eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
How did the statues of ancient Greece wind up dictating art history in the West? How did the material culture of the Greeks and Romans come to be seen as "classical" and as "art"? What does "classical art" mean across time and place? In this ambitious, richly illustrated book, art historian and classicist Caroline Vout provides an original history of how classical art has been continuously redefined over the millennia as it has found itself in new contexts and cultures. All of this raises the question of classical art's future.
What we call classical art did not simply appear in ancient Rome, or in the Renaissance, or in the eighteenth-century Academy. Endlessly repackaged and revered or rebuked, Greek and Roman artifacts have gathered an amazing array of values, both positive and negative, in each new historical period, even as these objects themselves have reshaped their surroundings. Vout shows how this process began in antiquity, as Greeks of the Hellenistic period transformed the art of fifth-century Greece, and continued through the Roman empire, Constantinople, European court societies, the neoclassical English country house, and the nineteenth century, up to the modern museum.
A unique exploration of how each period of Western culture has transformed Greek and Roman antiquities and in turn been transformed by them, this book revolutionizes our understanding of what classical art has meant and continues to mean.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400890279 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/29/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 65 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Setting the Agenda, or Putting the Art into Heritage
The thing has a history: it is not simply a passive inertia against which we measure our own activity. It has a "life" of its own, characteristics of its own, which we must incorporate into our activities in order to be effective, rather than simply understand, regulate, and neutralize from the outside. We need to accommodate things more than they accommodate us. — Grosz 2001: 168
What Is Classical Art?
Classical art is a battleground. "Art" is worrying enough for archaeologists. "Classical" is a step too far. Why? Because both terms are value judgments, and the value(s) ascribed to artifacts that make the grade so inflationary as to be misleading. "Real knowledge" comes not from antiquities that have been ripped from their original context, cleaned and reconstituted for display in galleries and glass cabinets. "Real knowledge" comes from antiquities that carry their dirt with them. Only if we can trace them back to where the ancients left them — better still, to where they used them — can we appreciate what these artifacts meant and did — give them back their agency.
Everything that is wrong with "classical art" is exemplified by two statues known as the "Tyrannicides" (Tyrant Slayers) in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples (1.1). Indeed everything wrong with classical art could be contained in the following caption: "The tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton by Kritios and Nesiotes, 477–76 BCE, marble." For a start, these are not the statues erected in the Athenian agora in the fifth century in honor of the men who killed the tyrant's brother Hipparchus. Those were bronze. Nor are they by Kritios and Nesiotes, but by an unknown copyist working under the Roman empire — if "copyist" is the right word. Without the genuine article, the best we can be is optimistic. And anyway, Kritios and Nesiotes's group was not the genuine article either. It too was a stand-in, after the original group by Antenor was stolen by the Persians in the sack of 480–479 BCE. Not that anyone, even in antiquity, worried that theirs was a replacement, any more than we worry that our Tyrannicides are Roman (although it makes it easier that we do not know enough about their Italian find-spot to reconstruct a rival context) or that they were admired in the Renaissance as "gladiators," and restored as well as relabeled. The replacements stole the show. The caption is a tissue of lies: these Athenian heroes are pretenders.
But before we consign the Naples statues to the storeroom, let us think a bit harder about the nature of this artifice: not what their claims to authenticity obscure about the original groups in their original settings, for none of that is recoverable, but what their posturing reveals about the ways in which the intervening centuries have treated them and material culture more broadly — how it is that we have "classical art" to contend with in the first place. At what point do the Tyrannicides become "art"? And how easy is it to separate the possible answers to that question, and their competing definitions of what "art" is, from questions of "technology," "politics," "archaeology"? As we are about to discover, "classical art" is less a battleground than it is a moving target.
