Greek&Roman ART

Saturday, January 16, 2010 at 4:34 AM | 0 comments

ARCHITECTURAL SCULPTURE

Archaism saw the advent of the kouros and the kore, themes which, despite subsequent stylistic evolution, dominated all subsequent statuary, it can also be credited with resolving the problem of adapting ornamental sculpture to the architecture of temples and treasuries.

While non-figurative sculpture consisting of flutings and mouldings appears almost everywhere on buildings, sculpted images are found in only three places: on the frieze running above the colonnade, in the pediments, and on the angles of the roof which can carry akroterial statues. Aleroteria leave the sculptor plenty of freedom because they stand out in the open, but friezes and pediments are different: they suffer the constraints of a set architectural framework which simply has to be accepted. Temples have two triangular pediments because they retained the very simple architectonics of a saddle roof with the two slopes descending to the longer sides of the budding, leaving a triangular gap at the ridge—line of the shorter sides. The explanation of the frieze, particularly the Done frieze, is a matter of more debate, but it certainly has nothing to do with the sculptural decoration which may be found in that position, as witness the fact that it is usually absent. Since metopes with relief are a more attractive sight than those without, books and museums show only the former, helping us to forget that the latter are very much in the majority and that the arrangement of a Done frieze is clearly independent of sculptural imagery. since most such friezes have none. The interest, then, lies in seeing how sculptors adapted to these architectural precondidons, and what procedures they tried and finally adopted.

First comes the Done frieze, a set of alternating triglyphs (vertical bands and grooves) and metopes (square blocks). Some triglyphs did bear sculptural images but very rarely and very late: on Delos, in the Portico of Antigone which dates from the third century, one out of two triglyphs has the head of an ox in very prominent relief; in the first century, baskets and sheaves of corn ornament the triglyphs on the small Propylaia at Eleusis. It was the metopes rather than the triglyphs which were sometimes carved with legendary scenes.

The constraints imposed on the sculptor were of two kinds. The first derives from the fact that the metope, considered individually, is both a restricted and an autonomous surface. It is restricted because it is square,, or almost so, and thus unsuitable for showing more than two or three figures, since if one of them, shown standing, occupies the entire height of the area there is space horizontally for only one or two other characters. It is autonomous, because it is separated from its neighbour by a triglyph, forming a break in the pattern and making it difficult to depict scenes with many participants. Secondly, the metopes are never isolated, but come in groups either large or small (six on the wall of the cella in the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, thirty-two on the long sides of the Parthenon), an invitation to the artist not only to produce a whole series of images (although he was not really obliged to, and most of the lateral metopes of the Hephaisteion at Athens remain bare) but to give them an iconographic link by choosing scenes from the same story.

In the monuments known to us, this initial situation is dealt with in different ways. First, there is the difficulty created by the restricted size and autonomy of each metope. The simplest solution is to take no notice of it by simply ignoring the breaks of the triglyphs. This is what the sculptor ornamenting the Sicyonian treasury at Delphi did around 6o BC; the same scene can continue through several successive metopes. Thus the boar of the Calydonian Hunt occupies one of the metopes on his own, while his assailants are shown on the neighbouring metopes, attacking him as if the intervening triglyphs were not there at all. Or there is the ship Argo, her prow shown in one of the metopes and the rest of the vessel probably continuing over one or two more. When a scene divided up between two or three metopes in this way was finished, the artist passed on to another, and the triglyph did not signal a change of subject; once it had been ignored through the depiction of a long scene, it had lost its role as an iconographic break. In the very early fifth century, on the Athenian Treasury at Delphi, the capture by Herakles of Geryon’s cattle occupied six metopes, whde each of the hero’s other labours was confined to a single metope.

Here is the second possible approach, the reverse of the first: the autonomy of the metope can be respected and exploited if a complete scene is placed in it This was the approach which prevailed from the fifth century onwards. It is hard to tell where it was invented, but it certainly appeared very early. Again in the Sicyonian Treasury, there
are metopes showing self-contained subjects such as Europa crossing the sea on the back of the bull, a scene which, thus reduced to the two protagonists, is entirely complete, as many later parallels show us. It is found at Sehnus (Selinate) as early as the beginning of the sixth century, in Temple C, which is exactly contemporary with the Sicyonian Treasury. Each of the three metopes which have been preserved contains a complete scene: a quadriga or four-horse chariot driven by Apollo, seen from the front; Perseus killing the Corgon; and Herakles carrying off the Kerkopes. A little later, in Temple E of the early fifth century, metopes show Herakles fighting the Amazon, the wedding of Zeus and Hera, Athena fighting a giant, and the punishment of Actaeon.

