The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art From Winckelmann to Picasso 9780755625789, 9780755631100

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illustrations Sculptures are in marble unless otherwise indicated. Since it is not the aim of this book to take sides in debates on the dating, attribution, or status of ancient sculptures, data are given only where there is a high degree of scholarly consensus. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

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Laocoon, prior to twentieth-century restoration, height 242 cm, Musei Vaticani, Rome (1059). Alinari Archives – Alinari Archive, Florence. Borghese Gladiator, signed on the support by Agasias, son of Dositheos of Ephesos, height 199 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Alinari Archives – Alinari Archive, Florence. Belvedere Torso, signed on the support by Apollonios, son of Nestor the Athenian, height 159 cm, Museo PioClementino, Musei Vaticani, Rome (542). Iberfoto/ Alinari Archives, Florence. Apollo Belvedere, prior to twentieth-century restoration, height 224 cm, Museo Pio-Clementino, Musei Vaticani, Rome (1015). Alinari Archives – Brogi Archive, Florence. Fallen warrior from the East Pediment of the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina, early fifth century bc, length c. 185 cm, Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich/photo Christa Koppermann. Reclining male figure (known as the river-god ‘Ilissos’) from the West Pediment of the Parthenon, c. 438–432 bc, length 156 cm, British Museum, London (West Pediment A; 1816,0610.99). © The Trustees of the British Museum. Figure of Dionysus (known in the nineteenth century as ‘Theseus’ or ‘Hercules’) from the East Pediment of

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the Parthenon, c. 438–432 bc, length 130 cm, British Museum, London (East Pediment D; 1816,0610.93). © The Trustees of the British Museum. Female Figures (known in the nineteenth century as ‘Fates’) from the East Pediment of the Parthenon, c. 438–432 bc, height 130 cm (figure K), British Museum, London (East Pediment K, L, M; 1816,0610.97 and 1816,0610.405). © The Trustees of the British Museum. Franz von Stuck, Wounded Amazon, 1904, oil on canvas, 65 x 76 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Vincent Van Gogh Foundation. Photograph of the Aegina Room of the Glyptothek, Munich, with its original decorations and view to the Barberini Faun, Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich. Photograph of the current display of the West Pediment from the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina, in the Glyptothek, Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich/photo Renate Kühling. Photograph of the current display of the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Benjamin Robert Haydon, Drawing of ‘Theseus’ (East Pediment D, Fig. 7), 1808, black chalk, heightened with white, on brown paper, 46.5 x 59.1 cm, British Museum, London (1881,0709.531). © The Trustees of the British Museum. Julia Margaret Cameron, Teachings from the Elgin Marbles, 1867, albumen print from wet collodion glass negative, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (The Nevison Bequest, E.2745–1990). George Frederic Watts, Physical Energy, c. 1870–1904, bronze cast (erected 1907), height 386 cm, Kensington Gardens, London. © The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. George Frederic Watts, Endymion, c. 1868–73, oil on canvas, 104.5 x 141 cm, private collection/courtesy Nevill Keating Pictures. James McNeill Whistler, Venus (from the ‘Six Projects’), c. 1868 (later retouched), oil on millboard mounted on wood panel, 61.9 x 45.6 cm, Freer Gallery of Art,



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18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1903.175a–b. 73 Venus de Milo, c. 100 bc, height 211 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. DeA Picture Library, licensed by Alinari. 75 Copy after Praxiteles, Aphrodite of Knidos (mid-fourth century bc), ‘Colonna’ version, height 205 cm, Museo PioClementino, Musei Vaticani. © 2011. Photo Scala, Florence. 77 Albert Moore, A Venus, 1869, oil on canvas, 160 x 76.2 cm, York Museums Trust (York Art Gallery). The Bridgeman Art Library. 91 Adolph Menzel, Studio Wall, 1872, oil on canvas, 111 x 79.3 cm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg. DeA Picture Library, licensed by Alinari. 94 Discobolos, traditionally considered a Roman copy after a bronze by Myron (mid-fifth century bc), ‘Lancellotti’ version, height 155 cm, Museo Nazionale delle Terme, Rome. Alinari Archives – Alinari Archive, Florence. 112 Apoxyomenos, traditionally considered a Roman copy after a bronze by Lysippos (fourth century bc), height 205 cm, Musei Vaticani, Rome. Alinari Archives – Anderson Archive, Florence. 114 Doryphoros, traditionally considered a Roman copy after a bronze by Polykleitos (mid-fifth century bc), height 212 cm, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples (6011). Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali Raffaello/Alinari. 115 Diadoumenos, traditionally considered a Roman copy after a bronze by Polykleitos (mid-fifth century bc), ‘Vaison’ version, height 183 cm, British Museum, London (1870,0712.1). © The Trustees of the British Museum. 116 Hermes with the infant Dionysus, attributed to Praxiteles, height 210 cm, Archaeological Museum, Olympia. Alinari Archives – Alinari Archive, Florence. 119 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Baigneuse au griffon (Bather with a Griffon), 1870, oil on canvas, 184 x 115 cm, Museu de Arte, São Paulo, Brazil. DeA Picture Library, licensed by Alinari. 122 ‘Warrior A’ (found at Riace), perhaps mid-fifth century bc, bronze, height 198 cm, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Reggio Calabria. Alinari Archives – Alinari Archive, Florence. 134

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29. Adolf von Hildebrand, Stehender junger Mann, 1881–84, height 183 cm, Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/bpk/Andres Kilger. 30. Auguste Rodin, L’Âge d’airain (The Age of Bronze), 1877–80, bronze (cast by Thiébaut frères), height 178 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Alinari Archives – Alinari Archive, Florence. 31. Frederic Leighton, The Sluggard, 1886, bronze, height 191.1 cm, Tate, London (NO1752). © Tate, London, 2011. 32. Frederic Leighton, Athlete Wrestling with a Python, 1877, bronze, height 174.6 cm, Tate, London (NO1754). © Tate, London, 2011. 33. Frederic Leighton, Daedalus and Icarus, 1869, oil on canvas, 138.2 x 106.5 cm, The Faringdon Collection Trust, Buscot Park. 34. Kore (Maiden), late sixth century bc, height 115.5 cm, Acropolis Museum, Athens (680). DeA Picture Library, licensed by Alinari. 35. Pierre Bonnard, Le Bol de lait (The Bowl of Milk), c. 1919, oil on canvas, 116 x 121 cm, Tate, London (T00936). DeA Picture Library, licensed by Alinari. 36. Wyndham Lewis, Portrait of an Englishwoman, 1913–14, graphite and gouache on paper, 56 x 38 cm, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund (1949.457). © 2011 Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence. By permission, The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity). 37. Kouros, said to be from Attica, c. 590–580 bc, marble, height 194.6 cm, Metropolitan Museum, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1932 (32.11.1). DeA Picture Library, licensed by Alinari. 38. Aristide Maillol, Femme (La Méditerranée), 1905 (plaster), bronze cast c. 1951–53, bronze, 104.1 x 114.3 x 75.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Stephen C. Clark (173.1953) © 2011. Digital Image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011. 39. Photograph by Walter Bennington of Henri GaudierBrzeska working on the bust of Ezra Pound, 1914, Henry

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Moore Institute, Henry Moore Foundation. © Leeds Museum and Galleries. 40. Arno Breker, The Party, 1939, bronze, formerly New Reich Chancellery, Berlin (destroyed). Photo akg-images. 41. Pablo Picasso, The Pipes of Pan, 1923, oil on canvas, 205 x 174 cm, Musée Picasso, Paris. DeA Picture Library, licensed by Alinari. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2011. 42. Pablo Picasso, Study of Belvedere Torso (Fig. 3), 1892–93, charcoal and conté crayon on paper, 52.4 x 36.7 cm, Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Institut Cultura de Barcelona. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2011. 43. Pablo Picasso, Head, 1920, drawing, 13.8 x 11.4 cm, private collection. Archives Succession Picasso. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2011. 44. Hercules and Telephus, from Herculaneum, fresco, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples (9008). DeA Picture Library, licensed by Alinari. 45. Pablo Picasso, Classical Head, 1921, pastel on paper, 63.5 x 48 cm, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel/photo Peter Schibli. 46. Farnese Hercules, height 317 cm, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples (9001). Alinari Archives – Brogi Archive, Florence. 47. Farnese Bull, height 370 cm, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples (6002). Alinari Archives – Alinari Archive, Florence. 48. Pablo Picasso, Three Women at the Spring, 1921, oil on canvas, 203.9 x 174 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr and Mrs Allan D. Emil (332.1952). DeA Picture Library, licensed by Alinari. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2011. 49. Pablo Picasso, Vollard Suite 65 (4 April 1933), etching, 19.3 x 26.7 cm, Musée Picasso, Paris. © RMN/Thierry Le Mage. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2011. 50. Pablo Picasso, Vollard Suite 66 (5 April 1933), etching, 19.3 x 29.7 cm, Musée Picasso, Paris. © RMN/Thierry Le Mage. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2011. 51. Pablo Picasso, Vollard Suite 61 (1 April 1933), etching, 29.7 x 19.3 cm, Musée Picasso, Paris. © RMN/Thierry Le Mage. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2011.

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to The Henry Moore Foundation for generous support towards the cost of illustration. Special thanks are due to those who have read chapters or the entire text: the two anonymous readers for New Directions in Classics, whose reports were exceptionally helpful, Christopher Green, Ian Jenkins and Charles Martindale. These readers, and others who have responded to drafts presented in research seminars and symposia, suggested many additions and elaborations, all of them fascinating, but for many of which I have not been able to make space in this text. I hope that the many egregious lacunae in what is necessarily a preliminary treatment only will encourage other scholars to add their own insights in future. I should like to thank the many others who have given advice, answered specific questions, or contributed insights, among them Mary Beard, John Betts, Alexander Bird, Arawn Charters, Catharine Edwards, Jason Edwards, Ja´s Elsner, Donato Esposito, Simon Goldhill, Shelley Hales, Imogen Hart, Michael Hatt, David Hopkins, John House, Ronald Hutton, Duncan Kennedy, Kenneth Lapatin, Ed Lilley, Kathy McLaughlan, Pantelis Michelakis, Edward Morris, Kate Nichols, Claire O’Mahony, Mike O’Mahony, Robin Osborne, Tricha Passes, Richard Read, Anna Gruetzner Robins, Jason Rosenfeld, Dorothy Rowe, Wendy Sijnesael, Kim Sloan, Peter Trippi and Robert Upstone. I have twice offered a course unit on ‘The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture’ for final-year undergraduates at the University of Bristol, and should like to thank all of the students, whose lively discussions made important, and multifarious, contributions to my thinking: Georgie Bell, Sam Boynton, Penelope Buckley, Owen Clarke, Victoria Crump-Haill, Laura Dee, Clare Dickinson, Charlotte Drew, Emily Flaxman, Semma Freites, Helen Graham, Tara Hamilton Stubber, Amanda Hilliam, Amelia Hoppen, Lara Lindsay, Cyrus

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Mahboubian, Emily Moore, Ed Morley, Rosie O’Reilly, Catherine Pockson, Jacob Russell, Rowena Satchell, Alexandra Shuttleworth, Tom Stourton, Florence Thomas, Hermione Townsend, Hugo VaughanHughes, Rachel Walker and Willow Williams. I also thank the participants in the international workshop convened at Bristol by Charles Martindale and myself in July 2009: Ellen Adams, Stephen Bann, Harriet BattenFoster, Michael Bell, Sarah Betzer, Joshua Billings, Grace Brockington, Heather Crawley, Penelope Curtis, Jens Daehner, Whitney Davis, Martina Droth, Caroline van Eck, Jason Edwards, Jorge Egea, Roberto Ferrari, Rachel Flynn, Robert Fowler, Jason Gaiger, Bénédicte Garnier, David Gilks, Christopher Green, Shelley Hales, Katherine Harloe, Ian Jenkins, Bente Kiilerich, Sylvia Loreti, Miranda Mason, Claudine Mitchell, Steven Morant, Neville Morley, Kate Nichols, Robin Osborne, Alex Potts, Wendy Sijnesael, Michael Squire, Caroline Vout, Rachel Walker, Michael Williams and Vanda Zajko. The workshop was generously supported by the Bristol Institute for Research in the Humanities and the Arts (BIRTHA), the Departments of Classics and Ancient History and History of Art, and the Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition (IGRCT). I am much indebted also to colleagues who have participated in the many conferences and events held by the IGRCT over the past decade. Many thanks to Alex Wright, Cecile Rault, Gretchen Ladish, Robert Hastings, and others at I.B.Tauris and Dexter Haven Associates for their help and ingenuity in making the book into a reality. I am grateful as always to Lisa Agate for her superb picture research.