It makes sense to start our target practice in the present. Today, the lost Tyrannicides of Kritios and Nesiotes, as represented by the Naples group, are a "set piece" on the "Greek architecture and sculpture" syllabus of the UK's final-year secondary school examinations and a key mo(nu)ment in textbooks on Greek art by Susan Woodford, John Boardman, and Richard Neer. Although these scholars admit to working with a Roman version, they see its style as emblematic of early fifth-century production, arguing with it as though it actually were the bronze erected in 477–476 BCE, and thus one of the first sculptures, after decades of "kouroi," to break free of the block and the frontal plane. I choose to spotlight Neer as he is a master of close reading and highly influential, in all sorts of respects, on my own thinking:
They charge forward with swords at the ready, bearing down upon their beholders. Their victim is not depicted but, instead, remains an ever-present absence: the war against tyranny has no end. Stylistically the group is a benchmark in the history of Greek sculpture. No earlier work so convincingly unites the depiction of subdermal musculature with that of vigorous movement. As Stewart puts it, "The Kritian group literally marks the birthday of the classical style in Athens."
Just as the Naples group cites the Kritian group that evokes the original dedication, so Neer cites Andrew Stewart, who is paraphrasing Brunilde Ridgway, mutually enforcing their art credentials. He might be said to miss a trick in not mapping the victim's "ever-present absence" onto the "absence" of the group itself, but can be forgiven his confidence: although the Naples statues are far and away the most intact versions to survive in the round, images of the Tyrannicides on pottery, coins, and a marble throne, once owned by Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin (1766–1841), repeat their poses and confirm their identity (1.2, 1.3, 1.17, and 1.18). Also, a fragmentary inscription, a chronicle or chronology from hellenistic Paros, dates the erection of the Kritian group precisely: the surety of locating it in a fixed time and place makes even an "echo" irresistible.
If it is authenticity we are after, there is plenty here — more real knowledge than can be gleaned from the only actual remains of the group, bits of the statue base to Harmodius and Aristogeiton (usually associated with the Kritian monument but sometimes with its antecedent) found in the Agora in 1936. But there is "authenticity" and "authenticity," and Neer's description, requiring that we see beneath the skin of the Naples versions as if it were bronze, is too bold. Or is it? Is it worse than doing what other art historians do — reduce the group's "vigorous movement" to a pair of static poses, and these poses to symbols of "political freedom" that are then identified in heroes throughout the visual record? This flattens Kritios and Nesiotes's contribution to the history of style, ironing the subtleties of art into straight ideology.
Back in 1956, when Reinhard Lullies and Max Hirmer collaborated on what would become one of the most widely translated and disseminated surveys of Greek sculpture, such was the premium on authenticity that Roman versions did not feature. In fact, the only role for the Tyrannicides was in a catalog entry for the early fifth-century statue from the Athenian Acropolis known as the "Kritios Boy" after purported stylistic similarities between it and the shadowy younger tyrant-slayer, Harmodius — and this despite the fact that Kritios was famed in antiquity as a bronze-worker (1.4). If anything it is this statue, its torso discovered in 1865 and its head in 1888, and its claims to be the last of the "kouroi" — one of the first sculptures to be more than "man-shaped," but young, alert, as though aware of its body — that gives the Tyrannicides their standing. The year before Lullies and Hirmer's publication, and in the wake of Antony Raubitschek's catalog of dedications from the Acropolis, including several statue bases bearing Kritios and Nesiotes's signatures, there was an eagerness to expand the corpus. It was proposed that the Delphi Charioteer too was made by Kritios or his school (2.1). In this climate, his star was rising.
Was this when the Tyrannicides shifted in status from honorific statues to artworks; once the stylistic analysis long practiced by connoisseurs of sculpture, gems, and painting had been theorized in the second half of the nineteenth century to become "attribution studies," supporting archaeology's claims to be a scientific discipline, and, simultaneously, turning Kritios into Canova? This new rigor undoubtedly changed classical antiquity. Indeed without it, we would have to put the Naples statues in the museum-store: they were not recognized as "Tyrannicides" until 1859, by the same scholar who eventually linked the ancient literary testimony about Polyclitus's Doryphorus (Spear Carrier) to the statue type that now bears its name (1.5). Today, the Doryphorus is regularly seen as the maturation of the classical style, as scholars continue to worry about exactly when and why Greek sculptors left abstraction behind in favor of the more naturalistic modes of representation that underpin Renaissance practice. In the future, the gradually swelling number of original bronzes found by fishermen and underwater archaeology may change the parameters of this discussion yet again, but for the moment, the Tyrannicides and Doryphorus rank among classical art's most eloquent proponents. When Neer discusses the bronze found off Cape Artemision in the 1920s (1.6), he writes, "we can be sure that whoever made it had looked at Harmodios and Aristogeiton."
