middle helladic to the late helladic i shaft graves 22 страница

The Mausoleion was essentially a shrine to the king and his dynasty and became one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. As Jeremy Tanner (2013) has pointed out, the monument is a mnema, a memorial, and so like the funerary monument of Kroisos (see Figure 5.24, page 123), and of Dexileos that we shall see later (see Figure 12.12, page 301). The inclusion of the mythical battles of the Amazonomachy and Centauromachy on the tomb forms a legendary frame­work for the achievements of Mausolos, in a similar way to the Centauromachy and Amazonomachy on the Parthenon serving as frameworks for the Greeks fighting the Persians. Unlike the Parthenon, this is a personal and not a civic monument. It reflects Mausolos’s agency, and the inclusion of multiple images of himself seeks to establish a future dynastic legitimacy for his successors.

In a similar way, the tholos at Olympia also served the agency of the Macedonian dynasty (see Figure 7.3, page 158). Begun by Philip II after his victory at Chaironeia in 338 bce, it was finished by his son Alexander and contained five chryselephantine statues of Alexander, his parents Philip and Olympias, and his paternal grandparents Amyntas III and Eurydike. Considering that gold and ivory statues had been reserved for deities in the sixth and fifth centuries, and that the tholoi at

Delphi and Epidauros were cult buildings, the Philippeion did in effect deify the Macedonian dynasty individually in a way that was quite different from previous customs.

Smaller individual monuments were also constructed in the fourth century that show this shift in decorum, such as the Choreagic Monument of Lysikrates in Athens (Figure 12.5). This monument, which originally had a bronze tripod on its roof, commemorated a victory in 334 bce at the festival of the Greater Dionysia in Athens by a chorus of boys financed by a man named Lysikrates. On top of a block-like pedestal is a miniature, slender variation of a tholos. Rather than a Doric exterior colon­nade, there are half-columns of the Corinthian order set against the drum, making this the oldest surviving exterior use of the Corinthian order. The entablature includes a miniature relief frieze of satyrs with Dionysos. The acanthus foliage on the roof supported the bronze tripod. At about 10.6 meters high (and higher still with its original bronze tripod), the lushly ornate monument has an unu­sual verticality that would have drawn the attention of passers-by. Choral and theatrical competitions were important civic events, but even as the inscription on the architrave commemorates an individual’s patronage and triumph, it is the lavish form and scale of the Lysikrates monument that first attract the attention of the viewer, before one is able to read the inscription with his name. Indeed, its prominence prompts a viewer to seek its owner, and it is possible that as a distinctive landmark the monument was known by word of mouth as the Lysikrates monument, even as we refer to it today.

sculpture

While fifth-century artists such as Polykleitos and Pheidias became renowned for their individual accom­plishments in later ancient histories of art, the fame and personalities of fourth-century sculptors such as Skopas, Praxiteles, and Lysippos were even greater.

Even while continuing the classical style of their prede­cessors, each was noted for perfecting some aspect of artistic style that made their work both celebrated and admired long afterward in the Roman empire. While none of their original work survives, we can see in extant fourth-century sculpture as well as some later copies elements of the refinements that they intro­duced. Overall, fourth-century art continued with the highly naturalistic human figure as its primary focus, but introduced elements of expression, emotion, and sensuality that made the figures less idealized than they had been in the fifth century. Sculptural style also became more diverse, so that one has to speak of sculp­tural “styles” that exist concurrently (see Ridgway 1997). The consequence of this, however, is that with­out stylistic uniformity, the ability to date sculpture on

^{11 r} 12.5 Choreagic

the basis of style is more difficult, and one sees in the scholarly literature strong disagreements over _{Monument of Lysikrates,}

dating for works of the fourth century and later. Rather than look at fourth-century sculpture in Athens, c. 334 _bce.

chronological order, we shall instead look at it in groups of similar style or type. Photo: author.

We will begin at the end of the period with a column drum from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos, now in the British Museum (Figure 12.6). The monumental sixth-century Temple of Artemis at Ephesos had been destroyed by fire in 356 все, and the new temple was still under construction when Alexander the Great conquered the area in 334. His offer of financial assistance for the recon­struction was turned down. This incident is helpful in terms of dating the relief drums from the bases of the columns; the reliefs, like the fluted drums of the columns above them, would have been carved near the end of construction to prevent damage from the construction of the interior. On this basis, the single surviving drum is dated around 320, after Alexander had moved on (and died in 323). The subject matter is uncertain, but we can identify Hermes by his kerykeion, standing in a Doryphoros- type pose and looking upward. Indeed, the proportions of the body and the articulation of the mus­culature and anatomy are very similar in style to the Doryphoros (see Figure 10.7, page 243) and show that the Polykleitan classical style continued to be used more than a century after the original. There are some differences that show it belongs to the fourth century, particularly the greater torsion of the figure around its central axis, the placement of the left arm to the small of the back, and the more expressive open mouth, but this figure possesses more similarities than differences in relation to the Doryphoros.

