“THE INVENTION OF ART” AND THE QUESTION
OF LOST ORIGINALS

By no means all civilizations that practised painting and sculpture valued them as what we now call art, that is to say, the work not of craftsmen but of artists. It may be argued, however, that the ancient Greek civilization is one of those which did, and that art began to emerge as a separate concept during the fifth century BC. At least, the features by which we recognize it in modern Europe today seem to be absent from the Archaic period, but can be clearly discerned after the fifth century.

First, there is the social advent of the artist. A great sculptor of humble birth may now sit at the table of a prince who would not entertain the local cobbler; the former is an artist, the latter a craftsman. Unlike most modern European languages, ancient Greek uses the same words, technites and deimiourgos, for both a famous and wealthy painter and a humble carpenter; differences glossed over by the language, however, still emerge socially and economically. It was mentioned above that the profession of sculptor was not always regarded in the same way, that both minor craftsmen and famous masters practised it, and even among the latter the physical aspect of their work was not forgotten. The same might be said of painters. Here, however, it is important to notice marks of the increasing esteem in which those two professions were held from the fifth century onwards. Economically, painters and sculptors could become surprisingly wealthy. For instance, Pliny the Elder tells us that the painter Zeuxis acquired such a fortune that he paraded at Olympia in a cloak with his name on it in letters of gold, and ended by giving his works away because in his view no money could pay their true price. Similarly, we have seen that the sculptor Telesinos was prosperous enough to work on Delos without charging any fee. Socially, the circles to which these artists were admitted are another indication: the painter Polygnotos was said to be the lover of the sister of Kimon. an important Athenian commander at the time of the Persian Wars, Phidias was close to Pericles, the painter Parrhasios mingled in Socratic circles, and Socrates himself, although an intimate friend of the Athenian aristocracy, started out as a sculptor. Plato confirms this state of affairs when, despite his personal contempt for the “deceptions” practised by imitative arts, he admits painters and sculptors to the last class but one of the social hierarchy, instead of relegating them to the last class of all with the rest of the demiourgoi.

A second indication is the emergence of theories of art, and of research into form undertaken for its own sake. Many modern European painters, sculptors and architects have written on painting, sculpture and architecture; not many clog—makers have written about the aesthetics and political implications of making clogs. Similarly, the constant search for new departures in painting and sculpture which produced all the artistic movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has no equivalent in what we call the crafts. Athenian literature provides evidence of a similar attitude in the Greek Classical period: cultivated

Athenians took an interest in painting and sculpture, discussed them, sometimes prided themselves on their knowledge of the subject. This simple form of art criticism went hand in hand with theoretical reflection. It appears first in such philosophers as Plato: though he disliked painting and sculpture, he had to study those arts in order to perceive their “harmful” influence, and in fact he writes about them at length; we will consider the passage about the three couches in the next chapter. Next, and even more interestingly, theoretical reflection occurs among the artists themselves. Lost in the great shipwreck of ancient literature, their treatises on theory have not come down to us, but such works cannot have been particularly rare since Pliny, writing on sculpture, speaks simply of “artists who have devoted whole books to this subject”. We know that, in the Classical period, the painter and sculptor Euphranor wrote on “symmetry” (a Greek term signifying the proportions of the parts of a work in relation to each other) and on colour, and that the sculptor Polyclitus wrote on the proportions that make up human beauty in a treatise known as the “Canon”. Galen tells us that Polyclitus also put theory into practice by producing a statue to illustrate his precepts. This ss a perfect example of research into form, since it was solely concerned with ways of making statues, without reference to their usual purposes, and the same can be said of the discovery of “wet” drapery and the invention of the “Skopas look”. We shall be returning to these subjects later. Their importance here is that they are symptoms of the emergence of what we call art.

A third and important indication of this change of attitude is a high regard for works of the past. Today the most wretched daub will be admired if it is thought to date from the sixteenth or seventeenth century AD, and people are ready to pay large sums to hang it on their walls. This is not a universal attitude: the builders of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe blithely demolished caner churches; Romanesque frescoes were found so displeasing to the eye that they were covered with distemper; and the clerics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries AD did not hesitate to break Gothic stained glass windows. It was the same in Greece: we have found Plato pronouncing the works of Daidalos ridiculous, and after the Persian occupation of 480 BC the Archaic sculptures of the Acropolis were buried and replaced by new work. Then all of a sudden, from the fifth century onwards, people began displaying wholehearted admiration for works several centuries old, although of course, as in our own time, they did not stop producing contemporary art. In the second century AD, for instance, the writer Lucian frequently mentions sculpture and painting, but cites only artists and works of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, five or six hundred years earlier. This retrospective admiration had two notable consequences.

