The Doryphoros or “Spear-carrier” by Polykleitos is one of the most recognizable male figures in Greek art. Made in the mid-fifth century B. C., and famed for its pose and proportion, the free-standing statue slowly loosens itself from the strictures of Archaic style, shifting its weight and rotating its head and pelvis to showcase its body. “Where am I?”, “Who am I?”, the Doryphoros seems to ask as he leaves the ranks of rigid kouroi behind him (for these earlier statues, see above, Morris and below, p. 478 Squire). His face is impassive, uncomprehending of having a body that is conscious that it is a body: not just a sema, sign or representation of a body as the kouroi had been, but a lifelike body, its muscles heavy with over-use, blood pumping through its prominent veins—a body that is neither funerary marker nor god like them, but something, someone, different. Whose body? The fact that Polykleitos is also renowned for writing a treatise on art, the Canon, has made the Doryphoros an ideal body, representative of the principles at the heart of the perfect statue (von Steuben 1990; Moon 1995).
The Doryphoros or “Spear-carrier,” “the first great High Classical bronze” (Hurwit 1995:12) does not exist. The statue which was so carefully conceived and cast by Polykleitos melted from view millennia ago. But not before it had inluenced countless artists to make their own versions: possibly the earliest known is a marble relief from the sculptor’s city of Argos (National Museum, Athens, 3153), but the majority are free-standing and were made for display in the Roman world. It is comparison of these stand-ins that enables us to venture a description of Polykleitos’ statue. Until the Minneapolis Museum of Fine Arts bought its version of the Doryphoros in 1986 (accession number 86.6; Meyer 1995; Hallett 1995a), the most
Figure II. I Marble version of Polykleitos’ Doryphoros from Pompeii in Italy (National Archaeological Museum, Naples, 6011). The bronze original dates to ca. 450 B. C. and this statue, to the first century B. C. or AD. Photo: Koppermann, Neg. D-DAI-Rom 1966.1831.
Famous was the marble statue from Pompeii (Figure 11.1), probably from the Samnite Palaestra, and now in Naples (National Archaeological Museum, Naples, 6011; Hartswick 1995:173-174). We have no such context for the original—though its most likely home was a sanctuary.
Comparison of these versions to determine what they have in common (“Kopi-enkritik,” as this process became known in the late nineteenth century—see above, p. 13 Snodgrass) can only take us so far back. The home of the fifth-century Dory-phoros is still unknown territory. We lack raw data, not only about its display-context, but about its materials (whether its eyes were inlaid with bone and glass like those of the fifth-century bronzes which were found in the sea off Riace in Italy (Figure 11.2), and whether its lips and nipples, were copper), its height, base, inscription, function. We also lack information about Polykleitos (Borbein 1996): although he is credited in the ancient literary record with making some twenty sculptures, none of these survive. Was the Doryphoros an image of an Homeric hero, an Achilles, as some scholars have argued (Stewart 1990:160; contra, Hurwit 1995:17, n.59; Koortbojian 2002:esp. 183-189) or was it of a real soldier? The Achilles attribution demands an optimistic reading of Roman writer Pliny the Elder, who tells us, without mention of any artist, that nude figures holding spears, made from models of young men from gymnasia, were called “Achilles” (Natural History 34.18). The tenets of the written Canon are just as difficult to resuscitate: we have but a handful of quotations, and summaries in Roman sources (Pollitt 1990:75-79; Stewart 1978; Borbein 1996:84-86).
For these reasons, splitting “A Place for Art?” into Greek and Roman sections makes little sense. The Minneapolis and Naples statues are each of dual nationality. Both stood on Italian soil, unsigned by their makers, and yet, by virtue of their similarity to one another, both constitute the genius and legacy of Polykleitos. As if this is not complicated enough, Pompeii, where the Naples example was found, was a Greek settlement which did not become a Roman colony until 80 B. C., and the statue perhaps made then, and by a Greek sculptor (Bergmann 1997:83; Hallett 1995b:nn. 40, 42). On this reading, it is naive to separate Greek from Roman culture. A similar story can be told about a significant proportion of the Classical and Hellenistic sculpture in our museums. The jury is still out on a marble statue-group of Hermes and the infant Dionysus, found in the Heraion at Olympia in 1877 and now in the Archaeological Museum there. Is it the only one of Praxiteles’ statues to survive, or a “copy”? But Myron’s Discobolos or “Discus thrower,” Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, the Dying Gaul and perhaps the Laocoon (Figure 11.17, see below, p. 471 Squire) endure only in later replay. Original statues from the fifth to third centuries are rare and, like the Riace bronzes, often recovered from ancient shipwrecks. Many of these ships were en route to Rome. From the moment Rome conquered Greece in the second century B. C. the demand for the physical manifestations of Greek culture exploded (see Miles 2008; Welch 2006).
