Tuesday, August 3, 2010
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11:25 PM
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THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD AND HELLENISTIC SCULPTURE
When Alexander the Great died in 323 BC, he left behind him a world turned upside down. In ten years he had conquered the entire Persian empire, soon to be divided up into the four great dynasties of Macedonian origin: the Antigonids in Macedonia, the Lagids (or Ptolemics) in Egypt, the Attalids in Pergamum, and the Seleucids in a Syrian kingdom comprising the whole Middle East. The period is known today as Hellenistic because it saw the spread of Hellenism. Massive and formerly barbarian provinces came under Greek influence, at least politically: the widening of horizons led to profound social and economic changes and the introduction of new ways of thought; finally, power moved to new capitals situated outside Greece itself, the cities of Alexandria, Antioch and Pergamum, which became art centres. Amidst these changes, art was inevitably going to start depicting new subjects in new styles.
From now on, however, the phenomenon described above as “the invention of art” encouraged reverence for works of the past, and nourished preoccupations which were the very opposite of innovative, so that Hellenistic sculpture became an art with two contrasting aspects. Specialists have tried to discern “baroque”, “rococo” and ‘classic” tendencies in it, with varying degrees of success. It is more useful to recognize that art was dominated by the competition, unknown in previous centuries, between contemporary creativity and a continuing awareness of earlier artistic works.
Although it is almost certain that the capitals of the new kingdoms were centres of contemporary creative art, it is still impossible to determine their respective shares. For instance, let us take the role of Alexandria, once believed so important that for a long time all Hellenisric art was described as Alexandrian. In fact, hardly anything has been found in the capital of the Ptolemics apart from everyday items: no major works allow us to define a specific style. There is one outstanding exception among these capitals, the city of Pergamum. Excavations of the site have given us a great many sculptures, most important of all the two friezes on the Great Altar of Zeus, summarizing the somewhat short history of the recent Attalid dynasty. The smaller frieze tells the story of Telephos, a local hero of the time of the Trojan war appropriated by the kings of Pergamum as their ancestor, in clear defiance of the facts. The larger frieze shows a gigantomachy which, with a transfer of contemporary events to a legendary context similar to that occasioned by the Persian Wars in the fifth century, commemorates the great exploit of the Attalids, their victories over the Gauls or Galatians. Moreover, several ancient replicas almost certainly derive from the art of Pergamum, particularly those relating to battles with the Galatians: the Dying Gaul, the statue of a Gaul committing suicide after killing his wife, and the wounded Gaul of Dclos (who has recently recovered his
head and shoulders). But anything that could be said of the Pergamene style in view of these works could, it must be admitted, almost equally well be said of the Laocoon, suspected from literary records to come from Rhodes. Since the chronology of these works is no better established than their geographical origins and we have far fewer textual records than for the Classical period it will be more useful to concentrate on the principal characteristics of HellenistiC sculpture than to become entangled in the many hypotheses about regional styles and developments.
There is no doubt that the key to Hellenistic art is the rejection of Classical “idealism”: a preference for the particular over the universal, for the momentary over the timeless. This tendency, which relates Hellenism to baroque art of the modern period, is the source of the term “Hellenistic baroque”, one of those incautious labels to be avoided because they lead to the erroneous assumption of parallels between styles which have few features in common.
Sculpture had never before been so concerned with particularities. Distinctions of age, only tentatively depicted in the preceding period, are now widespread. We find tiny children, created by sculptors who take care to distinguish their chubbiness from an adult anatomy, as we can see from the enigmatic Child with a Goose of Boethos. We find many statues of old people, and there is no reluctance to show the physical traces of old age in such works as the Drunken Old Woman, perhaps by Myron, a sculptor who shares his name with the author of the Diskobolos. The faces of Classical statues are uniformly ,beautiful; in Hellenistic art, facial differences are reflected portraiture and in small terracotta figures. In the latter, individualization is taken to extremes of ugliness. Less then, and in a less emphatic manner, ethnic distinctions appear: the Gaul Killing his Wife and the Dying Gaul have moustaches, while retaining the Greek style of heroic nudity”. The Dying Gaul also wears the Galatian torque round his neck. As for distinction of the sexes, present from the first in Greek sculpture, it is now extended to include the hermaphrodite!
