Greek&Roman ART: THE ARCHAIC PERIOD

Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 7:06 PM |

THE ARCHAIC PERIOD

As recently as forty years ago, when scholars were discussing the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations established in Greece in the second millennium BC, they gave both eras the single description of “pre—Hellenic”. However, the deciphering of clay tablets in the script known as “Linear B” has shown that they bear Greek related texts and that the Mycenaeans who wrote them were Hellenes. This suggests we should date the history of Greek sculpture from that period, namely, the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries BC, because they did produce plastic art, and the Greeks of the first millennium themselves traced the beginnings of their statuary art back to a much earlier date. In the ancient legends dealing with sculpture (the stories of Pandora and Pygmalion are those best known to us), Daedalos features in some seventy texts which refer to him not only as the builder of the labyrinth at Knossos inhabited by the Minotaur, but also as the first person to have made statues whose feet were not joined. The Iliad dates him as living well before the Trojan War.

This tradition -typical of the Greek anxiety to identify the “first inventor” of everything -is highly suspect: even the name of Daedalos, meaning “craftsman”, shows that he was not so much a real man as the personification of an art, or rather the imaginary prototype of the craftsman, and the sculptural innovation credited to him is characteristic of the Archaic type of kouros which, far from going back to the time of King Minos, appears only at the beginning of the sixth century. A very real innovation was thus attributed to Daedalos long after it could possibly have been his.

In fact, the material available to us shows a surprising break between the Mycenaean world and the period known as Geometric, which is usually regarded as the beginning of Greek civilization proper. This break can be observed in many other fields besides that of sculpture.

SMALL FIGURES
One of the most striking features of what is sometimes called the “Greek renaissance”, is that it at first produced only small figures in clay, wood, bronze and ivory. Such figures continue to develop throughout the Archaic period. Specialists have done their best to draw up a precise chronology, but the material is rarely found in excavations with other objects which can be exactly dated, and scholars are reduced to basing chronology on sometimes simplistic notions of evolution of style. It is safer not to regard the available datings as too precise, even though various scholars claim to have been able to narrow them down to within ten years.

Terracotta figures appear as early as the ninth century BC, thus beginning a tradition which was never interrupted and included the special genre of the “statuary vase”. This genre includes items such as the perfume flask in the shape of a kneeling boy from the Agora in Athens. Small bronzes and ivories help in giving the sculpture of this period its particular character from the eighth century onwards. The wooden sculptures have seldom been preserved, yet we know from the literary tradition that they were important — especially the most famous of them, the cedarwood chest given to Olympia by Cypselos, tyrant of Corinth. The figures on this chest, some carved in the wood itself and others made of ivory or gold, were so numerous that it takes Pausanias almost two hundred lines of his second-century AD text to describe them.

Apart from the non-figurative pieces, the bronzes divide conveniently into three groups: protomes, statuettes and armour. A considerable quantity are protomes: the heads of griffins or sirens used as attachments on cauldrons. There are also a great many statues, four to eight inches in height, either of animals — mostly horses, but also other species such as the cow from Delphi which dates from the very end of the Archaic period and is technically interesting because it was cast in a two—part mould or of men shown in various situations and attitudes: warriors, charioteers, flautists, ram—bearers. These do not usually bear any votive inscription. An exception is a two- line dedication by “Mantiklos to the Archer of the silver bow”, namely, to Apollo, engraved on the thigh of a male figurine known as the Tyszkiewiez Apollo. Finally there is decoration on breastplates and shields, either engraved or sometimes in relief

Work in ivory made up a considerable part of Mycenaean art. It now reappears in various forms: statuettes, such as the god (if he is a god) with the lion at Delphi, a work with a very Oriental look to it; the frame of a lyre, formed by the Samos boy; or an isolated head, like the one found at Perachora.

The small sixth-century ivories found at Delphi under the paving stones of the Sacred Way are particularly interesting because they depict definite legends. This is rare in small sculptures of the Archaic period (an exception among the bronzes is an attachment found at Delphi showing Ulysses escaping from the cave of the Cyclops clinging to the ram’s belly). Despite difficulties of identification, certain themes have been recognized: the pursuit of the Harpies by the Boreads; the struggle of Heraklea and the three—headed monster Geryon; the Calydonian boar-hunt; the departure of a warrior; and a fight between Greeks and Amazons, which is reminiscent of the decoration of the chest of Cypselos as described
by Pausanias.