But if post-Enlightenment thinking gave rise to classical art and archaeology as we know it, where does that leave the Renaissance? Before being outed as Tyrannicides in the nineteenth century, the Naples statues were already known, first as part of the antiquities collection in the Palazzo Medici-Madama in Rome, and then, later in the sixteenth century, in the Palazzo Farnese, where they joined a swelling cast of statuary including the Farnese Hercules (1.7 and 1.16). Competition with other Roman collections, such as those of the Borghese and Ludovisi families, not to mention the papacy (the supply of antiquities to the Farnese collection benefiting in 1534 when Alessandro became pope), made this display more important, turning the acquisition of ancient sculpture into a prerequisite of power. Catalogs and engravings of this sculpture put "classicism" on a stronger footing, with courts throughout Europe commissioning copies and casts of the finest statues, especially those in the Vatican's Belvedere Courtyard (a statue court commissioned by Pope Julius II in 1503), and exchanging them as diplomatic gifts. Classical art was already ideology. And it was already the subject of scholarly inquiry. The "canon" was expanding all the time — and statues were just the tip of the iceberg. The relevant fragments of the hellenistic inscription from Paros were actually acquired early in the seventeenth century in Smyrna (Izmir) by agents working for Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel (1585–1646), who was busy amassing his own antiquities for his house on the Strand in London. He had already benefited from a license to excavate in the Roman forum. The inscription was deciphered and published almost immediately in John Selden's catalog of the collection (1628–29), "the first direct study of classical archaeological material by an Englishman."
How did the Naples statues function in this environment? For all of the "rebirth" innate in Renaissance self-fashioning and its fashioning of antiquity, the Tyrannicides were dead, or at least lost in translation, enlisted, along with other versions of Greek works, to reemerge from Rome's soil (the Dying Gaul being another — 1.8), to fight a Roman cause as "gladiators." This gave them a nobility of their own, and one that legitimized, almost, the loss of limbs that the passage of time had inflicted. Both had suffered serious injury, "Aristogeiton," as he would become, having lost his head as well as his arms, penis, toes, and part of his mantle, and "Harmodius," his penis, arms, and parts of his legs and base. Prior to restoration, it was "Aristogeiton" that was more famous, evidence perhaps of the relatively low esteem accorded to Harmodius's expressionless face, features today understood as "archaic" in style. When in 1550 Ulisse Aldrovandi compiled his landmark text of the ancient statues to be seen in more than ninety collections in Rome, he described him, then still in the Palazzo Madama, as "very beautiful," his lack of head and arms notwithstanding. Renaissance draughtsmen sketched him for his strong chest and stance: an exemplary body in an artistic arena (1.9).
Even unknown soldiers could fight classical art's cause. But classical art was a moving target even then. By the time that German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann saw "Aristogeiton" in 1756, the statue had long been in the Grand Salon of the Palazzo Farnese, where it and its errant companion were part of a "gladiator" installation known in some of the palace inventories as the Horatii and Curiatii, a reference to Rome's early history that made their Italian indoctrination complete and may well have contributed to French painter Jacques-Louis David's recreation of the encounter on canvas two decades later (1.10). They were mercenaries in a campaign devoted to making Rome the world's cultural capital. They had also been restored: "Aristogeiton" now had a "splendid" head, but a head that, unlike his left arm and cloak, which had originally belonged and been reattached, was alien, thought by Winckelmann to resemble a "young Hercules." He had been literally rejuvenated to suit his new context. Photos taken at the end of the nineteenth century, a century after the move to Naples — post-1859, the "big reveal," and the statues' reunion — show an ancient, alien head (the same head that Winckelmann admired?) still in place (1.11). James G. Frazer's 1898 discussion of the Tyrannicides illustrates them anyway, adding that although Aristogeiton's head is erroneous, "it is a fine head ... resembling in fact the head of the Hermes of Praxiteles (1.12), whereas the head of Harmodius is entirely archaic." Even then, the latter's features weigh heavy. His companion's Herculean qualities are more mercurial. He is now similar to a statue excavated at Olympia in 1877, as what counts as a "masterpiece" keeps changing.
