The Archaeology of Sicily, Italy, Greece, and the Near East
An Electronic Research Outlet of
The Center for Old World Archaeology and Art
Brown University
The Hand of Daedalus
by R. Ross Holloway
Published for Electronic Distribution
1999
preface
The three lectures published here were delivered at Washington University in St. Louis in the spring of 1997 when I was privileged to hold the John and Penelope Biggs Visitorship in Classics. Among the many individuals at Washington University who extended a liberal welcome to my wife and myself, I wish to thank in particular Prof. George M. Pepe, Chairman of the Department of Classics, Dr. and Mrs. Edward Macias, Prof. Sarantis Symeonoglou, Prof. Susan Rotroff and Prof. Robert D. Lamberton. I further hope that this publication, in the new form of electronic communication, will serve to make the Biggs Visitorship and its contribution to classical studies better known throughout the world.
In preparation for electronic publication I have had assistance from Angela Leatherman for image scanning and Russel A. Philip for the design and realization of the web page. As always, my wife labored devotedly to edit the initial manuscript. The Greek font used throughout is "Laser Greek" distributed by Linguist's Software, Inc.
R. Ross Holloway
Table of Contents
Chapter I Architecture, Politics and Pride in Early Greek Sicily
Chapter II The Fateful Year 480 in the History of Greek Art
Chapter III How Did the Greeks Look at Greek Art?
Chapter I
Architecture, Politics and Pride in Early Greek Sicily
The Greek temple is one of the landmarks of Greek culture. When we look at a temple like the Concord Temple at Agrigento (ancient Acragas) fig. 1, however, its essential unity with the Greek city is such that we may forget that such monumental buildings were not characteristic of all aspects of Greek religion. The mystery cults, except where such cults were taken over by the city -- the Eleusinian mysteries of Athens is the best example -- have not left architectural monuments. Family cults, of course, were practiced in the bosom of the household. But it is hard to imagine a Greek city without the public worship which occasioned the erection of temples for the state gods. Yet there was a time before the Greek city assumed the character in which we know it in the fifth century B.C., when civic life was very different. The Greek colonies in Sicily preserve the clearest traces of the pre-citystate. Here too the development of the citystate and the simultaneous development of religious architecture can be followed better than in the Greek homeland. The tie between religion and politics and the personal ambitions involved are the subject of the following pages.
Fig. 1 Agrigento, Concord Temple (photo author)
According to the traditional chronology for the foundations of the Greek cities in Sicily (which is derived from Thucydides) Megara Hyblaea was settled in 728 B.C. This date is probably right to within a generation or so. Megara was first excavated before the turn of the century by the great Paolo Orsi, who during his more than forty years as Superintendent of Antiquities at Syracuse transformed every branch of Sicilian archaeology. Orsi, however, concentrated his attention on the city walls and the cemeteries. It fell to the French School at Rome and especially to Georges Vallet to uncover the city during the l950's and l960's. (1) 
Fig. 2 Megara, plan of the Agora and surrounding city blocks (after Vallet, Villard and Auberson, M˜gara Hyblaea vol. 1)
The French excavations at Megara brought to light the site of the ancient market place, the agora and the group of city blocks surrounding it, fig. 2 (2). The city plan goes back to the eighth century. On visiting the site it is a moving experience to see the foundations of the houses of the first Greek colonists. They are one-room cabins, generally about l2 ft square, just enough for a small family, as is clear in the reconstruction of one of the houses, fig. 3. The first houses also appear in heavy outline on the general plan, fig. 2. The open space of the agora was reserved for public uses from the moment of the foundation of the colony. It took more than a century, however, for any public buildings, including the two temples of the agora, to be built. Up to that time any civic cult was clearly a very modest thing. This is not an exclusively Megarian phenomenon. One would have found the same situation in what we know of the Agora of Athens, where cults were very scantily housed in early times. But one would still like to know how Megarian religion was being conducted in this period.
There is an answer to this question in a fragment of Sicilian history preserved for us by Herodotos, writing in the fifth century. Herodotos tells the story of an ancestor of the tyrant Gelon, one Telines who made peace with a dissident faction of the people of Gela who had moved off to a neighboring town. He did so by the power of the "holy things" of the great goddesses Demeter and Persephone, which he had in his possession (3). He was not a state priest because his reward for his services in ending the succession was that his family should be appointed priests of the cult in perpetuity. The Herodotean story about Telines takes us back to a time when private control of cults was more the rule than the exception. And there are other parallels to the Telines story. In Attica, for example, the cult of Demeter and Persephone at Phlya was administered by the Kykomidai, the family of Themistokles (4). And there were other families that, like Telines' descendants, had become state priests in perpetuity. One example is the Eteoboutidai of Athens who held the priesthoods of Athena Polias and Erechtheus. (5) 
Fig. 4 Gela, distribution of archaic cult places, 1) Acropolis, 2) Predio Sola, 3) Bitalemi, 4) Railroad Station, 5) St. Mary of the Germans (after Holloway, The Archaeology of Early Sicily)
Gela is located on the south coast of Sicily east of Agrigento. (6) But thanks to the extensive excavations carried out since 1950 one can form something of an idea of Gela in the time of Telines (Gela was founded, according to the calculations based on Thucydides, in 688 B.C.; Telines' date is uncertain). The distribution of the cult places of the archaic city is shown on fig. 4 (7). There are the temples of the acropolis (no. 1 on the plan), but there is also a profusion of cult places just outside the city. The divinities of at least two of these sanctuaries (nos. 2 and 3) were the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. In the case of no. 2 (Predio Sola) the identification is suggested by the character of the votive offerings, by far and away the greater number of which are masks or busts of the mother and daughter goddesses. At no. 3 (Bitalemi) there is also an inscription showing that this was a "Thesmophorion" where women practiced the rites of the goddesses -- the "Thesmophoriazousai" of Aristophanes takes place at the celebration of the "Thesmophoria" in Athens. This proliferation of extramural sanctuaries and duplication of cults suggests a religious landscape of private cults, or rather cults that are the possessions of certain families and practiced by them and their fellow clansmen. It is not difficult to imagine the impediment to civic life represented by this exclusive form of religion. Only one of these cult places, no. 5 (now the site of the church of Saint Mary of the Germans, a reference to the refoundation of Gela by Frederick II in the l3th century), became the site of a major temple. When a major temple is built, I suspect that the cult has been taken over by the comunity, just as Telines wanted his cult of Demeter and Persephone to be nationalized with permanent honorary and influential positions for his descendants. And I think that there is another corollary to this theorem: the Greek monumental temple has its origin in the promotion of civic cults at the expense of the private religion. (8)
We can see just this kind of development happening elsewhere in Greek Sicily. Take Selinus, for example, the westernmost of the colonies on the island, located on the south coast (9). Beyond the city of Selinus to the east, across a depression which was a harbor but has now become silted up, there appear the remains of three great temples, fig. 5. It is important to note that these are extramural temples. We are in no better position than at Agrigento to give the names of the ancient divinities to whom they were dedicated, and so they have the colorless designations E, F and G.
Fig. 5 Selinus, view from the city to the eastern Acropolis (photo author)
Fig. 6 Selinus, Temple ER (photo Ned Nabers)
Temple G, which was never completed, is one of the largest temples ever constructed in the Greek world. It was 36l ft. in length, 164 ft. across its facade. It was exceeded in size, and only by a few feet in each dimension, by the Temple of Zeus at Agrigento and by three mammoth temples in east Greece, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Temple of Apollo at Didyma and the Temple of Hera on the island of Samos. The only way to form any idea of this leviathan, which was worked on from the sixth century down to the fall of Selinus to the Carthaginians in 409 B.C., is from the air. The third member of the triad of temples on the eastern hill of Selinus was Temple E, fig. 6. Temple E, built about 460 B. C. in its present form, seems small by comparison with Temple G, but it is approximately the size of the Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens.
Why were there three major temples outside Selinus on the eastern hill? One possibility is surely that as many private cults existed here at the beginning of the history of the colony, sometime in the third quarter of the seventh century -- the date 628 B.C. for the foundation of Selinus is calculated from Thucydides but the date is only approximate. Selinus was a daughter colony of Megara Hyblaea, and it is interesting to note that up until the time the daughter colony was founded there is no trace of any great expenditure on public cults at Megara, at least in the agora. As at Gela, much cult activity must have gone on in private domains outside the walls. And what cannot be documented at Megara Hyblaea can be followed at Selinus and especially in the history of Temple E.