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introduction

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odernism in the visual arts is often defined as a liberation from the classical inheritance: Dadaism, wrote Hans Arp, ‘gave the clyster to Venus of Milo and allowed “Laocoon & Sons” to absent themselves at last after they had tortured themselves in the millennial fight with the rattlesnake’.1 The excitement of the modern has seemed to lie in a radical break from the past, a clean cut in which the rejection of the classical tradition opens the possibility to ‘make it new’, in Ezra Pound’s phrase. On the other hand, the modern discipline of art history began, according to one standard narrative, with the study of ancient art: Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of the Art of Antiquity2), first published in 1764, set the precedent for the historical study of the visual arts, still the dominant method in today’s scholarship (hence the standard name for the discipline, Kunstgeschichte or ‘art history’, as opposed, for example, to ‘literary criticism’). Thus the modern study of art and the making of modern art may appear to be founded on incompatible principles: the one on the centrality of ancient art, the other on its utter repudiation. This book begins from an opposite premise: that the modern study of ancient art and the making of modern art are inextricably intertwined. It is obvious enough that any notion of ‘modernity’ needs some form of ‘antiquity’ as its counterpoise, something that is already acknowledged in a founding text for the idea of a modern art, Charles Baudelaire’s ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ of 1863: ‘By “modernity” I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.’3 But if we cannot conceive of a ‘modern’ art without presupposing its ancient alter ego, no more can we envisage an ancient



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art that is uncontaminated by our own modern perspective. Walter Pater puts this well in an essay of 1868: The composite experience of all the ages is part of each one of us; to deduct from that experience, to obliterate any part of it, to come face to face with the people of a past age, as if the middle age, the Renaissance, the eighteenth century had not been, is as impossible as to become a little child, or enter again into the womb and be born.4

Thus the argument of this book works in two directions, which are reciprocal and complementary. On the one hand, to consider the art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a specifically ‘modern’ art, we shall need to examine the presuppositions about ancient art that enable the distinction between ancient and modern to be made in the first place. On the other hand, to understand what constitutes ancient art in any historically specific situation (including, of course, our own), we shall need to explore the modern conditions under which the study of antiquity has taken place. Crucially, these conditions include the notion of a modern art, without which, again, the notion of an ancient art cannot attain distinctive form. To say that antiquity and modernity, as conceptual or theoretical constructs, are mutually interdependent is scarcely to court controversy, and the point may even seem to boil down to a matter of terminology. In his early text, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, 1755), Winckelmann often simply used versions of the words ‘neu’ and ‘alt’ to distinguish between modern and ancient art, and some version of the ‘querelle des anciens et des modernes’ may be traced in any number of historical situations stretching back to antiquity itself, as E.R. Curtius pointed out as long ago as 1948.5 But it is fair to predict that the extension of the premise to the interrelations between classical scholarship and modern art will annoy at least some scholars in both disciplines. Consider the premise in a more radical form: the history of ancient art, as it is taught to today’s undergraduate students, is fundamentally shaped by events of the period since Winckelmann – and that applies to its evidential base, as well as to its methods of art-historical investigation. It is easy to support



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this claim with empirical data. For example, the illustrations to any textbook on ancient art published in the past fifty years comprise, almost exclusively, objects brought to scholarly attention after Winckelmann’s death. Among sculptures, the Elgin and Aegina Marbles, the Victory of Samothrace, the Doryphoros of Polykleitos, the pedimental sculptures of Olympia, the Hermes of Praxiteles, the korai of the Acropolis, the Charioteer of Delphi, the Zeus of Artemision, the Riace bronzes – all of these were unavailable for study in Winckelmann’s day, and the list can easily be extended to cover virtually all of the illustrations in any recent textbook. The few objects known to Winckelmann that still appear are relegated to later periods in the history, and to subordinate status. Moreover, and again with almost no exceptions, the objects in today’s textbooks, while they date from antiquity, cannot be shown to have been accorded any special value by the ancients themselves; their canonical status is a creation of modernity, not of antiquity. Such observations would be uncontroversial in relation to any historical period before the one here under consideration. No one would demur from the assertion that the High Renaissance understanding of ancient art, for example, was entirely contingent on the chance selection of objects that had been unearthed by the sixteenth century, together with such ancient literary references to art as had been transmitted and edited by that date. A problem emerges only when the assertion is extended to a period near our own. In that case, it comes into conflict with the conviction current among many scholars that their field of enquiry is ancient art as it was in antiquity, or as the ancients themselves knew it. But to hold such a conviction is tantamount, in Pater’s phrase, to believing that we can ‘enter again into the womb’. Scholars of modern art will be more likely to object that the enquiries of this book are simply irrelevant to their field of study – that ancient art, while it did not disappear from view after the end of neoclassicism, lost its privileged status as either conceptual norm or visual prototype; thus it might be possible to trace the influence of certain ancient sculptures on artworks of the period after 1815, for example, but that exercise would alter only details, not the main thrust, of the history of modern art. But consider, again, a more radical form of the premise: any debate in the criticism of modern art, after 1815, has its counterpart in a debate on



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ancient sculpture – and that applies as much to modern artistic projects ordinarily figured as progressive, either politically or aesthetically, as it does to those customarily treated as conservative. It is easy, here too, to support this claim with empirical evidence. While the coincidence of such wide-ranging issues as realism, originality, academicism versus the avant-garde, personal style or primitivism in discussions of ancient and modern art might be dismissed as mere emanations of the Zeitgeist, very little research is required to demonstrate empirical points of contact between disputants from the two arenas: examples to be explored below include Thomas Lawrence and Ennio Quirino Visconti, Auguste Rodin and Walter Pater, Adolf von Hildebrand and Ernest A. Gardner, R.H. Wilenski and Bernard Ashmole, Eric Gill and Gisela Richter – and, representing both arenas at once, Stanley Casson, the Oxford classics don who published books on both archaic Greek sculptural technique and modern sculptural practice around 1930. Furthermore, the modern artists who made work in response to particular ancient sculptures include all the heroes of the modernist avant-garde, as well as academic classicists; for example, among those who have made reference, of one kind or another, to the Venus de Milo (a discovery of 1820) can be counted such artists as Chassériau, Daumier, Rodin, Whistler, Menzel, Dalí, Niki de Saint Phalle, Arman and Jim Dine. These data points will seem merely eccentric to some, but again such would never be the case in the historiography of any earlier period in the history of art. No one questions the relevance of contacts between artists and humanist scholars in the Renaissance, or considers Michelangelo’s fascination with the Laocoon to make him any the less an innovator. The resistance to acknowledging the presence of ancient sculpture in modernism may owe something to loss of familiarity with the dauntingly technical world of classical archaeology among art historians trained in recent decades, but it is underpinned by the presupposition that modernism derives its very raison d’être from a radical break with the classical tradition. The corollary is an inordinately powerful prejudice that makes any form of classical reference, after the putative break, appear politically as well as aesthetically conservative – so powerful, indeed, that it may taint the scholar herself. To investigate classical reference in modern art is to risk being accused of complicity with reactionary ideologies. This, though, is



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to ignore the other half of art, in Baudelaire’s formulation. If the radical move, when Baudelaire was writing, was to call attention to the modern side of the dichotomy, the equivalent move for today may be to point to the ancient side. Yet Baudelaire’s two halves of art do not map simply onto the antithesis between ancient and modern art. The fallacy in the received views of both communities of scholars is the assumption that ‘the eternal and the immutable’ are the province of ancient art, while only modern art displays Baudelairean contingency. Some such assumption is equally dear to classicists who long to recover ancient art as it ‘really’ was in antiquity and to historians of modern art who long for a stable entity against which to pit modernist flux, but it enfeebles Baudelaire’s insight. Just as modern art aspires to the condition of antiquity – to become something ‘enduring’, in Cézanne’s phrase, ‘like the art in museums’6 – so must ancient art become ‘ephemeral, fugitive, contingent’ if it is not to petrify. That makes the case of sculpture – the petrified art of antiquity – particularly interesting. Winckelmann’s History emphasised sculpture partly for contingent reasons: the most compelling examples of ancient art available to him, in eighteenth-century Rome, were the marble sculptures unearthed in the Renaissance, the subjects of his great setpiece descriptions. It was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, however, who established a philosophical grounding for sculpture as the quintessential medium of antiquity, bound into a scheme of inexorable historical development in which painting was destined to succeed as the visual art-form of the ‘romantic’ or modern age. This scheme, elaborated in Hegel’s Berlin lectures of the 1820s, left its indelible mark not only on the discipline of art history, but also on theories of modern art that tended to found their developmental narratives on painting; a familiar example is the famous essay, ‘Modernist Painting’ of 1960, by the foremost American modernist critic, Clement Greenberg. Although Greenberg often discussed sculpture in his criticism, his few theoretical articles trace the sequence of modernist innovations in the medium of painting – from Manet through the Impressionists, Cézanne and Cubism to abstraction, in a progressive refinement of the only feature unique to painting, ‘the ineluctable flatness of the surface’.7 While Greenberg’s theory of modernism has come under widespread attack in the years



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since the publication of ‘Modernist Painting’, the underlying prejudice against the sculptural remains surprisingly persistent. Thus experiments with sculptural form, such as those in the painting of the 1920s, are often still seen as conservative retreats from the modernist project. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that this view depends ultimately on a Hegelian notion of artistic progress in which sculpture is doomed to the ancient past. No doubt there is some truth to this: one fascination of ancient sculpture, at least, lies in its silent durability in the face of change. Yet the most compelling stories about it are those in which it breaks free from its stolid inertia: the tales of Daedalus, the first sculptor to open the eyes of his statues and to separate their legs from the block, so that they seemed to be living beings,8 or of Pygmalion, who made a statue so beautiful that it came to life. As such stories remind us, one may fall in love with a statue, or worship it – possibilities that may disrupt its imperturbable autonomy in a Hegelian scheme of things. We have already seen, too, that the canon of ancient sculptures has been in a constant process of mutation throughout the period under consideration. In the same Salon review in which he introduced his idea of the ‘heroism of modern life’, Baudelaire declared sculpture ‘boring’ on account of its immemorial antiquity as an art-form, its stupid primitivism in contrast to the smart modernity of painting. Yet in a striking example of what Walter Benjamin called his ‘profound duplicity’ he also hinted at another way to construe the paragone: painting, with its single point of view, is ‘exclusive and despotic’, while sculpture has ‘a hundred different points of view’.9 In its immediate context this is a demerit, a sign of sculpture’s primitive inability to transform itself from brute matter into controlled artistic form. Nonetheless it links sculpture, paradoxically, to the contingency that Baudelaire elsewhere makes the sign of the modern. These disparate considerations make the enforced segregation of ancient sculpture and modern art in our scholarly disciplines appear not merely empirically dubious, but also intellectually reductive. To continue this line of thought, it may be helpful to consider more closely the writings of someone to whom such segregation would have appeared simply nonsensical, the eighteenth-century scholar who dedicated his History of the Art of Antiquity ‘to Art and the Age’.10



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Johann Joachim Winckelmann

In an essay of 1867, Walter Pater presents Winckelmann’s ‘Gewahrwerden der griechischen Kunst’ – ‘his finding of Greek art’, in Goethe’s phrase11 – as a quintessential modernist break from the past, a liberation from authority: ‘On a sudden the imagination feels itself free.’12 Pater also quotes Hegel to similar effect: Winckelmann ‘opened a new sense for the study of art. He is to be regarded as one of those who, in the sphere of art, have known how to initiate a new organ for the human spirit.’13 On this view Winckelmann belongs to the intellectual avant-garde; he is the pioneer of a new way of looking and thinking that is then taken up by Goethe, Hegel and Pater himself. Winckelmann’s life story, which Pater recounts in detail, is a striking one: the son of a cobbler in provincial Germany, he was nearly forty, still poverty-stricken, and working in obscurity in a library near Dresden when his first, slim book, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, appeared in 1755 – the title already suggests that Winckelmann intended no mere antiquarian study, but rather a project with direct relevance to contemporary art. Only then was he able to journey to Rome, at last to set eyes upon the celebrated works of ancient sculpture in the vast collections of the Papacy, the city of Rome, and the leading Roman families. Thirteen years later he was dead, murdered in a brutal attack without completing the extensive additions he had planned to his magnum opus, the History of the Art of Antiquity, the first edition of which had appeared in 1764; the second edition, compiled from his notes, was published in Vienna in 1776, the year of the American Declaration of Independence. By then the History and other writings by Winckelmann, written in or translated into French and Italian as well as German, had circulated through a variety of channels, including substantial excerpts in periodicals. Goethe’s essay on Winckelmann, published in 1805, made no bones about either his passionate friendships with other men or his lack of Christian religious commitment (Goethe explained this as a ‘pagan mentality’).14 Pater hinted, too, at his radical political views, which percolate into the History in the form of a dramatic idealisation of ancient Greek political freedom. Nothing about Winckelmann’s background or his career can



