The most influential art historian of the eighteenth century was Johann Winckel-mann (1717-68). Winckelmann was born in Prussia, the son of a cobbler. Coming to the study of ancient Greece as a young man through reading Homer he embarked on an academic career and by the age of 31 was the librarian of an aristocratic library in Dresden. Here he wrote his first essay on Greek art, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755). Then, having converted to Catholicism, he went to Rome and finally became librarian at the Vatican. In his most celebrated work, A History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), he developed his theory of the relationship between art and history. He took it for granted that Greek art was supreme. ‘In the masterpieces of Greek art, connoisseurs and imitators find not only nature at its most beautiful but also something beyond nature, namely certain ideal forms of its beauty.’ (Note the influence here of Plato. See also Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, New Haven and London, 1994.)
However, for Winckelmann Greek art was not static, it had its own rise to greatness and its own fall. The rise began with the Archaic period and reached its height (‘sublimity’ in Winckelmann’s terminology) in the Classical age, the fifth century BC. The essence of ‘sublime’ art was ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’. So the art of the Classical period (conventionally 479-323 Bc) was elevated onto a pedestal and remained for many the standard by which other periods of art were judged until well into the twentieth century.
Insofar as there are changes in style from the sixth to the fifth century, from Archaic to what is known as Classical, they can be seen above all in its sculpture (for pottery see p. 191). The most common expression of sculpture in the Archaic age were the kouroi, the stiff and formal male figures erected over a grave or as an offering to the gods (see p. 189). As has been seen the influence of Egypt on the pose was obvious and their bodies are not carved as if they were real mortals observed in the flesh. During the sixth century there were signs of a more natural pose developing, but it was not until the early fifth century that a revolution in sculpture takes place. The transition is usually symbolized by the ‘Critian boy’, a marble statue found on the Athenian Acropolis and attributed to Critius, a sculptor active in Athens around 490-460 BC. It is dated by experts to just before 480 BC and represents one Callias, a victor in the boys’ foot race in the Panathenaic festival. The changes from the traditional kouros are slight, but the boy is standing as a boy might actually stand, the right leg forward of the left which bears the weight of the body so that the right can relax slightly, not how artistic convention decrees a hero should pose. Yet this naturalness is achieved without the loss of an idealization of the human body. Here is, in the words of the art historian Kenneth Clark, ‘the first beautiful nude in art’ As John Boardman, the authority on Greek art, puts it: ‘This is a vital novelty in the history of ancient art—life deliberately observed, understood and copied. After this all becomes possible.’
There are a few clues as to why this revolution in art, from the stylized to the observed, took place. One is that bronze was becoming the most popular medium in which statues were being created. The technical problems involved in casting and assembling bronze statues had been solved by the end of the sixth century as the earliest examples show (see above, p. 190). From now on bronze predominated in Greek sculpture, but as almost every statue ended in the melting pot it is hard to guess this today. The few bronzes to survive (the Riace warriors, the Delphi charioteer, and the majestic Zeus found in a shipwreck off Cape Artemisium foremost among them) simply highlight what has been lost in quantity and quality. Bronze allowed far greater flexibility in modelling—the process of building up a figure as in bronze is totally different from cutting into marble. As a wonderful exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 2012, Bronze, also showed, bronze can be burnished to produce a wide variety of aesthetic effects that pure white marble lacks.
The revolution also suggests a preoccupation with human form. While before the artist was focused on those few human beings who had become heroes, he now seems concerned with the physical beauty of human beings as an end in itself. It is hard not to see the Riace warriors without being aware of their intense sensuality. Yet within a few years this sensuality fades and is replaced by a greater concentration on the nature of the human body as an ideal. It was the sculptor Polycleitos, probably a native of Argos working from the fifth into the fourth century BC, who allied aesthetics with mathematics when he suggested that the perfect human body was perfect precisely because it reflected ideal mathematical proportions that were capable of being discovered. One of his statues, the Doryphoros, or ‘spear bearer’ (originally in bronze, but now known only through Roman copies in marble), was supposed to represent this ideal. If this approach was followed to its extreme, all statues would have had the same, perfect, proportions, but the Greeks could not close their eyes to the variety of human experience. There always remained a tension in the art of the period between the abstract ideal of the human body and a particular body copied by the artist. This may be one reason for its aesthetic appeal.