The Temple begins in the seventh century as a shrine without colonnade, but with a building far more elegant than the simple early cult places of Gela. This has been revealed by recent excavations under the existing floor of the temple (10). It was a hall with a single main room, the core of the Greek temple plan, but it had two Doric columns before its doorway and two rows of columns in the interior (the columns were wood with stone capitals). The roof was decorated with brightly colored rows of terracotta palmettes along its edge and on its crest. There was a second version of the early temple before the existing temple was erected in the fifth century.
The transformation of the cult places on the western side of the city, among them the sanctuary of Demeter Malophoros (the Quince Bearer) was less dramatic but follows the same pattern as what happened on the eastern hill. 
Fig. 7 Selinus, plan of Temple C (after Holloway, The Archaeology of Early Sicily)
Within a half century of the city's foundation the first major temple of Selinus arose on the acropolis of the city. Temple C, as this building is called, is one of the best known archaic Greek temples, fig. 7. It was originally investigated in the 1820's by two Englishmen, Harris and Angell, the later of whom contracted malaria on the site and died soon after.
This was a large temple, 78 by 209 ft.; the plan is that of the classic Greek temple with colonnade surrounding the inner structure. The inner building is still quite distinct from the colonnade; in fact it is raised above the level of the colonnade floor. There is also a double row of facade columns, a typical feature of early Sicilian temples of which we shall see another instance at Syracuse. Temple C also had sculpture. In the triangular opening of the pediment there was a single enormous Gorgon's head. In mythology the features of this terrible monster, who was brought low by the hero Perseus, had the power of turning men to stone. Certainly the Gorgon's head was a powerful hex sign to display on a temple for its protection from all the malevolent forces that are on the loose in the world. Temple C also had sculptured metopes. These are thought to have been displayed on the east facade of the building. 
Fig. 8 Selinus, Temple C metope. Athena, Perseus and the Gorgon Medusa (Alison Frantz Collection, American School of Classical Studies at Athens)
The metopes of Temple C hold an important place in the history of art. The sculptures found by Harris and Angell in 1822 were the first examples of early archaic Greek art known in Western Europe. Although they are frequently dated about 550 B.C. or even later, to my mind they are perfect examples of early archaic Greek art. Their block-like anatomy, undifferentiated features and lack of detail (save for the knee joints) are characteristic of the opening of the sixth century, and the only way to defend the later date is to assume that these are retarded, provincial work, an idea which hardly suits the sculpture of one of the great cities of archaic Greece (11). The metope illustrated here, as reconstructed in the museum at Palermo, shows Perseus slaying the Gorgon, with Athena standing by, fig. 8.
Another of the well-known metopes from Temple C in Palermo shows Apollo-Helios in a front-facing chariot with two outriders. A third has Herakles striding along with two mischievous elves, the Kerkopes, trussed up over his shoulder. In addition to the three famous metopes there are also numerous fragments from other metopes from the facade of Temple C. One of them is the head of a warrior, posed full face as is characteristic of these sculptures. An armed divinity is surely the war god Ares. There are also fragments of a second chariot group, a pair of figures that can be identified as Zeus and Hera on the basis of the later representation of the divine couple from the Temple E metopes of the mid fifth century, and an assortment of male and female heads.
Restoring the program of the Temple C sculptures is aided by an inscription, found in Temple G, which enumerates the major gods of Selinus while proclaiming a great military victory (12). The text of the first seven lines, as restored, is as follows:
Through these gods the Selinuntines are victorious. We are victorious through Zeus and through Phobos(13), through Heracles and through Apollo and through Poseidon and through the sons of Tyndareus(14) And through Athene and through Malophoros(15) and Pasikrateia(16) and through the other gods but especially Zeus.
We have already identified the first four divinities named in the inscription on the metopes of Temple C, Zeus, Ares, Heracles and Apollo. Athene is present on the Perseus metope. The remaining fragments of sculpture work out very nicely for the remaining divinities, Poseidon (who would have been riding in a chariot with his wife Amphitrite as frequently in archaic art), Castor and Pollux (two young men) and Demeter and Persephone (both female figures). There is thus reason to believe that the metopes of Temple C are an epiphany of the great gods of Selinus. It is often said that early Greek architectural decoration was haphazardly chosen, as if it were merely decorative This most emphatically was not the case. And at Temple C we have the consolidation of state religion in sculpture as well as in architecture.
But how were these important, and expensive, building projects carried out? As the city asserted its control over religion, it also asserted its control over the treasuries of the gods. And temple building, by recycling some of this wealth, was good for the economy as well as for the religious solidarity of the city. Our fullest information about the administration of public works in Greece comes from Athens in the fifth century, a broad-based (for antiquity) democracy that was administered largely through boards and committees. But even at Athens there were overseers of works, the "epistatai" (epistatai), although their Sicilian counterpart functioned with considerably more autonomy. 
Fig. 10 Syracuse, Temple of Apollo, inscription on stylobate of the east facade (after Holloway, The Archaeology of Early Sicily)
Fig. 9 Syracuse, Temple of Apollo east elevation (after Holloway, The Archaeology of Early Sicily )
Let us now turn our attention to Syracuse, that beautiful city in the southeast corner of the island (17). The Temple of Apollo on the island of Ortygia may well be the oldest surviving Doric temple to have been planned with a colonnade of stone columns, fig. 9. It belongs to the moment that has been referred to as the "petrification" of the Greek temple, when stone replaced wood in construction, at least up to the roof line. The columns are squat and set very close one to the other, so close that standing between them you can touch two columns with your outstretched arms. The plan of the temple is similar to that of Temple C at Selinus and the date of the Syracusan building should be similar, perhaps about 600 B.C. The Apollo temple also has a building inscription, carved on the top step of its podium on the east facade, fig. 10 (18). The beginning of the text is uncontroversial:
"Kleo[....]es"" is a name surely and one can easily restore "Kleomenes" (punctuation points) made (punctuation points) for Apollo". Then "The son of Knidieides (punctuation points)". Let us now skip the next seven letters where there are problems, and go on to the end Stuleia : kala: Ferga. Again, the meaning is clear. "columns (punctuation points) beautiful accomplishments."
Putting the text all together so far, we have.: "Kleiomenes, the son of Knidieidies made (the bulding) for Apollo", blank, " columns; beautiful accomplishments".
In the problem section, I would see the first letter as a kappa missing its lower bar and thus read 
, which we may understand as 
, meaning "and he put his hand to". i.e. "he added". (19)
So now the full text:
"Kleomenes, the son of Knidieides built it for Apollo. And he put his hand to the columns; beautiful accomplishments they are".
This is a message from the man who was responsible for building the temple, the "epistates". In the message he displayed for his fellow citizens, Kleomenes seems to be saying that he built the temple and that in addition he put up those marvellous columns. Notice he doesn't say he dedicated the temple. He is not saying that he paid for the temple out of his own pocket. But he is making that claim for the columns and advertising his munificence.
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| Fig. 9 Syracuse, Temple of Apollo east elevation (after Holloway, The Archaeology of Early Sicily) |
This brings to mind another story, that of the Alcmeonid family of Athens, the family of Cleisthenes, who established the Athenian democracy after his return from exile in 511 B.C. While banished, Cleisthenes and his kinsmen became "epistatai" for the building of the temple of Apollo at Delphi and to ingratiate themselves with the god and his oracle they substituted marble for limestone on the facade (20). (The support of the oracle was going to be useful in the revolution Cleisthenes was soon to foment at Athens.) So we find another add-on. The Alcmeonidae were aiming at hastening the overthrow of the Peisistratid government at Athens and their return home. What was Kleomenes the Syracusan aiming at?
An epistates had considerable sums at his disposal. One Syracusan epistates of the archaic age got into trouble because he diverted building material from a temple project to his own house (21). But this was petty larceny compared to what Phalaris did at Acragas (Agrigento), again in the early sixth century (22). Phalaris was epistates for the temple of Zeus. He hired a security force, bought arms and staged a coup. His name lives on as a byword for the worst kind of tyranny.
The incentive to self promotion in the intensely competitive atmosphere of Greek public life also helps us to understand the extravagant multiplication of temples in early Sicily. At Selinus during the whole sixth and fifth centuries there cannot have been any decade when there was not at least one major project under way. At Agrigento the impression is the same. And if ancient Syracuse and Catane were not hidden by their modern successors, their building record would surely prove similar. Extravagant surely, but the ancient world was extravagant and equated wealth and its display with virtuous character in a way that we find hard to understand. The poet Pindar, who composed odes for the victories of Sicilian magnates in the Panhellenic Games, knew the tie between prestige and architecture very well. He begins one of his odes, for a Syracusan, (23)
As if on the handsome porch of a hall we raised golden columns like a towering megaron we shall construct (this ode).