It is not my intention to dwell on Rome’s relationship with Greece for much more of this chapter. It is “art” I want to examine. I want to show how, whatever we want to call ourselves, we need art, and all the problems that it brings with it (problems of value, status, function, beauty), to make material culture mean something; that, as Michael Squire will go on to elucidate, “form is context” and
Figure 11.2 Detail of bronze statue, known as Riace Bronze B, found off the coast of Calabria in 1972, mid-ifth century B. C. (National Museum of Magna Grecia, Calabria). ©Photo SCALA, Florence.
“context” is never set in stone, but shifting and multiple (not archaeological context so much as viewing contexts). I leave him to demonstrate how understanding this impacts on our understanding of the discipline, as I offer one answer to what finding a place for art might look like. In doing this, I eschew a chronological, textbook approach, casting my net as widely as possible to give a sense of the extent and variety of this material culture. I embrace examples from elite and non-elite culture, and from the center and the provinces.
Polykleitos’ fifth-century Doryphoros is unexceptional in lacking an original display-context. Many artifacts were found prior to the nineteenth century, before site-reports became the norm and the meaning of an object became grounded in the earth in which it lay. Many, too, have since been looted from archaeological sites and so stripped of any authenticity (e. g. Chippindale and Gill 1993; 2000). But this is exactly what the Romans did when they removed sculptures like the Riace bronzes (Figure 11.2) (National Museum of Reggio Calabria) from Greek sanctuaries and shipped them to Rome (Mattusch 1996; on the Mahdia shipwreck, Hel-lenkemper Salies 1994). No-one would consign those to the basement. Doing so would underestimate how much meaning can, and always should, be derived from looking, and in particular from iconographical analysis, to determine not only the identity or attribution of an object but, more than this, how it feels on the eye and in the hand. How it makes us feel. Knowing the dimensions of a statue-base or room, the company kept by a particular image, and exactly who got to see it, is obviously an advantage. But rarely are these data sufficiently exploited—to think about angles of approach, different light conditions, the effects of three dimensions as opposed to two—as though reconstructing an object’s specific setting on paper and on computer were enough to make it speak. It is not. Nor is this level of detail necessary. Today, the eighteenth-century scholar, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (see above, p. 15 Snodgrass and below, p. 480 Squire), is credited with establishing the study of classical art as a scientific discipline, with classifying materials and inscribing their place in history, but he has something else to teach us: his set-pieces of soaring visual analysis arguably get us closer to an object like the Belvedere Apollo (Belvedere courtyard, Vatican Museums 1015; Prettejohn 2005, ch. 1; on the finds-pot, Fusco and Corti 2006:52-56) than salvaging its precise setting would do.
All of this asks that we use our eyes for something more than empirical analysis, however fundamental to the discipline, measuring, drawing and counting must be, and however dependent on aesthetics (see below, Squire; Neer 2010). These skills enable us to identify and date artifacts and built environments. But as with tracing an object’s provenance, identification is not always possible. It is always at most the starting point (and need not even be that, see e. g. Dillon 2006:1-14). In what follows, therefore, I concentrate not on the moment of production nor on such technical approaches as attribution, typology, examination of paint traces, but on something more emotive—how objects affect their audience. Not that this means that these key skills can be dispensed with; rather that we need to find a way to juggle those aspects of the discipline as it has developed within Classics, and German-born classical archaeology in particular, and the methodological challenges which have come from embracing new approaches from visual culture and the cognate disciplines of anthropology and cultural theory. Visual analysis need not be as clinical as cataloguing, or as the term “visual culture” (which can seduce its advocates not to look carefully enough), suggests, but might enjoy—as Winckelmann’s set-pieces enjoy— “stage one,” the moment of confrontation, before classification.
Figure 11.3 Bronze herm signed by Apollonios from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, Italy (National Archaeological Museum, Naples, 4885). Photo: Koppermann, Neg. D-DAI-Rom 1964.1804.
Do this, and finding the “art” in artifact means finding a place for the viewing experience.
