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Art History Through Innovators:
Sculpture, Section 5
by Dianne Durante
Copyright (c) 2010 by Dianne Durante, all rights
reserved.
DuranteDianne@gmail.com
www.ForgottenDelights.com
You may distribute this lecture or quote from it as long as you do not
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in their entirety.
"Art History Through Innovators" focuses on major innovations - innovations that gave the artists who created them, and all the artists who followed, greater power to make viewers stop, look, and think about their works.
If the sight of first-rate thinkers at work inspires and refreshes you, you’ll love these jargon-free lectures. You’ll also gain a framework for appreciating art from any period. And perhaps you’ll find more art to love - more art that shows the world the way you think it can and ought to be.
"Art History Through Innovators" was conceived as a walking tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York - because seeing a photo of a sculpture or painting is never, ever as good as seeing the work itself. In the text that follows, I have made only minimal changes to the transcript of the lecture as presented in the Metropolitan Museum.
The audio version and the complete transcript can be ordered here here, or email DuranteDianne@gmail.com.
Click here for Section 1, Section 2, Section 3, or Section 4 of this lecture.
#5 Greek / Classical: Pheidias (?), Wounded Amazon, Roman copy of a work of ca. 450-425 BC
We’re
now at #5 on your map. Turn around
from the Polycleitus and look at the woman resting her arm on her head.
This is another life-size Greek sculpture.
Like the Polycleitus, it’s is a Roman copy.
The original was created at roughly the same date as
Polycleitus’s athlete: the second half of the 5th c. BC.
This sculpture doesn’t show a major innovation, but it helps set the context for the art of the following centuries. The original may have been created by Pheidias. Pheidias supervised the sculptural decoration on the Parthenon, a temple to Athena on the Acropolis in Athens. Its sculptures were carved in the 440s and 430s BC, and they’re usually considered the high point of Greek art. In the United States, this figure of an Amazon is as close as you can get to seeing the Parthenon style.
Fifth-century Greek sculpture has two characteristics that are easy to see in this sculpture. First: the figure is calm and dignified. But look on her side, the side where the arm is raised. You can see that she’s wounded—she’s been stabbed in the ribs. Yet she shows no pain or fear. She’s not grimacing or clutching her side. There’s just a suggestion of fatigue in the way she rests her arm limply on her head, and the way she leans on the pillar. That kind of calm dignity is characteristic of Greek art of the 5th c.
The second point I want to make with this sculpture is that the face is idealized. What do I mean by that?
Imagine
for the moment that you’re a sculptor.
If you do a sculpture of me and you try to show every random detail
you see, that’s “naturalistic.”
You could do a sculpture of me and try to include only details that you think are important, because they’re characteristic of me. So you might concentrate on the eyes or on reproducing a particular expression, but you might tidy the frizzy hair and omit some of the wrinkles. That would be a “stylized” sculpture.
Now suppose instead that you decide that a certain shape of forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, and so on, are perfect. You use them on every sculpture you create, including your “portrait” of me. That’s what I mean by “idealized.” Let me make it clearer with a comparison. Let’s go to #6 on the map.
#6 Greek / Classical: Head of a Victorious Athlete, Roman copy of a work of ca. 450-425 BC
We’re
still talking about idealized faces in the 5th c. BC.
Look at #6, a head on a 5-foot pedestal that’s set a couple
feet to the left of the Amazon.
This head has a lot of features very similar to those on the head of the
Amazon. The way the nose meets the
forehead, the width of the bridge of the nose, the shape of the eyelids,
the proportions and shape of the face are all very, very similar.
But the head on the left is the head of a man who’s a
victorious athlete. The Amazon is
a woman, and one who’s just been wounded in battle.
The reason they’re so similar is that both sculptors used
idealized features and both refrained from showing emotions on the face.
Those are characteristics of Greek sculpture of the 5th c. BC.
While we’re in this gallery, I want to briefly show you one more 5th-c. work, for comparison with later works. We’re moving to #7 on the map.
#7 Greek / Classical: Maenad relief, Roman copy of a work of the 5th c. BC
This
is #7 on your map. As you move
away from the Great Hall, it’s on your right, between the second and
third doorways. It’s a relief
sculpture of a woman, about 4 feet high, mounted on the wall.
This relief represents a follower of Dionysus, god of wine. She’s called a Maenad or Bacchante, and she’s dancing in a drunken ecstasy. We know that because of her pose and the staff she carries, and because according to all the myths, dancing in a drunken ecstasy is what Maenads do. But you couldn’t tell that from her calm, idealized face.
The point I want to make here has to do with the technique of relief sculpture. Look at how much depth is suggested in this relief. The carving is only about 2 inches deep, as you can see if you move to the side. But the figure looks three-dimensional, and she seems to have space opening up behind her. This isn’t new: the Greeks had been doing great low reliefs for a century or more. On the Parthenon frieze, the sculptor often managed to represent 4 horses side by side, in a relief that’s only a couple inches deep.
I’m showing you this relief of the Maenad for contrast with a Roman relief that we’ll be seeing in a couple minutes. Technically, it’s quite a feat to show this much depth in a low relief.
OK, let’s move on to #8 on the map.
The next segment (Greek sculpture of the Hellenistic period) will be uploaded in early June. If you're too impatient to wait, or if you want the audio version as well as the transcript, visit here for details or email DuranteDianne@gmail.com.
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