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| Fig. 12 Syracuse, Temple of Athene, interior (photo archive R. R. Holloway) |
One of the surprises of Sicilian archaeology in the l960's (and still a surprise today because the discovery has remained very little known) was the discovery that a temple of the Ionic style had been erected in Syracuse in the late sixth century (24). The reconstruction of one of the columns is shown in fig. 11. The column is unfinished in its lower part. A sculptured frieze was going to be added around the shaft of the column, after the fashion of Ionic temples in Asia Minor. This is the only use of the Ionic order for a major temple in Sicily. And one would like to know why the order was chosen.
The temple stood in the heart of Ortygia, the island nucleus of Syracuse. This building made a striking contrast to traditional Doric architecture. Perhaps there were some deep reasons motivating the Syracusan adventure into Ionic architecture. Or perhaps there was simply the vanity of an epistates who wanted to make his building an eye-catching advertisement.
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| Fig. 13 Agrigento, model of the Zeus Temple (photo, ©Deutsches ArchoÉlogisches Institut Rom, Inst. Neg. 63.2225) |
The Temple of Athene, which the tyrant Gelon (whom we have already met at Gela before he extended his control to Syracuse) built after his victory over the Carthaginians in 480 B.C., was erected beside the Ionic Temple. Gelon's temple is still one of the grand sights of Syracuse. It was incorporated into the cathedral of the city and now sports a magnificent Sicilian baroque facade. But the interior, after the Greek columns were brought into view by the restorations of the l920's. almost makes one think that he is inside an ancient Greek temple, fig. 12. The grills, such as existed in the ancient buildings, and the gleam of the offerings that constituted the wealth of the gods and city bring the temple back to life. Gelon's temple is traditional Doric. It made an eloquent contrast with the Ionic building beside it, a contrast that may well have been in the minds of Gelon and his architects.
The grand temple of Olympian Zeus begun after the victory at Himera by Gelon's father-in-law and ally the tyrant Theron of Acragas, fig. 13, was neither traditional in design or restrained in scale. It is a colossus, slightly larger than Temple G at Selinus. Like the Selinuntine temple it is still a mountain of fallen blocks. There was no colonnade, although one was suggested by the engaged Doric half-columns built up as part of the wall. But the most remarkable aspect of the building were the giants or telamons, human figures which appeared to be supporting the weight of the superstructure, fig. 14 (25). For the Greeks this was architectural inventiveness in an extreme form.
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| Fig. 14 Agrigento, Museo Regionale Archeologico, bronze patera from Monte Adranone (photo author) |
One can imagine fanciful explanations of the origins of the idea for the telamons: Carthaginian slaves immortalized on his temple of Gelon's ally in the great victory of 480, oriental genii transported into Greek architecture. Actually the source is quite close to home, the male supporting figures found in Greek minor arts, especially in offering bowls such as the example illustrated here from the site of Sambuca di Sicilia, not far from Agrigento, fig. 16.
The Greek monumental temple in Sicily began as the assertion of civic religion at the expense of proprietary cults and became the vehicle of ambitious men for self promotion. Personal vanity may also lurk behind architectural innovations, whether the use of the Ionic order in an area dominated by Doric or the use of telamons on the exterior of a temple. And finally, the office of epistates could also provide the bankroll of revolution.
The architectural history of mainland Greece is less dramatic than that of Sicily or Ionia. But the same forces were at work. The Parthenon at Athens is a monument to political centralization -- not only of a city state, but of an empire. It is also a monument to the ambition of Athens' leader Pericles. And one should not forget that Pheidias, the epistates, was put on trial for embezzlement. (26)
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Chapter II |
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The Fateful Year 480 in the History of Greek Art |
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During the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. a revolution took place in the visual arts in Greece which separated Greek art from its predecessors -- whether in Bronze Age Greece, in Egypt, in the Near East or Anatolia (that is modern Turkey) -- and achieved that convincing imitation of visual space which, in its revived form, is familiar to all of us in the visual arts of the Renaissance and of post-Renaissance Europe. It is no mean achievement to have created a point of reference for visual expression that has been so influential and so long-lived and to have done so in the space of little over a century. The topic of this discussion is only one aspect of that revolution: the way an important step in the revolution has been dated and the interpretation of the spirit of Greek art that has been founded on that date (1). The date is the year 480 B.C., when, as any one who has studied ancient art knows, Greek art passed from the "archaic" to the "early classical" -- or what is also known as the "severe style".
Two statues illustrate what happened. These are both images of real people, portraits in fact, although one of the subjects had been dead a century or even more when his portrait was created. The first figure is a remarkable statue in marble that was set up over the grave of a wealthy young man on the family estate in rural Attica some time in the second half of the sixth century B.C., fig. 1 (2). This statue also represents one of those rare cases where the statue base with its inscription was found together with the statue. The inscription reads: |
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Stand and mourn for Kroisos now dead Whom wild Ares struck down at the battleline's head. |
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The young man died in battle and his name was Kroisos. He bore the same name as the sixth-century king of Lydia, the king whom Solon of Athens visited and who was fabled for his wealth. The youth's father may have enjoyed close relations with the Lydian King; quite possibly he was the official guest-friend or proxenos, making him a kind of Lydian consul in Athens. And so he named a son for his foreign friend. And by erecting this statue without armor, without clothing, belonging to the class of such figures that are known as "kouroi", the father suggested that Kroisos had become a hero attaining a status between mortality and divinity. |
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Our second portrait is one of the two similarly heroic bronze images that were fished out of the water off the little summer resort of Riace on the coast of Calabria, the toe of the Italian boot, in 1972, fig. 2. The identification of the two statues -- both very similar except that one of the heroes wore a helmet and the other didn't -- is much debated. Elsewhere I have argued that this is a portrait of the founder of one of the Greek colonies in Sicily of the seventh or early sixth centuries (3). Actually three of these cities (Agragas [Agrigento], Gela and Camarina) had cofounders and so the twin statues would be the portraits of one of these pairs of founders. These are ideal portraits, but heroized portraits nonetheless, just as is the statue of Kroisos.
The differences between these two figures are the differences between archaic and early classical Greek sculpture. First of all, the material is different: one is stone, the other bronze. The use of bronze for life-size statuary becomes common in Greece only at the end of the sixth century. And much of the change in style is related to this technological development. Bronze sculpture is cast from models made in soft materials, clay or plaster. The technique favors molding and plasticity (4). It is opposite of the stone worker's technique, carving with hammer, point and chisel. Of course, after the introduction of large-scale hollow casting in bronze, sculpture continued to be made in stone. This was true of the sculpture decorating Greek temples and other public buildings and was true of much funeral statuary. Still, major sculptural dedications, particularly those in the great Greek sanctuaries, were now made in bronze. Considering the value of bronze and the ease with which statuary could be melted down, it is remarkable that any of these statues survive, but a number of them do. Otherwise, for famous pieces such as Myron's discus thrower or the portrait of Perikles, we have to rely on Roman copies made while the originals still survived (5). |
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Next, the pose of the statues is different. The directly frontal, "at attention" pose of the archaic figure has been replaced by a composition in which the weight is concentrated on one leg leaving the other bent and introducing a slight rotation in the torso. A more "natural" pose, one, therefore, that suits our experience in the visual field better than the artificial rigidity of the archaic formula. This is not quite the freestanding pose associated with the name of the sculptor Polycleitus; the shoulders do not follow the displacement of the lower body. But it is rather close to the Polycleitan formula. |
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Third, the diagrammatic emphasis with which the anatomy of the archaic piece is treated has given way to a greater integration of bodily structure. Devices such as the recession of the mouth used to emphasize the structure of the face and resulting in that familiar mannerism called the "archaic smile" are no longer with us. The Riace bronze is not necessarily a greater work of art than the portrait of Kroisos but it is more adjusted to the field of visual experience. |
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The passage from the archaic to the early classical is also marked by a change of fashion in women's dress. The archaic female equivalent of the kouros is called, appropriately enough the kore. In our example from the Athenian Acropolis, the kore is wearing the elaborate Ionian fashion of a linen chiton (or dress) covered by a mantle called the himation, and made of equally light material, fig. 3 (6). Ionic dress provided the archaic artist with a perfect field to exercise his command of surface elaboration and decoration. The dress seen on a mid-fifth century relief of Athena also from the Acropolis is the peplos, a simple woollen affair belted at the waist (7). Peploi were worn in earlier times -- they are much more practical in cold weather (and there is one famous archaic statue from the Athenian acropolis who wears just such a garment (8)) -- but the peplos became well nigh universal in sculptural images of women in the early classical period. And the peplos has no stacked folds and patterned ripples of cloth. The relief figure, fig. 4, identified as Athena by her helmet and spear, is called the "Mourning Athena" (9). The inference is surely wrong. She seems to be standing contemplating a boundary stone or a list of athletic victors. But one may notice again that whereas the archaic age would have made an image corresponding to a formula, and in this case almost surely an upright kore-like Athena, the classical age seeks the visually natural. Whether the apparent simplicity of the drapery has a moral value is another question, and one that we shall come back to. |
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The transition from archaic to early classical is connected with the date 480 B.C. in all the handbooks that I have on my shelf. The reason for this date lies in the history of the Persian Wars and in the interpretation of the excavations of the Athenian Acropolis.
