Art History’ of the Body

IBT039 – The Art of the Body with pics newest:Layout 1 21/2/11 15:32 Page 32 CHAPTER II Figuring what comes naturally? Writing the ‘art history’ of the body We began the last chapter with a recognisably ‘western’ image [fig. 1]. One of the things that made this sculpted body so recognisable, it was said, was what we called its ‘naturalistic’ appearance. What’s more, we related this modern representational mode to ancient traditions of figuring the human body (pp.1–7). But Graeco-Roman images didn’t always look like this. The features which modern western viewers recognise and admire in ancient art emerged only gradually. Earlier Greek images of the body, whether in the sculpted round [fig. 17], or on painted pottery [fig. 22], appear very different from the sorts of images that we normally associate with the ‘Classical’ or ‘Graeco- Roman’. How, then, should this stylistic shift be explained: where, when and why did it become an objective to make images that seem believable and lifelike? These are the questions which the present chapter sets out to explore. I should say from the outset that my aim isn’t simply to ‘answer’ them. Because this is a book about both ancients and moderns, I’m as much concerned with the legacy of (what we call) naturalism as with its Graeco-Roman development. My objective in this chapter is therefore historiographical rather than simply historical: to pose some larger questions about how we moderns have conventionally figured the history of ancient art. The point is important because it’s all too easy to overlook: that the stories we tell 32 IBT039 – The Art of the Body with pics newest:Layout 1 21/2/11 15:32 Page 33 figuring what comes naturally? about ancient images are ideologically invested in our modernity; by ex - tension, that the stories we tell about modern figurative art are themselves forged out of our histories of the ancient. A ‘Greek Revolution’ All manner of ‘textbook’ case studies might be introduced here. I’ve chosen to concentrate on arguably the most familiar: Ernst Gombrich’s Story of Art, first published in 1950. Whether Gombrich’s blockbuster is the best single-volume introduction to western image-making is open to debate. But this volume – with its self-confessed rationale of imposing ‘some intelli- gible order into the wealth of names, periods and styles’ – has certainly proved the most popular. Little could Gombrich have known in 1950 just how popular it would become. Sixty years (and some seven million copies) later, the Story of Art appears in its sixteenth English edition, available in some thirty or so translations. Gombrich’s combined interest in ancient and modern psychology makes for a particularly appropriate case study in this chapter. Why is it, he asked, that western artists set out to craft images that mirror the real world around us? For Gombrich, this phenomenon could only be explained in Graeco- Roman terms. A variety of phrases were devised to describe the phenomenon: the ‘Greek Miracle’, ‘Pygmalion’s Power’, the ‘Great Awakening’; the Greek ‘discovery’ of naturalism evidently had something of the fairy-tale about it – ‘Sleeping Beauty’, as it were. Still, there could be no mistaking the momentous importance of these Greek developments. The fourth chapter of Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (first published a little later in 1959) drives home the point. The ‘Great Awakening’, writes Gombrich, was nothing less than a ‘Greek Revolution’: by stirring art from its primeval slumber, Greek artists established our western regimes of both the image and imagination. Gombrich did more than any other twentieth-century historian to popularise a certain narrative of ancient art history. The story revolves around a type of monumental sculpture that modern critics have come to call kouroi (the plural of the Greek noun kouros – literally a ‘male youth’). 33 IBT039 – The Art of the Body with pics newest:Layout 1 21/2/11 15:32 Page 34 Fig. 17: ‘New York kouros’, first quarter of the sixth centuryBC . The kouros stands at a (for us) roughly life-size 1.84 metres (6 feet). Its figure, though, is structured around a series of non-lifelike rhythmical patterns: the belly-button (omphalos) is carved at the centre, and a series of diamond-ridges ripple out from it – at once down to the groin, and up to the ribcage. This ornamentation is mirrored in all manner of other ‘anatomical’ details – knees, elbows, even the central tie of the choker. 