It is striking, however, that the three scenes in Temple C belong to completely separate stories, as do the four scenes in Temple E; the legend of Heraldes, for instance, has no connection with the story of Acraeon. In other words, the imagery here respects what we defined as the first constraint imposed by the Done frieze — the autonomy of each metope — but not the second, namely, their grouping together in a way which invites us to link them by means of an iconographic connection. Of course, our evidence is restricted, and it is certainly dangerous to draw conclusions from only three or four metopes, but Temples C and E at Selinus do at least help us to see that the autonomy of each metope need not imply iconographic homogeneity throughout the series.

‘A third approach is to combine both solutions. This method was the one usually adopted from the fifth century onwards, but it seems to make its first appearance much earlier, for instance in the Heraion of Silaris (Foce del Sele) near Paestum. The temple of Zeus at Olympia certaioly provides the most complete illustration, dating from around 460 BC: twelve metopes crown the shorter sides of the temple, six on the east side and six on the west side, depicting the twelve labours of Herakies. Each metope is independent, accommodating a different episode shown in its entirety, without spilling over into neighbouring metopes, but the series is still a unit because it illustrates the deeds of a single hero.

The counterpart of the Done frieze is the Ionic frieze. It might be better described as the continuous frieze, since it is not only found above the architraves of Ionic temples (replacing the metopes and triglyphs of the Done temple). In the last quarter of the seventh century the Ionic or continuous frieze is found not only above the architrave of the Temple of Prinias in Crete, carved with horsemen, but on the lintel of its gateway, where a line of animals parades past; and then, in the middle of the next century, on the architrave of the Temple of Assos in the Troad, showing various subjects such as people feasting and the labours of Herakles. In the fifth century, the “Ionic frieze” appears on Done temples: for example, the Parthenon,
the Hephaistesun at Athens, Temple of Cape Soumon and the Temple of Apollo at Bassae . The frieze continues its existence outside Greece, ornamenting buildings of foreign types such as the Monument of the Nereids at Xanthos and the Mausoleum of Halikarnassus , and, in the second century, it appears twice
on the Great Altar of Pergamum.

The characteristics of Ionic or continuous frieze are exactly the opposite of those of the Doric frieze, and it therefore calls for very different methods of depiction.

There is no break like that provided by the triglyphs, and thus no horizontal restriction of space, nor, consequently, any division into a series of autonomous areas. Instead we have the continuity of a single uninterrupted band which is as long as the side of the building on which it is placed. The problems of this architectural constraint are no longer best solved by showing an episode with two or three actors, but by a scene involving an unsuccessful number of characters, thus giving the sculptor the latitude to add or subtract figures depending on the length of the space which needs to be filled.

Here again, however, aligning and multiplying figures is one thing; providing them with an iconographic link is another. At Assns, different subjects were shown in succession: the band is continuous but the relief is pictorially discontinuous. At about the same period, however — a passage in Herodotns dates it to around 525 BC — each side of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi is entirely occupied by a single subject and two of the subjects (the battle of the gods and the giants, and the battle between Greeks and Trojans in the presence of the gods) were chosen from scenes offering both sufficient characters to fill the entire surface and a sufficiently variable cast—list for the absence of any one character to pass unnoticed.

As this last method — iconographic homogeneity — was subsequently adopted, it is easy to understand why the favourite subjects for Ionic or continuous friezes were centauromachies, Amazonomachies and other battles in which the number of combatants could be chosen at will.

Many pediments are populated with figures in relief and, almost always, with statues more or less finished at the back. However, it was not self-evident that this should be so, for the triangular nature of the space available, imposed by the architectonics of the roof, had certain consequences for the sculptor.

The first was a difficulty that could not be avoided: it is impossible to show characters of the same dimensions in a triangular frame whose height progressively diminished from the centre outwards. Sculptors found various ways of dealing with the necessity of decreasing the height of figures in the same scene. One was to make the characters smaller and smaller in relation to their proximity to the angles: that is, they varied the module. This method was very seldom employed, but it is well represented by the pediment of the Temple of Artemis at Corfu, dating from the first quarter of the sixth century, where the enormous central Gorgon is flanked by the much smaller figure of Chrysaor, while even smaller characters fill the angles.

The other solution is to vary not the module but the attitude of the figures, showing them standing in the centre, then kneeling, and finally lying in the angles. This method appears very early, on the Siphusan Treasury at Delphi around 525 BC, and some years later in the Temple of the Alkmaionids, where the angles of the pediment show, for instance, a kneeling armour-bearer in one angle and in the other a recumbent triton, or lions devouring their prey. Also employed around the same time in the Megarian treasury at Olympia, this second approach was the one subsequently adopted, which is not surprising; Archaism had already accepted images using figures on disparate modules (a vase, for instance, shows a hare running on a tree-grown hill, with the hare almost the same size as the trees), but as painters and sculptors had been striving towards the greatest possible similarity between image and reality, the approach adopted at Corfu soon ceased to be acceptable, and it was necessary to find a better pictorial response to architectural constraints. Just as the metope favours subjects with two or three actors, and the continuous frieze favours subjects involving many characters, in this case the necessity for showing people lying and kneeling made battle scenes popular although not obligatory for pediments.