This conclusion is more of a battle-cry than it might sound. The Minneapolis and Naples statues are still in books on Greek art, rarely Roman, and dated to 450 B. C. by their museums. Not a lot of artistic sensitivity there. Their own special qualities are elided so that they speak not for themselves but as evidence. One further Doryphoros, yet to be mentioned (Figure 11.3), offers a particular challenge to this kind of labeling. Found in a square courtyard in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum on March 28, 1753, and today in the Naples Museum (no. 4885), it is a bronze version, which some scholars have deemed an “almost lawless replica of the original” head (Meyer 1995:74 on the views of Lauter and von Steuben). And yet it is just a head, set imperiously on a sloping herm base, with the legend “Apollonios, son of Archias, of Athens made it” emblazoned across it. Apollonios leaves nothing to chance. He wants his viewers to know that he is the creator. And well he might, for this is less a “replica” than a reinvention, which has neither the pose nor the proportions for which Polykleitos is famed. His Canon cannot underwrite it now. The inscription insists on new meaning. Part of this is provided by a second bronze herm (Naples Museum, no. 4889) from the opposite corner of the same courtyard—unsigned but sufficiently similar to be by the same sculptor, of a female, possibly an Amazon-type renowned for the wounded body that the herm lacks; part is provided by the wealth of other bronze and marble sculptures in the villa (Mattusch 2005), and part by the broader cultural context which ensured that Polykleitos’ ideal man was worth playing with. The self-consciousness that this accords to Apollonios and his audience asks us to view it as we would an artwork.
This conclusion is very different from the condemnation that “copies” used to elicit. When Winckelmann saw Apollonios’ herm in 1762 he thought it had been made “at the time that the arts flourished most in Greece” (Winckelmann 1771:46). But at that point, it had still not been identified as a Doryphoros—that did not happen until 1863 (see Donohue 1995). Winckelmann’s friend, the painter Raphael Mengs, already suspected the Apollo Belvedere to be Roman, but Winckelmann was not persuaded and continued to do as museums do today more knowingly, in treating “copies” as originals. Once the distinction was made, and once Britain and Germany had acquired real Greek sculpture in the shape of the Aegina Pediments, Parthenon marbles and the Bassai frieze, these “copies” were downgraded, to be rehabilitated only recently (Ridgway 1984; Bergmann 1997; Gazda 2002; Perry 2005; Kousser 2008; Marvin 2008). The only down-side of this revisionist view is that whereas Rome is now rightly seen as having a creative capacity which begins to shape a classical canon, subsequently honed in the Renaissance, Greek sculpture becomes the clay from which it is modeled. It is the Romans, and their desire for pieces like the Doryphoros, their plundering, buying, reworking and redisplay of them, that make art out of Greece’s cultural production. It is what the Romans do that turns the appearance of a statue from a by-product of its design and function into an artistic style which is ripe for the borrowing.
Back in the fifth century, by implication, before the Doryphoros’ cell-division, and the dissemination of the Canon, the statue was simply a dedication, a functioning object like the next statue, or like a tripod. Is this true? Certainly a cult image like the colossal chryselephantine statue of Athena in the Parthenon in Athens (Figure 11.4) was not just a statue, but a god, the god (often called “Athena” as opposed to “image of Athena”; Gordon 1979): even plundering generals took care to treat cult images respectfully (e. g. Marcus Furius Camillus’ men in Livy 5.22). And it was not the only god on the Athenian Acropolis. Visit Athens, or any Greek sanctuary for that matter, in the fifth century B. C. and, in addition to the cult statue, one would have found multiple Athenas or Apollos, each one as much the god as the next and each, therefore, unsettling of the others’ status as masterpiece (see above, p. 258 Osborne). All dedications to the god belonged to the god (Miles 2008:31). These were not artworks but epiphanies (Platt 2011).
But might there not be another way of reading this kind of proliferation—a reading which brings the Athena Parthenos and indeed Polykleitos’ Doryphoros
Figure 11.4 As is the case with Polykleitos’ Doryphoros, the original Athena Parthenos does not exist. This model, based on later versions and literary description, is in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. Photo: © ROM.
Closer to Apollonios’ version? In this light, the different manifestations of Athena compete with each other to outdo their rival’s size, stateliness, shininess. Some of them are even signed by their maker: 68 bases on the Acropolis dated to between 525 and 425 B. C. preserve the name of the sculptor (Raubitschek 1949). As is the case with the herm, these signatures are often an intrinsic part of the object’s visual impact (Osborne 2010). They do not interfere negatively with the god’s ownership of it, but augment the quality of the gift. Earlier, in the Archaic period, the inscriptions on funerary sculpture often mention the sculptor as well as the dedicant. They stake claims about the discernment and visual knowledge of both the patron and potential audience.