The Antikythera Youth, named after its recovery from a shipwreck near the island of Antikythera between the mainland and Crete, is a rare example of an original bronze statue from the fourth cen­tury все (Figure 12.7). Dating the statue by its archaeological context, however, is difficult since the

ship was carrying a cargo of both bronze and marble sculpture when it sank, some dating from the fourth century but others from the first century (see Figure 14.11, page 355). Coins found at the underwater site suggest that the ship may have been coming from Asia Minor and heading toward Rome in the first cen­tury все, bringing both new work and older statues appropriated, whether looted or purchased, from other contexts.

The youth has been identified by some scholars as Perseus, once holding the head of the Gorgon Medusa, but there is no agreement on this and no trace of the winged sandals that Perseus would have worn. The youth has a stance similar to the Doryphoros, but his right arm is extended and once held an object, as did the curled left hand to his side. Comparing the figure’s proportions to the Doryphoros, we can see that the youth’s head is smaller in relation to the body, making the figure appear more elongated. This is a refinement of the canon of proportions associated with the sculp­tor Lysippos (Pliny, N.H. 34.65), who is reported to have made more than 1,500 stone and bronze sculp­tures (Pliny, N.H. 34.37). His straight left arm and leg are shorter than their counterparts on his right, draw­ing attention to the youth’s right side, both in terms of size and the use of a projecting diagonal angle. This distortion is along the vector of the figure’s gaze, and if we consider this to be the primary vantage point, the elongated arm would be an optical correction for the foreshortened angle to make it look correct; such use of perspective adjustments is also associated with Lysippos in literary sources. While no original work can be attributed to the sculptor, the Antikythera Youth evokes the Lysippan canon of the late classical period. Dating by stylistic comparison is difficult in an era of widespread variation

and few bronze comparanda. A date of 350-325 все is usually cited, placing it slightly earlier than the more Polykleitan drum from Ephesos.

An original marble sculpture associated with the Lysippan canon is the statue of Agias from the Daochos Monument at Delphi (Figure 12.8). This ensemble included nine statues set on a long base within an enclosure, prominently located to the northeast of the Temple of Apollo (see Figure 7.2, 511, page 157). Based on the inscription, Daochos dedicated the monument between 337/6 and 333/2 все, and its nine statues included a portrait of himself and his grandson, as well as Apollo and six of Daochos’s royal ancestors. Agias had been a victor in the Olympics in the 480 s and his ears are deformed from his activity as a boxer (“cauliflower ears”), but this cannot be a true portrait since Agias had died at least a century beforehand. The head is small compared with the height of the body, but additionally there are some features that suggest qualities of realism associated in literary sources with the art of Lysippos. Although the figure has a contrapposto pose, both feet are set flat to the ground, making the figure firmly at rest. Looking at the shoulders, they sag more acutely from the neck than either the Ephesos or Antikythera figures. Finally, the mouth is turned down slightly and

the eye socket is more deeply arched and inset. Altogether, these details suggest a strong figure who is affected by his exertions, like an athlete who is trium­phant but tired after the contest. This is an element of realism not found in the Doryphoros or Parthenon frieze, whose figures never seem to tire; this is probably the sense behind Pliny’s account that Lysippos had said “men were made by those earlier sculptors as they were, but by him [Lysippos] as they appeared” (N.H. 34.65; tr. Pollitt 1990, 99).

These three statues date to the last half of the fourth century and show both the continuation and refine­ment of the Polykleitan style of the fifth century, but there are additional styles that coexisted with or pre­dated these. Dating to the 370 s все, the sculpture of the Temple of Asklepios at Epidauros has examples of two other stylistic trends. The Nike acroterion (see Figure 11.2, page 271), probably carved by Timotheos of Athens according to the contracts, is a successor to the florid style of drapery found on the late fifth- century Nike by Paionios at Olympia and the Aphrodite of the Parthenon east pediment even earlier (see Figure 10.8, page 245; Figure 10.16B, page 251). The drapery pulls across the breasts, abdomen, and thighs to be almost transparent at the same time as it piles and swirls elsewhere to create strong visual effects. The style in the pediment is different in spirit as well as execution (see Figure 11.1, page 270). The cloth on the Amazon does pull and bunch, but with less preci­sion and detail. There is more interest in the twisting and pulling of the figures and the drama created in their fight. The Greek warrior grabs the head and hair of the Amazon and pulls it back; the for­ward momentum of the rest of her body results in a sharp backwards bend in the neck. Her eyes bulge outward, and one can see in her face an interest in the pathos of a struggling warrior.