The second consequence of the triangular shape of the pediment was less a constraint than an invitation. Unlike the rectangular frame of the frieze, whether Done or Ionic, the triangular frame of the pediment has an axis well marked by the line bisecting it from the upper angle, and divides into two symmetrical wings (it is interesting that in ancient Greek the pediment was known as aetos, “eagle”, suggesting that bird’s outspread wings). Now there was nothing to say that the image must fit this geometry. Indeed, the axiality was ignored by several of the small Archaic pediments on the Acropolis at Athens, such as the Olive Tree pediment, and there was no symmetry of the wings in the great Archaic pediment (again on the Actopohs) often called the Bluebeard or Old Man of the Sea pediment, which shows Hercules fighting a triton on the left, and on the right a monster with three heads and a triple serpentine tail watching the fight . Images of this kind, however, disappear at the end of the sixth century, and around 480 BC, in the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina, we find an axial figure set below the upper angles of the pediments, while symmetrical characters match each other in the wings.

But, just as respecting the autonomy of metopes and the continuity of the Ionic frieze did not necessarily imply any concern for iconographic homogeneity, so homogeneity of theme can he seen as a separate issue from the need to accommodate the diminishing height of the tympanal frame. Thematically, the lions on the pediment at Corfu have no connection with the central group showing the Gorgon and Chrysaor, or with the small figures in the angles; nor do those filling the angles of the pediment on the Temple of the Alkmaionids at Delphi. A concern for iconographic homogeneity can also be dissociated from a concern for axial and symmetrical organization. Even though it lacks a central figure, and shows two wholly asymmetrical groups, the “Bluebeard” pediment is still a single iconographic unit.

As with the friezes, uncertainty about methods of responding to the pre—imposed constraints of architecture ended in the early fifth century. The definitive formula was adopted in 480 BC at the Temple of Aegina, and even more perfectly, twenty years later, at the Temple of Zeus in Olympia. Here the east pediment exploits a variety of attitudes, and is perfectly adapted to the axiality and symmetry of the tympanal triangle. It shows the central figure of Zeus, slightly larger than the humans standing next to him, Pelops and Oinomaos; next, and still observing symmetry, come the bride-to-be of one man and the wife of the other, then quadrigae (four—horse chariot teams), then kneeling or seated figures, and finally, lying in the angles, personifications of the two local rivers, the Alpheios and Kladeos, watching the episode in which royal status will pass from Oinomaos to Pelops. The battle of the Lapiths and the centaurs on the west pediment is composed in the same way, this time dominated by the axial figure of Apollo.

It will be obvious that the above account is not an exhaustive study of the friezes and pediments. We have been exclusively concerned here with considering how their ornamentation adapts in material and pictorial terms to the building on which it stands, but beyond these architectural conditions there is much more to be said about each work. For instance, let us take the metopes of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. It ii noteworthy that several of them treat the labours of Herakles in a new way. While contemporary vase painting always shows the story of the Lion of Nemea as a struggle between the hero and the wild beast, here the lion is dead and Herakles, his foot on its hide, stands motionless beneath the gaze of Athena. Similarly, while vase paintings show Herakles shooting at a whole flock of the Stymphalian birds, here the hunt is over and Herakles contents himself with presenting a dead bird to Athena, who is seated on a rock. As a story unfolds, the artist is free to show this or that part of it, just as one can choose this or that still from a film. The choice taken in these three metopes has the quasi—theological effect of directing the viewer’s attention away from the strength and skill of Herakles and concentrating it on the divine aid of Athena, without which, as a human, he would have found has exploits impossible. However, there is also a formal effect; the frieze as a whole has scenes of immobility introduced into it, in contrast with such scenes of action as the metope of the cleansing of the Augean stables. In the same way, the static nature of the figures on the east pediment contrasts with the lively movement of the Lapiths and centaurs on the west pediment (in a manner we shall encounter again on the Parthenon).. The sculptor has also taken pains to vary the battle scenes by varying their composition, which is pyramidal in the metopes showing the hind with brazen hooves and the queen of the Amazons, and X-shaped for the metopes depicting the horses of Diomedes and the Cretan bull.

The temples and treasuries of canonical architecture were not the only sites for sculptural decoration. Thasos provides ample illustration. The walls of a public passageway called the Way of the Theores (because the names of those magistrates were carved there) bore reliefs, now in the Louvre, showing Apollo with nymphs on one side, Hermes and the Graces on the other. More reliefs are carved on the uprights of the main gates of the ramparts, showing a goddess in a chariot, Herakies and Dionysus, Zeus and Hera, and a Silenus with erect phallus carrying a kantharos cup.