First of all, it resulted in something found among few peoples: the construction of a history of art. Such a thing need not take the form of an actual historical treatise. Writings on ancient art can take a more “literary” form, in learned allusions or the composition of poems supposed to be the dedications of much earlier works of art. However, Book XXXIV of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History contains a systematic survey of bronze sculpture in Greece. The important factor is not the form Pliny’s account takes, but the knowledge a Greek or educated Roman in the first centuries of this era would have of painters and sculptors living six or seven centuries earlier.
Second, and no less exceptional as a practice, was the collection of ancient works. Latin textbooks have made the case of Verres famous: in his De signis (“On Statues”) Cicero tells us how the Roman provincial governor Gaius Verres robbed both sanctuaries and private individuals of the pictures and statues he added to his own gallery, which included a marble Eros by Praxiteles, a bronze Herakles by Myron, and bronze canephorae (basket carriers) by Polyclitus. However, this was merely a particularly scandalous instane of a widespread custom: whereas the kings of Pergamum bought what they could from the whole Greek world, after the conquest of Greece in the second century BC Roman generals regularly plundered the country and sent their loot back to Rome. Lucius Mummius, who sacked Corinth in 146 BC, was particularly notorious for this practice. Not only do ancient authors record that this or that painting or statue was taken from Greece to Rome Pliny tells us of an Athena by Phidias dedicated by Aemilius Paullus in the Temple of Fortuna, while the Apoxymenos of Lysippos was dedicated by Agrippa outside his Baths underwater archaeology has repeatedly proved what they say. The treasures were transported on vessels which did not always come safe to harbour: the bronze statues brought up from the sea at Cape Artemisium, Marathon and Antikythera, and more recently off Riace, were the cargoes of ships which were bound for Italy but sank on the way. It is sometimes possible to fix the date of a shipwreck precisely: the famous Ephebe of Antikythera is a fourth-century bronze, but the study of everyday utensils found in the wreck shows that the ship sank around 90 BC.

This obsession with ancient works had the same effect as it does today. First came a surge in prices, which could rise to heights as phemonenal as prices do now: in someone’s will, the Emperor Tiberius is left a painting by the fourth-century artist Parrhasios or, if he prefers, the sum of a million sesterces, around 83,000 times the sum for which Judas was selling Jesus at exactly the same time. Later on, experts emerged who could attribute anonymous works to great names, thereby putting up the price. “Who could ever emulate Vindex’s eye for recognizing the manner of ancient artists, and his ability to attribute statues lacking inscriptions to their authors?” exclaimed Statius in the first century AD. And finally, as in the cast gallery of the Louvre today, came the production of replicas of the great originals. Not everyone could own Myron’s Diskobolos, the Doryphoros of Polyclitus, or the Apollo Sauroctonos of Praxiteles; they contented themselves with copies. This is the explanation for the dozens of replicas of the Diskobolos, Doryphoros and Apollo Sauroctonos in our museums today, none of them the genuine article. The custom of making replicas goes a long way back: a house in Delos, occupied earlier than 69 BC, has provided us with our best copy of the Diadoumenos of Polyclitus. Nor were replicas acquired only by private individuals: in his villa at Tivoli the Emperor Hadrian erected only marble copies beside the Canopus.

This “invention of art” had at least two major archaeological effects on our knowledge of Greek sculpture. First, so far as the body of works which has come down to us is concerned, it is likely that the normal course of destruction and preservation was affected, in both directions. On the one hand, the concept of art kept statues in use for centuries, and thus exposed them to the greed of looters. Without this regard for their antiquity, statues might have been buried like the Archaic sculptures of the Acropolis and so stored safely away for modern archaeologists. On the other hand, the statues taken on board ship, and then sunk in the wrecks that provide archaeologists with such treasures, would not have been preserved at all had they not been valued as art. To convince ourselves that those sea voyages, whether involved in looting or trade, have saved what would otherwise have been destroyed we need only observe that the great majority of bronzes extant come from wrecks, and conversely that the bases upon which bronze statues once stood in sanctuaries (identifiable by the “footings” carved in the marble to fix the statues in place) are now bare, showing that the metal was melted down for other purposes. Transport by sea has saved these shipwrecked statues, but obliterated their provenance: specialists may speculate about the temples from which came the statues found in the sea off Cape Artemisium and Riace, but we shall probably never know. The same is true of a consignment of large bronze Statues excavated at Piraeus, where it had probably arrived in transit, consisting of an Archaic kouros (mentioned above), two statues of Artemis, an Athena and a tragic mask.