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remotely be described as conventional, or privileged. However, through a combination of single-minded dedication to his work and imaginative flair he was able to found a new discipline, one that is still known under a name that recalls the title of his great work, Kunstgeschichte or the history of art. Outsider though Winckelmann was to the establishment institutions of his own day, those of ours – the museums, university departments and research institutes that deal with art history – are built on his intellectual innovation. Yet Winckelmann, in Pater’s account, is also a latecomer. Arriving in Rome in 1755, after his luckless early career in what Pater calls ‘the tarnished intellectual world of Germany in the earlier half of the eighteenth century,’15 he is bowled over by the ancient sculptures he sees in the great Roman collections. His experience recapitulates that of the humanist scholars and artists of two or three centuries earlier, when the first wave of enthusiasm for excavation had unearthed the ancient masterpieces that still dominated the Roman collections in Winckelmann’s day. Pater captures something of the excitement of this first wave of discovery: Filled as our culture is with the classical spirit, we can hardly imagine how deeply the human mind was moved, when, at the Renaissance, in the midst of a frozen world, the buried fire of ancient art rose up from under the soil. Winckelmann here reproduces for us the earlier sentiment of the Renaissance.16

Thus Pater was able to add the essay on Winckelmann, six years after its initial publication in the Westminster Review, to his collection on the art and literature of the Renaissance itself. Winckelmann’s role is that of an intermediary, without whose writings we could ‘hardly imagine’ the earlier period of discovery. By the same token, though, Winckelmann is out of chronological step, not just with the Renaissance artists and writers treated in the other essays of Pater’s collection, but also with the sculptures he himself describes so compellingly. Already in its first edition, the History was designed to give comprehensive coverage of all the extant remains of ancient art, and it was expanded significantly in the later editions. Thus it included such recent discoveries as the magnificent bronzes recovered



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from the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum in 1753 and the marble sculpture of a female figure unearthed by Winckelmann’s own patron Cardinal Albani and restored as a Thetis.17 Nonetheless, the star exhibits of the History were sculptures that had entered Roman collections in the first great wave of discovery, long before Winckelmann described them – in the order of their appearance in the History, the Venus de’ Medici (first recorded in 1638), the Niobe group (1583), the Laocoon (1506), the Belvedere Torso (1432–35), the Farnese Hercules (1556), the Apollo Belvedere (1509), the Borghese Gladiator (1611), the sculpture in the Belvedere misnamed Antinous (1543; Winckelmann thinks it a Meleager).18 These sculptures are given special treatment, in passages that immediately stand out from the narrative flow of the History: time stands still, and the reader is drawn into rapt contemplation. In these passages Winckelmann creates a modern version of the ancient literary genre of ekphrasis – set-piece description of a work of art or a scene in nature – and they are replete with allusions to the Homeric epics and other works of ancient literature.19 Thus they are immersed in classical learning; at the same time, they are Winckelmann’s most striking innovation as an art writer, distilled records of the process of looking and cogitation refined through his years of study. For the second edition, Winckelmann added an ekphrasis on Cardinal Albani’s Thetis – the only recent discovery to receive such treatment (and interestingly, also the only one never to succeed in entering the canon of the most celebrated sculptures).20 All of the other ekphrases relate to sculptures that ‘rose up from under the soil’ in the Renaissance. Those sculptures belong to the Renaissance too, in parts at least of their material fabric and facture; only the Belvedere Torso remained unrestored, while the others had been provided liberally with new extremities and details – how extensively they have been recarved is still a matter of debate. Above all, the sculptures belong to the Renaissance in fame. In the Introduction to the third part of his Lives of the Artists, Vasari lists most of them among the sculptures that inspired the artists of the High Renaissance: ‘Success came to the artists who followed, after they had seen some of the finest works of art mentioned by Pliny dug out of the earth: namely, the Laocoon, the Hercules, the great torso of the Belvedere, as well as the Venus, the Cleopatra, the Apollo, and countless others…’21



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It is interesting that already, in the mid-sixteenth century, Vasari was determined to link the extant sculptures to the most authoritative ancient text that deals with art, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. However, the claim is tendentious, or at best wishful thinking. None of the sculptures is certainly recorded, either in Pliny or in any other ancient source that comes down to us, except for the Laocoon (and there are problems even in that case).22 Thus there is no reason to believe that any of them was famous, or even particularly well-regarded in antiquity (again excepting the Laocoon). Winckelmann was well aware of this, and noted that the artists who signed the Belvedere Torso (Apollonius) and the Farnese Hercules (Glycon) were unrecorded in ancient sources. Indeed he offered tart censure to Jean-Baptiste Dubos, the author of Réflections critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture of 1719, for claiming that Pliny had mentioned the Farnese Hercules: ‘he mentions neither it nor Glycon who executed it.’23 Winckelmann’s History also demonstrated that, while the sculptures had frequently been illustrated together in compendia of the most famous sculptures of antiquity, they were a very miscellaneous assortment indeed, in terms of sculptural style or conjectural date of origin. Thus not only their individual fame but also their collective status as a canon of ancient sculpture was a creation of the Renaissance and succeeding centuries, not of their ancient origin. Moreover, they were nearing the end of their ascendancy: within fifty years they would be superseded by newer discoveries. Thus Winckelmann is doubly out of chronological step: if he came too late for his own sculptures, he also came too early for the canon of ancient sculptures that would be explored in the art-historical discipline he is famous for initiating. A massive mutation in the canon was already evident by the time Pater wrote his essay, as he freely acknowledges: It is since [Winckelmann’s] time that many of the most significant examples of Greek art have been submitted to criticism. He had seen little or nothing of what we ascribe to the age of Pheidias; and his conception of Greek art tends, therefore, to put the mere elegance of the imperial society of ancient Rome in place of the severe and chastened grace of the palaestra. For the most part he had to penetrate to Greek art through copies, imitations, and later Roman art itself; and it is not

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surprising that this turbid medium has left in Winckelmann’s actual results much that a more privileged criticism can correct.24

This may seem a curiously lukewarm estimate of a scholar to whom Pater was devoting by far the longest essay of his volume The Renaissance. But the experienced reader of Pater will hear the irony in the phrase ‘actual results’ – a clear signal that there is something else more important in Winckelmann’s work, something that ‘more privileged’ critics, busy making their corrections, may overlook. What could this be? What could make Winckelmann’s writings on ancient sculpture still worth reading, in Pater’s case shortly after, in ours rather longer after the canon of sculptures he wrote about had been superseded by an altogether different set of objects? The sculpture scholar Alex Potts, in his introduction to the recent translation of Winckelmann’s History published by the Getty Research Institute, several times mentions a timeframe of 50 years to demonstrate the impact of Winckelmann’s thought.25 That would neatly delimit his influence from the date of the first edition of the History (1764) to the fall of Napoleon (1815) – the approximate, or symbolic, date at which a new generation of Greek sculptures (to be explored in Chapter 1 below) supplanted in fame all of the Graeco–Roman sculptures beloved of Winckelmann, looted by Napoleon, then restored to their Roman collections, only to be downgraded by the ‘more privileged’ criticism of the next decades. Our timeframe, however, must be not 50, but 250, years if Winckelmann’s writings are still to be worth reading, and Pater’s essay may help us to see why. When he turns from Winckelmann’s biography to a discussion of Greek art itself, Pater does not hesitate to refer to works Winckelmann never saw – his prime examples are the Venus de Milo, discovered in 1820, and the line of youths on horseback from the Parthenon frieze, unavailable for study until it was removed to London in the early nineteenth century.26 Perhaps this is a signal that Winckelmann’s achievement was not so much to interpret the works that he actually discussed as to teach his readers how they might interpret works of art for themselves. The passages of description in Pater’s essay are brief, but he was learning to write in Winckelmann’s own vein: two years later he would publish the extended ekphrasis on Leonardo’s Mona Lisa that

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has become one of the most famous passages in English prose. The fortunes of the Mona Lisa passage echo those of Winckelmann’s own ekphrases, which began to circulate in manuscript form even before the first publication of the History and afterwards continued to be quoted, excerpted or anthologised apart from their narrative context – even now, it is safe to guess that many more students and scholars are familiar with Winckelmann’s passage on the Apollo Belvedere, for example, than have read the History from start to finish. Pater’s ekphrasis, too, has often been detached from the Leonardo essay and reprinted on its own, most notably as the first item in W.B. Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse of 1936, where it is divided into lines of free verse; in this reprinting, the passage becomes foundational for the practice of modern verse-writing, quite apart from its original context within Pater’s study of Leonardo.27 Thus the ekphrases play a double role. They can stand on their own, as autonomous pieces of writing, and indeed it is probably in that form that they have been most widely disseminated. Yet they also function, in the Leonardo essay or in Winckelmann’s History, as elements in a narrative that would be impoverished, or even pointless, without them: if they add little or nothing to the historical data presented in the essay or the History, they are indispensable for demonstrating why the historical data matter in the first place. They are both detachable from and integral to the larger narratives of which they are part. To see why this might be important, it is worth looking at some of Winckelmann’s ekphrases in more detail. The technique is established in the very first ekphrasis Winckelmann wrote, the passage on the Laocoon in the Reflections of 1755, which proved instantly detachable: it inspired Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s meditation on the difference between the temporal and spatial arts, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry of 1766 – already this first ekphrasis encouraged a response that extended its implications in new directions. Yet the passage has its maximum impact when it is read in the context of the Reflections, where its detachability is integral. In this early text, Winckelmann is not yet concerned with establishing a historical system for Greek art, and the narrative proceeds instead from the conditions in Greek antiquity that favoured an art centred on the nude human body to thematic sections on aspects of sculptural practice (as well as a section on painting),

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with abundant data and a consistent emphasis on what modern artists can learn from ancient example. Section four, approximately half-way through the text, interrupts the discursive flow with an abrupt shift to more elevated and allusive language. First Winckelmann presents a succinct summary of what makes Greek art great, in a phrase that has subsequently been quoted almost any time his name is mentioned: ‘eine edle Einfalt, und eine stille Größe’, ‘a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’. There follows the first of the grand similes, with Homeric resonance, that would serve in Winckelmann’s later writings to signal moments of special insight: ‘Just as the depths of the sea always remain calm however much the surface may rage, so does the expression of the figures of the Greeks reveal a great and composed soul even in the midst of passion.’ This prepares the way for the ekphrasis proper: Such a soul is reflected in the face of Laocoon – and not in the face alone – despite his violent suffering. The pain is revealed in all the muscles and sinews of his body, and we ourselves can almost feel it as we observe the painful contraction of the abdomen alone without regarding the face and other parts of the body. This pain, however, expresses itself with no sign of rage in his face or in his entire bearing. He emits no terrible screams such as Virgil’s Laocoon, for the opening of his mouth does not permit it; it is rather an anxious and troubled sighing as described by Sadoleto. The physical pain and the nobility of soul are distributed with equal strength over the entire body and are, as it were, held in balance with one another. Laocoon suffers, but he suffers like Sophocles’ Philoctetes; his pain touches our very souls, but we wish that we could bear misery like this great man.28

When he wrote this passage, Winckelmann can have seen the Laocoon only in reproduction, and it might be argued that the ekphrasis is a literary artifice, an imitation of descriptive passages in ancient texts (such as the famous description of Achilles’s shield in Book XVIII of Homer’s Iliad) rather than a spontaneous response to the sculpture. Even the personal note – ‘we ourselves can almost feel’ the pain – recalls the devices in Ovid or Philostratus for conveying the lifelike vividness of artistic representations. Winckelmann draws on Virgil, Sophocles and the Renaissance poet Jacopo Sadoleto (whose Latin poem responds to the Laocoon’s initial discovery) in what may seem, at first thought, a mere display of erudition.

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But if the passage is thoroughly immersed in the ancient tradition of ekphrasis, it also changes the terms, and with them the relation between the set-piece description and its surrounding context. Unlike the fantastical objects in such ancient ekphrases as that on Achilles’s shield, the Laocoon is an actual object that survives from antiquity (even though Winckelmann had not yet seen it with his own eyes, Fig. 1). Thus the role of the passage is not simply to illustrate, or embellish, the point about ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’; it is rather a proof that the Greek sculptural ideal is something concrete and extant in the modern world. Already the first sentence erases the difference between the sculpture, as representation, and the ensouled, suffering person, the Trojan priest Laocoon. The second sentence raises the stakes: the marble is no mere relic of antiquity, locked in the past, but has the power to produce a physical response in the modern observer: ‘we ourselves can almost feel’ the pain. The three literary allusions are not merely ornamental: in a process of triangulation they pinpoint the precise quality of the pain, less like Virgil’s theatrical scream than the



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1

Laocoon, prior to twentiethcentury restoration.