Finally, it was quite common to protect buildings with “apotropaic” images, so called because they were supposed to have the power of turning away evil spirits. This must certainly be the purpose of the Gorgon on the Corfu pediment. However, such images were also found carved in relief on private dwellings. Around the year 100 BC the outer walls of several houses on Delos show the bonnets of the Dioskouroi on their outer walls, or the club of Herakles, or an enormous phallus, the corresponding Latin name for which underlines its power of “fascination” in the sense of a spell or charm, or even all three at once.

Posted by jokjak

THE ARCHAIC PERIOD

Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 7:06 PM | 1 comments

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.

Posted by jokjak

HOW STATUES WERE USED

Monday, December 21, 2009 at 9:40 PM | 0 comments

HOW STATUES WERE USED

If 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.

Posted by jokjak

ART AND CRAFTSMANSHIP

Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 7:10 PM | 0 comments

ART AND CRAFTSMANSHIP

Although the texts and the monuments which have survived give us a full idea of the materials used in sculpture, they tell us little about the methods of working them. Classical literature provides almost no information on the subject, and votive inscriptions still less; finds of tools are rare, and so are depictions of sculptors at work. And it is not easy to interpret the depictions that do exist. Pot instance, the bottom of a cup now in Copenhagen, dating from the earliest period of red-figure pottery (late sixth to the early fifth century), shows a sculptor carving a herm, and the two outer sides of a cup now in Berlin depict several bronzesmiths working around a furnace, while others are finishing off a large statue. Such sparse information is complemented chiefly by what study of the works themselves can tell us. Moreover, technique varied from period to period.

We know that solid bronze casting and hammering was the practice in ancient times, and that subsequently the technique known as eke perdue or “lost wax” casting became widespread — some of the moulds used in casting have survived. The completed work was then artificially patinated. As for the techniques of working stone, particularly marble, the unfinished sculptures which have come down to us in considerable numbers -such as the relief from a house at Delos retain tool marks and so -provide information about the intermediate stages of carving. Many examples throughout antiquity show that it was common to use additional sections for projecting parts such as outstretched arms (as with the Archaic korai of the Acropolis) or the penis. Work in marble was finished by polishing with wax or encaustic, a process called ganosis, in the same way as bronzes were finished by patination. Even in Archaic times, sculptors were very skilful: the three great unfinished Archaic kouroi at Naxos, left lying where work began, show that enormous monoliths could be carved where the block of stone was quarried, and the dedication of the Naxian Colossus of Apollo at Delos, though enigmatic, suggests that working such huge blocks gave sculptors much satisfaction. We may set beside this the famous achievement of Telekies and Theodoros, who made the statue of Pythian Apollo at Samos in two halves, fitting them together when they had finished the work.

The sculptor does not simply practise an art -in sociological terms he also exercises a craft. Here again there are great gaps in our knowledge. In principle, nothing was more foreign to ancient Greece than the idea of art for art’s sake. Sculpture, therefore, was usually the outcome of a commission from a public body such as a city or confederation or (with increasing frequency in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods) from an individual. We may assume that it was not Phidias’s own idea to create the chryselephantine statue of Zeus at Olympia; dedications regularly confirm that patrons commissioned works, although the details of the procedure are usually vague. We do not often get even as much information as is provided by a decree of Delos in the third century, which tells us that “Telesinos of Athens was commissioned by the people to make the statues of Asklepios and Queen Stratonice, and he made the people a present of them, having executed the statue of Asklepios in bronze and the statue of the Queen in marble, and at no charge he also saw to the preservation and restoration of all the statues in the sanctuary which required it.”

Commissions can provide information about relationships between famous sculptors. Literary tradition mentions several competitions: one such, according to Pliny :he Elder, was held to provide the votive offering of Amazons at the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The artists who competed gave Polyclitus the verdict over Phidias and Kresilas, and on that basis modern criticism rather fruitlessly endeavours to attribute the wounded Amazons in our museums to one or other of those sculptors. Similarly, the story goes that Phidias and Alkamenes were each required to make an Athena to stand on a tall column. To correct the optical effect such a height would produce, Phidias gave the goddess a large head which shocked viewers when they first saw at, while Alkamenes, respecting the natural proportions of the body, drew high praise at first, but then laughter when his statue was put in place on top of its column. These stories of rivalry, however authentic, are complemented by accounts of collaboration; the most famous case is the Mausoleum which Artemisia, wife of the Carian ruler Mausolos, commissioned at Halikarnassos mid-fourth century BC. Pliny tells us that Skopas, Bryaxis, Timotheos and Leochares worked together on the carving of its decoration.

