
The idols so temples, worshipped like the gods them- wives, did not always look as we imagine Greek statues to look. Though some cult statues were the work of Phidias and other sculptors of the Classical period, many of the xoana, going back to a very ancient past and preserved out of religious respect, must have been nothing but rough-hewn pieces of wood. The story of the Pythagorean philosopher Parmeniskos bursting into laughter before the Lao of Delos tell us a good deal about the appearance of statue, described in the administrative accounts of the temple as being dressed in shoes, a linen tunic and a purple cloak. Even when a cult statue did look Classical, the sculptor did not have complete iconographic freedom, but had to bow to theological requirements and show what had to be shown. Phidias did not invent the curious outfit of his Athena Parthenos; we can see what she looked hke from the statuette known as the “Varvakeion Athena”, ad the description by Pausanias provides confirmation. Similarly, with the statue of Delian Apollo, it would not have been the idea of Tectaios and Angelion themselves to place the Graces on the god’s right hand and the bow in his left hand, in order to show that he was more inclined to reward worshippers than punish them.
Worship did not merely imply making a statue of the god; it also demanded that votive offerings should be made to him, offerings of very diverse kinds, some of them in the form of statues and statuettes. Their subjects were varied: sphinxes, lions, palm trees, phalluses, etc., but above all anthropomorphic images. This explains the many statues populating sanctuaries, of which we have evidence both from the works themselves and from many inscribed bases now separated from the statues they once bore. In the absence of explicit dedications, the difficulty n how to identify each statue, but on the whole statuary offerings fall into four recognized groups. First, the statue may represent the divinity to which it is dedicated, as suggested by the normal custom of offering masculine statues to gods and feminine statues to goddesses. In the temple of Zeus at Olympia the god was offered effigies of himself the zanes, meaning “Zeuses” in the local dialect. It is because of this possible divine identity that the statue in the Louvre described in its dedication as “offered by Cheramyes to Hera” is known as the Hera of Samos. Alternatively, the statue might depict an individual human, either the person dedicating it or someone else, like the statues of Kleobis and Biton at Delphi, offered by the people of Argos. Several statuettes of little girl of a kind unusual in Greek art must belong to one or other of these categories; they were found in the excavation of the temple of Brauron where such gin took part in liturgical service and were called arktoi or “bears”. Fourth and last, there is some reason to think that certain statue were substitutes for humans whom the divinity might claim to own. But in an iconography where there is nothing to distinguish between human and divine images, the inhabitants of the ancient world are unlikely to have been much better able than ourselves to disentangle eases of thematic ambivalence, and probably took no pains to do so.
Votive inscriptions and accounts by historians tell us the occasions for votive offerings. They were often congratulatory: a state would dedicate a statue out of gratitude for a military victory, or a private individual might do so after winning a prize in an athletic competition (the group to which the charioteer of Delphi belonged), or in a musical contest (as with the phalluses offered to Dionysos). The offering could also be expiatory: under Solon we hear of Athenian magistrates promising to offer Delphi a gilded statue of their own at Delphi if they offended against one of Solon’s laws. The zaues of Olympia were paid for out of the fines imposed by judges at the Olympic Games. Finally, many offerings were made for no other reason than propitiatory or even spontaneous devotion, no doubt mingled with the less admirable purpose of self-advertisement: the custom of offering a statue of oneself or a close kinsman was a useful way of putting up an individual effigy in a public place without having to get permission for it. We shall see below, in discussing the portrait, that many statesmen and private individuals exploited this opportunity in and after the Hellenistic period.
However, it was not gods alone whose presence was established by statues; the dead too could be commemorated. Although at tombs stelai with reliefs or painting were much more common, funerary statues also occurred. Identifiable to us only from their epitaphs, they frequently represented the dead person. Examples of these are the statues of Phrasikleia and Kroisos. The statue thus had the dual purpose of depicting the dead person as well as marking his tomb, whereas other funerary figures such as lions and sphinxes only marked the grave.
These were the principal uses of statuary; the function of the honorary portrait later became increasingly important too. Not all materials seem to have been equally suitable; there do not seem to have been any cult statues in marble, although it was the usual material used in the ease of funerary statues.
Any category of artefact comes to have unexpected uses. The twentieth century has contributed the “inflatable doll”; the people of antiquity were also aware that a statue might become a sexual partner. The story of Pygmalion, the legendary king of Cyprus who fell in love with a statue, is famous. Aphrodite gave the statue life, and Pygmalion married this ideal woman. Less well known is a curious passage from Euripedes’s Alcestis: King Admetus, on the point of death, induces the gods of the underworld to grant him his life if he can find a substitute. His wife Alcestis offers to sacrifice her own life, and the king, soon to be a widower, tells his wife: “Made in your image by the skill of artists, your body shall lie in my bed; I will lie beside it, I will embrace it, and though I do not hold my wife yet I ‘will feel that I am holding her.” An anecdote also told how a young man fell in love with the Aphrodite of Knidos, the famous statue by Praxiteles, and had himself shut up in the temple every night; the statue bore traces of his amorous effusions. A statue of Eros by Praxiteles was the subject of a similar anecdote. Legend, poetic invention and anecdote are alike evidence that statues often aroused strong feelings of admiration for their life-like qualities.
A statue usually had a base, and the forms and dimension of bases were very varied; in later times sizes were expanded to accommodate such groups as those of the eponymous Heroes of the Agora of Athens, or the Thessalian kings at Delphi , the bases were very often inscribed and sometimes decorated with reliefs like the Archaic scenes showing ephebes “boys” (young men in military training) reproduced here. But putting a statue on a base was not the only way of presenting it: from the Archaic period onwards, statues were sometimes placed on tall columns at the price of optical distortions such as those illustrated by the failure of Alkamenes. Later on, they were frequently set so groups on the sides of the marble public benches called exedrae.
While a statue needs something to support it, at can also be a support itself: not only may it take the place of a column, but the huge Archaic water basins known as perirrhanteria had stone statuettes as their feet, and at a later date small bronze figures were often used as the handles of mirrors.
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