Monument Lists

Week VIII From Week VI (there, additional images and comments)

Chios Kore: H&F 4.8, Kore from the Acropolis in Athens, made by artists from the island of Chios, painted marble, c. 510. Originally ca. 1m., now 54 cm. (broken at knees). A votive to Athena. She wears Ionian dress - the traces of paint are valuable documents both for sculpture and for textiles - a thin chiton and over it a digonally draped himation, both elaborately pleated, and a corown (stpehane) in her hair. Her left arm pulled her skirt to one side to help her take a step. One of the many archaic statues preserved by being carefully buried in the cleanup after the Persian sack of Athens.

Composition pairs: more focussed vs. looser, procession and/or paratcatic sequence

H&F 4.12 "Wrestler's base", from Athens, marble, c. 500 BC, just over a foot long. H&F show the front of this base which was carved on 3 sides, I add for you one of the other sides - all showed young men at athletic training in the gymnasium, carved in low relief (in a style very // to contemporary vase painting), with the background painted red to make them stand out (the side still has paint).

H&F 4.13 Exekias' Ajax & Achilles black-figure amphora from an Etruscan tomb at Vulci, now in the Vatican, ca. 540-530, ca. 61 cm ht. Both sides show great warrior heroes at moments of rest.

View and dets. of "front": a scene from the Iliad - Ajax and Achilles playing a board game in the tent of Achilles, signed by the painter; little word strings over the protagonist' heads spell out their comments on their moves. The tent "sides" are the frame sides, their armor leaning against it.

View back: the Dioscuri (the heroes Castor & Pollux, cf. Siphnian Treasury) at the end of a day with their horses.

H&F 4.14 Athlete krater by the Kleophrades Painter - a red-figure krater (wine-mixing bowl) found in an Etruscan chamber tomb in Tarquinia (South Italy), made in Athens, c. 500-490 BC, with scenes of young men working out in the gymnasium. This slide shows the whole face of the young discus thrower (context, Myron's Discobolos) in H&F's detail; the other side (detail in H&F) showed weight training, and jumping exercises (the pick is to swing for strength exercise, not to actually "work"!) This is the painter (the pot inscriptions name only the potter Kleophrades) who decorated your Heracles stamnos.

Heracles & Lion Stamnos by the Kleophrades Painter, Penn University Museum, c. 500-490 BC- see your takehome sources.

Tyrannicides and Greek temple sculpture - see the special link and Julia Shear's text for you explaining the monuments. be able to recognize Corfu, Aigina, and Olympia pediments and Olympia metopes.

Siphnian Treasury, 525 BC, Section: see special link. be able to remember the elements of the program - the 4 friezes and their myths, esp. the epic themes of the E (from the Iliad of Homer) and the N (from Hesiod's Theogony), the pediment themes, and also note the Dionysiac friezes that went around the caryatids' tall headdresses.

*Notes on scale: in figures below, note human ideal images tend to just within plausible range of great height (men were larger in the age of heroes), gods' images to the impossibly tall (ca. 2 m.). For reduced figures, there seems to have been some kind of shared scale of relative size, ca. 1/2 to 1/3 life-size (compare, early, the Archaic Nikandre of Naxos to to the 5th-c. Kritios Boy

The Male Statue:

Kouroi:

Archaic:

Kouros from Tenea (Attica), H&F 4.9, c. 570 BC, marble, life-size or just under, 1.52 m., now Munich. The very soft style (one of several styles popular around Athens) shows Ionian influence. Broken in several places, missing the right forarm; note how you can see still the plug carved down from the feet, for insertion (as the museum did) into a separate base block (like the bases above) which would have had an inscription and/or relief images.

Late Archaic/Severe Style

"Kritios Boy", H&F 4.10, from Athens' Acropolis, just before 480 BC [Persian sack - this too is from the debris pits], nmarble, miniature scale c/ 1/3 life-size (86 cm.), now Acropolis Museum. May be by Kritios, with Nesiotes one of the two artists of the 2nd Tyrannicide bronze dedication. Inlaid eyes (an imitation of bronze sculpture) now missing, with both arms from above the elbow, both feet and the right lower leg. The shape and turn of the head, and the working out of weight shift in the body's musculature, are Classical features; but the pose, and the little struts joining (once) wrists to thigh, keep to the kouros type. So does the fact that the kouros has long hair, here plaited and wound around his forehead to give him a short-looking hair-cap resembling the cropped hair Athenian men were about to take to (as anachronistically on the Tyrannicides) - compare the hair of the later Olympia W. ped. Apollo, who also has something of a kouros' immobile frontal torso and step.

