The Study of Greek Sculpture in the Twenty-first Century 1 BRUNILDE SISMONDO RIDGWAY Rhys Carpenter Professor of Archaeology Emerita, Bryn Mawr College UNTIL FAIRLY RECENTLY and to some extent even today our study of Greek sculpture has followed guidelines that were established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, primarily by such pioneers as Johann Joachim Winkelmann and Adolf Furtwängler. We assumed a linear stylistic development through time, with peaks in the fifth and fourth centuries b.c. followed by decline. We firmly believed in the superiority of Greek over Roman sculpture; the latter was considered imitative but helpful because it copied Greek creations by major masters now lost to us, which could then be reconstructed through discriminating analysis of these Roman replicas. And we trusted ancient literary sources, although written at a great remove in time from the persons and monuments they cited. Recently this situation has begun to change, thanks largely to historiography and to a new understanding of the Roman copies. I am fully aware that some scholars have not totally embraced such changes, or even reject them outright. I can only offer here my specific point of view and, for lack of time, ask that my word be taken for it, without thorough demonstration of each point. At the end, I shall recapitulate what I consider the most significant shifts in our thinking, but I should warn that I speak as an archaeologist, not as an art historian, although my topic concerns Greek art. * * * When Nashville, Tennessee, is mentioned, it usually brings about thoughts of the Grand Ole Opry; to me the name recalls the Parthenon, or rather the most accurate modern replica of the Athenian temple, built in the 1920s in consultation with a member of this Society, William Bell Dinsmoor, the great historian of Greek architecture. I was his 1 Read 15 November 2003. PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY VOL. 149, NO. 1, MARCH 2005 [63]
64 brunilde sismondo ridgway student in Greece in the 1950s and often heard him speak with pride of the accuracy of measurements in the interior of the Nashville cella, which he had designed. Some thirty years later, in the 1980s, I in turn was one of the consultants for the colossal statue of Athena Parthenos Pheidias gold-and-ivory masterpiece that Alan LeQuire, a local sculptor, had been commissioned to recreate. Officially displayed to the public on 20 May 1990, but still lacking its gold coating, the image could finally appear in all its luminous splendor on 5 September 2002. 2 Now you might think that if the new approach to the study of Greek sculpture is to create artificial theme parks, the situation has definitely changed for the worse. Yet the Nashville Athena Parthenos has taught us a great deal. None of the great chryselephantine colossi from antiquity has survived, and it is difficult for us to visualize something at this enormous scale. Just to give an example, the much smaller Nike figure alighting on Athena s hand is considerably taller than life-size; yet from the floor it looks almost like a homing bird easily coming to rest on a human hand. It is hardly visible for detailed inspection. By contrast, the great shield, standing roughly at eye level, could and did have its many motifs sketched and reproduced in later times. An understanding of the image s visibility, greater or lesser, is only one of the acquisitions we have made through this reconstruction. Granted that no amount of research could fully recover the appearance of the Pheidian sculpture, the proportions of the base and of the statue itself, carefully worked out on the basis of ancient evidence, closely approximate the original. The tripartite composition, when completed, proved to harmonize perfectly with the surrounding colonnade and to fill the interior of the cella with a presence that is both awesome and overwhelming. It proclaims the dominance of size and especially of the exotic and rich materials the ivory, the gold over elements of style; indeed, Pheidias was praised for rendering the majesty of the gods, not for his personal manner. It makes us understand the fame that could accrue in antiquity to its maker, who was also the master of the Olympia Zeus and other chryselephantine statues. The difficulty of the Nashville enterprise, which took eight years just for the image, without the gilding, despite the use of more malleable materials and the help of many assistants, explains why the Athenian was credited only with the making of the Parthenos, and not of other sculptural elements of the temple. 2 On the Nashville building and the Athena, before the gilding, see W. F. Creighton, The Parthenon in Nashville, Athens of the South, rev. ed. (Nashville, 1991). On the Pheidian Athena, see K. S. Lapatin, Chryselephantine Statuary in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Oxford, 2001), 63 79, figs. 149 65.