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noble suffering of Sophocles’s Philoctetes or the ‘anxious and troubled sighing’ observed by Sadoleto. The final clause raises the stakes yet again to introduce a moral dimension: ‘we wish that we could bear misery like this great man.’ When he reached Rome, Winckelmann was able at last to study the sculpture itself, and to compare it to other sculptures. Already in the Reflections he is fascinated by the musculature of the Laocoon. In the History he expands this into a four-way visual comparison: The serrated muscles on the sides [of the Borghese Gladiator, Fig. 2] are more prominent, active, and contractile than is natural. The same thing is yet more clearly seen, in the same muscles, in the Laocoön, – who is an ideally elevated being, – if this portion of the body be compared with the corresponding portion in deified or godlike figures, as the Hercules [the Torso, Fig. 3] and Apollo of the Belvedere [Fig. 4]. The action of these muscles, in the Laocoön, is carried beyond truth to the limits of possibility; they lie like hills which are drawing themselves together, – for the purpose of expressing the extremest exertion in



2

Borghese Gladiator, signed on the support by Agasias son of Dositheos of Ephesos.

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3

Belvedere Torso, signed on the support by Apollonios son of Nestor the Athenian.

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anguish and resistance. In the torso of Hercules deified, there is a high ideal form and beauty in these same muscles; they resemble the undulations of the calmed sea, flowing though elevated, and rising and sinking with a soft, alternate swell. In the Apollo, an image of the most beautiful of the gods, these muscles are smooth, and, like molten glass blown into scarce visible waves, are more obvious to touch than to sight.29

Indeed this is a five-way comparison, for Winckelmann also has in mind the musculature of the living body. For him the Greek ideal is founded on the artists’ observation of the nude bodies of actual ancient Greeks,30 successively refined in the imagination through the heroic, though still human, body of the Gladiator,31 to the deified Hercules (his interpretation of the Belvedere Torso) and finally the Apollo, ‘most beautiful of the gods’. The comparison is based on the closest scrutiny of particular muscles, those at the sides of the chest or trunk, yet the literary element does not drop away, as the profusion of similes in this passage indicates.



4

Apollo Belvedere, prior to twentiethcentury restoration.

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Elsewhere Winckelmann dwells in minute detail on the chiselled finish of the Laocoon: Though the outer skin of this statue when compared with a smooth and polished surface appears somewhat rough, rough as a soft velvet contrasted with a lustrous satin, yet it is, as it were, like the skin of the ancient Greeks, which had neither been relaxed by the constant use of warm baths, – as was the case with the Romans after the introduction among them of effeminate habits, – nor rubbed smooth by a scraper, but on which lay a healthy moisture, resembling the first appearance of down upon the chin.32

Here the simile depends on ancient sources that record bathing customs, and the final comparison recalls famous passages from the Homeric epics where the first down on the chin denotes the youthful beauty of Hermes.33 Thus close looking is never divorced from Winckelmann’s reading of ancient literature, and indeed this is central to his research method. He advises the future scholar of ancient art first to decide ‘precisely all the pieces which he intends to publish, and then, when he has them perfectly familiar to his memory, let him begin to read all the ancient authors, without a single exception’.34 It is this, indeed, that makes the work a history. In the absence of documentation for the sculptures themselves, their role in ancient history can only be reconstructed by drawing on every available scrap of ancient text that can be related, in some way or other, to any feature of the object at hand. The ways in which Winckelmann creates links between observed features and ancient textual evidence, in the course of the History, are bewildering in their diversity. For the Laocoon alone, Winckelmann draws not only on Homer, Virgil, Sophocles and reports of bathing customs (perhaps prompted by the findspot in the baths of Titus, for which archaeological and historical evidence is also adduced), but also Pliny’s account of the group, miscellaneous data on marble carving, and inscriptions related to the sculptors.35 The passages just quoted are rich in allusion, but they are not quite ekphrases in the fullest sense; they do not make the crucial shift from the observed forms, in inert marble, to the altered state in which the sculptures become something more than mere objects. In ancient

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ekphrasis the shift can move the imagined object to a supernatural level, as when the figures depicted on Achilles’s shield start into movement to engage in battles, disputes, processions and revelries. This might be described as a move from the material to the spiritual realm, and some of Winckelmann’s ekphrases seem to dematerialise the sculptures. The famous passage on the Apollo Belvedere begins with a moderate claim: the artist, Winckelmann writes, ‘has employed in its structure just so much only of the material as was necessary to carry out his design and render it visible’. The description proceeds to work through the physical characteristics of the statue, from its stature and striding pose through the facial features and finally the hair, but concrete observation constantly shifts into the language of a hymn of praise, heavily indebted to Pindar and the Homeric Hymns:36 ‘The soft hair plays about the divine head as if agitated by a gentle breeze, like the slender waving tendrils of the noble vine; it seems to be anointed with the oil of the gods, and tied by the Graces with pleasing display on the crown of his head.’ This describes the characteristic topknot of the sculpture, but at the same time casts an atmosphere of religious reverence around it. The final sentences shift attention away from the sculpture to its effect on Winckelmann himself: In the presence of this miracle of art I forget all else, and I myself take a lofty position for the purpose of looking upon it in a worthy manner. My breast seems to enlarge and swell with reverence, like the breasts of those who were filled with the spirit of prophecy, and I feel myself transported to Delos and into the Lycaean groves, – places which Apollo honored by his presence, – for my image seems to receive life and motion, like the beautiful creation of Pygmalion. How is it possible to paint and describe it! Art itself must counsel me, and guide my hand in filling up hereafter the first outlines which I here have sketched. As they who were unable to reach the heads of the divinities which they wished to crown deposited the garlands at the feet of them, so I place at the feet of this image the conception which I have presented of it.37

The sculpture, like the god Apollo, has the power to inspire its worshipper with the spirit of prophecy, and the result is the ekphrasis itself, through which the marble seems to come alive, like Pygmalion’s statue. Just on the verge of hubris, Winckelmann pulls back to confess

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the impossibility of making an adequate description; at the same time the image returns to its original character as a statue, at the feet of which Winckelmann places his hymn, in emulation of the ancient poets. Now that the Apollo Belvedere has lost its status as the greatest of ancient sculptures, Winckelmann’s reverence may appear eccentric, or even deluded. However, the dematerialisation of the sculpture in this description may be oblique evidence of close looking. Winckelmann is just as aware of the sculpture’s executive weaknesses as the later scholars who demoted it to the status of a Roman copy; elsewhere he notes that the sculptor of the Laocoon ‘must … have been a far more skilful and complete artist than it was requisite for the sculptor of the Apollo to be’.38 Perhaps the end of the passage records the effort of imagination through which Winckelmann was able, in Pater’s words, to ‘penetrate to Greek art through copies, imitations, and later Roman art itself ’. Winckelmann’s reverence for the beauty of the Greek male nude, inseparable from his scholarly dedication to plastic art, made Apollo, god of art and beauty, his tutelary deity. Like the Greek sculptors who, in his account, transformed the bodies of real men into ideal sculptures, Winckelmann always works with the concrete materials available to him, in this case the Apollo Belvedere. Yet his ekphrasis aims to go beyond the evidence, to envisage the god as the greatest Greek sculptures, irrevocably lost in the mists of time, would have shown him. Winckelmann reserved the note of religious transport for the Apollo, but in other ekphrases he found different ways to lift the description away from the literal level. For the Venus de’ Medici he conjures a vision of the courtesan Laïs ‘as when, for the first time, she stood naked before the artist’s eyes’.39 The powerful chest and thighs of the Belvedere Torso bring to mind visions of the labours of Hercules, and Winckelmann can even imagine the expression on the missing face ‘as he meditated with satisfaction on the great deeds which he had achieved’; elsewhere Winckelmann tells us that it was in puzzlement over the complex pose of the fragmentary sculpture that he had struck upon the idea that it represented Hercules after his deification, rather than in his mortal guise (seen, as Winckelmann believes, in the knottier musculature of the Farnese Hercules, Fig. 46).40 In the matter-of-fact introduction to his account of the Albani Thetis he records the circumstances of its

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discovery, a headless fragment found in the ruins of a villa of Antoninus Pius. Then the ekphrasis swings away from archaeological data to reinstate the lost head: From this body, worthy of the Goddess of Youth, there rises in the imagination of every one who views it a head that resembles the opening bud of a vernal rose; and we seem to see Thetis ascending from the bosom of the ocean, just as a beautiful woman seems most beautiful at the moment when she rises from her bed.41

The simile of the rose, also used in the ekphrasis on the Venus de’ Medici, is parallel to the sea images Winckelmann favoured in his accounts of male sculptures: as in the first ekphrasis on the Laocoon, a simile, with its reminiscence of the elevated language of Homeric epic, often serves to change the gear from matter-of-fact data to the heightened imaginative world of the ekphrasis. Even though these are real sculptures in lifeless marble, each time the ekphrasis works the magic of a Daedalus, who made his statues seem to move, or Pygmalion, whose statue came to life. Pater draws a Shakespearean parallel: ‘Hermione melts from her stony posture’ when Winckelmann ‘finds’ Greek art.42 It is, then, of the very nature of ekphrasis that it is detachable from the surrounding narrative. Nonetheless, it is the surrounding narrative that creates the prosaic conditions from which the ekphrasis can make its imaginative leap, and most of the historical data are to be found in the surrounding sections; whereas the multifarious literary allusions of the ekphrases are thoroughly absorbed, so that often they can only be detected by the learned, ancient authorities are cited everywhere in the rest of the text. As scholars after him would do, Winckelmann draws abundantly on the ancient texts that provide a chronology of names of artists and their works, principally Books 34–36 of Pliny’s Natural History, or that describe artistic monuments, principally Pausanias’s extended travelogue, the Description of Greece (second century ad).43 However, he explains at the outset that what he means by ‘history’ is ‘not a mere chronicle of epochs’, but rather a ‘system’ like that of the great Greek historians. An aspect of the system is the overall pattern of ‘origin, progress, change, and downfall of art’, which owes as much to recent philosophers of history such as Giambattista Vico as to the ancients.44

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This rise-and-decline pattern proved astonishingly persistent in the face of contradictory evidence, as the following chapters will demonstrate: only in the early twentieth century were the oldest stages of ancient art rescued from derogation as primitive or underdeveloped, and the art of later antiquity could carry the taint of decline more recently still. But another aspect of the system is closer to what is now called the social history of art, with its ‘thick description’ of the social and cultural contexts for ancient artistic production. In Winckelmann’s as in other eighteenth-century texts this accompanies a consistent idealisation of political freedom as essential to the flourishing of the arts. The wide purview means that a bewildering array of ancient writers is cited, apart from those who dealt specifically with art. Winckelmann would seem to have made a determined effort to follow the advice he offered to future scholars of ancient art, ‘to read all the ancient authors, without a single exception’. In their relationship to the surrounding context, then, Winckelmann’s ekphrases pose a foundational problem for art history as a discipline: how the stubbornly discrete artefacts that constitute the art historian’s primary data are to be woven into a continuous narrative that can only be constructed retrospectively, and with considerable aid from textual authorities.45 The ekphrases, detachable as they may be, are also integral to the overall system as concrete links between the past world of ancient art – the preserve of the classicist or historian – and the modern world in which the sculptures survive to be experienced in visual and spatial immediacy – the preserve, it might be said, of the artist. But things are not quite so simple on either side. While the sculptures’ antiquity (or at least the antiquity of those parts of them that had not been recarved or added) was not in doubt, we have already seen that their role in the ancient world was distinctly uncertain. Since they were unrecorded in ancient texts, their dates and the circumstances of their ancient origin were altogether unknown. That meant that Winckelmann was obliged to invent an array of methods for inserting them into the chronological narrative of his History. He uses stylistic analysis to assign the sculptures of the Niobe group to the ‘grand style’ of the fifth century bc, a judgement of quality to date the Laocoon to the reign of Alexander the Great (the ‘time when art was in its highest bloom’, according to

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Winckelmann’s reading of the ancient textual evidence),46 epigraphic evidence to place the Belvedere Torso a little later, and provenance to insert his descriptions of the Apollo Belvedere and the Borghese Gladiator into his discussion of the reign of Nero (who, Winckelmann conjectures on the basis of their findspot in the town of Nero’s birth, may have imported them into Italy). Because he had no securely dated work from what he considered to be the great ages of Greek art, there was no fixed point from which to work – Chapter 1 will show how great a difference it made to have even a single datable work (the Parthenon sculptures) from which to establish comparisons. But at this stage the dating procedures were experimental; Winckelmann could only sketch out the methods with dummy data, so to speak. A curious result is that many of the ekphrases on the sculptures he thought best, and for which his system therefore required an origin in the great Greek ages (fifth or fourth century bc), actually appear at much later stages in the narrative, when the sculptures could be connected to some event in the Roman period for which there was documentation. Thus the Apollo and the Gladiator are discussed in the reign of Nero, even though Winckelmann thought they had been made much earlier, and the Albani Thetis in the reign of Antoninus Pius, in the ruins of whose villa it had been found. Most bizarrely, Winckelmann places the so-called Belvedere Antinous in his discussion of the reign of Hadrian, the patron of Antinous, even though he was arguing – rightly, as it would now seem – that the sculpture did not represent Antinous at all. He could, moreover, have given an ekphrasis instead to one of the sculptures that did represent Antinous, which would give it a firm date at the end of Hadrian’s reign – presumably that did not suit the purpose, though, since the Roman date would place the sculpture in the period of decline, and Winckelmann preferred to emphasise the Belvedere sculpture. Winckelmann knew very well that his putative dates of origin could not be substantiated. Even the conjecture that the Laocoon was too good to date later than Alexander the Great ‘cannot be proved’, as he disarmingly admits,47 and this sculpture – like all of the others to which Winckelmann devotes ekphrases – is now dated to a much later period. Nonetheless, Winckelmann’s methods for dating sculptures are embryonic versions of those on which later art historians have continued to depend. This is