The kingdom of Kroisos of Lydia was the last buffer between the Greeks and the expanding Persian Empire. As soon as Kroisos was defeated -- the traditional date is 546 B.C. -- the Greeks had to face Persia. The Greeks living in Ionia, that is along the modern Turkish coast, succumbed immediately. The Greeks of the Greek mainland were granted a fifty-year respite while the Persians were occupied elsewhere, but then their turn came. It didn't help matters that the mainlanders, first and foremost the Athenians, sent an expeditionary force to assist a revolt among the Ionians in the 490's. Revenge as well as expansion was on the Persians' minds. |
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The Acropolis one sees today is the Acropolis made splendid by the monumental architecture erected between 448 B.C. when work began on the Periklean phase of the Parthenon (the date is given in a inscription recording the actual payments for building materials) and the end of the century when Athens' failure in the Peloponnesian War and the dissolution of the empire that paid for the buildings brought these projects to an end (fig. 5). But by that irony that has turned so many disasters into archaeological treasure troves (for example Pompeii destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius 79 A.D.), the archaic statuary and votive offerings of Athens that saw the Persian sack did not vanish but lived on hidden on the Acropolis. |
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In 1827 the War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire ended victoriously for the Greeks (due to the intervention on the Greek side of the British and French navies). The removal from the Acropolis of the accretions of medieval and later times was an immediate priority of the new Greek government. Excavation of the entire surface of the Acropolis down to the underlying bedrock became a project carried on fitfully but finally seen to completion some sixty years later. As is clear from the section across the Acropolis, fig. 6, the slope falls off to the south Consequently, the south side of the Parthenon had to be built on a massive platform, some 33 feet high at the southwest corner. The same situation prevails to a lesser extent on the north side of the hill. This means that the 19th century excavators found remarkably deep ancient deposits. And from these strata there emerged that rich treasure of archaic statuary, bronzes and pottery that is now on view in the Acropolis Museum. |
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The initial sounding at the SE corner of the Parthenon was made in 1835 by the German Ludwig Ross, the first director general of antiquities in Greece under the German prince Otho who had become the King of Greece on the suggestion of the European powers in 1832, fig. 7 (11). Beneath the levels marked by the presence of marble flakes from the finishing of the superstructure of the Parthenon and limestone fragments from the working of the blocks that make up the great platform the workmen encountered a stratum, ten to twelve feet thick, marked by lumps of charcoal, marble fragments discolored by fire, vases, lamps, terracotta figurines, small bronzes and the terracotta decorations of buildings destroyed before the Parthenon's foundations were built. As he brought this material to light, there was no question in the excavator's mind that these architectural pieces came from the temple and shrines destroyed by the Persians. The logic of stratigraphic reasoning, however, cautions one to remember that the most we can say is that this material came from fill against the great platform. The Parthenon itself was begun in 448, as we know from its building accounts. Of course the platform on which it stands could be older, but this fact in itself does not seal a connection between the fill against the platform and the Persian sack or exclude the possibility that material made after the Persian disaster was also included in the building fill. |
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Still, the discovery of archaic debris on the Acropolis in 1835 laid the basis for identifying anything of pre-Parthenon appearance as an element of "Perserschutt", to use the German term that has passed into common usage. Since Lord Elgin put the Parthenon sculptures on display in London in 1812, everyone had a good idea of the style of sculpture in Athens in the years following 448 B.C., fig. 8, 9. What appeared to be earlier was automatically categorized as "Perserschutt" and so dated before 480.
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The most remarkable find of archaic sculpture on the Acropolis was the cache discovered in January of 1886 between the Erechtheum (the temple that stands north of the Parthenon on the Acropolis) and the fortification walls on that side of the hill, fig. 10 (12). Nine korai were found laid neatly side by side. And the more romantic commentators were led to assert that on their return from Salamis and Plataea the Athenians had piously buried the votive statues so brutally handled by the Persians in mass graves like this. |
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Some of the sculpture appeared very archaic, fig. 11. Other pieces were tending toward the early classical, fig. 12. But on more than one occasion archaic sculptures were found in company of pieces of Parthenon style and so could hardly be said to come from pious burials of the year 479 (13). At the other extreme, one of the korai was even found in the building fill for the Propylaia, the monumental gateway to the Acropolis, which was begun in 438 (as we know again from secure inscriptional evidence) (14). The notion of the Perserschutt, however, generalized from the deep stratigraphy alongside the Parthenon to almost anywhere on the Acropolis, proved to have an enduring appeal. The year 480 became a watershed in the history of Greek art, the archaic before that date, the early classical after. The watershed, moreover, was not merely a change in style; it was a change of spirit. One of the more authoritative students of Greek Art, Martin Robertson, Lincoln Professor of Archaeology emeritus at Oxford, wrote in his general study of Greek art published in 1975,(15) |
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That the change came at this moment can hardly be unconnected with the sense of release and self realization brought to the Greeks by the struggle with Persia. |
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In fairness I should stress that Robertson is referring to the entire Persian conflict from about 500 to 480, but nevertheless it is clear that, in his view, the formal break with archaic conventions was also a change of moral fibre. This interpretation of a change in sculpture style as the manifestation of the indomitable spirit of the victors of Marathon and Salamis is a mainstay of modern histories of Greek art. Almost the exact same idea appears in the work of another English scholar, Henry Walters, of the British Museum, in his history of Greek art originally published in 1906. Writing of the Athenians in particular he says, in the more florid prose of the Edwardian era: The Persian Wars .....gave an extraordinary impetus to the genius of that wonderful people and impelled them to undertake with enthusiasm the labor of rendering their city more beautiful than before. And working throughout the product of the new artistic movement a strong religious and patriotic motive is apparent.(16)
German, Italian and American scholars could be brought to witness that these notions are hardly a British monopoly. Only the French seem reticent on the subject. But they too would agree, I imagine, in the importance of what Brunilde Ridgway of Bryn Mawr has called, "The fateful year 480". (17) |
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The underpinnings of interpretations like these are not hard to find. Although the progression of artistic styles through the history of ancient cultures was already set out in the eighteenth century by the father of art history, J. J. Winckelmann, he and his age still judged art by its success in achieving some Platonic ideal of perfection. The search for the beautiful had been ever the artists' objective; some had succeeded better than others. That history was working through art was a new notion born in the nineteenth century and associated in particular with the German philosopher Hegel. Hegel's conception of historical process was one of a collision of forces and ideas producing each new stage of history and culture. He and his contemporaries were living in the shadow of the French Revolution which had changed every aspect of Europe in an inalterable way. Was not the war between Greece and Persia of the same dimensions, and had it not been fated to have effects of equal importance? The Hegelian view was bolstered by the fact that Greek historians like Herodotos saw the clash as one of ideals, those of the free citizen of the city state against the shadow of tyranny. And in his play "The Persians" the dramatist Aeschylus brought the transfiguration of the Greeks in the victory to the stage. But neither Herodotus or Aeschylus claimed that the Greeks were any different after their victories than before. They were what they were and proud of it. It was the modern historian who visited on the Greeks the need to participate in historical process and to change their outlook for the better, casting off the frivolities of the archaic age for a new seriousness. The kore and her drapery became the symbol of frivolity and the severe style became the Greek equivalent of moral rearmament. |