the study of greek sculpture 65 To be sure, Plutarch, in his Life of Pericles, describes Pheidias as the episkopos of the entire project, but he was writing during the Roman imperial period, when such overseeing functions were common, as contrasted with the more democratic processes of fifth-century Athens. Extant building accounts show that the pedimental sculptures, which we so highly praise, were carved between 438 and 432 b.c., at a time when Pheidias was already at Olympia, making the Zeus. Even if he had left behind approximate models, the many hands and different elements of style noticeable in the gable figures show that we have looked in vain for the touch of Pheidias on them. We have come to realize that architectural sculpture, for all its occasional excellence, was not of primary aesthetic importance to the Greeks. 3 Moreover, we now question the emphasis given by the ancient sources to individual masters, in the realization that the writers were influenced by their own personal circumstances and moralizing purposes. The histories of art they indirectly constructed were readily accepted by us because of our Renaissance experience, when individual sculptors possessed distinctive styles and personalities. But the very concepts of originality and art for art s sake were entirely extraneous to the Greeks, and their works should not be scrutinized with modern eyes. 4 Much more important than architectural sculptures were the freestanding bronzes, of which regrettably so few have survived. Among them, however, is the impressive head of a long-bearded male whose strong aquiline features, narrow eyes, and distinctive bald pate with long strands of hair combed across it have earned it the nickname of Porticello Philosopher from its findspot off the coast of South Italy. As a work of art, it would deserve a place of honor in any museum, yet a purely stylistic analysis led initially to a serious misdating of the piece within the Hellenistic period and to its misidentification as the realistic portrait of a member of the Cynic School. This head, however, was found, together with several other fragments, within a shipwreck that, when scientifically excavated (in 1970), ensured for the sculptures a date within the fifth century b.c. This is why archaeologists have been waging a spirited campaign against illegal digging and 3 It was, of course, of religious significance and was an expression of regional preferences. See B. S. Ridgway, Prayers in Stone. Greek Architectural Sculpture (c. 600 100 B.C.E.), Sather Classical Lectures 63 (Berkeley, 1999), for general comments, and 193 200 for discussion of the possible role of Pheidias in connection with the Parthenon. 4 See, e.g., J. Isager, Pliny on Art and Society. The Elder Pliny s Chapters on the History of Art (London/New York, 1991), and, with reference to the Renaissance, Humanissima ars: Evaluation and Devaluation in Pliny, Vasari, and Baden, in Ancient Art and Its Historiography, ed. A. A. Donohue and M. D. Fullerton (Cambridge, 2003), 48 68. Many of the essays in this volume are pertinent to my own topic.
66 brunilde sismondo ridgway illicit acquisitions by museums: it is only when the ancient context of a piece is known that proper assessment of it can be made, not only in chronological but also in sociological terms highlighting the true meaning the work may have had for its original viewers. Regrettably, our approach to ancient portraiture has been guided by our interest in validating mentions of statues of notable personages in the ancient sources, with consequent debate on the identification of various (labeled or unlabeled) works of Roman manufacture (the so-called Roman copies), and with endless speculation on the origin of the genre and of physiognomic realism. Although it was early recognized that retrospective and even quasi-mythological portraits were created on demand for instance, portraits of Homer only recently has a new approach asked different questions based on the motivating forces behind the sculptures and on the physical evidence of inscribed statue bases. As for the Porticello Head, I am personally convinced that, far from depicting an identifiable human being, it represented a mythological figure, such as, for instance, the centaur Cheiron. 