LARGE STATUES

To us, the appearance of large stone statuary is marked by the “Auxerre goddess” in the Louvre, dated around 640 BC. She measures only two and three-quarter inches, and may have come from Crete. She is a woman shown standing, wearing a long skirt and short cape, with her right hand on her breast in what is often interpreted as a gesture of worship. She looks very flat, as if she might have been carved from a stone slab. Very similar is a statue from Delos, fortunately for us accompanied by a dedication which mentions its origin: it was given, we are told, by Nikandre of Naxos. Some eighty years later in date, the “Hera of Samos” in the Louvre — which, as the dedication tells us, is in fact an offering to Hera — and a statue from Miletus contemporary with it look as if they were carved not from slabs, but from columns. Then, breaking with this angular or circular geometric style, we find many statues much closer to the live model, in particular the whole series of korai from the Acropolis Korai is the name traditionally given to feminine statues of the Archaic period, and is part of ancient terminology — the inscriptions describe the caryatids of the Erechtheion as korai — meaning simply “young girls”, as descriptive a term as one could desire, and one which disposes of the difficulty of deciding exactly what such figures represent.
Corresponding to the “young girls” are the “young men”, the kouroi (singular: kouros) who are of a much more consistent type: they are always nude — apart from an occasional belt carved on the statue itself or added in bronze — with one foot forward, nearly always the left foot. Their arms usually hang down beside their bodies. Occasionally they may be holding something, such as the ram, no doubt a sacrificial animal, to which the “Kriophoros” or “Ram-bearer” of Thasos owes his modern name, or the bow and phiale (a flat, shallow cup or bowl) which the hands of the bronze kouros from Piraeus are thought to have held; or, in statues of divinities, the attributes required by religious association such as the bow and the Charites or Graces in the hands of the cult statue of Delian Apollo, now lost. What distinguishes them from each other within this almost invariable pattern is their degree of similarity to the living model, in other words, “realism”, which we shall consider at greater length later on.

Archaic statuary cannot be reduced to these two types of standing human figures. For one thing, not all figures were shown standing; there are quite a number of statues of seated figures, and the “kneeling run” first makes its appearance in the “Nike of Archermos” from Delos (Archermos was the name of one of the two Chian sculptors who signed the figure), where the Nike’s bent knee is taken to show that she is running. For another, humans are not the only beings depicted. The people of Naxos gave a great sphinx to Delphi, and there is another, less complete, at Delos, as well as the survivors of what was once a series of at least sixteen lions, probably also dedicated by the Naxians towards the end of the seventh century.

So much for the subject matter. The materials varied. Marble from several regions was used, but so was limestone, for instance for the “Auxerre goddess”. The “Piraeus kouros”, in particular, confirms what the texts tell us: that the large statues of the Archase period were also east in bronze.

As mentioned above, information about the sculptor’s actual technique is very scanty, but the ambition of certain projects is striking. The unfinished colossoi of Naxos measure up to thirty-two feet, and the “Colossus of Apollo” at Delos, also Naxian work, must have reached a similar height, although only its chest and pelvic area survive; it seems to have been mutilated by lime—burners. ‘F he sculptors of the period were aware of their achievements: the base of the same Delian Colossus bears an inscription which puts words into the statue’s own mouth in the fashion of the time: “I am of the same marble, statue and base.” A great deal of ink has been expended on this line, and it is still difficult to decide between the two possible ways of reading the Greek, as meaning either “I am of the same kind of marble”, namely, Naxian, which seems so obvious as to make the remark superfluous, or “I am of the same block of marble”, which is false, since the statue and its base do not form a single monolith in the manner of the Egyptian colossoi. Whatever the explanation, however, it seems certain that someone wanted to record a great achievement. Similarly, Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC, still remembers the tour de force of two sixth-century brothers, Telekles and Theodoros of Samos, who each made half of the statue of Pythian Apollo, working in different places, and did it so precisely that “when the two parts were put together, they fitted so well you would have said that one man had made the entire body”.