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perhaps the clearest example of the discrepancy between Winckelmann’s ‘actual results’ and the impact of his thinking: even though all of his dates for particular sculptures have been discounted, the multifarious methods he devised to give them provisional locations within the History all remain central to art-historical practice. Just where Winckelmann seems to be recounting ancient fact, he is at his most modern. On the other hand, while the ekphrases shift abruptly away from the historical narrative to concentrate on how the sculptures appear to the present-day observer, they remain deeply indebted to ancient techniques for literary description, and replete with allusions to the ancient authors. Just where Winckelmann seems to be recounting the modern affect of the sculptures, he is at his most ancient. That suggests that the classicist or historian cannot afford to ignore the ekphrases, even though the sculptures they describe have fallen from fame. And again the methods Winckelmann developed, in this case for close looking, cannot be disentangled from later art-historical practice. In Dresden Winckelmann began to hone his visual skills under the tutelage of the artist Adam Friedrich Oeser, later the friend of Goethe; in Rome he studied sculptures intensively with the painter Anton Raphael Mengs, the dedicatee of the History, and other artists such as Angelica Kauffmann, who spent hours with him in the Roman galleries. In the Preface to the History he pours scorn on the writers who tried to describe ancient statues without such visual training: In the large and valuable works descriptive of ancient statues which have hitherto been published, we seek in vain for research and knowledge in regard to art. The description of a statue ought to show the cause of its beauty, and the peculiarity in its style … But where are we taught the points in which the beauty of a statue consists? What writer has looked at beauty with an artist’s eyes?48

If students of ancient art need to ‘read all the ancient authors, without a single exception’, they must also learn to look ‘with an artist’s eyes’ – and that is no matter of spontaneous or impressionistic response. Rather it is the result of long-sustained study, as Winckelmann reiterates often: The first view of beautiful statues is…like the first glance over the open sea; we gaze on it bewildered, and with undistinguishing eyes, but after we

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have contemplated it repeatedly the soul becomes more tranquil and the eye more quiet, and capable of separating the whole into its particulars.49

Winckelmann describes at length his difficulty in reconciling traditional estimates of the Belvedere Torso with his own observations. Having come to terms with the sculpture, he proceeds to study other representations of Hercules for comparison: ‘I imposed upon myself the rule of not turning back until I had discovered some beauty’.50 His ekphrasis on the sculpture shows him looking ‘with an artist’s eyes’: The artist may admire in the outlines of this body the perpetual flowing of one form into another, and the undulating lines which rise and fall like waves, and become swallowed up in one another. He will find that no copyist can be sure of correctness, since the undulating movement which he thinks he is following turns imperceptibly away, and leads both the hand and eye astray by taking another direction.51

This vividly captures the complexity of looking at a sculpture, with the hundred viewpoints that Baudelaire deplored, as opposed to the two-dimensional images which many of the antiquarian scholars of Winckelmann’s day studied. And more recent scholars cannot pride themselves on any advance in this respect. The chapters below will show how important the development of photography was to scholarship on ancient art, and now we have immeasurably greater resources in electronic form. Nonetheless, or perhaps a fortiori in the computer age, the twodimensional image remains standard for art-historical scholarship, even in the study of sculpture. There is still no easy way to circumvent the arduous self-education in looking that Winckelmann recommended. In his essay of 1867, Pater quotes Goethe: ‘One learns nothing from [Winckelmann], but one becomes something.’52 If Goethe is right, it does not matter that the sculptures Winckelmann actually described no longer dominate the canon, or even that his dates and other factual information have long ago been corrected by ‘a more privileged criticism’. Art historians can do without the Apollo Belvedere and the Albani Thetis; but they cannot do without the art-historical methods that Winckelmann sketched with his dummy data. Indeed, Winckelmann might be said to have established the intellectual basis on which the Graeco–Roman canon could be discarded, even though he came too early to do so himself.

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The impact of Winckelmann’s thought on artistic practice may have been equally far-reaching, although it is difficult to detect for a good reason. Previous theories of imitation – including, for example, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s contemporary Discourses on Art (1769–90) – presented ancient sculptures as models that could be quoted, so to speak, in the modern work. For Reynolds the works of the ancients (which meant, effectively, sculptures) were ‘a magazine of common property, always open to the publick, whence every man has a right to take what materials he pleases’ without fear of being ‘charged with plagiarism’.53 Imitations of this kind are easy to identify – a famous example is Reynolds’s own quotation of the Apollo Belvedere in his portrait of Commodore Augustus Keppel (1752–53, National Maritime Museum, London). One reason that receptions of ancient sculpture are harder to detect after 1815 is that artists largely – although not, as we shall see, entirely – discarded the traditional range of models in ancient sculpture, the Apollo Belvedere and the other Graeco–Roman sculptures. But a more important reason is that ‘imitation’ of the antique, after Winckelmann, need no longer be based on models that might be quoted. The artist no longer ‘learned’ a repertoire of models, but through study of the antique ‘became’ something that (s)he could not have been otherwise. The idea immediately recalls the notion of Bildung, or self-cultivation, much prized in Goethe’s generation (Pater uses terms such as ‘self-culture’ when speaking of Winckelmann and Goethe).54 Perhaps it also helps to explain the apparently paradoxical phrasing of the Reflections: The only way for us to become great or, if this be possible, inimitable, is to imitate the ancients. What someone once said of Homer – that to understand him well means to admire him – is also true for the art works of the ancients, especially the Greeks. One must become as familiar with them as with a friend in order to find their statue of Laocoon just as inimitable as Homer.55

This would seem to describe a different kind of imitation, one that is based not on subservience to a model, but rather on the intimacy of a friend. In the process imitation cancels, or perhaps exceeds itself, since a true understanding of the ancients means grasping their ‘inimitability’, also the goal of the modern artist who aspires to measure up to their standard. ‘Imitation’ in the old sense is beginning to metamorphose into

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something more like the modernist notion of originality. The artists of Winckelmann’s generation, including his friend Mengs, were not yet ready to change the terms for imitation so radically; the central figure of Apollo in Mengs’s ceiling fresco for Cardinal Albani, the Parnassus of 1761, still instantly recalls the Apollo Belvedere. The new terms – again if Goethe was right – could not be ‘learned’ from Winckelmann’s writings. What they might encourage the artist to ‘become’ is a more difficult question, and the starting point of this book.

The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture

The brief account of Winckelmann in the previous section is a propaedeutic to this book: we shall see traces of his writing in all of the chapters to follow, and they are not absent from the latest histories of ancient art, even though his data from ancient literary sources will be progressively, and relentlessly, replaced by new material data from archaeological research. My contention is that all modern art-historical writing (not just writing on ancient art) is indebted to Winckelmann’s intentional deployment of diverse ancient literary techniques in relation, specifically, to crafted objects that have material existence independent of the texts that describe them – something that is neither a necessary development from ancient ekphrasis nor an inevitable one for modern art writing.56 Nevertheless, Winckelmann belongs to the Introduction, for the story of this book begins with the fall from grace of all of the sculptures he held dear. At the beginning of his account of Greek art, Winckelmann figures himself as an athlete competing in the ancient Olympic games, ‘since my essay is to be regarded as no less doubtful in its issue than theirs’. That was no exaggeration, given the inadequacy of the data he had available to try writing a comprehensive history of ancient art from its origin to its end: I imagine myself, in fact, appearing in the Olympic Stadium, where I seem to see countless statues of young, manly heroes, and two-horse and four-horse chariots of bronze, with the figures of the victors erect thereon, and other wonders of art …

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I would not, however, wish this imaginary flight … to be regarded as a mere poetic fancy. It will, on the contrary, be seemingly realised, if I conceive all the statues and images of which mention has been made by authors, and likewise every remaining fragment of them, together with the countless multitude of works of art which have been preserved, as present before me at the same time.57

It is tempting, and by no means far-fetched, to suppose that Sigmund Freud had this passage in mind when he wrote his own ‘flight of imagination’ (he also calls it a ‘phantasy’, in psychoanalytic vein) of Rome as a palimpsest, with all its buildings, of all its ages, simultaneously present to view – and it is no more far-fetched to see a similar psychological complexity in Winckelmann’s ‘imaginary flight’.58 By the time Freud was writing, part of Winckelmann’s Olympian scene had indeed been proved to be no ‘mere poetic fancy’. Although Lord Elgin had run out of funds before realising his dream of excavating at Olympia, German archaeologists finally carried out the project in the late 1870s (as Chapter 2 will recount). In a pattern that we shall find typical, they never found the myriad statues of Olympic athletes that Winckelmann had desired to see, long since melted down or plundered. But what they actually found caused the canon to undergo another of the mutations that will punctuate the narrative to come: the Nike of Paionios, the surprisingly severe pedimental sculptures of the Temple of Zeus, the magnificent marble sculpture of Hermes with the infant Dionysus that may have been made by Praxiteles (or not; the dispute is unresolved). Winckelmann’s phantasy of wholeness, where all the statues of antiquity might be reunited like long-lost siblings, remains unrealisable, its poignancy perhaps an indication of how uncomfortably close statues are to real people. But new technologies, first cast-collecting, then photography, and now digital imagery have come close to achieving the second half of his desire. We can survey – together, although admittedly in reproduction only – ‘every remaining fragment’ and ‘the countless multitude of works of art which have been preserved’ – innumerably more of them, indeed, than were above ground in Winckelmann’s lifetime. Nonetheless, we must be mindful that the first half of Winckelmann’s desire – ‘all the statues and images of which mention has been made by authors’ – remains unattainable, as surely as our

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beloved dead who will never return. Thus the narrative of this book is one of triumph, but also of ‘eternal and immutable’ loss: we shall never have the chance to experience the art of antiquity as the ancients knew it. That leaves us with three choices. The first is denial, the preference (it must be acknowledged) of those historians who persist in pretending that scholarship can construct an adequate account of ancient art as it was in antiquity. The second is despair, the preference of those, more honest, who accept the data but cannot give up longing for the statues (and the other great works of antiquity) somehow to come back to us. The third is metamorphosis, whereby our lack of ancient sculptures may generate a plenitude either in modern scholarship or in modern art – that is the preference of many artists, to be explored in the chapters to follow, and of this book. The starting point, accordingly, is the loss – not literal, but more importantly in canonical status – of Winckelmann’s sculptures, the ones revered since the Renaissance, and documented in fascinating detail in Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s study of 1981, Taste and the Antique. Chapter 1 explores this fall, together with its compensating gain: the new generation of ‘really Greek’ sculptures, unknown to Winckelmann, that came to replace the works celebrated in his ekphrases. Ancient sculpture, surprising as it may now seem, was a not insignificant element in Napoleon’s imperial policy. His agents removed the most famous works of Graeco–Roman sculpture from Rome to the Louvre (Winckelmann’s writings must have helped to dictate which sculptures were worth appropriating). After Napoleon’s defeat the sculptures were returned, and the neoclassicism of art and fashion began to wane; in received tradition this marks the crucial moment when the example of ancient art began to lose its authority over art theory and practice. But this book combats that received idea. At the same moment a new range of ancient sculptures took centre stage: sculptures from the Parthenon acquired by the British Museum in 1816, the Venus de Milo, discovered in 1820 on the Greek island of Melos and given to the Louvre, and the pedimental figures from Aegina, acquired by Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria in 1812 (thus Britain, France and Bavaria could all claim to own classical antiquities of the