If this is by Kritios it shows some of his high-class work before he got the commission to replace Antenor's Tyrannicides, and the relation of eye and hair workmanship to bronze goes with that profile too. (You can see Antenor's kore, with similar bronze-style eyeholes, in context slides to Week VI.)

Olympia W. pedeiment Apollo, H&F 4.24-25, c. 468-60 BC, life-size.

Classical 5th c.

"Doryphoros" [lance-bearer] of Polykleitos of Argos, mid. 5th c., Roman marble copy in Naples of bronze original [struts and tree-trunk added for stability, shaft carried on left shoulder would have been added in metal to the copy], heroic scale just over life size, 1.98 m. (6ft. 6in.), associated with Polykleitos' Kanon [an ideal figure expressing his proportional theories, on which he wrote a book]. He steps forward on his right leg and turns his head to the right, bending the left arm to balance a ?lance on his left shoulder, with his right arm hanging straight and loose. Our classic illustration of 5th c. contrapposto; the kouros' step forward has been retained as a device for narrative animation. Note the athlete's short hair; we don't know if the original showed a (legendary hero) warrior like Achilles, looking like a contemporary athelete, or such an athlete who competed in the javelin throw (the artist was famous for his athletes' victory images) at one of the great pan-hellenic games (like those at Olympia, like Argos in the Peloponnese). It was certainly very famous, for there exists a great many Roman copies.

Context: The bronze Doryphoros Herm from Herculaneum, Villa of the Papyri sculpture garden. A herm is a decorative pillar carrying a bust, in the Roman period often the head and shoulders of famous "masterpieces"; the inscribed label ("by Polykleitos") on this one confirms that the type you see in the Naples replica copies one of his works.

--- basalt Doryphoros torso, another Roman copy fragment, doen in a hard dark stone to imitate the surface sheen of an antique bronze.

Riace Bronze Warrior, H&F 4.36, bronze with eye inlays (bone and glass paste) and silver and copper foil for teeth and lip color, mid-5th c. BC. From a shipwreck in the harbor of Riace in Sicily, now in Reggio Calabria. One of a pair (or more) of royal warriors, thus legendary heroes (see context slide, second warrior). Both carried a round hoplite shield on their bent left arms (shield-strap remains) and a lowered spear in their right hands - try to imagine those shapes and lines back in - and stood in relaxed contrapposto, turning their heads to their right, with typical Classical parted lips to indicate life (breath). That these are ancient, not modern warriors is shown by their long hair and full beards, and the diadem on this warrior. We don't know where they were made or displayed as votives, before ending up in the hold of a ship in Sicily; they could be from this very region of West Greece. Important as one of the few original 5th c. bronzes, and for preserving the polychrome inlays of such figures.

Dionysos on the Parthenon E. pediment, on Athens' Acropolis, by the Athenian workshop of Pheidias, complete by 432 BC (inscription about installation)., marble heroic-scale original. Here, an example of original ideal nude male sculpture of the 5th c. BC, from an alternative school (like the Riace warriors) to Polykleitos. (Similar massive torso but more elongated proportions.) From the left corner of the pediment, opposite the "Three Fates" corner group in H&F with its reclining Aphrodite. The god, shown as an ideally beautiful young ephebe with shirt hair, leans in the pose of a recling banqueter holding up a winecup on a feline animal-skin spread over a lump of "ground", looking towards the direction of his own theater on the slopes of the Acropolis below, next to the earth- and grain- goddesses Demeter and her daughter Kore (Persephone). His neighbors and compositional pendant are all goddesses with whom he was often associated Sometimes identified as Heracles, because of the feline animal skin.

Late Classical 4th c.

Hermes and Dionysos of Praxiteles of Athens, H&F 4.38, Roman marble copy of marble original (note tree-trunk and strut) of c. 340 BC, votive from inside the temple of Hera at Olympia, over-life-size (c. 7 ft./ 2.13 m.) Right arm and attachments (grapes, staff) missing. The messenger of the gods, Hermes, at Zeus' command brought his baby brother Dionysos away from his mortal mother Semele into hiding in the wilderness to protect him from the rage of his jealous step-mother Hera (in whose temple this stood!). Wearing his messenger's elaborate (once painted) sandals, Hermes rests in the woods, stepping/leaning on a lopped trunk, his great mantle wound around his arm to cushion the baby falling over it in a splash of texture and (once) color, in the classic extreme "hip-shot" sway of Praxiteles' works, dangling (once) a bunch of grapes high up in his outstretched right arm to amuse the baby god who will grow up to show men to make wine; in his curled fingers he would have held his (attached, metal) herald's rod with a snake twined around it (caduceus). The tiny baby, who once had a wreath on his curls, clutches Hermes shoulder and leans forward grabbing at the grapes he sees, his spread hand and sharply-tilted head showing his desire. Hermes gazes dreamily out to his left, away from the objects and axes of motion and attention, again as in many of Praxiteles' works; the long body and relatively small head show 4th-c. preferences, by contrast to Polykleitos' more square figures.