The spatio—temporal distribution of Archaic statues is a puzzle to us, and a perplexing one. To take their chronology first: we go by a system of dating which now functions as smoothly as its results are uncertain. The partition is the same with the large statues of the Archaic period as with the small figures: we have almost no such fixed chronological reference points as we do for later periods, so for want of a better criterion we assume that the statues least like the living model are the oldest, and vice versa. We have then only to arrange the kouroi according to this criterion, and distribute them on a chronological scale. If a new kouros is found and looks more “realistic” than a kouros given a date in the year 6oo, and less realistic than another kouros of 58o, we simply assume that its date is
590!

Generally speaking, there is no need to doubt the initial premise: it is certain that the kouros type evolves in the direction of greater and greater likeness to the living model. But not every individual statue will conform in this way: the neat linearity we are so ready to ascribe to stylistic development would inevitably have been disturbed by age differences between sculptors, and most of all by regional differences.

Now for the second major problem. Our attribution of Archaic statues to different geographical areas is as tentative as their regional diversity is certain. They have been found almost everywhere in Greece. To take the example of the kouroi: Attica, Delos, and the sanctuary of Apollo Ptoios in Boeotia have all yielded up a certain number of such statues, to which we may add Kleobis and Biton from Delphi, the most famous specimens of the genre and the Ram-bearer of Thasos, etc. — and we may assume that they were not all carved so the same place. This dispersal of works is confirmed by literary texts and the few signatures available to us: Antenor came from Athens, Telekles and Theodoros were Samian, Archermos was from Chios, Aristion from Paros, etc.

So far so good, but when it comes to establishing the place where a given statue was made, with a view to defining regional styles, matters become very complicated. We usually have no information to assist us except the place where the statue was found, the marble st was made of, and anything said in the inscriptions carved on it or on its base. The place where a statue was found is not necessarily the place where it was made: no doubt Antenor, who signs a kore on the Acropolis, was Athenian, just as a base at the Ptoon sanctuary bears the signature of a Boeotian sculptor, but if the statues known as Kleobis and Biton at Delphi are those mentioned by Herodotus, we must take it that they were made in Argos, as he says. Similarly the funerary statue of Phrasikleia, found in Attica, is signed by Aristion of Paros, and in close proximity on Delos we find the signature of Archermos of Chios and the dedications of Euthykartides and Nikaudre, who describe themselves as Naxians. Even in the Archaic period, sculptors and their works moved around so much that no specialist hesitates to detect — or to claim to detect — the Naxian style in the Ptoon sanctuary or the Parian style on Delos. Marble also moved around, and its exact origin is not always easy to determine. Kleobis and Biton, works which were probably Argive but were dedicated at Delphi, are made of Cycladic marble, apparently Parian. Finally, we cannot expect much from the inscriptions; today they are often separated from the statues to which they referred, so that on Delos, for instance, out of three inscriptions giving the nationality of the person dedicating the work or its sculptor, only the dedication by Nikandre remains linked to its statue because it is engraved on the figure’s thigh. Inscriptions which form part of a statue in this way are too rare to provide reliable information; what useful conclusions can we draw about the Parian style as a whole from the fact that Phrasikleia is signed by a Parian?

In the face of so many uncertainties and so little definite evidence, therefore, we must remain wary of the tables some scholars try to draw op tracing the Attic style, or setting out the differences they detect between a Parian and a Naxian kouros, only too often in such terms as “flowing lines with no dryness” or “the yielding softness of the model”, impressionistic ideas which merely add vagueness of terminology to our lack of knowledge. Moreover, writers persist in speaking of “schools”, suggesting that those regional differences which are so difficult to pin down depended on the consistency of an artistic training about which, for this period, we know nothing at all. Thus, although we believe that there were Attic, Argive, Boeotian and island sculptors in the Archaic period, it would he foolish to attempt an account of regional differences here. It is more useful to concentrate on questions for which we have evideoce.