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highest status). In contrast to the Graeco–Roman sculptures of the Roman collections, these newly prominent sculptures all came from Greece itself, and a new notion of Greek authenticity emerged as a crucial test of value. Whereas earlier discoveries had been made to look new through extensive restoration (often by fine sculptors such as Bernini), the new preoccupation with authenticity made restoration a vexed issue; although the great Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen restored the Aegina figures with a new regard for antiquarian accuracy, the Parthenon sculptures and the Venus were left unrestored. These decisions, partly pragmatic, had a distinctive impact on ideas about the aesthetic of Greek sculpture; the fragmentary and battered condition of the sculptures made a deep impression on artists. The appearance of the new ancient sculptures was in tune with new, ‘romantic’ sensibilities of the nineteenth century; at the same time, though, it was inseparable from the special ‘Greek-ness’ of the sculptures. A familiar aspect of the history of nineteenth-century art is the increasing emphasis on the artist’s individuality, on personal style, and on the cult of the artist as celebrity. Less familiar is the fact that ancient sculptors shared in the new fascination with creative individuality, the concern of Chapter 2. When Kant, in The Critique of Judgement of 1790, referred to the Doryphoros of Polykleitos as a paradigm for ancient sculpture, he was depending exclusively on ancient texts; at that date, no physical object and no visual image was associated with the famous work. It was only in 1863 that the German scholar Karl Friedrichs identified a sculpture in the Naples Museum as a copy of the Doryphoros; from there, stylistic comparison made it possible to attribute other extant sculptural compositions to Polykleitos. Suddenly, the personal style of a sculptor famed in ancient texts became visible for the first time. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century the same process revealed – or created – the personal styles of other celebrated sculptors, such as Lysippos in 1849, Myron in the 1850s, Praxiteles in the 1870s. It is no mere paradox-mongering, then, to say that Polykleitos (as we know him) was an artist of the 1860s, Praxiteles of the next decade. Moreover, the study of ancient sculpture was in the forefront of the development of attribution and connoisseurship, usually associated with the slightly later researches of Giovanni Morelli into Renaissance art. Again, the

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identification of personal styles not only gave a wholly new focus to the study of ancient sculpture; contemporary artists also responded to the new range of individual styles, so that a painter such as Frederic Leighton or a sculptor such as Auguste Rodin could be compared to Praxiteles. The ancient canon underwent another of its mutations, as statues that could be attributed to a famous sculptor gained in status. But there could be losses, too – in 1893, the German scholar Adolf Furtwängler demoted the Venus de Milo, which many had believed a fine work of the greatest period of Greek art, to a late and derivative example of Hellenistic sculpture. Arguably, the Venus has never quite recovered her scholarly reputation, although her distinctive armless silhouette remains a familiar image in contemporary art and popular culture. Chapter 3 carries the story beyond a more powerful modernist break, even, than that of 1815: that of 1900, the birth moment of twentiethcentury modernism. The artists of the early twentieth century returned at intervals to classicising or sculpturesque modes; after the First World War many artists associated with Cubism in France, Italian Futurism or German Expressionism turned to sculptural form, sometimes in conjunction with classical subjects or motifs. This and other ‘classical revivals’ within modernism have often been characterised as conservative backlashes; not unreasonably, the horrors of the First World War have seemed to inspire a longing for the stability of the classical tradition. Yet renewals of interest in classicism and sculptural form were much more pervasive in the modernist art movements than the art-historical literature has usually acknowledged, from Paul Cézanne’s nude bathers to Max Ernst’s or André Masson’s explorations of myth; sculpturesque nudes reappear in Picasso’s work every few years throughout the succession of modern ‘isms’ with which he experimented. In sculpture classicism and modernism are still more difficult to disentangle: the radical reduction of sculptural form in the work of Constantin Brancusi, for example, might be seen either as modernist abstraction taken to an extreme, or as classical simplicity at its purest. Moreover, as in the developments explored in earlier chapters, the ‘classicism’ of the twentieth-century modernists is not some generic version of the classical tradition, but rather relates to specific ancient sculptures and debates about them. In the twentieth century, archaic and very early ancient

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sculpture rose to a status it had never had before – would that scholarly development be conceivable apart from modernist taste? At the end of each chapter I shall offer a reflection on methodology. In these I abandon the impersonal third person, or the collective ‘we’, so as clearly to distinguish my confessions from the exposition of historical data (although one of the areas the reflections will explore is the difficulty of drawing a clean distinction). Like Winckelmann, I am anxious about entering the Stadium, in which I nonetheless hope to compete before the massed ranks of scholars and students, both of ancient and of modern art, vastly more learned in their respective areas than I. But the essay will have been worthwhile if I can persuade some of them, at least, to pay more attention to one another. I leave the elaboration of this point to the chapters to come, but a preliminary note in the first person singular may be warranted here. The seed of this study was planted when I was researching the exhibition on the nineteenth-century painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, shown at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool in 1996–97. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Alma-Tadema amassed a vast collection of some 5,300 photographs, largely although not entirely of ancient artefacts, which he used to research his meticulously detailed paintings of everyday life in the ancient world. As I worked through the collection, contained in 167 portfolios now held at the University of Birmingham, I was surprised to notice how few of the photographed objects were familiar to me from my undergraduate courses on ancient art at Harvard University, where I was a student from 1978 to 1982. Ancient art, I had been taught to think, was the oldest and most stable part of the Western canon. When I and my fellow students perused the ‘special study set of fine art reproductions’ obligingly prepared by the University Prints to accompany Fine Arts 139 (Greek Art and Culture), we took it for granted that we were seeing a definitive collection of the greatest works of antiquity. I am not sure we thought deeply about it, but I think we also assumed that the same collection of works, since they had been made in the centuries before the birth of Christ, were the basis for the classical tradition as understood by the artists we studied in our other courses, on the art of the Renaissance and later centuries, up to the

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present. How then could it be that Alma-Tadema’s photographic archive had so little overlap with the prints for Fine Arts 139? I still have the special study set, and refer to it often as a handy reference. Recently I went through it to see how many of the 140 prints corresponded to objects mentioned in Winckelmann’s History. The answer was two: the Idolino of the Museo Archeologico in Florence and the Farnese Diadoumenos, now in the British Museum. All of the rest were discovered after Winckelmann’s death; and none of the sculptures he specially prized were chosen as examples for the Harvard course (although Winckelmann was, needless to say, frequently referenced in the course readings). There is somewhat more overlap between Winckelmann’s canon and the sculptures represented in Alma-Tadema’s photographic archive. Nonetheless, a substantially different data set constituted the primary material for the study of ancient art at each of the three dates – Winckelmann’s lifetime, Alma-Tadema’s, and my undergraduate career. Ancient sculpture, far from being the bedrock on which the Western tradition is built, would seem to be a constantly shifting configuration. As a corollary, it must be the case that ‘classicism’, or the ‘classical tradition’, has no stable meaning when applied to the modern art of any of the historical moments in question. And until much more research is available on what constituted the classical tradition throughout this period, the conventional assumption that modern art involved a break from that tradition must be regarded as unproven. I began this project, then, in a state of bewilderment, ‘like the first glance over the open sea’, in Winckelmann’s phrase. As in Winckelmann’s initial attempt to locate the sculptures of his first-hand experience in some sort of chronology, there was no fixed point from which to begin the enquiry. Both data sets were in a state of flux – ancient sculpture because of the perpetually mutating canon, modern art because, once the idea of the modernist break had been called into question, there was no secure rule for deciding which works might, or might not, be relevant. To change the metaphor, it was like trying to solve a mathematical equation in which all of the variables, on both sides of the =, are unknown quantities. But there was no going back: the empirical evidence was simply too powerful to revert to a methodology that treated either ancient sculpture or modern art as a closed historical system, independent of one another or

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of the present-day observer (that is, myself ). Here I found much-needed support from the theories of reception history or reception aesthetics, proposed in the later 1960s by the Constance school in Germany, and applied most powerfully to classics from the 1990s by what may now be called the Bristol school in the UK, which places greater emphasis on reception as a two-way process in which each text interprets the other.59 Both of these methodological explorations concentrated primarily on written texts,60 a familiar pattern in the various developments associated with the term ‘critical theory’ in the Anglo–American academic worlds of the past thirty years or so. Art history has been slow to pick up new theoretical developments in the humanities, whether that is because of a deeply ingrained conservatism (only partly masked by its tendency loudly to proclaim its left politics) or simply because the discipline remains relatively small in comparison with the powerful departments of literature in our academic institutions. Thus there have been a few notable essays in reception study within art history, such as Mieke Bal’s Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (1999) or Richard Brilliant’s My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks (2000),61 but little sustained exploration of reception as a potential method, at least in Anglo–American art history; ‘reception’ does not, for example, appear among the key terms explored in the influential volume Critical Terms for Art History (in either its first edition of 1996 or its revision of 2003).62 In Germany, Wolfgang Kemp has drawn on the work of the Constance school for his books Der Anteil des Betrachters: Rezepzionsästhetische Studien zur Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts (1983) and Der Betrachter ist im Bild: Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionästhetik (1992), but these have not been translated. Kemp has, however, introduced his method to anglophone readers in an essay, ‘The Work of Art and its Beholder: The Methodology of the Aesthetic of Reception’, published in 1998. Here Kemp presents the idea of an ‘implicit beholder’ (reminiscent of the ‘implied reader’ in the work of Wolfgang Iser of Constance) and outlines a series of ‘forms of address’: the interaction of figures within a pictorial composition so as either to include or exclude the beholder; figures within a composition who serve as ‘focalisers’ to direct the viewer’s attention; pictorial perspective; the framing and cropping of a scene; and the ‘blanks’ or indeterminacies in

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a composition that demand the viewer’s interpretative intervention (this draws explicitly on Iser’s work).63 It will be obvious that all of these forms of address (except, perhaps, the last) are explicitly geared to painting as an art-form. Moreover, and whether or not this is a logical consequence, they all tend to refer the beholder’s activity to compositional features predetermined in the painting itself. Reception thus returns to the control of the artwork, and by extension of its producer: Kemp’s account of painting is like Baudelaire’s, ‘exclusive and despotic’, and we are back to something like business as usual. Can sculpture, with its ‘hundred different points of view’, offer a heuristic towards a more dynamic and flexible kind of reception study, one in which the beholder can actually make a difference? My aim in this book is to explore that question, and to do so I shall draw on a wide variety of reception methods. In this Introduction I have already done so, by reading Winckelmann through the intermediary of Pater’s essay of 1867. I have also tried to suggest how Pater himself shows the way, by reading Winckelmann through Goethe and Hegel, and the Renaissance through Winckelmann. This use of mediating texts may seem at first thought eccentric, or at least needlessly complicated. A more conventional strategy, according to current art-historical practice, would be to read Winckelmann, instead, through Alex Potts’s book Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History of 1994. The implicit assumption would seem to be that there is a clear distinction to be made between current scholarship and the historical material under consideration, and some will find fault with me for failing to engage more directly with Potts’s arguments. Reception methodologies, indeed, often call attention to the standpoint of the present-day observer as a crucial determining factor, not to be occluded in any illusory attempt at naïve historicism. But if the standpoint of 1994 belongs to the present day, and that of 1867 does not, where is the dividing line? And which text is ‘anachronistic’ in a reading of Winckelmann? Some versions of reception theory, among them that of the Constance scholar Hans Robert Jauss on whom I have drawn heavily in the chapters to follow, seem to aim at a totalising account that can somehow take in all of the layers of reception, from the first readers (or beholders) through to those of the present day. While Jauss sees the totalisation as ‘ongoing’

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it nonetheless has a ring of finality: ‘The obvious historical implication… is that the understanding of the first reader will be sustained and enriched in a chain of receptions from generation to generation; in this way the historical significance of a work will be decided and its aesthetic value made evident.’64 The ambition may be compared to Winckelmann’s attempt to write a comprehensive history of ancient art, something that Jauss perhaps acknowledges in an essay, ‘History of Art and Pragmatic History’, that gives a foundational role to Winckelmann.65 The project of tracing the entire ‘chain of receptions’ for any single work, let alone for such an expansive category as ancient sculpture, is obviously impractical, as indeed was Winckelmann’s; it may also be illogical in its premises, since (as Jauss again acknowledges) the comprehensive ambitions of the method are not consistent with the radical contingency of the primary data it uses.66 Winckelmann’s History is exemplary in this respect precisely to the extent that his ‘actual results’ have been found wanting. It might be said that Winckelmann went about things in the wrong way – that it was a mistake to try to make the study of visual art into a ‘history’, rather than a critical, philosophical or interpretative project. I partly think so. But in the course of research for this book I have come to see, repeatedly, how the mismatch between the empirical materials under examination and the methods used to interpret them can be productive, like the ‘chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table’ of the Surrealists.67 In what follows I emphasise singular points of contact between ancient sculptures and modern interpretations, not totalising views, even my own. In this respect I go against Jauss’s and many other theories of reception. I do not want to take the role of the present-day observer for whom the past history of receptions can constitute a totality, even if only in the fleeting moment of the observation. Thus my metaphor for reception is not a ‘chain’, in which my book is the last link even temporarily. Rather it is a ‘chance encounter’, where ‘chance’ does not imply inconsequentiality. On the contrary it offers the possibility of a precision and rigour that would be unattainable at a higher level of generalisation. It will be evident that the element of ‘chance’ is uneven. From a common-sense perspective, it is obvious that a modern reception of an ancient sculpture may be deliberate and intentional on the part of the

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modern artist, student or scholar, whereas the reception is quite out of the control of the ancient sculptor, patron or audience. But I hope to persuade readers that it does not follow that the modern reception has nothing much to tell us about the ancient sculpture ‘itself ’, and only reveals modern attitudes towards it. Demonstration will have to await the more detailed discussions to follow. Meanwhile, I shall end my Introduction as Winckelmann ended the Preface to his History, with a dedication. My book is addressed equally to readers interested in ancient art and those interested in modern art, and among them artists. All of them will find much to correct in my actual results. But I shall account my book a success if it leads any of them to chance encounters with ancient sculpture that go beyond the purview of the presentday observer.