Eventually this head is removed and the rightful one put in its place — although this is not the original either, indeed it is not even ancient, but a cast taken from a rather damaged head found in 1922 in the Vatican storeroom. In 1957 this Vatican head was united with its body, a high-quality marble torso discovered in 1937 at the foot of Rome's Campidoglio that confirmed Aristogeiton's identity (1.13). Bit by bit, we muddle toward the Tyrannicides of our textbooks, a patchwork of old, new, and plaster pieces. How does their visual impact and authority as ancient sculpture compare with the statues studied by Aldrovandi, Winckelmann, and Frazer?
Early in the Renaissance, when the ancient fragments that had contributed to the fabric of Rome throughout the medieval period began to be taken more seriously, broken sculptures were intriguing despite, if not because of, their breakage, the pock-marked Pasquino group and the Belvedere Torso (figs. 5.6 and 9.5) being a case in point. But the more these sculptures influenced contemporary art practice and antiquaries obsessed about their subject matter and their original appearance, the more sculptors saw fit to learn from them by laying hands on them, taking them back to their roots, not by stripping accretions but adding attributes. Even in a museum context, substitutions continue, those made in the name of knowledge not necessarily more authentic than those made for the sake of gladiatorial spectacle and rivalry between Rome's grand families. Frazer already appreciated the statues as "the finest and most perfect reproduction of the group." What does Aristogeiton's "improved" head add? So clumsy is the join between it and the torso that permanent decapitation might have been preferable.
Where the head is crucial is in making Harmodius and Aristogeiton different ages. For all that the fragments of the statue base support the claims that they were honored for a political act that liberated Athens and led to their martyrdom, some ancient sources give a more personal motive for their actions. According to Thucydides, Harmodius was a boy "in the flower of his youth," Aristogeiton his older male lover, and Hipparchus, the tyrant's brother, a seducer who threatened their union. In other words, Harmodius and Aristogeiton were models of the kind of male-male desire that has been central to the admiration of Athenian cultural production from at least Winckelmann's writings, as well as "splendid specimen(s) of ancient art." Stewart writes, "the group implicitly puts the homoerotic bond at the core of Athenian political freedom and urges us to do the same." But not if we cannot look both figures in the eye and see an older bearded man shoulder to shoulder with his clean-shaven beloved or "eromenos," the paradigm of pederasty familiar from sympotic pottery (1.14) and from Plato. The head discharges the group from its service to Rome and restores a spark that is peculiarly Athenian.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Classical Art"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Princeton University Press.
Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
1. Setting the Agenda, or Putting the Art into Heritage 1
2. Finding the Classical in Hellenistic Greece 20
3. Making Greek Culture Roman Culture 43
4. Roman Art, the Building Blocks of Empire 71
5. Reviving Antiquity in Renaissance Italy 97
6. European Court Society and the Shaping of the Canon 125
7. “Neoclassicisms” and the English Country House 151
8. Seeing Anew in the Nineteenth Century 186
9. The Death of Classical Art? 220
10. And the Moral of the Story . . . 243
Notes 247
Bibliography 301
Index 343
What People are Saying About This
"This is an ambitious, highly original, and timely book. It is a sophisticated contribution to art history, classics, classical archaeology, and classical reception studies, and will be essential reading for scholars in all these fields."—Elizabeth Prettejohn, author of The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Winckelmann to Picasso"Deeply informed by a long command of classical art and archaeology, this is an exceptional book. It is extremely wide-ranging by comparison with almost any other book on classical art since it includes the entire phenomenon of classicism in the European tradition. Increasingly, scholars are looking at ancient art in a broader context and there is absolutely no doubt that this is going to be the book for this generation of scholars for a significant time to come."—Jaś Elsner, author of Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text