One such question arises from the sudden appearance of large stone statuary works. If we are right in dating this phenomenon to around 640 BC, it is striking that we suddenly see the whole Greek world populated with works of a totally new kind, works for which we can find no antecedents. The kouros is particularly startling in this respect; the kore assumes very varied aspects, depending on period and place — from the slab-like “Auxerre Goddess” to the columnar “Hera of Samos” and the korai of the Acropolis — but from its first appearance the kouros type was firmly established, and indeed was fixed for centuries to come, for in the middle of the Classical period the Doryphoros of Polyclitus and the Agias of Lysippos retain the figure’s total nudity and the way the weight is carried on one leg.

Now this sodden appearance cannot be explained by a native tradition. Mycenaean sculpture certainly existed, as we can tell from the famous painted stucco head, nearly life—size, found at Mycenae; set side—by—side with the Archaic female head of Hera from Olympia, as above, it might even be a distant relation. So far as we know, however, there were no kouroi in Mycenaean sculpture, and in any ease we have seen that there was so marked a break between the decline of Mycenaean civilization and the “Greek renaissance” at the beginning of the first millennium as to exclude any relationship. Even supposing that certain lines of evolution did remain unbroken, we would be left with the fact that there were neither korai nor kouroi in Greece from the start of the first millennium to the middle of the seventh century. Since the “native tradition” explanation can he ruled out, we are left with two possibilities: spontaneous invention and borrowing.

The first possibility is by no means inconceivable we have long become used to the idea that different civilizations make analogous inventions independently, and we can hardly suppose that the makers of statues and statuettes in the Far East, the Mediterranean world, black Africa and pre-Columbian America, peoples separated by centuries and by thousands of miles, all copied each other. If so many civilizations seem to have produced images of the human figure in the round of their own accord, we may well credit ancient Greece with the same spontaneous invention; designing a statue with one leg advanced to improve its balance is a simple procedure which could occur to many minds, and so forth. The theory of a native invention still further enriching the “Greek miracle” can thus be sustained.

However, it is not the explanation that ancient Greek historians seem to have accepted in general; on the contrary, they supported the idea of an art borrowed from Egypt. In his Description of Greece, Pausanias (about AD 16o) remarks here and there that certain very old statues “are extremely like Egyptian statues”. Three centuries
earlier Diodorus Siculus was even more precise: “The style of the ancient statues of Egypt is the same as that of the statues made among the Greeks by Daedalos” (to whom, it will be remembered, the ancient Greeks attribute the invention of sculpture, relying on erroneous chronology), and speaking of the Apollo of Samos, made
by. Telekles and Theodoros in two separate parts, he says:
“This was not the usual method of working among the
Greeks, but was much practised by the Egyptians (...); following Egyptian technique, the Samian statue was divided
into two equal halves, one of which was from the head to
the genitals; with the arms hanging down beside the body
and the legs apart [in other words, in the attitude of walking] it was essentially similar to Egyptian statues.” Even better, this similarity of style is claimed to have been the result of an apprenticeship: “Among the ancient makers of statues, the most famous, Telekles and Theodoros, had lived in Egypt.”

This is a very plausible proposition. There is little point
in insisting on similarities of appearance, the same frontal
pose, the same attitude of arms and legs, which have
struck many modern observers and have won over many
archaeologists to support the thesis of an Egyptian origin
for the kouros. It is more important to show that borrow in from Egypt was historically possible, since similarity of configuration is no conclusive proof; the two parties must actually have been in contact. They were; from the seventh century onwards, Pharaoh Psammetichus I had been hiring lonians and Carians as mercenaries. Herodotus expressly says so, and we have confirmation from the Greek graffiti on the colossoi of Abu Simbel, nearly two hundred miles to the south of Aswan. Psammetichus had also given the Milesians permission to found the city of Naucratis in the Nile delta. It is understandable, therefore, that Herodotus could claim that “we Greeks know exactly what went on in Egypt from the time of the reign of Psammetichus”. Greeks evidently knew the country well, and had acquired a familiarity with it which must have extended to a knowledge of its art. Not only do the facts confirm contact between the two peoples, a necessary condition for the borrowing theory, but there is a surprising coincidence of dates. Psammetichus was employing Greek soldiers in the second quarter of the seventh century, and the oldest kouroi date from around 625 BC: just enough time, we might say, for the mercenaries to go home to Greece and sing the praises of an Egypt which, in the words of Herodotus, “contains a thousand marvels and works of which no idea can be formed”, and for sculptors to go there as apprentices. That would account for the sudden appearance of stone statuary on a large scale in Greece, following the first contacts with Egypt. It would explain the date of the statues, their striking similarity to Pharaonic statuary, and also a taste for the colossal which is astounding in beginners. Here, after all, are men suddenly beginning to carve stone, and instead of confining themselves to statues on a small scale (such as the “Auxerre Goddess” and certain kouroi), within a few decades they are working on statues much larger than life-size, and even colossal, like the kouroi left unfinished on Naxos, or the Colossus of Delos. And what is more, those statues are monoliths. It is very tempting to read into this a desire to compete with Egyptian statuary and its colossal monolithism, so striking that Herodotus and Diodorus emphasized it several times.