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1 THE DISCOVERY OF GREEK SCULPTURE

Incomparable marbles, such as were possessed by no museum in Europe, suddenly appeared in London and in Paris. They were sculptures torn from the Parthenon itself; and there was a statue, less violently acquired and of less illustrious origin, but of similar style, our Venus of Milo. Is there still a clear memory of the astonishment, the disturbance into which these masterpieces threw men’s minds? This type of beauty ran counter to all our traditions …; an unforeseen harmony of the most contrary gifts, an unbearable mixture of the ideal and of the real, of elegance and of force, of the noble and the natural, confounded our judgement. The characteristic of true masterpieces is to cause this kind of surprises. They take us unawares and trouble us in the routine of our admirations; then, soon afterward, their ascendancy is triumphant, they seize upon us and turn to their profit our tendency toward habit; at that time, they make us see with new eyes, and bring down to a secondary rank everything that had reigned before them. Excerpt from an article by Ludovic Vitet, copied by Eugène Delacroix into his journal, 3 February 1860 (italicised passage underlined by Delacroix)1

W

hen Winckelmann wrote his History of the Art of Antiquity, he was in no doubt about where to study ancient art: ‘it is difficult, indeed almost impossible, to write in a thorough

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manner of ancient art … anywhere but in Rome.’2 That had been true since the wave of discoveries in the Renaissance – if not, indeed, since ancient imperial conquest had brought so many famous Greek sculptures to Rome. Just half a century later, though, the first of the modern mutations to the canon had irrecovably changed the map for students of ancient sculpture. Now they would need, at a minimum, to visit London, to see architectural sculptures of the Parthenon, transported from Athens amid fanfare and controversy by Lord Elgin; Munich, to see pedimental sculptures from the island of Aegina; and Paris, to see the Venus de Milo. Moreover, all of these sculptures were housed in new or rapidly developing museum institutions that made it a mission to present antiquities to the new audiences of urban modernity.

ARCHITECTURAL SCULPTURE: THE ELGIN AND AEGINA MARBLES

There is something more than a little mad about the project of removing vast quantities of sculptured marble from temple sites in Greece, where they had endured more than two millennia, to the modern cities of Northern Europe. Add to that a genuine uncertainty about how valuable these sculptures were, and even about what kinds of value they might have: would they contribute to knowledge of the ancient world? To the education of artists and the progress of the fine arts? To the creation of new public institutions for the modern states of Europe? To the glory of the sovereigns or nations who acquired them? The whole enterprise would seem not just impractical, but distinctly shaky in its basic rationale. In the event, both the Elgin Marbles, at the British Museum in London, and the Aegina Marbles (to use the nineteenth-century designations),3 at the Glyptothek in Munich, established themselves as distinguished for all of these kinds of value. Indeed, they became exemplary objects for defining these kinds of value, and thus for measuring the value of other objects. We are now so accustomed to seeing illustrations of both sets, in books either on ancient art or on the development of the modern museum, that it requires a considerable effort of the historical imagination to recapture the moment when their value was not self-evident.

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T HE MO DE R N I T Y O F A N C I E NT S CULPT URE

It is a truism of the art-historical literature that the classical ideal, in the period with which we are dealing – roughly speaking, from Winckelmann to Hegel – was premised on the notion of a self-contained, autonomous and whole work of art, in particular a freestanding sculpture of a beautiful human figure, the embodiment of a fully achieved, harmonious human subjectivity.4 That may work well enough for the sculptures of the great Roman collections, the ones that dominate Winckelmann’s writings. But the Elgin and Aegina Marbles are nothing like that: they are great, sprawling assemblages, manifestly broken away from their architectural contexts, in pieces of disparate scale and in endlessly disputed relationships. However they are displayed, the empty spaces that interpose and envelop them are just as aesthetically potent as the massive, ponderous stones. Curators may arrange them more or less according to the best available information about how they were juxtaposed on the original buildings, and numerous possibilities have been tried.5 But the spectator’s experience of the sculptures, in any museum display, differs in basic respects from how they could be experienced in their original temple settings, by viewers at the time of their creation and at any time subsequently. Removed from the temple facades where they could be surveyed as if they were a picture, their three-dimensionality becomes much more important. When they are brought down to the ground, we can walk around them. Placed in a museum gallery, they share the spectator’s space, which fundamentally alters the experience of their physical scale. No longer are they measurable in relation to the abstract proportions of the temple building, but instead in relation to the human viewer: they are life-sized, or in the case of the pediment figures from the Parthenon, larger than we are. And, most obviously of all, we no longer see them at a distance, but can choose to come as close as the curators and guards will let us; and we can approach and recede, to assume different viewing distances, more flexibly than when they were high in the air. We can study them in much greater detail, and from many more points of view. All of this is obvious, and an inevitable entailment of the museum context, something on which the recent critical literature has placed great stress. We have bent the marbles to our purposes, so we can subject them to the scholar’s study or to the tourist’s admiration. In

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the process they have lost their original contexts in Athens or Aegina. In a significant sense, they have lost their antiquity, their rootedness in the ancient world that created them, to become part of the modern museum environment instead. But something else has happened: the marbles have changed their basic art-form. They are no longer integral parts of an architectural ensemble. Quite simply, they have become sculpture – not, to be sure, sculpture in the sense of the self-contained, autonomous object, an important point to which we shall return. But they are sculpture in the terms of the museum visitor’s experience: three-dimensional objects that occupy the same space as the viewer and are available for close looking. The change might be dismissed as a misrepresentation of the original status and function of the objects, whether we moralise that as an ideologically driven ‘appropriation’ or simply as a regrettable, but unavoidable, consequence of the practical circumstances of modern art appreciation and tourism. However, this chapter will argue that the category shift, from architecture to sculpture, has much more important repercussions. It is not simply a matter of bending the marbles to modern purposes, or of expediency: museum display has changed not only how we construct the history of ancient art, but how we think about what ancient art is, in itself. Since we regard ancient art as paradigmatic for theoretical discussions of art in general, the change has repercussions for art theory in the widest sense. And since we also consider ancient art integral to what we can know about the ancient world, there are repercussions, too, for what we think of classical antiquity, again in the widest sense. Some of the debates about the aesthetic status and value of both sets of marbles in the early nineteenth century can seem merely quaint, now that they have been written so firmly into the history books. Were the Elgin Marbles really by Pheidias, or were they by mere workmen; were the Aegina Marbles of merely historical interest, as examples of pre-classical art, or do they have aesthetic value in their own right? Such questions may seem naïve, or beside the point – preoccupations of the classically educated elite of the early nineteenth century, whose dilettantish connoisseurial interests have long since become outmoded. Yet these debates are highly sensitive to the wider repercussions just outlined: we can learn from them just how much was at stake in making

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the Marbles public property, in the case of the Elgins, or in putting them on public display in the case of both sets. To understand the debates, the Elgin and Aegina Marbles must be considered in relation to yet another set of marbles, the famous sculptures that dominated Winckelmann’s History. Those sculptures set the standard against which the Elgin and Aegina Marbles were initially judged. And through a series of dramatic events in the tumult of Napoleonic Europe, they also set up the terms for the display of ancient art in a public museum context. In 1796 French forces under Napoleon Bonaparte invaded and quickly subdued the Papal States. According to the terms of the armistice, confirmed in 1797 by the Treaty of Tolentino, the papal authorities were required to cede one hundred works of art to the French, and the commissioners appointed to administer the process made sure to select all of the sculptures celebrated in Winckelmann’s ekphrases. In a massive logistical exercise irresistibly reminiscent of the ancient Roman spoliation of Greek cities, the sculptures were packed and sent, along with a wagonful of paintings, to Paris. There they were displayed as star exhibits in the Louvre, newly established as a public museum and soon to be renamed the Musée Napoléon. Following Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, the museum was dismantled and most of the sculptures were restored to their previous owners. These events set the crucial precedent for the large-scale removal of sculptures from their places of ancient origin to a modern capital city in Northern Europe, and an equally crucial precedent for the idea that a collection of antiquities could have value as a public museum in the modern capital city. At the same time, they marked the last moment of triumph for the Roman sculptures, glorious but doomed. Perhaps, paradoxically, the enormous scholarly and critical attention devoted to those sculptures while they were in the Louvre hastened the tendency to relegate them to secondary status, as Roman copies rather than original Greek masterpieces. Thus the Musée Napoléon served not only as a positive example of what a public museum of antiquities could be like, but also as a negative example that intensified the demand for authentically Greek sculptures. As the German archaeologist Adolf Michaelis put it a century later, ‘The Musée Napoléon was the last magnificent example of a museum exhibiting a Roman character.’6 It is no coincidence that it

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was during these same years that Lord Elgin negotiated the removal of a portion of the Parthenon sculptures from Athens (then under Ottoman control) to London, and that a team of English and German architects and scholars took possession of pedimental sculptures from a temple on the island of Aegina and put them up for sale. By the time of the Battle of Waterloo, a new generation of sculptures was poised to take over the role that the Roman sculptures had briefly served in the Louvre. Yet the new sculptures had none of the scholarly and critical authority that had been established over the previous three centuries for the Roman ones; a case would need to be built for them. Their one claim to consideration, in the first instance, was that they were really Greek. Tellingly, it was just this point that was disputed by the most forceful opponent of the Elgin Marbles, the antiquarian scholar Richard Payne Knight, who attempted to claim that many of the sculptures were the product of a Hadrianic rebuilding, and not part of the original Greek programme.7 Elgin himself was very much aware of events in Paris. In a letter of 1811, while the Musée Napoléon was flourishing, Elgin wrote of his own sculptures: this assemblage would furnish for the study of art and the formation of taste, as the means of giving to this Country those rational advantages, the importance of which has been of late so much brought into evidence, by the many valuable Collections of ancient art so studiously concentrated in Paris.

And in 1816, when he petitioned the House of Commons to make his sculptures public property, he drew attention to the vacuum created by the dispersal of the Musée Napoléon’s collections: my Marbles…have essentially gained in the public opinion, even on a comparison with the chef-d’oeuvres of ancient Art which, till lately, adorned the Gallery of the Louvre…[T]he fate of that Gallery, and the influence of the dispersion of it, have eminently exemplified, in the face of Europe, the importance of collections of this nature, in a national point of view.8

In response to Elgin’s petition, a Select Committee was set up in 1816 to enquire into the purchase of the sculptures, and the price that should be paid for them. The Committee took evidence from 18 witnesses (including Elgin himself ), who were asked specifically to evaluate Elgin’s

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collection in relation to the sculptures that had been at the Louvre; some of the witnesses were also asked to comment on the Aegina Marbles, which by then had become the property of Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria. Indeed, Ludwig had made an offer on the Elgin Marbles, which may have had some influence on the eventual purchase price; and, in turn, there had been a British attempt to buy the Aegina Marbles when they went up for sale in 1812.9 So the fortunes of all three sets of marbles – the Roman ones, the Elgins and the Aeginas – were thoroughly intertwined throughout this period. Perhaps the first systematic thinker to accommodate both of the new sets of sculptures in a comprehensive historical scheme was G.W.F. Hegel, in his Berlin lectures on aesthetics, delivered in the 1820s (although not published until 1835, after his death). While Hegel’s impact on the fledgling discipline of art history has attracted considerable attention, his Aesthetics is usually discussed for its role in the history of ideas, while his observations on concrete works of visual art are neglected. This has tended to occlude the significance of his remarkably early interpretations of the Greek sculptures. He starts with Winckelmann – a reminder of just how important Winckelmann’s History must have been in forming not only Hegel’s periodisation of ancient art, but also his basic historical method. He follows Winckelmann’s method of weaving concrete monuments into an overall historical pattern, and indeed gives this new philosophical purchase through his more systematic dialectical method. However, he also makes the crucial break away from the Roman sculptures that dominate Winckelmann’s narrative, but which dwindle to merely vestigial presences in Hegel’s. Already in the 1820s, Hegel manages to weave the Elgin and Aegina Marbles seamlessly into the storyline, as he says himself early in the discussion: ‘Winckelmann had of course a great number of Egyptian and Greek statues in view, but more recently we can see Aeginetan sculptures as well as masterpieces ascribed to Phidias or necessarily recognised as belonging to his period and chiselled by his pupils.’10 The sentence adumbrates the different roles the two sets of marbles will play in Hegel’s narrative. He has already made it clear that the advance in knowledge since Winckelmann is not merely a matter of the number of sculptures that had come to light, but also of ‘their style and our estimate of their beauty’.11 And as his story unfolds, the Aegina