One can contrast the Epidauros Amazonomachy with the more ballet-like treatment of the same theme on the friezes of the Mausoleion at Halikarnassos (Figure 12.9). These reliefs, carved in the 350 s все, show well-muscled bodies and vigorous poses, but without marring their idealized beauty

The interest in pathos is very strong in the sculpture of the west pediment from the Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea. Pausanias (8.45.5; 8.47.1) writes that the temple and its cult statue were designed by Skopas after a fire had destroyed the previous building in 395 все; the attribution and dating of the architectural sculpture, almost certainly done by a workshop, is less clear. If Skopas were involved in the Tegean pedimental sculpture, it would likely be later than Halikarnassos, where he and Timotheos are said to be among its four sculptors (Pliny, N.H. 36.30), making a date in the 340 s possible. The subject of the west pediment was the combat between Achilles and Telephos, the son of Herakles and Auge and ruler of Mysia, a city in northwest Asia Minor. The Greeks in sailing to Troy had landed at Mysia and, mistakenly thinking it to be Troy, attacked the city but were forced to with­draw. During the fight, Telephos was wounded by Achilles. Telephos’s wound would not heal, how­ever, and he had to force Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek forces, to make Achilles heal him, after which Telephos led the Greeks to Troy.

The head from the pediment with the lion skin headdress has been identified as both Herakles and Telephos, but it is more likely that Telephos wears it to show his heroic lineage (Figure 12.10A). If so, we have to place him in the center of the pediment, being attacked by Achilles, who would be to his left and our right. Telephos was moving away from Achilles but turns his head back sharply to his left to look back at his opponent, as the bulging neck tendons indicate. The face has furrows around the cheeks and across the forehead and the lips are pulled down and back, but it is in the eyes that one can sense the pain of Achilles’s spear striking the king. The eyebrow forms a ridge over the eyeball, and the undercut fold of skin above the upper eyelid droops to obscure the eyelid, almost a visual parallel to Homer’s phrasing of “night descending on a warrior’s eyes” as he dies. A second

head of a helmeted warrior from the pediment (Figure 12.10B) is sharply turned upward as well as twisted, and his eyes would seem to be rolling up into their sockets in the throes of death in a stronger display of pathos.

Based on the sculpture from Tegea, Skopas is char­acterized as particularly interested in emotion, but lit­erary sources also record that he did a number of cult statues that were likely more idealized in their style. Such disparity in style, along with a lack of detailed lit­erary sources, has raised difficulties in assessing Skopas’s work.

We will end our survey of sculpture by considering the work of Praxiteles of Athens, who was best known for his statue of Aphrodite at Knidos (Figure 12.11). He is also linked with the sculpture of Hermes and Dionysos that we will consider in the textbox for this chapter. For the Aphrodite, Praxiteles had been com­missioned by the community on the island of Kos to make a cult statue of the goddess of love; our sources tell us that he made two works, one clothed and one nude (Pliny, N.H. 36.20). We have seen that male nudity was commonplace in Greek art, but female nudity outside of narrative or symposion scenes was rare. The people of Kos took the clothed version, while the island of Knidos bought the nude version, which subsequently became one of the most famous works of art in antiquity and afterward.

The original statue was set at the center of an open circular colonnade in her sanctuary, making it open to view from all directions. The original is lost, but there are dozens of literary references and literally hundreds of copies and adaptations that give us some idea of the work’s reputation and appearance. The goddess is shown in a contrapposto pose with a strong S-curve contour; her head turns to her left and there is a slight torsion in the figure. She is picking up a cloth that has been rest­ing on a hydria, a reference to her act of bathing. The features of her face are very softly modeled and tranquil, and her hair is drawn back on both sides to create a triangle framing her face; the rich tex­ture of the hair further sets off her smooth skin. Here Praxiteles essentially defined an ideal of female beauty that lasted throughout the Hellenistic period and into the Roman era, as reflected in later works such as the Aphrodite of Melos (see Figure 14.17, page 362) and the portrait of Cleopatra (see Figure 14.24, page 369).