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In the midst of all this discussion haven't we forgotten the year 480? And haven't we forgotten to follow the further exploration of the "Perserschutt", which we left in the hands of Ludwig Ross as he first discovered it in 1835? But what if there was no pure "Perserschutt"? What if there were no single strata on the Acropolis composed only of remains from that memorable sack? What if, therefore, there was no telling when any one deposit was laid down, except by reference to buildings for which there are dates in written documents? If so, the history of Greek art would be cast free of the fateful year of 480. And the transition between archaic and classical would have to be established by other means. These considerations do not raise the spectre of a major revolution in the dating of Greek sculpture. The Parthenon would still be anchored to the years 448-432 (18). The Temple of Zeus at Olympia, illustrating the period of the severe style between the archaic and the developed classical style of the Parthenon, fig.13, is still fixed to the years before 458 by literary testimonia (19). And from the next to last decade of the sixth century we have the evidence for the good health of the archaic style from the pedimental sculpture of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. We know the facades of this temple were being worked on at that time because the Alkmeonid family of Athens undertook the contract to erect one of the facades before they came back from exile in 511 B.C. and set off the revolution that overthrew the tyrant Hippias at Athens (20). But the revision to be outlined below may have some consequences for the history of the Acropolis as well as freeing us from the need to view the development of Greek sculpture in the early fifth century as a moral imperative. |
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At the outset one must realize that the Parthenon as we see it today, in fact as it has stood since 432 B.C., is not the first but the second project for the building, this earlier project also for a marble temple. There are abundant traces of the earlier building. For example, a molded base for a wall end of its interior structure (an anta) was reused in the subflooring of the Periklean building, fig. 14. And this is only one of the many reused blocks from the earlier structure (21). The Parthenon also sits off center on its podium. The earlier building (the three-step upper foundation of which is encased within the present Parthenon) would have been placed symmetrically on the podium and would not have overlapped it at the western end as the present building does. Consequently, one must realize that the great foundations on the south side of the building, beside which Ludwig Ross began digging in 1835, were made not for the Periklean Parthenon begun in 448 but for the older project. |
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The project for this temple was not carried very far. The three-step podium was finished and the lowest drums of the columns were set in place. Other drums from these columns, only the beginning of their vertical channeling indicated, were later used as blocks in the north fortification wall of the Acropolis, fig. 15. We can be sure that these drums are from an early Parthenon, first because they are marble, and second because their size (six ft. diameter) means they must have belonged to a building of Parthenon dimensions and there is room for only one temple of the size of the Parthenon on the Acropolis (22). |
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Since the podium of the temple was narrower than that of its successor, this temple is restored with six rather than with eight columns across its short sides in the plan proposed in 1912 by Bert Hodge Hill , fig. 16 (23). Needless to say the arrangements for the interior suggested on this plan are wholly hypothetical -- in this case based on the plan of the existing temple, fig. 17. |
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But what is the date of this older Parthenon? This question is clouded by three pieces of misinterpreted evidence. The first is these very column drums in the northern fortification wall. They are, so the argument runs, the column drums of an unfinished Parthenon that was under construction before the Persian sack of 480. The drums show damage, but is the damage from the Persians or does it come from rough handling when the drums were reused in the fortifications or does it come from the fact that these drums were some of the first to have been removed from the Pentelic quarries and had defects, common in the upper beds of marble deposits, which became apparent only after they had been taken to the Acropolis? We have no idea exactly when the north face fortifications were built (the testimonia to the work of the Athenian leader Kimon in strengthening the defenses in the 460's state specifically that his work was on the south side of the hill) (24). The column drums, therefore, are in no way proof of a Parthenon before 480. |
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The second piece of evidence is the traces of burning, as they have been interpreted, observed on stones of the first Parthenon and once attributed to the Persian fire. They are the marks of lichen. (25) |
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The third proposed link between physical evidence of the Persian destruction and the older Parthenon comes from the inspection of reused blocks in the upper foundation of the temple begun in 448. Observation of a row of blocks actually in place below the north wall of the cella of the temple has been carried out with an endoscope, the same instrument used to make medical observations of the human intestines (26). The blocks are damaged. The cause suggested is fire, not hot enough to calcify the surface but sufficiently hot to injure the marble. The drawing published of one such block shows a diagonal slice of stone missing along the entire length, the separation of which is attributed to this agency. |
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Appeal to the Persian fire for the cause of the damage to these blocks relies on one, but only one, explanation of their condition. Quarrying of marble, as already noted, can induced minor fractures that, in time, lead to breakage. Unsuitable for the upper structure, such blocks could be used in the foundation. And where, one may ask, are the traces of fire on all the dozens of other reused bocks of the Parthenon? |
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The entire subject of the Persian fire, moreover, needs to be examined with the question of fuel in mind. It is one thing for the Persians to have set ablaze the wooden roof of the Old Temple of Athena (midway between the Parthenon and Erechtheum) and thus destroyed the building (27). The same is true of any other small buildings on the spot. But how did the Persians burn down a marble temple which, if we are to believe the usual interpretation of the remains, consisted of nothing more than a podium and the stumps of its walls and columns? In this condition it is not even sure that any scaffolding would have been available to fuel the fire. Did Persian vengence extended to transporting wood up to the Acropolis in the quantity necessary to desecrate a building that was only in the early stages of constiruction? The hypothesis of the Pre-Persian Parthenon is a very difficult one to defend on the basis of the surface condition of any stones that may have come from it. (28) |
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To find an answer to the problem of the date of the first Parthenon one must return to the excavations in the deep fill on the south side of the temple. In the crucial years of 1888 and 1889 the excavations were recorded by the German architect Kawerau, who was later to publish an account of the work with his Greek colleague Kavvadias(29). Kawerau's notes are preserved in the German Archaeological Institute in Athens and have been published by J. A. Bundgaard together with the archive of photographs taken at the time (30). There is, therefore, a documentation, if not a perfect documentation, of the work carried out. |
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The section reproduced in fig.18. takes us to the southwest corner of the Parthenon. And it shows, in some detail, the strata found between the Parthenon foundation and the fortification wall of the Acropolis. |
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In addition to the podium of the Parthenon on the right-hand side of the drawing, there are three elements to consider. The first is the Bronze Age fortification wall of the Acropolis which appears as the wide structure at the base of the walling shown in the center of the section. This ancient defense must have served the Acropolis throughout archaic times (31). With a wooden palisade erected above the stonework it was manned by the few diehards who refused to evacuate the city and mounted a futile resistance against the invaders in 480 B.C.
New defenses of the Acropolis were built along the south side of the hill by Kimon during the 460's, and certainly before 462 when he was sent into exile. They can be seen at the left-hand side of the drawing. (32) |
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Between the foundations of the Parthenon and the fortification wall there is still another wall, which created an earth terrace that was raised as needed to facilitate the work on the foundations of the temple. Although for most of its length it runs parallel to the Parthenon's foundations and is quite independent of the old fortifications figs. 19 (plan) 20 (view), the section, there is one point where this wall is footed on the inner part of the old Mycenean wall fig. 21 (33). One can see the successive building terraces against the foundations of the Parthenon both in the section drawing and in the photograph of the excavations from 1888 (fig. 18, 22). It is this terrace wall that holds the key to dating the older Parthenon at the western end of the building. |
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In fig. 21 we see a drawing of the retaining wall and below it the old Bronze Age wall. The terrace wall rests on the Bronze Age wall at this point (B on the plan, fig. 19. Remembering that the old Bronze Age wall remained the defense of the Acropolis down to 480 B.C. (and probably even down to the 460's when it was replaced by the Kimonian defenses) it is evident that the retaining wall must be dated after 480 and probably a decade or more after that date. This piece of evidence is sufficient to negate all efforts to date the Older Parthenon before the Persian Wars. The Pre-Periklean Parthenon must also be dated after 480 (34). The stairway in the irregular terrace wall shows that for a period of time after the ground level had risen beside the foundations of the temple, access had to be available from the lower level outside the wall.
