A Place for Art?

11 A Place for Art? Introduction If we ask what impact the material culture of the Greeks and Romans discussed in this book has, and has had, on our environment today, then we will get a wide range of answers depending on what we look at. The distribution and appearance of archaeological sites open to the public reflects the priorities of classical archaeologists over the last two centuries. The classical landscape is visible in terraces, field boundaries and in the parts of Europe that grow wine, but has been overtaken by new technologies: developments in agricultural techniques mean that little beyond the ecological conditions in which modern agriculture operates is shared with the Greek and Roman world. Many modern towns bear the imprint of their Greek or Roman predecessor, especially those in the Roman west where the creation of new settlements of a highly regular plan and the building of strong walls often enabled and constrained subsequent urban construction. But the forms of our houses owe little to their Greek and Roman predecessors, and whatever religious practices we engage in, none of them employ rituals at all close to those of Greek and Roman religion. Greek and Roman religious architecture has certainly left its mark, but more on secular than on religious buildings. If we turn, however, to the ways in which we represent and comment on our world and the people in it, the legacy of the Greek and Roman world is still going strong—as much in what we produce as how we think. Just as the great works of Greek and Roman literature—the Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Greek tragedy— and of Greek and Roman philosophy—the works of Plato and Aristotle, of Epicu- reans and Stoics—shape what those of us in the West write and the way in which we think, so the greatR works e of Greek v and Roman i ssculpture e and painting d shape western art. Often, as with Michelangelo’s David or Rodin’s Thinker, this influence Classical Archaeology, Second Edition. Edited by Susan E. Alcock, Robin Osborne. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. S Susan E. Alcock, Robin Osborne—Classical Archaeology Alcock_6917_c11_main.indd 439 2/2/2012 6:51:20 PM 440 introduction is immediately obvious. But even more abstract works are reactions against the Classical. Up until this point, this book has sought to understand Greek and Roman sculpture and painting by putting it back into its ancient archaeological context. These objects have helped us see what Greeks and Romans were doing, in terms of thought as well as of action, in any particular time and place. In the first edition of Classical Archaeology that was the only discussion of art that we offered. But just as literary scholars enrich our appreciation above all by studying the relationship of one classical text to another, by excavating allusions and intertexts, so, also, much of the work of classical archaeologists has been devoted not to studying paintings and sculptures in their original temporal and spatial context, but to the exploration of how the form of this statue relates to the form of other statues, and to how the iconography of the scene on this pot, or wall, or relief can be understood in the context of the iconography of the scene on another pot, or wall, or relief. Seen like this, “ancient context” is a much bigger canvas than can be provided by the walls of a particular room, site or city. There are strong practical reasons why this move is helpful. Works of literature survive for us in copies made either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages. Not only do we not have the original text from the hand of the author, we often have little indication of where or exactly when and in what circumstances that text was com- posed. Although there are statues, paintings, mosaics and pots which do survive from antiquity in the place where they were first displayed, plenty lack such site- specificity. Many statues, paintings, mosaics and pots were moved in antiquity or reused afterwards. Many were rediscovered so long ago that we now have no idea where they came from. And many come down to us as copies. Indeed, some of the most famous examples survive only as copies, thereby betraying nothing of the maker’s hand or of the circumstances in which he produced the original. Study of the original context of display is therefore often impossible or highly speculative. But it is not simply the practical difficulty of contextual study that makes art historians devote their time primarily to examining instead the relationships between different works of art. One definition of a work of art is that it is an object whose appearance is determined not by its function but by reference to the appearance of other objects in the world (in terminology made famous by the anthropologist Alfred Gell (1998), the work of art is an “index” of a “prototype”). A portrait references the appearance of a living, or once-living, person. It also references all other portraits, in particular all other portraits with similar formal characteristics—so a portrait bust relates to other portrait busts, a portrait miniature to other portrait miniatures, a portrait of a pope to all other portraits of popes. Such references are both unavoidable—the viewer is necessarily reminded of other similar objects—and are positively sought outR by the artist. e Art vcriticism ienriches s our understanding e d of the traces of paint on one canvas by drawing attention to the traces of paint on another canvas. Often the works of art that are juxtaposed by scholars are more or less contemporaneous—we understand the portraits of Allan Ramsay by juxtapos- ing them to those by Sir Joshua Reynolds, or we see how Sir Thomas Lawrence S reacted to and developed the conventions displayed in Reynolds’ portraits. But, Susan E. Alcock, Robin Osborne—Classical Archaeology Alcock_6917_c11_main.indd 440 2/2/2012 6:51:20 PM a place for art? 441 equally often, the most revealing comparisons are not between contemporary works of art but with classic works of art of an earlier age: to understand the sculpture of Rodin one needs to know the sculpture of Michelangelo. The two contributions to this chapter explore the way in which art objects are different from other material studied by archaeologists. Art objects are not simply evidence for something else, for the ways in which Greeks and Romans thought about their own identity and about the nature of their gods, for instance, but are objects with a life of their own. Caroline Vout and Michael Squire here explore not only how works of sculpture and painting made, and make, richer the visual experi- ences of those who viewed them, but also how works of Greek and Roman art transcended their original context of creation, living multiple lives that crossed hundreds of years and political and ethnic boundaries. Precisely because of the transcendent power of the art that it is discussing, this chapter does not, as earlier chapters have, treat the Greek and Roman worlds separately. Rather, in the first contribution, Caroline Vout explores what Classical art is and what it demands from and makes possible for the viewer today. In the second contribution, Michael Squire then shows how the way in which we look at Classical art today has been shaped by the particular ways in which classical archaeologists carry out their study. In doing so he brings this book full circle back to the first chapter in which Anthony Snodgrass and Martin Millett examine more generally how what we know and what we make of the material world of the Greeks and Romans is a product of the history of its study. We will not understand the art of the Greek and Roman world, any more than we will understand other aspects of its material culture, unless we also understand the history of its study—unless we understand classical archaeology. R e v i s e d S Susan E. Alcock, Robin Osborne—Classical Archaeology Alcock_6917_c11_main.indd 441 2/2/2012 6:51:20 PM 11 (a) Putting the Art into Artifact Caroline Vout The Roman-ness of Greek Art and the Greek-ness of Roman Art 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 stric- tures 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, p. •• Morris and below, p. •• 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.

Load more