We shall explore issues of gender and sexuality in more detail in the next chapter, but the differing artistic treatment of the male and female body in the preceding centuries of Greek art certainly points to different social attitudes about modesty and virtue in men and women. Praxiteles’s creation of a canonical female nude was certainly revolutionary in artistic terms, but whether social conven­tions adapted to this new idea is harder to evaluate. Certainly there has been a tendency in scholar­ship to see in the Aphrodite a hint of modesty as she pulls her garment up to clothe herself, but is she doing this in response to being disturbed at her bath in a feeling of shame? This would typically be expressed through lowering your eyes while someone is looking at you. Without the original statue, it is difficult to know if Aphrodite is looking straight out at something or someone to her left and the viewer’s right, or if she is looking downward and turning her head away from a viewer who stands in front of her body, which would suggest shame and modesty. Given that this was a cult statue and
likely elevated slightly on a base, her gaze appears level and even to look over the head of the viewer toward an unseen, perhaps divine presence. Within a religious sanctuary, a leering attitude would be inappropriate, and Greek myth has many tales of the dangers of inap­propriate attitudes of human intruders toward god­desses, and of the potential dangers of this statue in particular to its viewers.

The beauty and fertility that Aphrodite epito­mizes were essential for society, as we saw in the Parthenon pediment (see Figure 10.16B, page 251), but here they are revealed in their own right. In this sense, what we see is another dimension of the fourth-century transformation of the classical style by an interest in sensuality and sensual experience.

The cult of Aphrodite, like that of Asklepios, had both public and personal dimensions. Whereas the suppliant at Epidauros sought physical healing, one might say that the visitor to Knidos sought beauty and love and was meant to be emotionally moved by the sight of the goddess. A Roman-era writer, Lucian, wrote a long account of two friends who visited the sanctuary and admired the goddess from both the front and the back. Their rapture over the statue, both physical and verbal, conveys to us that in their eyes the goddess embodied both female beauty in her graceful limbs and parted lips and, from the rear view, male beauty in the flowing line of her thighs,

buttocks, and back (Stansbury-O’Donnell 2014). To see beauty was to experience pathos, and perhaps a temporary release or euphoria from harsher images of reality.

art and individuals

The contexts of the works that we have considered up to now have been highly visible and public. Looking at art that has a more personal or private context, such as a tomb or individual possessions, we can see a similar range of styles and interests, from idealistic naturalism to more realistic, emo­tional, or sensual expression. We can begin by looking at the stele of Dexileos from the Kerameikos in Athens (Figure 12.12). The inscription on the base informs us that Dexileos died fighting the Spartans at the Battle of the Nemea River in 394/3, just a decade after Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War. The inscription is unusual in also giving us a birth year, making Dexileos twenty when he died. The relief is larger than fifth-century stelai like those of Ampharete (see Figure 10.19, page 254) and Hegeso (see Figure 5.28, page 127). Indeed, it is about the size of the Parthenon metopes and, like them, carved in high relief. Stylistically, the figure has an idealized naturalism similar to the Parthenon riders (see Figure 1.1, page 2). The stele was placed upon a stepped, curved wall that stood on a square stone platform at a fork on the street of tombs just out­side the Dipylon Gate (Figure 12.13). In this location, standing at least 4 meters above the ground and angled toward those approaching from the city’s Dipylon Gate, the monument was visually prominent, more so than others along the same road such as the Koroibos-Kleidemides family (see Figure 5.27, page 126).

While it looks and functions like a grave monu­ment, Dexileos was not actually buried here. As was customary, his ashes and bones were placed with the other fallen warriors in the state burial ground of the Demosion Sema, further west outside the Dipylon Gate toward the Academy. It was here that those who died in battle for Athens were buried and their names, the casualty list, were inscribed annually on a stele. This practice of a civic tomb began sometime in the second quarter of the fifth century bce and became an important ritual of the polis, taking prec­edence over entombment in a family burial plot.

There were also sculptural monuments at the Demosion Sema, and Dexileos was included on a second public monument near the tomb dedicated to the eleven cavalrymen who had died in the Battle of the Nemea River.

Dexileos’s personal monument is, strictly speaking, a cenotaph set up by the family in addition to his state- funded tomb and cavalrymen monument and explic­itly commemorates an individual rather than a group.

As can be seen in the reconstructed tomb, it is part of a family plot and would serve as both a personal and family commemoration, like the nearby tombs of the Koroibos-Kleidemides family. Dexileos is shown as a hippeus or knight raising his arm to deliver the final blow to an opponent collapsing under his horse.

Curiously, Dexileos is clothed, as he would have been in battle, while his opponent is unrealistically nude, reversing the heroic nudity of works like the Amazonomachies seen above. That his enemy is given heroic nudity amplifies Dexileos’s triumph. Sitting high and angled to face the street, the monument elevates the individual and family to a heroic status.