However, there is still one considerable difference between Pharaonic and Archaic Greek statuary: while the Egyptians had no objection to representing male nudity in painting and relief, they did not do so in statuary. On the other hand, unlike the female korai who are always clothed, the Greek kouros appears from the first completely nude. Can we therefore continue to claim that the kouros is a borrowing from Egypt when the type was not known there? It should be remembered that all manufactured items, whatever they are, are the cod product of both the purpose for which they are made and the technique employed to achieve that purpose — materials, tools and skill. The image of a horse, for instance, is explained both “thematically”, as we might say, by the item to be represented (the appearance of the living animal which it must resemble sufficiently for identification), and technically by the way in which the artist set about creating it. Quite often these two features are not of the same regional origin: in the eighteenth century, for instance, the Chinese depicted the foreign theme of the crucifixion of Christ in the local style, with a view to exporting items to Europe, while conversely the tomb painters of Kazanlak (in present—day Bulgaria) in the third century BC treated indigenous subjects in a manner imported from Greek painting. The same may be true here: the Greeks did not go about entirely naked, but they were not shy about stripping in public for gymnastic exercises (gymos means “naked” in Greek). Indeed, many texts confirm that by comparison with the Orientals who always wore long robes, this custom of nudity was regarded as specifically Hellenic. Looked at in this way, the nudity of the kouros no longer militates against its possible Egyptian origin; it can be seen as thematic Hellenization of the Pharaonic masculine statue.

What uproar there would be in the Louvre today if someone stole the “Auxerre Goddess”! Yet she did not always receive such respect. The figure owes her modern name not to having been dug up in the course of a lucky excavation in Burgundy, as occurred later with the “Vix Krater” but to her discovery in an attic of Auxerre Museum at the cod of the last century by Maxime Collignon, Professor of Greek Archaeology at the Sorbonne. She had come there anonymously, left in a suit- ease by the caretaker of the civic theatre, who had acquired her for the sum of one franc from the sale of a Parisian collection, for use in Classical stage sets! The actual provenance of the statue is thus unknown, but her adventures are very instructive if Collignon’s discovery was fortuitous the same cannot be said of the difference between the attention he paid to the statue — immediately devoting two bog articles to it — and the contempt shown not much earlier by her sale price and her relegation to the attic of a provincial museum. Collignon, of course, was a very experienced scholar, but the interest he took in the Auxerre statuette is also evidence of a new enthusiasm for Archaic sculpture which related to the way European art was developing at the time. This was the moment when art broke with a “realist”, almost illusionist tradition, so which the aim of both painting and sculpture was to reproduce subjects so exactly that eventually the image could scarcely be distinguished from reality, and instead presented the conceptual deconstruction of reality in Cubism or turned away from it completely in abstraction. Those who were enthusiastic about the new trends, and hostile to earlier “realism”, would obviously derive more pleasure from the “Auxerre Goddess” and the Sounion kouros than from the Doryphoros type which still inspired academics. In their “schematic” or “geometric” effect, theseworks resembled contemporary artistic novelties, just like the African statuary which was beginning to be appreciated at the same time and for the same reasons. It was only one step from this to imagining that ancient or exotic sculpture shared the new European aesthetic, and that step was duly taken. Archaic Greek sculpture has even been thought by some modern critics to be related to abstract or conceptual art; the more moderate spoke of it in terms of “conventions” and “simplification” or “schematization” of a more or less voluntary nature. Hence there arose the fundamental problem, much discussed in histories of Greek sculpture, of “realism” in Archaic statuary.