Praxiteles was famous for his carving of life-like, colored marble images; you can see his bravura display of technique in the drapery textures and the difficult (and dangerous) cutting of the slim marble extensions of the pose. The Roman-era travel writer Pausanias saw this image in situ and secribed it, thinking it to be the original; it seems to be a very finely made replica for a damaged or spoliated original votive.

Compare:

Dionysos, on the Derveni Krater H&F 5.9, c. 350-25 BC, burial urn from a rich chamber tomb in southern Macedon, now Thessaloniki. Bronze covered with gold (gilt bronze) with silver inlay, just under a meter high, used as an urn for the dead man's ashes (his name appears on an inlaid inscription at the lip). On the body of the monumentalized wine-container, a continuous frieze of a Dionysiac woodland paradise, with satyrs and maenads dancing all around; front center, thee wine-god Dionysos sprawls on a rock, his panther by his side, next to his immortalized human bride the Cretan princess Ariadne, who make a bride's unveiling gesture as Dionysos lays his leg across her lap. An inlaid ivy wreath, knotted over his head, runs around the top of the frieze, another around the lower neck. On the shoulder on each side sit two attached statuettes (back, sleeping satyr, and maenad) - here, Dionysos and Ariadne again, in reversed positions and states of attanetion, in the story moment "before" - at left Dionysos turning to awaken the sleeping Ariadne at right, = the moment when he found her abandoned by theseus on the beach at Naxos, fell in love, and woke her to marry him and be turned into a goddess. Fierce and fabulous animals make the friezes at top and bottom of the whole base; snakes whose tails end in vine-tendrils curve around the handles, whoe "holes" are filled with masks of gods and heroes, like Heracles (top right). (Ivy, grape-vine and snakes are all attributes of Dionysos). - Many Greeks believed, nb., that participating in Dionysiac "mystery" rituals would bring the soul the same eternal bliss Dionysos gave Ariadne.

Athletic Victory Images:

Winners in the Greek games had the right to dedicate an inscribed image for themselves at the sanctuary where they won, as well as at home. Like kouroi, the images of the competitor himself "are" their male dedicant, but without being a portrait in our sense, for all show ideal head types. Eminent sculptors from many cities did commissions for the internatioanl sanctuaries, which showcased their work in turn to very broad audiences.

Delphi Charioteer H&F 4.23, .29, from the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, for one of the tyrants of Gela in Sicily, c. 478 or 474 BC (dates of possible Delphic games where patron could have competed), cf. the inscribed base (not shown). He has short hair curling up before his ears, wears a charioteer's long gown (chiton) belted high up and tied down across the shoulders, and a finely embroidered head-band with a meander pattern. Retains some inlay in the eyes, and on the carved "embroidery" of the head band; still holds some of the attached bronze rein straps in the outstretched right hand. Though very static, you can see the slight head-turn of most Severe-Style images. The charioteer stood at "parade rest" and erect in a chariot drawn by two horses, loosely reining in his charges - compare the procession of competitors on the Archaic amphora H&F 4.26.

Obviously, the moment shown is not the race itself, as it had happened in the stadium at the top of the sanctuary. Instead this summons the image of the display moments before the race (drawn up at the starting line) (compare Olympia E. ped.), or after, moving slowly or standing still at the announcement of the victory award. obviously, Chariots - the most prestigious contest for the owner/patron of the horses - were raced by hired or slave drivers, who got no credit in the award and its inscriptions. The bronze statue was made in several cast pieces joined together (compare H&F 4.28, the Foundry Painter's name-cup, scene of a sculpture foundry in action) - the joined left arm is now missing, it robably stretched out just like the preserved right.

"Discobolos" (discus thrower) by Myron of Eleutherae, Roman marble copy (note tree-trunk) of a mid-5th c. life-size bronze original, of a discus-thrower in mid-spin, about to whirl back and hurl his discus. H&F 4.34 is the Rome, National Museum copy. Compare the relatively wiry body, and the play with contour & void, angles and arcs, to the patterns of the slightly earlier Olympia W. Ped H&F 4.25; for the choice of the height of action vs. restful moment before/after, compare too the base reliefs and amphora above; and note the active pose with outstretched limbs for the Tyrannicides, and for the statue being made on the Foundry Painter cup H&F 4.28, from a few decades before.