5 Studies on the technology of Greek bronzes have provided additional insights on style. This point is best exemplified by the so-called Riace Warriors, discovered underwater in 1972 off the coast of Calabria and now in the Reggio Museum. In this case, no evidence of a wreck could be found and therefore no external data could lead to a firm chronology. Stylistically, these splendid statues have been assigned to the fifth century b.c., yet debate continues: on whether as many as thirty years separate the two, whom they represent, and who was their maker. All the big names of Classical times have been proposed in this connection, but it is encouraging that at least a few scholars are willing to consider a non-attic, even a colonial workshop of origin, as contrasted with the dominant Athenocentrism of previous years. Although at first glance the two warriors look different, it has been argued that each of them was produced from a single basic model, 5 See C. J. Eiseman and B. S. Ridgway, The Porticello Shipwreck: A Mediterranean Merchant Vessel of 415 385 B.C. The Nautical Archaeology Series no. 2 (College Station, Texas, 1987) on the ship, its cargo, and the evidence for dating its demise. A second bronze head, stolen from the same wreck, was returned to Italy by the Basel Museum in 1993. It should be clear from my comments that I cannot subscribe to Philippe de Montebello s lament that museum curators can no longer deal solely with art qua art : The Changing Landscape of Museums, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 147.3 (September 2003): 259 72, esp. 260. On the sociological meaning of ancient portraits, although still somewhat tied to the ancient sources and stylistic analysis, see P. Zanker, The Mask of Socrates, The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity, trans. H. A. Shapiro, Sather Classical Lectures 59 (Berkeley, 1995). An important study of portraits on the evidence of inscribed statue bases is being carried out by C. M. Keesling.
the study of greek sculpture 67 which was then altered with direct modifications to the wax casting models during an intermediate stage of their manufacture. Bronze casting is in fact a technical process depending on the mechanical reproduction of a preliminary form through the use of molds, with possible changes to each piece involving the position of limbs or the addition of different details, even different heads and attributes. This practice had long been recognized in the making of terra cotta figurines, but these were considered commercial products of the minor arts as contrasted with the Art with a capital A of monumental bronzes. This very distinction, however, is purely based on modern prejudices and should be abandoned. The repetitive use of basic models explains also how complex groups of thirty or more life-sized bronze figures, as attested for Delphi and Olympia, could be produced within a relatively short time, some of them by collaborating sculptors coming from different geographic areas and workshops, who therefore could be presumed to have had distinctive individual styles and yet were capable of creating homogeneous compositions. 6 With the theory of a single basic model reproduced and modified at will falls the concept of originality so dearly advocated by modern commentators. Once again, the Riace bronzes can be used to clarify this point, since the exact dimensions of Warrior B have been noted in a marble statue in Corinth, which is, however, completed with a portrait head of Gaius Caesar and is therefore indisputably dated to the Roman imperial period. 7 Is the marble a copy of a fifth-century bronze, or are the Warriors types that could be reproduced at any time after prototypes of the Classical period? I personally believe that the bronzes date no earlier than the first century b.c., but I do not dispute that their style recalls the fifth century. Two important points can be made regardless of their true chronology: stylistic formulas could be replicated at any time after their initial introduction, and the line between original and copy is either blurred or entirely nonexistent. The famous Laokoon in the Vatican Museum offers a good example of a work currently debated as either a late republican original or a copy of a Hellenistic bronze, although much higher dates had been proposed 6 For technical comments on the Riace Warriors see, most recently, C. C. Mattusch, In Search of the Greek Bronze Original, in The Ancient Art of Emulation. Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity, ed. E. K. Gazda, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, suppl. vol. 1 (2002): 99 115, esp. 111 15; for additional bibliography and reference to different theories, see B. S. Ridgway, Hellenistic Sculpture III. The Styles of ca. 100 32 B.C. (Madison, 2002), 199 202, esp. nn. 32 39. 7 C. de G. Vanderpool, Serial twins: Riace B and some Roman Relatives, in From the Parts to the Whole 1 (Acta of the 13th International Bronze Congress held at Cambridge, Mass., May 29 June 1, 1996), ed. C. C. Mattusch et al. (2000): 106 16.