But the question of “realism” requires us to draw two essential distinctions. The first involves dissociating the skill needed in making statuary images from the figure represented, whether this is a symbolic aspect or a true portrait; we have seen that the nudity of the kouroi is probably symbolic. Much has been written about the “schematic” representation of the wig—like or beaded hairstyles of the kouroi, but the only useful question, and one which unfortunately cannot be answered for lack of information, is whether the sculptors were responsible for those curious hairstyles or whether young men simply wore their hair like that at the time. In any case, at the beginning of the fifth century the hairstyle of the Zeus of Cape Artemisium does not look at all like an artistic artifice but, complicated as it is, like a genuine or at least possible way of arranging the hair. Similarly, when Aristodikos and the nude warriors on the pediment of the temple of Aegina have their pubic hair trimmed into an arrowhead shape, it may have been a genuine fashion. In short, we should not be too quick to ascribe all physical features that can be modified and therefore may reflect reality to sculptural “sehematism” or “conventions”. The sculptors may have shown simply what they saw, so that we can really argue usefully only from the depiction of the skeletal structure and musculature.

That is, we can do so if we draw a second distinction, between the result and the intention. There is a whole specialist literature describing in detail the flaws in this or that kouros: there is an incomplete ear here, a pointed thoracic notch there, the ribcage is rendered by five, four or three horizontal lines, the asymmetry of the swelling above the kneecap resembles a circumflex accent ... All this is true enough, and to be honest, one would not care to be operated on by a surgeon who had learnt his external anatomy from the Sounion kouros. But even if a statue is thus some way from the living model, if it “simplifies” or “schematizes” that model, was this deliberate? We cannot assume that related styles are necessarily the result of the same intention, nor, consequently, can we say that because results look identical, the intentions were indeed also identical.

Configuratively, for instance, Picasso’s bull is very like the animals in the prehistoric cave paintings, which are also “schematic” in nature. The difference is that Picasso meant it to look like that, as we can tell from a series of drawings beginning with a very realistic bull an the Rosa Bonheur manner. Being acquainted with all kinds of earlier styles and able to practise them all equally successfully, he had a choice.

On the other hand, it is very probable that the prehistoric painter knowing only the style of his time, so that we cannot imagine his ever painting in a different manner — simply wanted to show a bison or a horse, and painted them as he knew how to paint them. The question we face, then, is whether sculptors of the Archaic period were deliberately “schematic” or whether their schematic manner is the result of inadequate skill.

The only defensible theory is one of initial awkwardness yielding to increasing skill. We expect schematism at the start: every visual art is initially “abstract”, that is, it reduces the subject depicted to the hoes or volumes felt to be essential. We observe this individually in works by children or untrained adults, and collectively in what are called the “primitive” arts. The same was true in Greece; even the first kouroi are very realistic by companion with the little triangular figures seen two centuries earlier in the vase-paintings of the Geometric period. Furthermore, similarity between statues and real—life models was achieved more slowly because sculptors were less inclined to copy the latter than reproduce the former, using the usual techniques of their time, however inadequate.

But if, instead of commenting on each kouros, we look at them as a whole, it is very easy to arrange them in progressive order, moving from those which seem to be a long way from a living youth, such as the Orchomenos or Sounion kouroi, to those most like one, such as the “Kritian Boy” and finally all the masculine statuary of the Classical period. Of course it would be pleasing if this progress towards realism were to coincide with chronological order, and indeed that n probable, but we cannot say so without falling into the trap of circular reasoning, since for lack of external evidence the dating of statues is implicitly based on the idea of evolution towards a greater similarity to the living model. None the less, despite some chronological uncertainties, study of the kouroi as a whole shows a constant collective endeavour to escape schematism, even if it is schematism that often makes Archaic statuary — like Romanesque art — valuable in the eyes of many art-lovers today.