Reexamination of the stratigraphy of the fill at the south side of the Parthenon by Kolbe and Tschira convinced these scholars that loose material from the working terraces against the Parthenon above the level of the retaining wall actually rolled down against the inside of the Kimonian fortification, proving that the building of the podium went on when the lower parts of the fortification were already in place. (35) |
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Two other pieces of walling have been brought into the argument over the construction of the Parthenon foundations with confusing results. These are the ashlar walls marked A - H and E - F on the plan fig. 19, Fig. 23 (photo). They were not built with any relation to the Parthenon or its foundation in mind. While the irregular retaining wall is generally parallel to the Parthenon's foundations, they are not. They follow the general direction of the old Mycenean defense wall. But both disappear into the Kimon defense wall. The continuous line uniting these two pieces of walling on the plan is unjustified because there is no evidence that it is a single wall. These are more likely to have been two separate walls with two separate purposes. And both belong to the history of the defenses of the Acropolis more than to the building of the Parthenon. (36)
Where is the "Perserschutt" then? The answer is everywhere and nowhere (37). The rich deposits on the Acropolis are secondary fills created not as a direct result of the Persian sack but by the builders of the first Parthenon and other buildings on the hill. As such they have no homogeneity or purity. Every object from the Athenian Acropolis that one wishes to date to the Pre-Persian period must be judged on its own characteristics. |
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We are fortunate to possess in Roman copies a pair of statues that were erected together in the Athenian marketplace three years after the Persian sack. They commemorate two heroes of the revolution against the tyrants, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who staged an abortive uprising three years before the Alkmeonid party returned successfully to Athens (fig. 24) (38). We know these statues better than many Greek statues preserved only in Roman copies because casts taken from the originals have been discovered in a Roman sculptor's studio in Baiae near Naples in Italy (39). Harmodius and Aristogeiton, as represented by the sculptors Kritios and Nesiotes, are fully early classical statues. Did early classical sculpture begin only three years earlier? And was the youthful figure, the so-called Critios boy (fig. 25) necessarily made before 480 simply because he was found on the Acropolis and presumed to belong to the "Perserschutt"? The American student of Greek art, Jeffrey Hurwitt, has now studied the problem of the Critios Boy at some length and comes down for a date after 480, and quite sensibly so, through the analysis of the statue's own characteristics. (40) On the other hand, all traces of the archaic style cannot have vanished from Greek sculpture at one magic moment. My feeling is that the archaic style in sculpture did not die all at once but faded away over several decades during the same years that the masterpieces of the "severe" or early classical style were being made. If we are to follow the "Perserschutt" fallacy to its logical conclusion, there would be no dedicatory sculpture surviving from the Acropolis after 480. Common sense is against this notion. Nothing prevents our speculating that some "late archaic" dedications, such as the kore offered to Athene by the Athenian Euthydikos (fig. 26), were erected in the years following rather than preceeding the Persian sack (41). This is a private offering, probably set up by a businessman as a token of his commercial success with no thought of Persians, moral renewal or the artificial boundaries that modern commentators have imposed on ancient art. (42) |
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Chapter I |
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The Hand of Daedalus by R. Ross Holloway Chapter III |
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How Did the Greeks Look at Greek Art? |
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Every year on 18 December the German academic world pays tribute to the memory of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. It is no exaggeration to say that the way in which we conceive the history of Greek art, the way in which we teach Greek art, and much of the research carried out in the field of Greek art are still conditioned by Winckelmann's writings. It is from Winckelmann that we draw the schema of the rise of Greek art from its archaic beginnings to the apogee of the fifth and fourth centuries followed by a decline which embraces both the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Valiant champions of these later periods have contested this prejudice in favor of the pristine Greek city-state art, but the sentiments of current taste are still firmly with Winckelmann. Winckelmann is not the origin of this point of view. He found it already in the Roman authors Pliny the Elder, Cicero and Quintilian, three writers who preserve the scraps of what we might call connected art history in antiquity. It was not good art history. It was the product of a schematic rise-and-decline mentality that infected a good deal of Greek and Roman thoughtÒLivy takes the same attitude toward Roman historyÒbolstered by the classicizing prejudices of Roman official art and Roman collecting. Nothing seems to shake the hold of Pliny the Elder and Winckelmann on our conception of Greek art. Not even the Marxist historians of ancient art have made any serious attempt to replace it with some scenario based on elites, means of production, and class struggle. They seem to reserve their attention (and probably wisely so) for Rome. |
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Apart from purely archaeological and formal endeavors, there is only one field of the history of Greek art which modern scholarship has pushed forward with enthusiasm. This is the stylistic study of master personalities. In vase-painting, there has been success, partly because of a group of signed originals that directed efforts in the beginning, partly because of the genius of Sir John Beazley. It is true that as the better material was exhausted, the hunt for master hands has led to the study of increasingly unimportant pot painters, but the achievement of Beazley's Attic Red-Figured Vase Painters and Attic Black-Figured Vase Painters is one that will not soon be equaled. In sculpture, despite the great names listed by Pliny and appearing in the guide book to Greece written in the second century A.D. by Pausanias, the results have been disastrous. I do not think I put the matter unfairly by saying that attribution studies in Greek sculpture have produced less progress for more investment of time and energy than that registered in any other field of archaeological scholarship. The reason is that by and large these stylistic analyses have used Roman copies and we are now sadly realizing the infidelity and inaccuracy of the copies and the copyists' readiness to recombine from two or more sources if the occasion demanded. The appearance of a true original, be it the Delphi Charioteer, the Zeus of Artemision, or more recently the Heroes of Riace and the Motya Ephebe, seems to shed no light but to induce only greater perplexity. The only bright spot is the archaic period which did not interest the learned Romans, but where we do have original sculpture and inscribed bases for it, occasionally bearing artists' signatures. |
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Why is it that no one has thought to attempt to understand Greek art with the guidance of the Greek? Why has no one thought to ask, "How did the Greeks look at Greek art?" The answer is that there are precious few references to art in the Greek authors, and what there are is not encouraging. In what must surely rank as one of the great understatements of all time, Sir Maurice Bowra wrote of "The comparatively modest claims which the Greeks made for the place of art in Life" (1). Everyone knows that Plato refused to have poets and painters in his ideal state and that from the tragedians, historians and orators there is perplexing, though not total, reticence (2). But the poet Simonides was proud to have paid 2 minas (200 drachmai, 800 gm. or 1.75 lbs. of silver) for a statue and many dedicatory statues or grave monument must have cost more (3). The building programs of many a Greek city must have taxed its gross national product and Athens was ready to invest the taxes of her naval league in buildings of the Acropolis. These circumstances in themselves are proof of the importance of art in the life of the city state. And so I believe my questions are useful ones, and I shall attempt to answer them as best we can. We shall find that there were several strains of response among the Greeks to the art around them and, moreover, that they reflect the importance of one branch of Greek art which has almost wholly perished, illusionistic painting. |
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| Let us begin, if not at the beginning of Greek literature, then at least at the beginning of Greek prose, with Herodotus. What does the curious traveler, historian, ethnographer and collector of marvels have to say about art? From Herodotus we learn that images are magical. If a Spartan king dies abroad, an image is made and placed on a decorated bier and carried to the grave at Sparta (4). The magical quality of art works is illustrated again by the action of Phocaeans who, fleeing from the city before the Persians, took with them the images of their gods (as well as the intrinsically valuable votive offerings from the templesÒgold and silver that isÒHerodotus says specifically that the paintings, stone and bronze objects were left behind) (5). Finally there is the familiar story of the Argive youths Cleobis and Biton: | ||
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On the occasion of the festival of Hera at Argos it was necessary that their mother be transported to the temple by a yoke team. But the oxen did not come in from the fields in time. In view of the lateness of the hour the young men themselves took up the yoke and dragged along the wagon, their mother riding upon it, until they arrived at the temple forty-five stadia away. This deed was viewed by the entire assembly, and there followed the best reward of life, by which the god showed that it was preferable for man to die rather than live. The Argive men stood around and hailed the strength of the youths while the Argive ladies praised the mother for her children. She was carried away in her joy at the deed and the impression it had made, and, standing before the cult statue, she prayed for Cleobis and Biton, her sons, who had done her such honor, and asked that the goddess might give them man's greatest blessing. After the prayer they sacrificed and celebrated. Then the youths lay down to rest in the sanctuary and did not arise. Death was their reward. The Argives had statues made of them and dedicated them in Delphi since they had achieved such distinction (6). |
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The bases of the statues of Cleobis and Biton were excavated at Delphi in 1893. They appear to fit two almost identical figures of standing youths belonging to the opening years of the sixth century which were excavated nearby. Although there have been doubting voices, the statues we have long known as Cleobis and Biton are typical of the type of figure that must have honored them (7). And the story illustrates the uneasy awe that surrounded such figures in the minds of the early Greeks, magical things that capture and hold the wonderful and the terrible. |