Again we don't know which games-site sanctuary the original decorated; several replicas show it was very visible & famous, so we think it is the Discobolus of Myron which Roman art history texts praised in discussing that artist, since the subject and period named there fit the subject and style of what we see. You can see on H&F's photo, in the hair, the little stubs not carved away from setting the measuring points for making the copy. (For the models that would make it possible, cf. the paster cast fragments for the Tyrannicides found in Baia at the Bay of Naples, images to Julia Shear's lecture).

Victory in War:

Nike of Olympia, H&F 4.33: marble original signed by Paionios of Mende, erected on a tall triangular-section pillar by the facade of the temple of Zeus as a war-victory statue for a Athenian ally city's victory over Sparta in the Peloponnesian Wars, c. 420 BC; the inscription also indicates how Paionios himself on the competetion of artists, to get the commission. Badly broken (it fell from a great height!), missing its face, wings, much of its arms and its billowing cloak. Wearing a peplos, fallen away to bare her left breast and leg, and a mantle pinned from her shoulders, Nike "floats" in the air, holding her mantle in with herlowered right hand and (once) raising her left arm high (also holding the cloak? a plam branch?). descending with spread wings from Mt. Olympus, sent by her master Zeus (who stood in the E. pediment at the same height, nearby), along with his eagle who (also battered) skims under her feet. You can see the holes for an attached something, and the strut under Nike's foot which would have been invisible from the ground. The bravura marble carving (you can still see the deep undercutting on the lower swirling folds) made a great thin background shell of the forms of spread wings and billowing cloak; her flesh would have been left white, contrasting with the pint of the eagle, and the colors of her two pieces of costume. Compare the drapery on the Athenian vase of c. 410 by meidias, H&F 4.41.

Draped Women and Female Nudity:

Heroic nudity for goddesses and as "stuational"

Erechtheion caryatid: female worshipper in peplos, Athens' Acropolis, 421-05 BC, cf. H&F 4.20.

Compare Delphi Charioteer

- the Classical paradigm for draped figures - skirt draped in columnar flutes over weight leg, smooth over flexed free leg, draped in modelling-line arc over hips from the shoulders, lying relatively smooth over the upper body with arced folds between the breasts.

Olympia W. Ped. Centauromachy detail, 468-60 BC, cf. H&F 4.25 : Lapith princesses struggling virtuously, their clothing disheveled, against rape by Centaurs, half-animal guests at the wedding of the Lapith Peirithoos who become drunk and violent.

Paionios' Nike, above, c. 420 - bare breast and leg revealed in flight

Parthenon E. pediment, by 432 BC, right corner "Three Fates" = Aphrodite of Pheidias (goddess of love & sex) reclining on a draped "bed" with two other goddesses - "wet drapery" and its modelling lines revealing the body (compare Paionios' Nike) - note Aphrodite's characteristic slipping gown, baring one shoulder down to the top of the breast (and sometimes completely off it).

Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles of Athens, c. 340, H&F 4.39, Roman marble copy of over-life size marble original (c. 2 m.), Vatican replica of cult-statue on the island of Knidos. *The first fully nude Greek female image since the late Dark Age: The goddess stands in a slumped contrapposto pose, at her private bath, still wearing a ("gold") arm-bracelet - dropping or lifiting her clothing from/onto a great "metal" water vase, reaching towards iit such that her hand covers (and indicates) her own groin. She turns her head slightly to her left, gazing dreamily outwards with parted lips - beginning to react to a spectator? An image of the "sea-born" goddess delievered but rejected to the people of Kos, bought by the people of Knidos for their Aphrodite sanctuary. In the Roman era (when hundreds of copies were made) the image stood in the middle of a round temple on a cliff by the sea, whose colonnade may have had no walls behind it leaving her open to view; the 2nd-c. AD writer Lucian left an elaborate praise-essay about the statue, and said it showed indeed stains, behind, left by overly-enraptured male worshippers.

Compare: Praxiteles' Hermes of Olympia, above, for characterization, narrativized setting, play with space, contour & (applied) color and texture contrasts, and crossing gaze/motion/gesture linear axes.

"Venus de Milo" = Aphrodite of Melos, H&F 5.6, c. 150 BC, over-lifesize (c. 2 m.) marble original from a sanctuary on the island of Melos, now Paris, Louvre. Missing arms and shield; breasts cut down in the modern era. For the pose, holding a shield up to her right with raised left arm and right arm brought across the body, compare for context: the Roman bronze Capua Venus-Victoria. The situation = Aphrodite in her private chamber, holding up the shield of her lover Ares (god of war) as a mirror - so, this votive was possibly a victory dedication. Note the eternally slipping mantle rapped around her legs and hips, a convention for gods' images since e.g. the Zeus of the Olympia E. Ped. (Shear lecture images).

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