Recognizing this means recognizing that, in some senses, the question “is there a Greek or Roman equivalent of the words ‘art’ and ‘artists’?” is a red-herring. Polykleitos’ fifth-century Doryphoros did not stand alone in its sanctuary or wherever else it might have been, but vied for attention with tens of other statues (Figure 11.5), both there in situ, and beyond, in other parts of the Greek world. The more of these statues one sees, the less the immediate space and specific program of display are relevant. When one stares at a sculpture in the Louvre in Paris, for example, and is reminded of a piece which one saw in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the rest of the room becomes peripheral. So too, perhaps, for those who first witnessed the “Spear-carrier.” Sanctuaries encouraged competition (see above, p. 262 Osborne): dedications like the giant Samian kouros, dated to ca. 590-570 B. C. (Figure 10.2, with the name of its dedicant, Isches, incised at eye-level into the lesh of its left thigh: Kyrieleis 1996), had long been placed in enclosures of their own, next to the sacred way leading to temples so as to attract attention away from their neighbors. Even though this kouros has a similar smooth roundness to others found at Samos, as distinct from those found in Attica or Boeotia, it stands apart and asks to play its part on a bigger stage than existed in this sanctuary to Hera. It is this big wide world of statuary as much as it is local or sacred context that defines an object’s meaning.
This world was bigger and the competition fiercer than scholarship is often willing to acknowledge. The post-Renaissance premium put on naturalism (see below, Squire) has rendered all kouroi rigid, and given successors like the Doryphoros and the Riace bronzes a kind of artificial intelligence. But put the bodies of the kouroi back onto their bases, as is done all too rarely in books on Greek Art, and we discover variety and innovation there also, not least that the well-known Sounion kouros, which dates to 590-580 B. C. (National Archaeological Museum, Athens, 2720) is not square on its pedestal but turned on an angle as though tired of toeing the line (Neer 2010:42). Others stood on blocks elaborately carved with scenes of young men wrestling, playing ball, and baiting cat against dog (National Archaeological Museum of Athens, 3476; Keesling 1999), forcing us to reassess their cool confinement above. And it is not just their bases that beg more careful consideration. Stylistic differences between kouroi cannot be explained by chronology alone: suddenly we notice that the features of the male statue, dated to 550-540 B. C., and found in the same pit as Phrasikleia, whose inscription again records the sculptor’s name, in Merenda, Attica (National Archaeological Museum, Athens,
Figure 11.5 Marble version of Myron’s ifth-century Discobolos, from the Esquiline Hill in Rome (National Museum of Rome, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, 126371). Photo: Eisner, Neg. D-DAI - Rom 1970.2913.
4889), are so soft and seductive as to make the Doryphoros’ facial features seem unnatural.
Look around in museums, and we are confronted with a mass of material that is yet to be given the recognition it deserves, and which threatens to blow apart everything we think we see when we attempt to put a piece, any piece, back into its ancient context: the many statues, free-standing, equestrian and pedimental that muddy what initially seems a clear trajectory from the Sounion and Samian kouroi to Phrasikleia’s companion to the Doryphoros; like the curious clothed kouros in the stores of the New Acropolis Museum (New Acropolis Museum, Athens, 633: Payne and Young 1950:plate 102); or the Attic grave stele found near the Kerameikos and now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens (inv. no. 871: Kaltsas 2002:n. 385)—almost a mirror image of the famous Ilissos stele which was found in the river (inv. no. 869). How can anyone discuss one without the other (Figures 11.6 and 11.7)? And yet the Ilissos’ rival is nigh-on unknown—because the Ilissos stele itself is without an immediate context and thus wrongly viewed in a vacuum, because excellent photographic archives like those of Hirmer and the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut have for a long time dictated what is and is not reproduced in books, and because, these biases notwithstanding, there is just too much out there to gain more than a partial picture. To call excavation the art historian’s enemy would be absurd. We must embrace the surplus of data it offers, and the inevitable loss of data, and do our best to work with both of them.
Art History is a discipline dominated by the catalogue raisonne, with all the claims to completeness that that brings with it. Take, for example, the Das romische Herrscherbild series, which provides its readers with compendia of portraits of Augustus (Boschung 1993), Hadrian and his imperial family (Wegner 1956) and Caracalla to Balbinus (Wegner and Wiggers 1971), among others. Each of these publications gives its readers what it could claim at the time to be a full set of images—the “corpus”—as though something like the head of Caracalla, originally part of a statue probably from Rome and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Figure 8.8 and p. 322 Davies), is orphaned without its siblings. And of course, rarity, is an important factor in considering how an artifact was seen in antiquity. But it is only one factor. The artifact’s incongruity or normality is dependent on issues other than its identity. Take a new find like the highly publicized statue of Hadrian from Sagalassos in Turkey (Figure 11.8) which clamors to be included in Wegner’s dataset (Waelkens 2007 and forthcoming). And so it should be. But it is so huge as to be off the scale, the head alone measuring 70 cm (ca. 28 inches). At around 4 to 5 m (13 to 16 feet) in height, it would have dwarfed other specimens of the emperor. When put next to even the over-lifesize (211.5 cm—ca. 7 feet) statue of Hadrian as Mars, god of war (Figure 11.9), today in the Capitoline Museum (Salone 13, inv. No. 634: Opper 2008:71, 228), it is another species.
World History