68 brunilde sismondo ridgway for it in the past. The sculpture has attracted renewed interest since the 1957 discovery of complex marble groups in a grotto at Sperlonga, south of Rome. The decorative program of the ensemble is still open to discussion, but the epic nature of the subjects is clear, as is their general mid-hellenistic ( Baroque ) style. The group in the center of the round basin depicts Skylla attacking Odysseus ship and its sailors, and the rudder box of the vessel carries the signatures of the three Rhodian masters cited by Pliny as the makers of the Laokoon. A recent thorough review of epigraphic and documentary evidence has shown that they were active around 40 b.c., which is therefore the approximate date to be assigned to their works. 8 Their known repertoire exhibits a range of styles to which, traditionally, different dates would have been assigned. It is now increasingly clear that styles were chosen for their appropriateness to the subjects: High Hellenistic for epic compositions, Classical for images of the gods, Archaic (or rather, Archaistic) to suggest antiquity and venerability, and so on. A recent observation has also emphasized how some of our impressions are based on incomplete knowledge or reliance on just a few ancient sources. Laokoon s expression, since discovery in 1506, has been described as either restrained and dignified, or as the ultimate depiction of physical and psychological pain; he has been criticized for not looking toward his children attacked by snakes or justified as raising his eyes to the gods in reproach. Yet an examination of Laokoon s eyes has revealed that the once-painted irises had no pupils, as if struck by blindness a rendering corroborated by a late imperial author, Quintus of Smyrna, whose Ilioupersis retains echoes of an earlier tradition. But it is useless to consider the ancient visual arts as illustrations of specific texts; myths were widely known through oral transmission, and different versions of the same story were current at any given time. 9 It is therefore erroneous to date ancient monuments according to the relative chronology of ancient sources. 8 Laokoon: see the various papers published in E. Décultot, J. Le Rider, F. Queyrel, eds., Le Laocoon: histoire et réception (Revue Germanique Internationale 19 [2003]), notably, on chronology, S. Settis, La fortune du Laocoon, 269 301, esp. 271 77, with its distinction between stylistic dating and documentary dating. Additional references in Ridgway 2002 (supra, n. 6), 76 81. Sperlonga sculptures: e.g., B. S. Ridgway, The Sperlonga Sculptures: The Current State of Research, in From Pergamon to Sperlonga: Sculpture and Context, ed. N. T. de Grummond and B. S. Ridgway (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 2000), 79 81. 9 F. Queyrel, Les couleurs du Laocoon, in Décultot et al., 2003 (supra, n. 8), 57 70, esp. 63 65. On the relation between text and image, see J. P. Small, The Parallel Worlds of Classical Art and Text (Cambridge, 2003).
the study of greek sculpture 69 Historiography, moreover, has done a great deal to clarify our prejudices: the negative value we used to attribute to the Hellenistic period, mostly because we could not connect it with major masters; the primitive character we accepted for works of the Archaic period, largely because the ancient sources tendentiously described them so; most of all, our unwarranted assumption that no creativity could prevail in imperial times hence our attempts to discover a Greek prototype behind every Roman sculpture in the round. This attitude has given rise to the so-called Kopienkritik: the gathering of all examples of a given composition, regardless of even substantial variations in its reproduction, in order to extract from each the true Greek forms underlying it. This approach is today somewhat discredited, in the realization that not all works in Greek style derived from a Greek prototype and that each item was appropriate for its time and context the latter likely to be much different for a Roman than for a Greek commission. 10 In our desire to recover Greek originals we have even overlooked the ambiguous testimony of single exemplars, like the Laokoon, for which no known replica exists. Yet Pliny described it with admiration as being made ex uno lapide, from a single block of stone. This appreciation for virtuoso technique has now been highlighted by a recent suggestion. I shall therefore end with a brief glance into the world of Roman copies, because the better we understand Roman sculpture, the better we shall understand the Greek. Struts are stone bridges left between parts of a composition to strengthen outstretched elements and prevent easy breakage. They have traditionally been interpreted as indicating that a specific statue was a marble translation from a bronze original, whose more stable medium required no such supports. This is certainly the case in many instances. But were struts considered disfiguring in antiquity, or were they visually ignored? A third possibility exists. It may be demonstrated by the type of the Wine-Pouring Satyr, usually attributed to Praxiteles because of its fluid surfaces, graceful pose, and large number of extant replicas. It is more likely, however, that the composition was so often repeated because it was particularly appropriate as a fountain 10 Historiography: see the various papers in Donohue and Fullerton 2003 (supra, n. 4), esp. M. D. Fullerton, Der Stil der Nachahmer : A Brief Historiography of Stylistic Retrospection, 92 117, with useful additional references. Of great importance are also two books by A. A. Donohue: Xoana and the Origins of Greek Sculpture, American Classical Studies 15 (1988) and Early Greek Sculpture and the Problem of Description (Cambridge, forthcoming). On the Roman copies and Kopienkritik, see E. K. Gazda, Beyond Copying: Artistic Originality and Tradition, in Gazda 2002 (supra, n. 6), 1 24, esp. 5 17.