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| Such responses to art as magic may be intense but they contain no hint of taste or appreciation. Herodotus does not fail us in this regard, although his reaction is so naive as to be shocking. The first book of the Histories is full of sights of Delphi. But Herodotus' scale of value reminds one of the Phocaeans' criteria for selecting among the votive offerings in their temples: price. And so it is the sumptuous gifts of Oriental potentates which Herodotus pauses to mention. | ||
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Gyges the tyrant (of Lydia) sent no small presents to Delphi, as his many silver offerings at the Delphic shrine testify. Besides this silver he gave a vast number of vessels of gold, among which the most worthy of mention are the craters, six in number, and weighing altogether thirty talents, which stand in the Corinthian treasury......... Midas dedicated the royal throne on which he was accustomed to sit and administer justice, an object well worth looking at (8). |
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Alyattes sent a gigantic silver vessel...... and a patera (?) of inlaid iron which, though hardly so precious, caught Herodotus' attention (9). |
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But it was Kroisos, of course, who outdid them all: 113 ingots of electrum, each two talents, and 4 ingots of pure gold, each 2 1/2 talents and a gold lion, weight 10 talents, an enormous gold and equally immense silver bowl, silver caskets and other vessels, and near the end of the list, a female figure in gold, height 4 1/2 feet (10). |
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Size and splendor is what attracted the tourist, then as now. On the occasion of an alliance with Kroisos, the Spartans made a huge vessel in bronze, covered with figures of animals all around the outside of the rim which they sent to Kroisos in return for his presents to them. The vase never reached KroisosÒit was either misappropriated or sold by the Spartan envoysÒin any case it ended up in the sanctuary of Hera on Samos (11). |
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| A final instance of interest in the rare, the costly and the elaborate: also in the Samian sanctuary there was a breastplate from Egypt, another diplomatic present gone astray: | ||
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The breastplate.... was linen and had a vast number of figures of animals woven into its fabric and was likewise embroidered with gold and cotton. What is most worthy of admiration in it is that each of the twists, although of fine texture, contains within it 360 threads, all of them clearly visible. (12) |
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In Herodotus there is no discussion of content, of style, of artistic personality, of anything but the most commonplace reaction to expense, materials and clever workmanship. Our expectations, of course, have been conditioned by centuries of Christian art contrived as an instrument of meditation or a vision of beatitude. Consequently our desire for an experience of enlightenment is very strong, stronger indeed than any lingering interest in the intellectual games of iconography which have also been part of our recent artistic past. |
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| The naive response we find in Herodotus is something different, and in a way, universal, shared by the unsophisticated of our own day, as well as the ordinary Greek. It is the amazed delight of the audience of a puppet show. And the animation of such response is illustrated at the beginning of the Ion of Euripides. The chorus of the play is composed of slave girls who accompany their mistress Creusa to the oracle at Delphi. And here is what they exclaim on entering the precinct, the same precinct where Herodotus saw so much that was "worth seeing", for the first time (13). | ||
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It's not just Athens where you see Temples with columns and public images. Here in the shrine of Apollo, Lato's son, You've got a knockout of a temple With columns at both ends. Look, just look, Zeus' boy has snagged Oh! I see. And who's that beside him with the torch. I've made him in my weaving. That's Look there. A man on a winged steed assailing I can't take my eyes off him. Oh! and the battle of the giants |
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| The essential ingredient in the art that appeals to such response is vividness and energy, not necessarily illusionistic veracity. And such naive artistic experience had been with the Greeks since Homer. Homer describes the sword belt of Herakles in the Odyssey (14), | ||
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Golden was his swordbelt, and scenes were worked on it Of bears and wild boars and savage lions And grim war and the slaughter of men. |
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The brooch was of gold in two parts and both were worked with a dog holding down a spotted deer and watching it struggle. All admired how the dog was made and seemed to be eyeing his prey while gripping it by the throat and how the fawn's feet writhed as it sought to escape. |
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My observations up to this point are not intended to deny an intellectual side to early Greek art. It is Homer too who described the shield of Achilles with the antithetical scenes of the City at Peace and the City at War, and this kind of thematic unity now is widely recognized in archaic art (16). |
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But our search for the intellectual side of Greek art can lead us to underestimate the appeal of "typical" scenes in Greek art. The battle of centaurs and Greeks recurs again and again in the decoration of temples of the fifth century B.C.: Olympia, the Parthenon, the Hephaisteon, the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion. And as the centauromachy wanes in popularity the battle of Greeks and Amazons takes over in its place. In a number of instances the use of the centaur battle must respond, or be appropriate to, an allegorical program. But one wonders if this is true in all cases or whether more than occasionally such scenes were chosen for their appeal to the naive spectator. |
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In fact for archaic Greece and for a significant element of classical Greece art was truly what the Greek work techne implies, craft. It was appreciated for the dexterity of its makers, its complexity and material splendor. Good design, harmony and balance were appreciated. The presences evoked by art, whether divinities or heroes, were magical with all the connotations of that word, and although the themes of narrative art were not chosen randomly, it was the combination of awe before the magical image, and naive response to vitality and action that gave early Greek art its power. This interpretation is confirmed by the inscriptions found on the bases of archaic statuary, as set forth in a too little known study made by Christos Karouzos in 1946 (17). The archaic statue speaks to address the passerby, one of the most eloquent being the elegiac epitaph quoted by Plato (18) , |
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A bronze maiden I, I lie on Midas' tomb While water flows and the tall trees bloom Resting on this tear-stained bier I tell the passer, "King Midas lies here." |
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| Not only vital, these figures are marvelous as physical objects referred to commonly in the inscriptions as "fair adornments". In the later sixth century the tone of the inscriptions changes. It is the artists who are now putting forth claims to their skill and knowledge. An inscription for the great Aiginetan sculptor Onatas, quoted by the traveler, Pausanias, runs (19), | ||
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Many are the works of skillfully wise Onatas from Aigina, This is one too. He is the son of Mikon. |
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This attitude characterizes the sculptors of the two generations to whom we owe, among other treasures, the archaic statuary from the Athenian acropolis. |
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The fifth century, however, saw changes in the outlook of the Greek artist on his own work. For the first time the sculptor or painter steps forward in the role of innovator and creator. This claim seems to have been made first for Pheidias. The remark that in making the cult statue of Zeus for the temple of Olympia, Pheidias seemed to have added something to religion is most familiar from its appearance in Quintilian, but it was current at least from the second century B.C. when it was quoted by Lucius Aemilius Paullus on his visit to Olympia in 167, as we know from the contemporary account of Polybius (20). I doubt if Paullus was the author of this bon mot, yet something about Pheidias and his age had planted the idea that an artist could be a creative visionary, seeking, as in the case of Pheidias' Zeus, an image to match the poetry of Homer. |
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Our evidence about Pheidias' contemporary, the painter Parrhasius, is still clearer. If we can trust the tradition preserved by the Elder Pliny, Parrhasius was the archetype of the princely artist flaunting his success by high living and self advertising (21). Parrhasius, moreover, makes an appearance in Xenophon's Recollections of Socrates, an unadorned work by a contemporary. The conversation turns on the artist's imitation of appearances, and with them the character and temper of his subjects, and it assumes the artist's intervention in the interpretation of what he sees (22). |
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The work of such artists was assisted by technical developments in Greek painting. The term "skiagraphia" used to describe the painting of the later fifth and fourth century has occasioned much debate. The obvious interpretation, painting employing shadowing, or chiaroscuro technique, has been challenged, but the recent discoveries of frescoes in the princely tombs of Macedonia of the later fourth century have conclusively shown that shadow modeling was in common use in the classical period. The luster of the great Greek painters, Zeuxis and Apelles as well as Parrhasius, must in no small degree have relied on the vividness and verisimilitude of the chiaroscuro image (23). |
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The same kind of representation, so adapted to opening up the unknown world of transient moods and conflicting passions (24), brought with it inevitably the realization that this was an art of the impermanent and changing rather than the magically eternal. But at the same time, the Greek painters had registered a further success, the creation of a spatial illusion. The first stage of this development was the tiered perspective compositions associated with the school of Polygnotos of Thasos in the mid-fifth century. The effect of space in these paintings may have been something like that achieved by Giotto and his followers in the thirteenth century but the compositions aimed at embracing a wide spatial vision and covered entire walls of public buildings. The destruction of Greek painting makes it difficult to follow the progress of spatial representation but the result of over a century of experience is shown in the hunt fresco of the royal tomb (possibly that of Philip II) from Vergina in Macedonia (25). Therefore, it is the introduction of spatial and temporal values, primarily in painting, as well as the recognition of the artist's originality and imagination, which are the singular innovations of Greek art in the fifth and fourth centuries. |