The second scientific effect of this “invention of art” is to put us in the archaeologically unusual situation of being able to assess a part of what we have lost. Normally the history of an ancient art is the history of the works that have been preserved, and we have no idea what the passage of time has destroyed. Here the opposite is the case. The history of Greek sculpture, as of Greek painting, includes works now lost, and often an excessive significance is ascribed to those works. Hundreds of mentions throughout Greek and Latin literature present a kind of ledger of our losses. Pausanias says that Polyclitus made a chryselephantine Hera for the goddess’s sanctuary at Argos; according to Cicero, there was a Hephaistos by Alkamenes in Athens; Pliny tells us that Leochares was the author of a group showing the Abduction of Ganymede by the eagle. All these have disappeared, to all appearances reduced to two names, the name of the sculptor and the title of his work. Occasionally descriptions and extant replicas give us an idea of what has been lost, even if we can no longer see the originals. These are the archaeological consequences of admiration for old masterpieces. That admiration led to the writing of art history, which allows us to assess our losses, and the habit of art collecting, which encouraged the making of replicas and thus provided us with copies of the lost originals.

The archaeological situation may therefore seem very favourable: not only might the material for study be said to have creased by default, but when we come to look at the historical data, the name of an artist and the name of his work, we have statuary replicas available. Such optimism, however, would be out of place.

True, everything seems straightforward if we are told that Alkamenes made an Ares which has not been preserved, but that we can look at the “Ares Borghese” in the Louvre, which is a replica of it, and get an idea of the lost original. Yes, but how can we be sure that the “Ares Borghese” — a marble possibly carved at the beginning of the Christian era, we do not know where, and which does not bear any inscription — is really a copy of the Ares made by Alkamenes himself during the fifth century? This would seem to be a good place to initiate the non-specialist reader into what one might disrespectfully call “archaeological jiggery—pokery”.

First, we note that there are other more or less fragmentary statues similar to the “Ares Borghese”; this indicates that it is not just any statue, but the replica of an original famous enough to have been reproduced several times. We are therefore justified in trying to discover what that original was. After that, however, matters become more complicated: the problem of the Ares of Alkamenes cannot be seen in isolation, and so in fact we are questioning the facts about Greek Classical statuary as a whole. We have to combine two different Sets of data: the historical facts about works as mentioned in literary texts, and the statuary types represented by the replicas. To put it another way, we have to match a list of names detached from the items they describe with a list of unnamed items. This kind of exercise resembles children’s games in which you have to match ten pictures of hats to the pictures of the people who wear them: if you put the chef’s hat on the miller, the whole Set falls into disarray.
To take the case of the Ares mentioned above as our example, if we are to make an accurate identification we must establish two distinct points: we must show that it is legitimate to equate the extant Borghese statue with the lost Ares of Alkamenes, and we must show that the anonymous marble in the Louvre is in the style of Alkamenes and depicts Ares. We have no hope of proving the first point, our “attribution”, since all the works of Alkamenes have been lost. The ancient texts are no help here: Quintilian, while saying that Polychtus had the gifts of diligentia and decor but lacked pondus — words too vague to be of use to us — adds that “Phidias and Alkamenes are admitted to have what Polyclitus lacks”. This is of little assistance. Of course, the attribution to Alkamenes would be more plausible if we were sure that the Borghese statue really is an Ares, given the rarity of famous statues of this god, who was not popular with the Greeks.

Unfortunately, however, the second question, the identification of the subject, is no more easily resolved. For one thing, the comment of Pausanias, the only author in antiquity to mention an Ares by Alkamenes, cannot put us on the right trail, since he gives no description of it, and for another, the Borghese statue merely shows a naked man wearing a helmet, a figure who could be anyone. It is not surprising that he has been taken in turn for Paris, Achilles and Alexander. As it happens, a survey of all the scholarly erudition devoted to this small problem since the end of the eighteenth century shows that equating the lost original of Alkamenes with the statue known as the “Ares Borghese” is only a matter of opinion, an opinion which has gradually gained credence without ever having been proved correct.

This case, discussed above at some length, is much the most frequent situation, and unfortunately cases of the opposite kind, where we may reasonably think we have achieved certainty, are exceptions. One such is Myron’s Diskobolos. Whereas Pausanias’s comment about the Ares of Alkamenes consisted solely of the two names, a brief dialogue in Lucian gives us a detailed description of the Diskobolos: “What statue are you talking about? — Haven’t you seen a statue standing in the courtyard, the work of the sculptor Demetrios? — You mean the discus- thrower, bending in the attitude of one about to throw, his face turned to the hand holding the discus, his opposite knee slightly bent as he seems about to rise and cast it? No, not that one; the statue you describe is one of the works of Myron, the Diskobolos.” Furthermore, the statues recognized as replicas of the Diskobolos are so different from the standing male nudes that make up the greater part of ancient masculine statuary, and so like Lucian’s description, that doubt is excluded. The same might be said of the Apollo Sauroetonos (“lizard-killer”) of Praxiteles: Pliny describes the statue as “a youthful Apollo, arrow in hand, watching a lizard creeping near him”, phrasing which conforms exactly to several statues showing a young man who is leaning on a tree with a little lizard running up it.