34 IBT039 – The Art of the Body with pics newest:Layout 1 21/2/11 15:32 Page 35 figuring what comes naturally? Rendered in monumental materials like marble and limestone, kouroi became an ever more conspicuous feature of sixth-century BC life. They evidently served a miscellany of purposes: some functioned as statues of the gods; others were dedicated as votive offerings; others still, especially around Athens, were erected as funerary commemorations. ‘Stand and mourn at the sema of dead Croesus, whom raging Ares slew in the front line’, as one inscription reads, attached to the so-called Anavyssos kouros (erected c. 540 BC). In Attica – i.e. the area near Athens – funerary kouroi were explic- itly figured assemata : they did duty not just as ‘tombs’, but as ‘signs’, ‘markers’, and ‘tokens’. Despite their varying functions, kouroi adhered to a recognisable formal pattern [figs. 17–21]. While different regions adapted the blueprint to suit their own geographical tastes, and although, as we shall see, details change over time – proportions, facial expression, hair, etc. – the kouros’ essential pose remained more or less the same: the figure steps forwards with the left leg, holding both hands by the sides, and distributing his weight equally. From the late seventh to the early fifth centuries, the kouros embodied a more or less symmetrical idea of balance, poise, and equilibrium. To encounter this statue was to engage (and be engaged in) the direct frontal gaze of the sculpted subject. Where does this statue type come from? As Gombrich rightly explains, the ultimate inspiration seems to have been Egyptian. In practical terms, such cultural interaction is relatively easy to explain. The eighth century saw increasing contact between the Greek Mediterranean and the east – so much so, in fact, that the period from the mid-eighth to mid-seventh centuries has come to be labelled ‘Orientalising’, after the eastern appearance of so much contemporary Greek imagery. The Aegean island of Samos was one prominent place of intercultural traffic, not far from the coast of modern-day Turkey. The small Cycladic island of Delos likewise attracted a multicultural array of pilgrims: it’s surely no coincidence that one of the earliest monumental Greek figurative sculptures known to us, inscribed as an offering from a certain ‘Nikandre’, was dedicated on Delos in the middle of the seventh century. 35 IBT039 – The Art of the Body with pics newest:Layout 1 21/2/11 15:32 Page 36 THE ART OF THE BODY: antiqvityv and its legacy Entrepreneurial Greek merchants were quick to capitalise on such cultural interchange. Some even set up their home in Egypt. We know of at least one certified Greek colony situated not in the area around Greece, Turkey or Southern Italy, but rather in the Upper Nile Delta – albeit within easy reach of the Mediterranean Sea. The residents of Naukratis adopted a Greek name to define their ‘power’ (kratos) of or over ‘ships’ (naus); one Greek historian tells that Amasis II (Pharaoh 570–526 BC) officially handed over the colony to Greek settlers (Herodotus, 2.178). Still, there could be no denying Naucratis’ Egyptian context, located some hundred miles north- west of Cairo. By the sixth century, imports and exports between Greece and Egypt were evidently turning into big business. This two-way exchange of goods went hand-in-hand with a bartering of ideas. ‘The Greek masters’, declares Gombrich, ‘went to school with the Egyptians.’ Ancient writers were not unaware of the debt. One first-century BC author even explains how the proportions of early Greek sculpture derived from Egyptian canons of proportion. According to Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian working in first-century BC Rome, a pair of artists named Telekles and Theodoros used the Egyptian scheme to practical advantage. Collaborating on a statue set up in Samos, the two brothers were able to finish the statue despite working miles apart: Telekles made one half of it in Samos, while Theodoros made the other half in Ephesus. ‘When the parts were joined together, the whole work so fitted together as to have the appearance of having been made by one man’ (Library, 1.98.6–9): This kind of work is not practised among the Greeks, but among the Egyptians it has been especially perfected. For with them the symmetrical proportions of statues are not judged according to what appears to the eye [kata tēn horasin phantasias], as they are with the Greeks; rather, when the Egyptians lay out their stones, they divide them up and set to work on them – and it’s only at that stage when they deter- mine the modular proportions [to analogon], from the smallest to the biggest. They divide the layout of the body as a whole into twenty- one parts plus a quarter, and in this way they attribute the figure with 36 IBT039 – The Art of the Body with pics newest:Layout 1 21/2/11 15:32 Page 37 figuring what comes naturally? its overarching system of proportional symmetry. Whenever the craftsmen agree an absolute size with one another, they then work separately and harmonise the respective sizes of their works.

Load more