The monument does, however, create an ambiguity around Dexileos himself (see Hurwit 2007). Like his victim, Dexileos was a casualty of war and ultimately did not triumph in battle as the image suggests, although he might have been a successful fighter before being killed. An image that showed him attacking an opponent on equal terms could have been read as either triumphant or not, but this image shows a victorious climax over a heroic foe that contrasts with the facts recounted in the inscription below: he is shown triumphant, but actually died in battle. There are other ambiguities. Dexileos died fighting for the democratic regime of Athens against Sparta, but his status as a hippeus places him among the aristocratic elite who had supported the Thirty Tyrants that controlled Athens briefly after its defeat by Sparta in 404 bce. Perhaps his cenotaph helped to confirm the place of his family in the fourth-century polis.

Later tombs from Athens and elsewhere show this oversized representation of the individual. From the middle of the fourth century in Salamis comes the grave stele of Mnesistrate, whose name appears in the cornice above her on the left (see Figure 13.2, page 322). A bearded man, presumably her husband, is shown as speaking with her. She is modestly clothed, but her S-shaped pose and her gaze are not unlike the Aphrodite of Knidos. The cloth of her chiton and himation pull more tightly across her thigh and buttock and her head is turned slightly outward from the background plane and looks directly at her husband, unlike the more modest pose, clothing, and gaze of Ampharete and

Terracottas also show the animation and decorative quality of fourth-century styles. The collec­tion of figures from a girl’s tomb in the Kerameikos cemetery includes Apollo playing the kithara, a seated figure with a phiale, a woman carrying a child on her shoulders, a priestess of Kybele with a tambourine, and a dancer next to an altar (see Figure 1.5, page 10). This is an unusual assortment of tomb figures for this time, but it becomes much more common in the Hellenistic period and the emergence of what are called Tanagra figures. The pose of the priestess of Kybele is of particular interest in that she is nude and leaning against a column like a figure of Aphrodite. She has the same strong S-contour that we see in Praxiteles’s Aphrodite, although this figure is a couple of decades earlier than Praxiteles. The flowing drapery of the dancer recalls the Nike figures that we have seen, and the terracottas in general show the willingness to adapt features associated with specific deities to new contexts.

We also see changes in the figural imagery associated with mirrors. The caryatid mirror of the sixth and fifth centuries is replaced by hinged mirrors with relief covers as the prevailing type (Figure 12.14). This example, from a tomb in Elis, shows the drunken Herakles grabbing the maiden Auge, whom he will rape and by whom he will father Telephos, whom we saw as an adult in the pedi­ment at Tegea (see Figure 12.10A). Auge is usually shown in art as resisting, backing or pulling away from Herakles, but her action here is more ambiguous. While Herakles’s right hand grabs her gar­ment, he is falling back and is not really able to bear his own weight, nor are his eyes focused on her. Her hands actually cup under his arm, as if she were trying to support him rather than resist. Like the Amazon at Halikarnassos, her drapery falls away behind her body, revealing her in near total nudity. The scene is very sensually composed, but raises a question, as with the Aphrodite of Knidos, as to whether the situation is shameful (in the story, her father king Aigeus will set her and the child adrift in a box to perish at sea) or is an epiphany of beauty and desire that suggests her power over Herakles. The mirror was found in a tomb and a mirror’s viewer would almost certainly be a woman. As an example of an ideal figure, however, Auge sends a quite different message than the caryatid of fifth-century mirrors, nearly nude and directly interacting with men (see Figure 10.6, page 242).

A similar sensuality is featured on the main scene of a large volute krater found in Tomb B at Derveni, about 10 kilometers northeast of Thessaloniki (Figure 12.15). The krater had been set on a pedestal in a stone-lined cist tomb, one of several that probably belonged to an elite family, along with a variety of bronze and ceramic washing and sympotic vessels. The krater contained the ashes and bones of a man aged thirty-five to fifty years and a younger woman, pre­sumably his wife. Based on the military and horse gear in the tomb, he was probably a soldier and possibly a cavalryman. An inscription in the Thessalian dialect, placed on the vessel’s rim sometime after its manufac­ture, states that it is the “krater of Astioun, son of Anaxagoras from Larissa" a town in Thessaly. Based on the grave goods, the tomb dates to 325-300 все, but the vessel is dated earlier to 375-350 based on style and motifs. Beryl Barr-Sharrar suggests that the vessel was commissioned by Anaxagoras and later used by his son, or possibly grandson, as a funerary urn (Barr- Sharrar 2008, 182).