The proof is that as soon as a new procedure tending towards greater realism is invented it is definitively adopted. In the oldest kouroi, for instance, as in Egyptian statuary, the knees are not asymmetrical, like real knees; their asymmetry was slow to appear, but once it did sculptors never went back to the unrealistic symmetry of the early period. Moreover, the Greeks must have been aware of this regular movement from schematism towards realism;
of course no Archaic sculptor has left us his memoirs, but it is very likely that, acquainted with earlier works and ignorant of the future, all those who were introducing innovations must have felt they were reaching new peaks of realism. At least, Plato, who lived at the end of this period of development, does not hesitate to write that “Daedalos, so the sculptors say, would look ridiculous if he came back today and made works of the kind that won him fame”.

In short, when Picasso’s work moved from the realistic bull to the abstract bull, his evolution was exactly the reverse; Archaic statuary long remained formally non—realistic, but we have every reason to think that it was realistic in intention from the first. This distinction between result and intention prevents us from unthinkingly ascribing to a deliberate act of will something which may well have resulted from inadequate skills. Here we come to the problem of the “Archaic smile”. A certain number of kouroi, especially in the lonian part of the Greek world, convey the impression of smiling. So too do several of the korai on the Acropolis in Athens. This has led to many flights of fancy about the joie de vivre of young people happy to be alive, especially in the setting of the lonian world whose refined and easy-going pleasures are commonly contrasted with Done severity. But it is disconcerting to find the dying men on the Aegina pediment still smiling! We forget that things are seldom exactly what they seem if they may be otherwise: an image n genuinely smiling only if it can be unsmiling.

Now the korai of the Acropolis are all “smiling” up to Euthydikos’s kore), known as La Boudeuse, “the sulky girl”, because of her ierious expression. Similarly, there came a point when the lonian kouroi assumed an expression of sullen gravity well illustrated in Attica by the “Blond Boy”. Rather than supposing that a wave of bad temper suddenly swept through Greece, we may think it more plausible to regard the constant “smile” as the result of a certain way of carving the human face, and to conclude that no feelings are expressed in Archaic statuary because we never see an alternation of sad and happy faces at the same time and in the same place. The same reasoning, applied this time to relief and vase painting, would explain why the eye is always found shown from the front in a face depicted in profile. Modern criticism may be well wide of the mark in comparing this effect to one of the Demoiselles d ‘Avignon, or considering the magic significance of the eye; it ii obvious that sculptors and vase painters abandoned this non—realistic practice for good when one of them found out how to create the illusion of an eye seen in profile by tracing a curved arc between the two lines of a V—shape set on its side.

Progress towards closer and closer similarity between statuary and real bodies was made along two lines, of unequal importance. First, the anatomical observation of which specialists generally make so much: this ii certainly a significant factor when we see the stylized depiction of the ribcage give way, in the Orchomenos kouros, to five jutting rolls of flesh where nature provides only three. But more important was the progressive acquisition of manual skill. The proof ii that “observation” ii excellent where it ii most easily rendered, in clothing which, being manmade, is artificially geometric in a way more easily accessible than the human body to the schematic abstraction of beginners.

Similarly relief was obviously much in advance of statuary in point of realism, perhaps partly because it is easier to change your mind when working in relief, but chiefly because, once you do not need to make an image stand upright and you are presenting it only from one aspect, your art ii very close to drawing. It ii precisely in passing from the linear to plasticity that we find progress in statuary realism. The development is obvious at the very end of the sixth century in the Aristodikos kouros of Athens: many earlier kouroi have anatomy which ii almost correct, but the marble, still so to speak rough—hewn — with the buttocks, for instance, showing quasi-right angles — displays only the general lines perceptible in the abstraction of the design. We now pass from those lines to the reality of the flesh which supports them; the line of the haunch becomes the volume of muscle and joint. The realism of the end of the Archaic period ii even more evident, in plastic terms, in the statuary invention of muscle than in the greater attention sculptors were paying to living anatomy.

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