Art History For Dummies. Jesse Bryant Wilder
run, jump, and throw — or at least appear to!
The bronze Charioteer of Delphi (circa 470 BC) is stiffer than Kritios Boy, but his upright posture would have helped him to be seen standing in a chariot atop a tall monument. The concentrated look in the charioteer’s face and the elegant, naturalistic folds of his robe are characteristic of early fifth-century Greek realism, also known as the severe style. The statue was commissioned to celebrate an athletic victory, a chariot race. Sports events were a big deal in Greece. During the Olympics, all warfare ceased so the Greeks could compete for laurel leaves instead of fighting for money and power.
The fact that the athlete was cast in bronze shows how highly the Greeks regarded sports heroes. They had godlike status, especially in their hometowns, where they were given a pension and free meals for the rest of their lives.
Tarker / Bridgeman Images
FIGURE 7-4: Greek statues begin to get comfortable around 480 BC. Kritios Boy is the turning point. The sculptor has learned to turn the body just enough to give him a relaxed look.
Golden Age sculptors: Myron, Polykleitos, and Phidias
The high classical style began in about 450 BC, when Greek sculptors learned to suggest motion and fill their marble flesh with the appearance of life force. For example, Myron involved the entire body of Discobolus (“Disk Thrower”; see Figure 7-5) in a single, compressed action. The statue appears wound up, his energy ready to burst forth. Yet his classically serene face and the faraway look in his eyes contrast with the action of his body, giving the athlete a timeless quality, as if he were throwing his discus into eternity.
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FIGURE 7-5: This is a marble Roman copy of Myron’s original bronze Discobolus.
Creating balance and proportion
The artist Polykleitos created a feeling of balance with contrasting tensions that also suggest motion. The off-center pose that gives this relaxed but balanced look is called contrapposto. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus (circa 535 BC–475 BC) summed up the concept: “Opposition brings concord.”
You can see the contrapposto effect in a Roman copy of Polykleitos’s Doryphoros (“Spear Bearer”; see Figure 7-6):
The cocked left arm contrasts with the straight or engaged right leg, while the straight right arm offsets the bent left leg.
The left leg seems to propel the figure forward.
Opposite forces preserve the feeling of balance while creating a sense of tension and action.
Almost 2,500 years after he was carved, Doryphoros still has the glow of Greece’s Golden Age (circa 450 BC–440 BC). Polykleitos wrote a book of rules of proportion called the Canon; it was followed by succeeding generations of Greek and Roman sculptors. He cast his original Doryphoros in bronze to demonstrate the principles of the Canon. The many surviving marble copies of Doryphoros attest to its popularity and to the respect that Roman copyists had for the Canon of Polykleitos.
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FIGURE 7-6: This Roman copy of Polykleitos’s Doryphoros is at ease and tense at the same time.
Sculpting art that is glorious and timeless
If the proverbial “glory of Greece” rested on two men’s shoulders, it would be Pericles and Phidias. Phidias was the most celebrated Greek sculptor and the overseer of the sculptural work for Pericles’s building projects on the Athenian Acropolis (downtown Athens).
There is a sort of bloom of newness upon those works of his, preserving them from the touch of time, as if they had some perennial spirit and undying vitality mingled in the composition of them.
The surviving Parthenon statues (many in fragments and now in the British Museum) have the same qualities that ancient writers raved about:
Omnipresence: The figures seem to be watching themselves as they participate in the action, as if they were of this world and yet beyond it, part of the Greek heaven, Olympus.
Realistic spirit: Even though the heads of the Three Goddesses are missing, the superbly rendered fabrics (which have the wet or clingy look pioneered by Phidias) speak for them, revealing the moods, spirit, and down-to-earth sensuality of the flesh-and-blood women behind the clothes.
Participation: What are the three goddesses doing? Watching the birth of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, springing full-grown from the brow of her father Zeus.
Today, even though they are in ruins, the “vitality” of the Parthenon statues endures.
Fourth-century sculpture
After the fall of Athens in 404 BC, the city-state gradually got on its feet again, though it never rose to its former glory. Nevertheless, Greek philosophy peaked in the fourth century BC. (Maybe Athens’s defeat made all Athenians more philosophical.) Plato taught at his famous Athenian Academy from about 387 BC to 347 BC, and Aristotle, his greatest student, taught at the Lyceum in Athens from 335 BC to 322 BC, after educating Alexander the Great in Pella, Macedonia.
The fourth century BC also produced three great sculptors: Praxiteles, Skopas, and Lysippos (the personal sculptor of Alexander the Great). In fourth-century sculpture, the wet look got even wetter, but the timelessness associated with Phidias and Polykleitos gave way to an everyday or down-to-earth quality — less idealism, more realism. For example, Praxiteles depicts his Knidian Aphrodite preparing to take a bath, while his Hermes (see Figure 7-7) looks fondly on the playful infant Dionysus cradled in his arm.