Skopas was from Paros and the other three sculptors were from Athens. At the Ephesian competition, similarly, Polyclitus was from Argos, Phidias from Athens and Kresilas from Kydonia in Crete. In all the cases just cited, we find sculptors working, outside their native cities. Votive dedications confirm this mobility: the funerary statue of Phrasikleia, a woman of Athens, dating from Archaic times, is the work of a Parian, and it seems that an itinerant way of life was widespread in the Hellenistic period, when numbers of bases bore signatures. For instance, we have seven signatures of Thoinias who describes himself as from Sicyon: two are in Sicyon itself, two in Oropos, one in Tanagra, another at Delos, and there is probably a seventh at Pergamum. However, it was not essential to travel: in the second to first centuries BC there was much signed statuary on Delos, and the sculptors were all Delians. This was because Delos had a large, prosperous population, providing sufficient custom. Getting commissions was the important factor.

The market had its ups and downs. The great building works eventually undertaken by Pericles on the Acropolis after its total destruction by the Persians in 480 BC are a good illustration. The accounts of the expenses for the Erechtheion frieze have come down to us, engraved on marble; they describe the payment of fees to sculptors for carving various additional figures, as follows:
“to Antiphanes of the Kerameikos quarter, who made the chariot, the young man and the team of two horses:
240 drachmae;
to Phyromachos of Kephisia, who made the man leading the horse: 60 drachmae;
to Soklos of Alopeke, who made the figure holding the bit: 60 drachmae;
to Phyromachos of Kephisia, who made the man leaning on his stick by the altar: 6o drachmae; etc.”

The accounts go on for several columns. But work on this scale could not last indefinitely, and in any case the decline of Athens, sucked dry by the Peloponnesian War, put an end to it. All those obscure sculptors whose pay is recorded in the accounts were now out of work, and it is very probable that they had recourse to what we might now call “retraining”: this is the usual explanation for the sudden reappearance of funerary stelai, absent since the end of the Archaic period and no doubt forbidden by the laws which restricted ostentatious funerals. Sculptors employed on public works had to switch over to the private sector, and it seems likely that pressure from such unemployed craftsmen contributed to a disregard for the sumptuary law which the piety (or vanity) of the bereaved in any case predisposed them to infringe. If so, it is not surprising that the funerary stele of Dexileos rivals the reliefs of horsemen on the Panathenaic frieze.

Commissions mean fees, but again, there is very little information about sculptors’ financial status. We have seen, for instance, that the Erechtheion accounts give the price paid for each separate figure, but we need to know what costs the craftsman bore and how much tithe he spent on a piece of work. However, the pay seems quite good if we remember that 60 drachmae for a statue is 180 times the sum of the two obols paid at the same period to judges as their daily fee. It is true that the judges’ fee must have been very low, since it was also the daily allowance made to the needy a little later. But in the next century Menander says that a man can live on twelve drachmae for a month and six days. Famous sculptors must have been in very comfortable circumstances; even a man like Telesinos, unknown to us from any source but the single decree cited above, was in a position to make the Delians a present of the two statues they had commissioned from him and throw in further restoration works, also at no charge. The same applies to the Mausoleum of Hali-kar-nassus: Pliny tells us that “the queen died before the work was finished” but that Skopas, Bryaxis, Timotheos and Leochares “did not, however, leave until their work was finished, believing that it would be a memorial to their glory and their art”, which suggests that they were working for nothing. At around the same time, however, Plato reports Socrates as saying that the sophist “Protagoras had earned far more money than Phidias and ten other sculptors put together”.

As for the social status of sculptors, it must have varied from one individual to another: the men who made the separate figures for the Erechtheion were not on a par with Phidias, who was a personal friend of Pericles. We need to know more about the social circles frequented by sculptors, but it is noteworthy that Plato, not a lover of the imitative arts, allows both sculptors and painters, whose position in society was certainly a comfortable one, to occupy the sixth rank of the social hierarchy, instead of relegating them to the seventh rank with other manual workers. And yet they still seem to have been regarded as manual workers. Five hundred years later, in the second century AD, Lucian described the dream which decided his profession: Sculpture personified, covered with marble dust, her hands hard with calluses, vainly tried to remind him of the glory of Phidias and Praxiteles, while the well- dressed figure of Philosophy replied that if he became a sculptor he would never be anything but a craftsman living by the work of his hands.

Sculptors, or at least the makers of statues, may not have had a desirable position in society as a whole, but they seem to have enjoyed high status among artists. The artistic hierarchy is well illustrated by the use of signatures, reflecting the status and renown not only of the signatory himself but of his entire professional category. The extreme scarcity of signed mosaics suggests that the men who made them were of no social standing, a fact confirmed by the lack of interest in them shown by Classical historians. In the same way, vase painters signed their work only during a relatively short period. On the other hand, inscribed bases show that throughout antiquity even the least famous sculptors usually signed their works.

