HISTORY OF ANCIENT GREEK SCULPTURE
EARLY ANCIENT GREEK SCULPTURE
The first Greek statues were made during the Archaic Age (750 B.C. to 500 B.C.). They had the same rigidity, stiff posture and stylized walking gait as their counterparts in Egypt. Their left arm was forward and the fist were clenched like most Egyptian standing figures. The first advancement the Greeks made was creating a free standing statue. Egyptian statues were either seated or shown emerging from a slab of stone which acted to hold the figure up.
Early statues called “ kouroi” were often sensuous and monumental nude statues and often featured a mysterious Mona Lisa smile. “Kouros” and “ kore” are the male and female terms for “young person.” Art historian Andre Stewart told National Geographic, kouroi “were intended be erotic.” The subjects were usually young, male and had beautiful bodies. The largest known kouri are 16 feet high and made from marble. Before kouri the largest known sculpture in Greece were small bronzes.
Adam Masterman, an art teacher, wrote in Quora.com: The Archaic period (700-490 B.C.) represents the Greek response to seeing the awesome and impressive monumental sculptures of ancient Egypt. Archaic sculptures are relatively realistic, but very stiff and formal. They often stand in perfectly symmetrical poses, and have an imposing bulk to their proportions. They tend to feel more like archetypes than individuals, monuments rather than portraits.”
According to the Canadian Museum of History: “Life-sized or larger stone sculptures were not produced in Greece before 650 B.C. It was around that time that the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichos allowed two groups of Greeks (Ionians and Carians) to settle along the banks of the Nile River. The Greeks learned the art of large stone carving from the Egyptians although they used the limestone and marble available in Greece, not the harder porphyry and granodiorite favoured by the Egyptians. The Egyptian “look and feel” was initially adopted by the Greeks but they were not content for long to simply produce sculptures in a style that had served the East for many generations. Within a couple of centuries they had evolved their distinctive Greek approach and abandoned the Egyptian formula.
Classical Greek Sculpture
Classical Greek Sculpture (500B.C. to 323 B.C.) was less rigid than sculptures from the Archaic period. Works featured flexed knees, turned heads, and contemplative expressions that were regarded as attempts to suggest motion, thoughts and naturalism. As time went on more and more anatomical features emerged, the bodies became more relaxed, muscular, sensual and less rigid, hair falls more naturally, motion was conveyed, clothing seems softer and more cloth-like facial expression convey more emotion and movement and action and are more realistically conveyed. A “middle distance” gaze of the statue’s eyes was greatly admired.
As Greek art developed and the sculptors evolved from skilled craftsmen into artists, the buttocks on their creations became more rounded, the ears took on more of a three-dimensional shape, collarbones were more pronounced, and, according to Boorstin, the lachrymal caruncle of the eyes was revealed for the first time. “The whole figure becomes more alive,” he says, “as the stance becomes relaxed and rigid symmetry and posture disappears…Their favored sculptural material was bronze…Bronze freed the sculptor to uplift limbs and tempted him to new postures.” [Source: “The Creators” by Daniel Boorstin,μ]
Adam Masterman wrote in Quora.com: “The Classical period (480-323 B.C.) was defined by a marked increase in naturalism, which means that the sculptures started looking more like real people in real poses. This period shows the first examples of contrapposto, which is where the weight is shifted to one leg (which is how humans tend to stand). Contrapposto is more realistic, and it’s also more visually dynamic; it creates a subtle s-shape to the torso that is very common and recognizable in Classical sculpture. These figures are still very idealized, but with more anatomical subtlety and muscular definition, and a broadening range of poses.”
Describing a classical Nike, or Victory, from the Acropolis Museum Holland Cotter wrote in the New York Times: “Bending to untie her sandal, the intricate, looping folds of her drapery creating a linear pattern that reveals rather than hides the swelling contours of her torso. Her sensuality stands in dramatic contrast to a stele from the Metropolitan’s own collection, in which a mournful looking little girl holds two pet doves, one of which gently touches her mouth with its beak.” [Source: Holland Cotter, New York Times, March 12, 1993]
On some funerary sculptures, some of which may have been carved by artists who worked on the Parthenon, Cotter wrote in the New York Times: “Here the figures are neither gods nor heroes but human beings engaged in the intimate activities of their lives. On one memorial, a husband and wife gaze confidingly at each other; on another, the well-known “Grave Stele of Hegeso,” a wealthy woman regretfully admires her jewels, carried in a box by her servant. The presence of the servant… is of much interest here. Notably smaller than her seated mistress, anonymous, proferring wealth that is not hers, surely she has something pertinent to say about what democracy… actually meant in the Greece of the fifth century B.C. “Golden Age,” a society, after all, that held a large population of slaves and extended full citizenship only to men.
Polyclitus and Praxiteles
Polyclitus was one of Greece’s most famous sculptures. According to an often repeated tale he once made two statues at the same time. One was made according to his principals of art and another he modified according the wishes of people who observed it. When the two were finally unveiled everyone marveled at one of the statues and laughed at the other. Thereupon Plyclitus said: “But the one of which you find fault with, you made yourselves; while he one you marvel at, I made.” [Source: “The Creators” by Daniel Boorstin,μ]
Polyclitus produced wonderful sculptures of athletes. A New York Times critic Grace Gluek wrote his “brilliance is evident on the rhythmic play between the torso and the thorax, each tilting slightly in the opposite directions, and in the lifelike separation of the feet that gives the otherwise placid statue a sense of movement.”
Praxiteles did some of the most wonderful sculptures in Olympia and is one of the few artists we know by name who has produced works that exist today; the sensuous “ Aphrodite of the Cnidians” and classic “ Hermes “ . Scopas was the name of another great Greek sculptor.
On a famous story about Praxiteles, Pausanias wrote in “Description of Greece”, Book I: Attica (A.D. 160): “ Leading from the prytaneum is a road called Tripods. The place takes its name from the shrines, large enough to hold the tripods which stand upon them, of bronze, but containing very remarkable works of art, including a Satyr, of which Praxiteles is said to have been very proud. Phryne once asked of him the most beautiful of his works, and the story goes that lover-like he agreed to give it, but refused to say which he thought the most beautiful. So a slave of Phryne rushed in saying that a fire had broken out in the studio of Praxiteles, and the greater number of his works were lost, though not all were destroyed. Praxiteles at once started to rush through the door crying that his labour was all wasted if indeed the flames had caught his Satyr and his Love. But Phryne bade him stay and be of good courage, for he had suffered no grievous loss, but had been trapped into confessing which were the most beautiful of his works. So Phryne chose the statue of Love; while a Satyr is in the temple of Dionysus hard by, a boy holding out a cup.” [Source: Pausanias, “Description of Greece,” with an English Translation by W.H.S. Jones, Litt.D. in 4 Volumes. Volume 1.Attica and Cornith, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1918]