Winckelmann claimed that the ‘sublimity’ of Classical art was the result of the atmosphere of liberty and exuberance that followed the Persian Wars. So the moderation and self-control of the Critian boy reflects the self-confidence of a city that knows it has achieved greatness. Democracy has been achieved, the Persians defeated at Marathon and seen off again in 479.
Yet it pays to be cautious. It is all too easy to read into the expression of a work of art what one hopes to see there. Nevertheless there is the sense of a change of atmosphere, the readiness to reproduce what can be observed because it is worth observing, rather than relying on conventions adopted from elsewhere. This may be no more than the experience of working in bronze but it could reflect an elevation of man, as ‘the measure of all things’ (as the fifth-century philosopher Protagoras put it) in line with the many other intellectual developments of the age.
The transition to an art rooted in observation can also be seen in temple sculpture. While an individual statue might continue to be the offering of a private patron (victors at games were a particularly popular subject), the temples provided settings for publicly financed sculpture. In particular, the pediment of a temple, with its wide centre and narrow corners, offered a space that called for special compositional expertise. The first and crudest attempts to fill a pediment, in the sixth century, involved placing a large central sculpture (for instance, on the temple of Artemis at Corcyra, 580 BC, a Gorgon’s head), flanked by unrelated scenes to fill in the space. Gradually greater order was brought into pediment design, and by the end of the sixth century the temple of Aphaea on the island of Aegina has a single scene, from the Trojan War, on its western pediment.
The new mood in Classical sculpture, seen in statuary with the ‘Critian boy’, is found on the reliefs made for the pediments of the great temple to Zeus which dominated the sanctuary at Olympia and which was built in the first half of the fifth century. In its new display in the museum at Olympia it is one of the most powerful expressions of Greek art. On the east pediment, a chariot race is about to begin. Zeus presides over it. The contest is between Oinomaos, king of Pisa, and Pelops, who will win the hand of Oinomaos’ daughter, Hippodamia, if he triumphs. The divine horses of Oinomaos make him favourite to win but, as the onlooker will know, Pelops has fixed the race by replacing the axles of Oinomaos’ chariot with beeswax and Oinomaos will be killed. Pelops is cursed for his trickery and the curse brings the suicide of Hippodamia and endless misfortunes to his descendants, ‘the house’ of their son Atreus that includes the ill-fated Agamemnon. The myth of Pelops is portrayed here because, by tradition, Pelops was buried at Olympia. (For Aeschylus’ treatment of the curse, see The Oresteia, p. 275 below.)
It is not only that the poses of the figures are more natural than those of their stiffer Archaic forebears, but the characters exude a sense of feeling and awareness. They know what is about to unfold. The sculptures are all the more moving because of the relative simplicity of the figures and the designs in which they are set. The ‘seer’ on the east pediment is the example most often picked out to make the point. On the west pediment Apollo watches over a tumultuous conflict between Centaurs and Lapiths. Here order presides over disorder, Apollo’s face has transcended the tumult around him. The sculptures may have originated from Athens and the stage is set for a further development towards the finest and most majestic temple sculptures of all, those of the Parthenon (see p. 258).
Classical art cannot be removed from the wider political, religious, and social contexts within which it is presented. Cities were showing off their achievements both at home and at the Panhellenic shrines. They had heroes to display, victories to celebrate, statements to make to their fellow Greeks, all of which could be done through monumental art. The difficulty lies in pinpointing what more they wanted to say about the figures they created, what kinds of statement about humankind are being made. Are they flaunting their confidence as victors, as with the Riace warriors, possibly made to celebrate the victory of Marathon and displayed with typical Athenian arrogance at Delphi or Olympia, or are they being deliberately erotic, as in the sensuous figure of Nike concealed under drapery from the Temple of Nike in Athens? (This is one suggestion made by Andrew Stewart in his Classical Greece and the Birth of Western Art, Cambridge and New York, 2008, a study that places monumental art within the wider cultural context of the fifth century. See also Richard Neer, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture, Chicago and London, 2010, for a well-received recent assessment. Neer argues that Classical art is an intensification of Archaic styles rather than a revolutionary development in itself.)
World History