Moving from the professional activities of sculptors to their training, what little information we have is as sporadic as it is incomplete. The authors usually tell us that such and such a sculptor was the pupil of this or that man. We know that Myron and Polyclitus studied together, and the question of finding a teacher of sculpture comes up once in Plato. We may assume that sculptors were not self-taught but we have no details of how a pupil might find a master, how he would pay that master, and so on. In any case, despite the suggestion conveyed by the general terms “Argive school” or “Attic school”, there is unlikely to have been any teaching of the fine arts such as exists in today’s colleges and universities.

Finally we may also suppose that a man known for his work in sculpture was not obliged to devote himself to it exclusively: Phidias was also overseer of the architectural projects on the Acropolis, and Euphranor was said to be as good a painter as he was a sculptor.

Posted by jokjak

STATUARY AND RELIEF

Friday, December 11, 2009 at 7:14 PM | 0 comments

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.

Posted by jokjak

BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY OF GREEK SCULPTURE

Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 6:46 PM | 0 comments

GREEK ART
BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY OF GREEK SCULPTURE

Since the eighteenth century, Greek sculpture has been the object of something akin to idolatry, and only recently have we been able to put it more in context. This is not to say that sculpture was the only form of Greek art generally appreciated: though in 1788, Abb Barthelemy in France was content to depend on literary texts to conjure up Classical Greece in describing the travels of the young Anacharsis; as early as 1750, Soufflot was drawing the temples of Paestum and Stuart and Revett were discovering the architectural monuments of Athens. But the widespread success of Winckelmann’s books, followed in 1766 by that of Lessing’s Laocoon, with its extensive theorization of the celebrated Vatican group, served to focus interest on sculpture. It is mainly in connection with sculpture that we have tended to speak of “the Classical beauty of Greece”. It is sculpture that is currently held to be the most representative and indeed the most excellent of the arts of ancient Greece. And it is an art with which we have the good fortune to be particularly well acquainted.

This emphasis would appear to be justified. Our admiration for vase paintings and mosaics was not shared by the Greeks, who considered them of minor importance, but they really did consider sculpture to be an outstanding feature of their civilization, worthy of the critical and historical interest attested to in many texts. And whereas buildings that have survived reasonably intact are few and far between, and major paintings have virtually disappeared, works of sculpture have been preserved in vast numbers. To be convinced of this, one need only cast an eye over the reserves of a great museum such as the Louvre. Chronologically, the works extant cover a good thousand years, without a break, from Archaic times to the Imperial period, and geographically they range from the Italian colonies to Asia Minor.

To this abundance of statues, statuettes and reliefs must be added written sources of two kinds. Firstly, inscriptions on the works themselves: during the Archaic period, these were commonly engraved on the statue itself, in particular on the thigh, but are more usually found on the pedestal; this eventually became the established custom. These inscriptions give, in whole or in part, the identity of the work, the date, the name of the votary or patron, and that of the sculptor. For instance, the base reproduced on this page states that the work was offered by a certain Cleiocrateia to the goddesses Demeter and Persephone, and was the work of Praxiteles. Most statues have been separated from their original pedestals, but attempts to match them are none the less instructive, making it possible to sketch out the careers of certain artists. Secondly, there are many texts concerning sculpture and sculptors, some literary, and some in the form of inscriptions, particularly lists of wages paid. Apart from Pliny the Elder, who wrote at length on Greek statuary in bronze and marble, there are no continuous histories of Classical sculpture, but Greek and Latin writers often touched on the subject from various points of view. In the nineteenth century, the German J. Overbeck made a collection of such passages, which, though not exhaustive, runs to some three hundred pages.

Given the abundance of surviving monuments and a mass of textual information, archaeologists of Greek sculpture would appear to be in a strong position. But much more than this is required if we are to obtain a complete and reliable picture.

The first obstacle is one common to the study of all relatively ancient civilizations: the older a work, the more likely it is to have been damaged, and the less we tend to know of its date, function, and so on.

It might reasonably be claimed that the fame of the Venus de Milo is owing to the loss of her arms; from this derives her strange fascination. But, in ancient times, there was nothing unusual about her. Her arms would have been posed in natural fashion; she may have held some object in her hands. She is by no means unique in this respect. The outstretched arm of the Ephebe of Antikythera, for instance, seems to make so striking a gesture only because he was grasping or holding up for inspection something that has since disappeared. Unfortunately, the restoration of missing parts of statues is virtually impossible. In architecture, the recurrence of basic elements often means that the whole can be reconstructed from a relatively small fragment. Sculptors, on the other hand, being subject to no consistent rule, were free to impart to an arm any movement they saw fit and to place in an outstretched hand any one of a number of objects. Reconstructions are therefore a matter of conjecture. We will never solve the mystery of the arms of the Venus de Milo, unless of course the originals one day come to light! Indeed, the only hope of restoring the integrity of statues lies in identifying broken fragments. And some sharp-eyed archaeologists have achieved miracles in this field. With the gradual addition of hitherto scattered fragments, an isolated head kept at the museum in Delphi has been transformed into a statue of Dionysos, while the kneeling Gaul of Delos has recently recovered his head and shoulders. But such operations may be jeopardized by unwise interventions: in order to fit replacement parts, the Neo-Classical sculptor Thorvaldsen sawed off the broken stumps of the statues from the pediments at Aegina — now displayed in Munich — and so destroyed all possibility of restoring heads or other fragments discovered at a later date.