An interest in the fleeting moment was not unknown in the Classical period either — the sculptor Skopas is credited with the open lips and rolling eyes of the “Skopaic look” but now it comes to the fore; often coupled with a concern for particularities, giving pride of place to the least durable of situations: to a momentary effort, like that of the “Borghese Warrior”; to the pain of Marsyas tied to the tree and flayed alive, of Laocoon and his sons strangled by the serpent, of the giants of the Altar of Pergamum, of the Drunken Old Woman perhaps abandoned by everyone, holding the jar of wine which she cradles in her arms instead of a child; and to death, the death of the Dying Gaul or the Gaul killing himself while his wife dies. This concern to show the fleeting moment does not just mean new postures — the collapse of the Gaul’s wife, the enervated pose of the Drunken Old Woman, or the struggle of Laocoon — but some unusual touches such as the blood flowing from the wound on the Dying Gaul’s thigh, or the way the scrotum n contracted under the influence of pain and effort in the Laocoon and the Borghese Warrior. It might be expected that this liking for temporal singularity would go hand in hand with a taste for spatial
singularity, that the art of the fleeting moment would also be the act of individualized settings. While Classical painting and sculpture were almost universally reluctant to depict the background of a scene, it has often been thought that the representation of landscape was developed in Hellenistic art However, the landscape effects (in fact very restrained) in the frieze of Telephos on the Altar of Pergamum have been much exaggerated, and it has been wrongly thought that the “picturesque reliefs” of the Imperial period were Hellenistic, or at least derived from Hellenistic originals. If we confine ourselves to what we observe, we shall find that painted or sculptural landscape was a development of Roman art.
But whereas the Athenians of 480 BC made haste to bury the old sculptures of the Archaic Acropolis, instead of restoring them as something precious, and Plato thought the works of the great Daidalos would look ridiculous at a later date, during the Hellenistic period the creation of new works did not cancel out the prestige of earlier sculpture, just as the avant-garde movements of the nineteenth century co-existed with a concern to preserve older art.
Attention to the sculpture of the Classical period, works several centuries old, took two distinct forms, although in some cases we cannot decide which applies. First was what might be called academicism: that is, the production of new works as close to the old style as possible (although one can never entirely escape one’s own period). Such are the Victory of Samothrace, with her swirling garments in the wet drapery tradition; the Tralles Boy, about whom nothing is new but his cape (which inspired Cocteau); the Poseidon of Melos; the Agde Boy (if it is true that he derives from a Hellenistic original); and the Venus de Milo. Examples in relief work include the frieze of the Temple of Artemis Leucophryene at Magnesia on the Maeander. Second, there were straightforward copies of Classical originals, such as the fine replica of the Diadoumenos of Polyclitus found in a house on Delos which must have been abandoned in the first third of the first century BC. These replicas are usually spoken of as a means of gaining access to the great lost originals of Classicism, and they were considered froni that point of view earlier in this book, but it must not be forgotten that producing them was a major achievement of Hellenistic and later of Imperial art.
Hellenistic sculpture did not merely copy the Classical sculpture which immediately preceded it. Whereas the people of the fifth century had scorned the Archaic art of only a little earlier, at was now taken up again by a movement which was not, it is true, very widespread, and was basically confined to the first century and the early Imperial epoch. No specialist, of course, could mistake one of the works now described as Archaistic for a genuine Archaic sculpture of the sixth century; there are too many differences. None the less they display features alien to Classical and normal Hellenistic sculpture, such as the bard and curled hair-style of the herm of Delos, the hair and drapery of the bearded man carved on one of the sides of a Corinthian base, the attitude of the divinities walking in single file on the relief of Delos, where the figure of Hermes is bearded, as he had not been shown since the fifth century. All this can be explained only as imitation of much older works.
Hellenistic sculpture commonly refers back to earlier Greek’ art, but it did not exploit foreign art, although the Ptolemies and Seleucids had monuments in foreign styles on their territories. Although the people of the Hellenistic period were aware of geographic distinctions, as we can see from the coining of verbs meaning “to speak, to act, to live in the Greek, Sicilian, Egyptian, etc., manner”, in art they turned readily to what was old but almost never to what was exotic. In Egypt itself, of course, the Ptolemies commissioned temples in the traditional Pharaonic style such as the temple of Edfu, with statues and reliefs which an uninformed observer might think dated froth the times of the Rameses. Later on the Roman emperors did the same at Philae and Dendera. But the local style co-existed with art in the Greek traditions and did not merge with it, and almost no foreign influences infiltrated Greece itself. In depicting Serapis — a god who, it is true, was of recent origin and half Greek — Bryaxis gave him the appearance of a Zeus or Hades, and similarly the cult statue of the Temple of Isis on Delos (around a3o), is just a woman draped in the Greek fashion.
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