70 brunilde sismondo ridgway sculpture and suitable decor for a Roman villa. In some versions, the struts are plain, but in at least two cases these stone supports were embellished with spiral fluting, thus attracting attention to themselves rather than fading into the background. It has therefore been argued that they were appreciated as evidence of carving skill in obtaining a complex composition from a single block. The case is proved by an entirely Roman subject, albeit in pseudo- Greek style: a Venus and Mars datable to the Antonine period (a.d. 147) by their portrait heads. The female figure recalls Hellenistic renderings, the male is a fourth-century type, and the spear which a Greek sculptor would probably have added in metal is secured by two spiral struts impossible to miss. 11 In summary, these are the new approaches I would list in our current study of Greek sculpture. Emphasis on the Great Masters has diminished, in the realization that originality and distinctive manner are modern constructs, and that fame in antiquity could accrue for size and materials and not necessarily for stylistic appreciation. Architectural sculpture is the product of workshops, not of major masters. It should be examined primarily for its religious and narrative content. Portraiture must be studied from documentary evidence, not from the so-called Roman copies or on stylistic grounds alone. Context was the dominant theme of the papers presented on 9 10 November 2002, at a colloquium in Athens, Greece, on Early Hellenistic Portraiture: Image, Style, Context, of forthcoming publication. Context is all-important in assessing chronology and purpose; even an aesthetically imperfect or mutilated sculpture can be of great significance within its findspot. In this connection, scientific analysis and proveniencing of statuary marbles and other stones have made great strides and are today obtained whenever possible. Bronzes, by virtue of their technique, straddle the line between original and copy. Types and formulas should be emphasized over the search for a hypothetical prototype. Duplication does not stem from lack of creativity, nor does it always bespeak a famous creation. Athenocentrism is lessening its stranglehold on our interpretation. Different areas of the Greek world are being considered as centers of sculptural productivity. 11 M. B. Hollinshead, Extending the Reach of Marble: Struts in Greek and Roman Sculpture, in Gazda 2002 (supra, n. 6), 117 52; the Venus/Mars group is illustrated on 129, fig. 6.6; the satyr is mentioned on the same page.
the study of greek sculpture 71 Stylistic development as strict linear progression is now discredited. Styles were chosen for appropriateness to subject, and could be revived at any time after their introduction. No chronological period should be considered inferior to others on the basis of ancient sources. The ancient sources are seen as less reliable than previously thought, each with its own tendency, which was not that of writing art history. The visual arts in antiquity were for telling stories, rather than illustrating text. Historiography is revealing our biases favoring Greek over Roman art, with consequent slant in our choice of terminology. The philological approach to ancient sculpture (the collection of alleged replicas Kopienkritik comparable to the establishment of manuscript families and stemmata) is invalid and distorting. Single exemplars are particularly dangerous, and we must be more cautious in our attempts to correlate brief, non-descriptive mentions in Pausanias and Pliny with extant Roman copies. We are learning not to apply modern criteria to the judgment of ancient sculpture: our unseemly struts were occasionally used as desirable evidence of carving skill.