The mutilation of statues is particularly regrettable because it often makes identification difficult. In fact a work may fall into one iconographic category or another, depending on its proposed reconstruction: if the Outstretched arm of the Ephebe of Antikythera was brandishing the Gorgon’s head, he was a Perseus; if his curved hand was plucking an apple, he was Herakles in the Garden of the Hesperides. In the same way the great bronze found in the sea near Cape Artenissium (p. 62) is a Zeus his hand is restored to hold a thunderbolt, or a Poseidon if it is grasping a trident, for apart from any name which may be inscribed on the base of a statue, now often separated from it, it is the attributes which usually make identification possible. This loss of identity leads to a series of confusions that can sometimes affect the attribution of a work to one sculptor rather than another. The Ares Borghese will provide a good illustration when we come to discuss Classical statuary, where such difficulties most commonly arise.

Besides the problems of restoration, identification and attribution, there is the difficulty of ascertaining two other important details in the history of a work: the date and place of its origin. To take chronology first: our knowledge of Greek sculpture is now good enough for us to be able to date most works unhesitatingly to within some fifty or a hundred years. But there are always difficult cases: there has been uncertainty over the date of the Venus de Mio, the Apollo of Piombino has varied between the sixth and the first century BC, and the statues of the temple of Lykosoura have been ascribed to various dates between the second century BC and the second century AD. It would not be too unkind to say that specialists regard it as their professional duty to find reasons, whether well-founded or otherwise, for contesting the generally accepted chronology.

We shall be accepting the usual chronology here, but it must be admitted that the evidence for dating works is reliable only up to a point. Ideally, the date is indicated by a text, such as the passage in Herodotus which tells us that the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi was built around 525 BC, or it may be inscribed on the work itself, for instance in the ease of the funerary stele of Dexileos , with its inscription saying that the young man had died “during the archonship of Eubulides”, namely, very precisely, in jg BC, but such good fortune is unusual. As information provided by the context of the archaeological excavation is not much more frequent, we can date works only by their style, that is, by their resemblance to or difference from works which have definite dates. When taken to extremes by scholars who believe they can pin a date down to the decade or even the half-decade, this method can be very dangerous, because the works used as points of reference are not always incontestably dated them- wives, and most of all because stylistic similarities and differences do not necessarily depend on period. They can equally well be explained, firstly by the differences between craftsmen of varying skill, tastes and ages; although the building of the Parthenon took only fifteen years, and work on the metopes seems very likely to have been completed in an even shorter period, their style is more archaic than that of other parts of the temple. Secondly, there are regional differences: not all parts of Greece developed at the same rate, and some lagged behind others, so that stylistically similar works may be of very different dates because they were not made in the same place.