Although scholars wrestle with these problems today they are not new, particularly where attributions are concerned; the wrsters of antiqusty themselves encountered them. We have just found Statius praising the eye of Vindex, who could assign anonymous works to great masters, but his praise was ironic, for everyone knew that such attributions were not incontestable: “As to the children of the dying Niobe, in the temple of Apollo Sosianus, whether they are by Skopas or by Praxiteles is a matter of debate”, says Pliny, who elsewhere notes that “some attribute the statue of Hephaistion, the friend of Alexander the Great” (and the work of Lysippos) “to Polyclitus, although he lived about a hundred years earlier.” Dionysius of Halikarnassus writes: “If sculptors and painters’ apprentices did not spend much time training the eye to acquire experience of the way in which the ancient masters worked, they would not be able to distinguish them easily from each other, and could not say for certain, unless they knew from oral tradition, that this work was by Polyclitus, that one by Phidias, this other work by Alkaments; or in paintings that this was by Polygnotos, that by Timanthus, this by Parrhasios.” Such uncertainty in the writers of antiquity, who were better informed than we are, must leave us astonished by the intrepidity of archaeologists who are prepared to attribute Artemisium Zeus to Kalamis, or a bronze Artemis from Piraeus to Euphranor, when we know almost nothing about those sculptors.

Attribution and identification of late replicas of much earlier originals are not solved. There is still the problem of reconstruction. Let us look at the three versions of the Diskobolos which are reproduced here: as mentioned above, Lucian’s precise description combined with their posture, an unusual one in Greek statuary, make it certain that these are replicas of Myron’s famous work. But we at once notice that the three figures are not all turning their heads in the same way, nor do they hold the discus in exactly the same manner, and if we compare not just three replicas, but all those available, there are even more differences. One thing is certain: since the three replicas are not identical, they are not all faithful copies of the original. We cannot simply ask which is the right one, first because they may all be inaccurate, and second because each may conform to the original in one point but not another. In the circumstances, how can we reconstruct the configuration of the original? Let us say plainly that there is no answer to that question. Some decades ago attempts were made to reconstruct the lost original by assembling what appeared to be the most faithful parts from each replica: the Museo delle Terme at Rome, therefore, has a reconstruction of the Diskobolos consisting of a torso from the Castel Porziano replica with a head from the version in the Louvre, a right arm from the one in Florence, and feet from the British Museum. This is a pointless exercise, for it will always be modern taste deciding between the possible variants of every part of the body from the different replicas.

Baffling as this Situation is, we can at least point out that statues are not necessarily the only depictions giving an approximate idea of what the lost originals looked like. It was mentioned above that famous statues featured on coins, so frequently that a whole book has been devoted to the reproductions of statues on Greek coins, and they are also depicted on vases and terracotta lamps. These small numismatic and ceramic reliefs may have been more accurate than the statuary copies. This is certainly likely with many of the coins: the drawback, of course, is that they offer only tiny vignettes, but they do show only what was local, like the Zeus of Olympia on coins of Elis, or the Lykosoura group on Megalopolis bronze coins: the engraver had them, so to speak, before his eyes, while many of the statuary replicas were inevitably made far from their originals. The same may be true of ceramic replicas: when Pliny mentions the Abduction of Ganymede, carried off by Zeus in the shape of an eagle after the god fell in love with him, he tells us that “Leochares made an eagle showing Ganymede as prey and the god carrying him off, its talons handling the young man gently even through his clothing”; an antefix from Cassope and an attachment on a relief vase show the eagle and Ganymede in this attitude, which seems to agree much better with Pliny’s description than the very different posture attributed to them in a much later statue in the Vatican, a replica often considered a good copy of the original by Leochares.

As we can see, the three problems of attribution, iconographic identification and reconstruction make the relationship between an original and its later replicas one of the most difficult questions to answer in an archaeological study of ancient Greek sculpture. Except, of course, in the extremely rare case where the original has been preserved! There is not any difficulty in comparing the caryatids of Hadrian’s Villa, or the caryatid of the Imperial period dug up at Corinth, with their fifth-century models, which are still to be seen on the Acropolis, although anxiety about their state of preservation has recently caused them to be moved from the Erechtheion itself to the museum.