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Although a less pliable and illusionistic medium, sculpture did not remain unaffected by this revolution in Greek art, as is apparent in the sculptural decoration of temples where the sequence of scenes and expanse of some of their settings, notably in the pedimental triangles, offered the opportunity to emphasize spatial and temporal values. The maturing of Herakles from youth to aging hero on the metopes of the Zeus Temple at Olympia is an early instance of this phenomenon. The bracketing of the scene of the birth of Athene on the east pediment of the Parthenon between the chariot of the sun and the chariot of the moon, thus placing the action of the pediment scene within the space of a day, is another. |
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Further distance from magical force of art and the naive response to it was caused by the allegorical messages now hidden behind the literal subject matter of representation. Again the sculptural decoration of the temples and temple-like buildings is important. There is surely significance in the fact that the subjects of the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon are repeated (with one exception due, I believe, to a lacuna in the surviving descriptions) in the decoration of the helmet, shield, and sandals of the cult statue (26). Furthermore, through the whole group of representations, I believe, there runs the theme of alliance and victory (Athena's cult statue held a Victory in her outstretched hand), which after all nicely served the purposes of the Athenian Empire. All this, however, is very contrived and far from the immediacy of the magical or naive. |
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One must remember that Herodotus was a contemporary of Pheidias and a member of the Athenian colonizing venture at Thurii in south Italy in the 440's. Their Athens was the Athens of the sophistic movement and of its epistemological and ethical skepticism. At the same time it was the Athens of reaction to these developments, of Strepsiades, Socrates' foil in Aristophanes' "Clouds" and of the author of a political tract known to modern scholarship as "The Old Oligarch", who writes with the tone and outlook of a simpler day. The naive appreciation of art was still, I believe, the popular appreciation of art as it has remained almost ever after. And its response to the new illusionism was wide-eyed delight in its artificial verisimilitude. From this source there derive the endless anecdotes of the artistic proficiency of the Greek painters: the painted grapes that attracted the birds to peck at them, and the rest. |
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A fissure had thus opened up in the Greek view of their own art between the reflective connoisseur and the naive citizen, whose reaction to art still carried the vigor and emotion of his ancestors, but did not immediately run to a taste for allegory or to an appreciation of the expressive originality of the best contemporary art. This rift found its definitive expression in Plato. But before considering Plato, we must take note of the reaction of the poets of the fifth century. |
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| I have dealt with these passages in an appendix to my study entitled A View of Greek Art, but I believe I understand them better now than when I wrote 25 years ago (27). The references to the visual arts in the tragedians and in the poets are the exact opposite of the naive tradition. In Greek literature the image of a painting or sculpture is of something that looks alive but isn't, that looks as if it could move but can't, that looks as if it could speak, but won't. So in Aeschylus Iphigeneia as she stands about to be sacrificed for a fair wind at Aulis (28), | ||
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Letting slip the saffron dyed stuff to her foot from her eyes she struck each of the sacrificial officers with a shaft seeking pity standing out as if in a picture, wishing to speak..... |
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| but, of course, unable to do so. At least here the image is not insulting to the visual art. But Euripides had no such tact. For him, in the mouth of Orestes (29), | ||
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Statues of the market place are skins without brains. |
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| Pindar was clearest on the matter (30), | ||
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I am no maker of statues or one to fashion figures standing quietly on their pedestals |
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My poems, Pindar goes on to intimate, have some life in them. The literary comments of the fifth century, in fact, are a demand for just the kind of spatial, temporal and illusionistic development in the arts that were being brought into being at that very time. |
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The most negative of all negative voices against the fine arts belongs to Plato. Everyone is aware that at the conclusion of the Republic the imitative arts, especially painting and poetry, are banished from the ideal state. But before doing so, Plato sums up the Greek experience before his time, showing an appreciation, if not approval, of everything we have discussed up to now. |
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| At the beginning of the Critias we find Plato appealing to the image of landscape painting and its pleasures (31), | ||
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But I should like to make my meaning clearer, if you will follow me. All that is said by any of us can only be an imitation and representation. For if we consider the likenesses which painters make of bodies divine and heavenly and the different degrees of gratification with which the eye of th e spectator receives them, we shall see that we are satisfied with the artist who is able in any degree to imitate the earth and its mountains and the river s and the woods and the universe and the things that are and move therein, and further, that knowing nothing precise about such matters, we do not examine or analyze the painting; all that is required is a sort of indistinct and deceptive mode of shadowing them forth. (translation, Benjamin Jowett) |
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| Landscape painting, wide spatial vistas, chiaroscuro: it is all here in this passage. And one does not have far to look for the literary convention. Thus Socrates' remark in the Phaedrus (32), | ||
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1 cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. (translation, Benjamin Jowett) |
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| Plato does not deny that there is pleasure in the contemplation of art. So says the Athenian visitor in the Laws (33) and there is no more eloquent compliment to the magnificence of the artist than Plato's comparison of the majesty of the starry heavens to work of Daedalus. Socrates is speaking (34), | ||
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The starry heaven which we behold is wrought upon a visible ground and therefore, although the fairest and most perfect of visible things, must necessarily be deemed inferior far to the true motions..... |
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The spangled heavens should be used as a pattern and with a view to that higher knowledge; their beauty is like the beauty of figures or pictures excellently wrought by the hand of Daedalus, or some other great artist, which we may chance to behold; any geometrician who saw them would appreciate the exquisiteness of their workmanship, but he would never dream of thinking that in them he could find the true equal or the true double or the truth of any other proportion. (translation, Benjamin Jowett) |
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| In Plato art is sumptuousness and decoration, fully consonant with the most naive viewpoint and so it is presented in the picture of the luxurious state in the Republic Book II and Plato insists on the importance of harmonious design and ornament, as is only natural in an author who like so many Greek thinkers was attracted to the abstract purity and finality of geometry. I have not emphasized the role that proportion played in Greek art. Greek design was grounded in the severely decorative art of the Geometric Age, and in the later archaic age the wedding of mathematics and architecture became a conscious endeavor. At the same time, the question of proportion in the representation of the human figure changed from craft formulas and conventions to explicit theory and its application. The sculptor Polykleitos is supposed to have embodied his own system of proportion in a consciously didactic statue. For a philosopher like Plato dedicated to the position that only the abstract was real and valid while appearance was a deception, geometry was fundamental, eternal and sacred. Socrates puts it in the Philebus (35), | ||
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I do not mean by beauty of form such beauty as in that of animals in pictures, which the many would suppose to be my meaning; but, by way of argument, understand me to mean straight lines and circles, and the plane or solid figures which are formed out of them by turning-lathes and rulers and measurers of angles; for these I affirm to be not only relatively beautiful, like other things, but they are eternally and absolutely beautiful and they have peculiar pleasures, quite unlike the pleasures of engraving. (translation, Benjamin Jowett, adapted) |
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| It is for this reason that painting, with the other imitative arts, is a deception and that Plato was ready to deny Greek culture (Homer is to be banished as well as the painters) in order to perfect it. As the stranger in the Sophist puts it (36), | ||
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We know, of course, that he who professes by one art to make all things is really a painter, and by the painter's art makes resemblance of real things which have the same name with them; and he can deceive the less intelligent sort of young children, to whom he shows his pictures at a distance, into the belief that he has the absolute power of making whatever he likes. (translation, Benjamin Jowett) |
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| Plato objected not only to the falsity of illusionistic art, but to the emotionalism implicit in the exuberant responses of the naive. His is a protest against the immediacy with which the Greeks had been stirred by music and against the emotion of their response to the poetry of tragedy, dithyramb, elegy and lyric poetry. There is an iconoclastic strain hidden in the Greek soul or more precisely in the soul of the Greek village. When the Mycenaean palaces and cities collapsed, this spirit asserted itself in the geometric age. When Christianity came to Greece it gathered strength until it burst forth in the iconoclastic furor of the ninth century A.D. In the interval there is archaic and classical Greek poetry and art and the opposition of the prose poet who summarized his countrymen's reactions to their arts with masterful understanding before condemning them in the search for a more moving and more logically perfect transcendence. | ||
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Chapter II |
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