We know that artistic chronology and geography affect the dating of a work; unfortunately we do not always have a very good idea of where any individual work was .ale. Indeed, apart from those relatively numerous cases where a work has come down to us through a trade in antiquities of doubtful legality, and those who profited by I have good reason to keep quiet about provenance, the first thing we know about a work is where it was found and consequently what it was used for. Very often, of course, when it was made for an everyday purpose, it must have been made where it was found: a funerary stele found and therefore used in Boiotiu is very likely to have been carved there. However, the situation is different with more important works, for two main reasons. First, as we shall see, from archaic times onwards leading sculptors worked far from their native cities, and second, the great temples received votive offerings from many different cities, which may have produced and transported the work rather than commissioning it at its destination. On Delos, for instance, statues given by Naxians stand side by side with statues given by Parians, and only debatable differences of style allow us to distinguish them.
Over and beyond these difficulties, common to all archaeological research, the study of Greek sculpture is more specifically subject to a kind of misapprehension quite frequent in Classical studies, which inclines to sup— pose that what is available to us now was important in Classical antiquity. Pompeii, for instance, was one provincial town among many, and owes its archaeological significance solely to its exceptional state of preservation. The same applies to sculpture, from two points of view. First, we are willing to grant sculpture pre—eminence in Greek art because a great deal of it has survived; yet there are good grounds for thinking that the Greeks themselves ranked painting much higher, and very few paintings have survived. Above all, in the field of sculpture itself we tend to believe that the items now extant are the very best that were produced. We take insufficient account of two major losses — of materials that have perished, and of originals by famous sculptors — which can be assessed only by the comparison of the surviving works with the evidence of literary texts.
In the first place, some of the materials used in statuary which has perished were those most highly prized by the Greeks. White marble from Mount Pentelikos, Paros, Naxos or elsewhere — and stone in general were not as exclusively used as we might be tempted to think from what we see today in our galleries of Classical antiquities. Greek sculpture employed many other materials. Wood was used chiefly in the creation of very ancient works, mainly the cult statues often called xoana. It was also used for making an extremely famous piece which has not been preserved: a cedar-wood chest ornamented with figures of ivory and gold, presented to Olympia by Cypselos, tyrant of Corinth. The combination of gold and ivory occurs in the technique described (from the words for those two materials) as chryselephantine, and literary tradition traces its origin back to the beginnings of the Archaic period. In I this technique, a wooden core was overlaid with carved ivory representing flesh, and plates of gold representing clothing. Several cult statues of the Classical period were of chryselephantine work, among them the Zeus in the temple at Olympia and the Athena Parthenos in the Parthenon, regarded as the two masterpieces of Phidias. Then there were other metals: iron, mentioned several times in the texts; lead, used for small figurines often made for magical purposes; and above all bronze, in which most of the famous statues were cast, including the Diskobolos of Myron, the Doryphoros of Polyclitus, and the Satyr of Praxiteles. Finally, various plastic materials seem to have been in restricted use: these included clay, the usual material for figurines of the kind traditionally called Tanagra figures, but not common for large works of sculpture except in Cyprus, although there are several famous pieces such a the figure of Zeus carrying off Ganymede at Olympia, aid the head of a Theban Sphinx; and, lastly, stucco, principally used in private houses to add relief ornamentation to polychrome walls.

There is no universally accepted hierarchy of the materials used in sculpture, any more than there is of the different arts, but it is unusual for a civilization not to arrange them on a scale of values. The Greeks had their own scale; they rated chryselephantine most highly — because it was the most expensive and thus rarely used then bronze, and then possibly wood because of the great antiquity of its use in sculpture. Marble came after these. Great sculptors did of course carve some of their masterpieces in marble, and Pliny tells us that Praxiteles worked better in marble than bronze, but of the three categories into which Classical sculpture as a whole was divided, marble came last, after chryselephantine and bronze. This
suggested by its constant use for works of secondary importance: for copies of famous bronzes, which will be described below; for votive or funerary reliefs provided by minor craftsmen, no doubt at a moderate price, to anyone ‘who wanted them; and for monumental sculpture. The 6.ct that architectural sculpture was viewed as work of secondary importance often surprises non-specialists. For instance, we customarily associate the statues on the pediments of the Parthenon and the Panathenaic frieze with the name of Phidias. However, though Phidias oversaw the construction of the Parthenon, his own contribution was the chryselephantine Athena Parthenon, and there is evidence that he worked on the architectural decoration of the temple. In fact it is unusual for Classical authors to give the names of the sculptors of pedimental statues, as they do in crediting those of the temple of Zeus at Olympia to Paionios and Alkamenes information provided by Pausanias and often disputed by modern scholars, who regard it as retrospective local glorification of the pediments — or in attributing the statue of the temple of Tegea to Skopas. The names of those men who carved the reliefs on friezes are not given at all.

So what is left? Wood is preserved only in very dry or very wet soil, and only a few remnants of wooden sculpture survive, including a large statuette from Samos. Very little chryselephantine statuary remains: the combination of ivory and gold was very fragile — in the middle of the Hellenistic period, the inventories of the temple treasuries at Delos tell us that a piece of gold had already come away from the statue of Apollo and when paganism came to an end it was tempting to reuse these two precious materials. We still have various small ivories and plaques of worked gold, but of the vast chryselephantine statues mentioned and sometimes described in ancient texts, the only parts now extant are three heads and some other life size Archaic fragments, much restored, which were discovered at Delphi in a trench dug beneath the Sacred Way. Finally bronze easy to melt and therefore to recycle for other purposes has largely disappeared. We owe the preservation of bronzes to special circumstances. The Charioteer of Delphi was found where it had been buried ever since Classical rimes; the Zeus of Cape Artemisium, the Ephebc of Antikythera and the Ephebe of Marathon , and the two statues more recently Wound off Riace owe their survival only to the shipwreck of the vessels taking them to Rome. In contrast to the almost total disappearance of any chryselephantine work and the rarity of sculpture using wood and bronze, thousands of marble works fill our museums. In short, the material most commonly found today was regarded as relatively .mediocre in Classical antiquity. Unfortunately for the archaeology of Greek sculpture, the durability of materials is in inverse proportion to their status in ancient times.

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