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Marbles become the definitional example for the archaic style, and the Elgins for the fully achieved classical style. (It should be noted that, at this date, no earlier sculptures were available for comparison, so the Aeginas could assume the role of the archaic in Winckelmann’s scheme; it was not until sixth-century sculptures came to light, as Chapter 3 will explore, that the Aeginas (first quarter of the fifth century bc) were recategorised as ‘transitional’ from archaic to classical.) Thus both sets of marbles play their roles in Hegel’s developmental narrative. But the Aeginas do little more than that; they are important principally for moving the narrative on from the earlier ‘symbolic’ stage towards the classical ideal: But all the same this stage, really preliminary to ideal art, does not extend all the way right into what is actually classical because on the one hand it is obviously preoccupied with what is typical and therefore without life, and on the other, while approaching life and movement, it can reach at first only the life of nature; not the life of that spiritually animated beauty which displays the life of the spirit unseparated from the life of its natural shape…12

So for Hegel there is still, in the Aegina Marbles, a divide between external nature and inward spirit. This manifests itself as a difference between the bodies and the heads of the figures (Fig. 5): The whole body, except the head, witnesses to the truest treatment and imitation of nature. Even the accidental features of the skin are imitated and carried out excellently with a marvellous handling of the marble; the muscles are strongly emphasised, the bone structure of the body is indicated, the shapes are constrained by the severity of the design, yet reproduced with such knowledge of the human organism that the figures almost deceive us into thinking that they are alive, why! even that we are almost scared by them and shrink from touching them…On the other hand, a true presentation of nature was entirely sacrificed in the workmanship of the heads; a uniform cut of the faces was preserved in all the heads…: the noses are sharp, the forehead still lies back without rising freely and straight…the closed mouth ends in angles drawn upwards…13

Hegel is referring to the famous ‘Aeginetan smile’, of which more later. Both sets of marbles are definitional, then, for their respective styles. However, the Elgin Marbles, because they represent the fully achieved

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Fallen Warrior from the East Pediment of the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina, early fifth century bc.

classical ideal, are definitional, additionally, for Greek sculpture as a whole, and indeed for the whole stage in the development of spirit that is represented by the classical art-form and its characteristic art of sculpture. Thus the main discussion of the (chronologically later) Elgin Marbles actually occurs earlier in the text, in Hegel’s theoretical discussion of the ideal of sculpture, before he even gets to his account of the historical stages. With the Elgins, there is no divide: …especially has our admiration been intensified to an extreme by their free vivacity, by the way in which the natural material is permeated and conquered by the spirit and in which the artist has softened the marble, animated it, and given it a soul. In particular, whenever that praise is exhausted, it comes back ever anew to the figure of the recumbent rivergod [Fig. 6] which is amongst the most beautiful things preserved to us from antiquity.14

The Elgin Marbles were already famous for what Hegel calls their ‘liveliness’, but he takes this a step further by winding it ingeniously into his dialectic. It is the result of ‘their having been created freely out of the spirit of the artist’, who has cast off all traces of tradition and convention. However, this freedom is fully united with a scrupulous fidelity to natural fact that raises the imitation of nature to a new level. Hegel finds the naturalism of the sculptures no longer ‘constrained by the severity of

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Reclining male figure (known as the River-god ‘Ilissos’) from the West Pediment of the Parthenon, c. 438–432 bc.

the design’, but fully expressive of ‘every situation of rest or movement’.15 Again this draws on previous discussions of the Elgin Marbles, seen as supremely sophisticated in the accuracy with which muscle and flesh respond to the position of the limbs. For example, the painter Thomas Lawrence compared the reclining male figure then known as ‘Theseus’ (Fig. 7) to the Belvedere Torso (Fig. 3): ‘there are parts of the Torso in which the muscles are not true to the action, and they invariably are in what remains of the Theseus.’16 And the archaeologist Ennio Quirino Visconti (keeper of the Musée Napoléon) was compelled to revise his earlier championship of the Roman sculptures when he saw the Elgins in 1814: ‘In the best conserved parts do we not rediscover the traces of a chisel which knew how to soften the marble and transform it into supple and living flesh?’17 But again, Hegel takes the point a step further, to claim that this gives animation to ‘every point; even the minutest detail has its purpose … and yet it remains in continual flux, counts and lives only in the whole. The result is that the whole can be recognized in fragments, and such a separated part affords the contemplation and enjoyment of an unbroken whole.’18

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Figure of Dionysus (known in the nineteenth century as ‘Theseus’ or ‘Hercules’) from the East Pediment of the Parthenon, c. 438–432 bc.

Ingeniously, Hegel has managed to produce a theoretical justification for appreciating the Elgin Marbles in their fragmentary and fractured condition, perhaps the greatest sticking-point in their reception. The two reclining male figures caused the least difficulty; they could be seen more or less as if they were like the freestanding sculptures of the Graeco– Roman tradition, such as the Apollo Belvedere, which some of the Select Committee witnesses thought a little better, some not quite so good. The sculptor John Flaxman was uncomfortable with that comparison, given the mutilated state of the Elgin male figures, but he felt happier when he thought of comparing them with the more fragmentary Torso.19 Interestingly, the draped female figures were much more difficult than the nude males for most witnesses to accept (Fig. 8): the broken folds of the drapery appeared incompatible with notions of the wholeness and serenity of the classical ideal. The sculptor Francis Chantrey explained the carving of the draperies as a consequence of their original situation in the open air: ‘those were for a broad light, consequently the drapery is cut into small parts, for the sake of producing effect.’ And he went

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on, ‘that is very surprising, they are finished to a high degree, but the arrangement is calculated to be seen at a great distance.’20 Thus the process of detaching the marbles from their context paradoxically raised important questions about their original creation. Why did the sculptors finish their figures on the backs, as if they were freestanding, when viewers would never have seen the rear view? And why did they finish the sculptures to a level of detail that would be lost to viewers from the ground, forty feet below? It was as though the sculptures had somehow been destined for their eventual museum settings, and only temporarily elevated and distanced on the temple. Hegel’s interpretation effectively cancelled the principal aesthetic demerit of the Elgin Marbles, their ruined condition, and enabled them to take their place as the culmination of the classical art-form, the very summit of human artistic achievement. That is remarkable: the Elgin Marbles had become available for critical discussion just a decade or two earlier, yet in Hegel’s lectures they have already trumped all of the monuments that had been famous since the Renaissance. Arguably, though, Hegel failed to find a similarly powerful aesthetic justification for the Aegina Marbles, and it took much longer for such features as the ‘Aeginetan smile’ to overcome the charge of aesthetic immaturity. Perhaps,

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Female figures (known in the nineteenth century as ‘Fates’) from the East Pediment of the Parthenon, c. 438–432 bc.

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as opposed to the impassive faces of the Graeco–Roman sculptures, the smile seemed to break out of the figure’s self-containment, to invite the spectator’s response; that might help to account for Hegel’s strange fantasy that the sculptures might be about to come alive, or it might seem slightly embarrassing. As the English edition of Adolf Furtwängler and H.L. Urlichs’s textbook Greek and Roman Sculpture put it as late as 1914, ‘The “Aeginetan smile,” which is the amiable expression of emotion, obtained among those ignorant of its intention an often almost comic interpretation.’21 Walter Pater, in a moving essay on the Aegina Marbles first published in 1880, turns the smile into a positive aesthetic feature through the use of compelling transhistorical analogies, both forwards and backwards in time: Otherwise, these figures all smile faintly, almost like the monumental effigies of the Middle Age, with a smile which, even if it be but a result of the mere conventionality of an art still somewhat immature, has just the pathetic effect of Homer’s conventional epithet ‘tender,’ when he speaks of the flesh of his heroes.22

This adumbrates the striking revaluation of archaic sculpture at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, to be explored in Chapter 3 below, when new discoveries and changing aesthetic principles, in complex mixture, gave cogency to what had previously seemed merely ‘primitive’ in early Greek sculpture. In Wounded Amazon of 1904 (Fig. 9), for example, the Munich painter Franz von Stuck reinterprets the fallen warriors of the Aegina pediments (with an intriguing gender reversal), and the clearly defined planes of the Aegina sculptures may be among the points of reference for the simplified bodily forms of sculptors such as Aristide Maillol in the early years of the twentieth century. The delayed response indicates how difficult it was to accommodate the early style of the Aeginas within traditional notions of the classical ideal. Hegel did not invent the view that the Aegina Marbles were primarily of historical importance, whereas the Elgins could assume the aesthetic potency of the fully developed classical ideal. That view was already evident in the testimony to the Commons Select Committee in 1816, and it was accepted in the final Report: ‘[The Aegina Marbles] are described

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as valuable in point of remote antiquity, and curious in that respect, but of no distinguished merit as specimens of Sculpture, their style being what is usually called Etruscan.’23 Thus the Aeginas served as a helpful point of contrast for what proved perhaps the decisive argument in favour of public ownership for the Elgins: the Elgins came to seem uniquely capable of serving as a school for artists, and promoting the excellence of the fine arts in the present day. The Select Committee Report concluded, in its last and decisive sentence, that as British public property the Elgins ‘may receive that admiration and homage to which they are entitled, and serve in return as models and examples to those, who by knowing how to revere and appreciate them, may learn first to imitate, and ultimately to rival them’.24 This clearly echoes that paradoxical sentence from Winckelmann’s Reflections of 1755: ‘The only way for us to become great or, if this be possible, inimitable, is to imitate the ancients.’25 In one sense, then, the Elgins could transcend their chronological position in the history of ancient art to become aesthetic exemplars for

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Franz von Stuck, Wounded Amazon, 1904.

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the modern world as well. But in another sense the transcendence of the Elgins was a function precisely of their position at the culminating moment in a chronology already established in Winckelmann’s History. By inserting the two new sets of marbles into the pre-existing scheme of rise and culmination, Hegel was able to substantiate not only the historicising urge in Winckelmann’s thought, but also what might be seen as the rationale for the historical study of ancient art, in Winckelmann’s conviction that its spirit could and should live as a potent aesthetic force in the present day. It is important to stress that for Hegel there is no question but that the Elgin Marbles are quintessentially sculpture – not adjuncts to architecture, which in Hegel’s scheme represents an earlier phase of development. Perhaps, indeed, Hegel’s relative valuations subtly imply that the Aeginas fail to cast off their subservience to their architectural framework as thoroughly as the Elgins. Yet however successful Hegel was in ignoring it, the fact that both ensembles came from buildings plays a crucial role in validating the chronology, since the buildings – unlike any of Winckelmann’s Graeco–Roman sculptures – can be securely dated on the basis of independent historical or epigraphic evidence. The removal of the marbles from ancient temples to modern museums brought the tensions between aesthetic and historical considerations vividly to the fore. On the one hand, the detached marbles ceased to serve as architectural components, and became freestanding sculptures at a stroke; on the other, they owed their status to the chronology that only their original incorporation into a building could verify. The museum displays devised for the new sculptures dealt with these considerations in different ways. Since the British Museum already existed, the Elgin Marbles could be accommodated immediately, and they went on view as soon as 1817. That, however, meant integrating them with existing collections, something that was attended with considerable practical difficulties. Contrary to its general practice, the Museum displayed plaster casts of the Aegina Marbles so that the chronological development of Greek art could be represented.26 Yet the Elgins were too large a collection to be inserted seamlessly into a chronological display; their commanding physical presence among the Museum’s collections gave visible expression to their conceptual

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importance as the summit of the Greek achievement. In Munich, however, Ludwig built his own museum, the Glyptothek, where the architect, Leo von Klenze, was able to design a suite of galleries in continuous historical sequence.27 The history of ancient art, formerly something that existed only in textual form, in such books as Winckelmann’s, could now be dramatised in three-dimensional space, with material objects. Photographs of the original display show a longitudinal view, down the gallery where the Aegina pediments were arrayed on either side, through two arched doorways to the Barberini Faun as the focal point, two galleries and (perhaps) two centuries beyond (Fig. 10).28 Thus the Glyptothek display reinforced the historical position of the Aegina Marbles within the overall chronology of ancient art in a physical and material way that was simply not achievable at the British Museum, or the older Italian collections of antiquities. It was partly for contingent reasons, then, that the displays at the Glyptothek and the British Museum, respectively, reinforced the sense that the Aegina Marbles were valuable principally for their place in the chronological

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Photograph of the Aegina Room of the Glyptothek, Munich with its original decorations and view to the Barberini Faun.

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sequence, whereas the Elgins stood in some sense apart as the culminating masterpieces of classical antiquity. What was not contingent, though, was the remarkably thorough victory of the chronological system as the preferred museological practice. By 1849, when the archaeologist Charles Newton reported to the Trustees of the British Museum on a fact-finding mission among the antiquities collections of Europe, he had to admit that the Glyptothek provided the best model for what he called ‘the true method of arrangement – that according to periods of art’.29 That was still the view of Adolf Michaelis in 1908. The Glyptothek, he said, was the only museum to rival the British Museum in the quality of its antiquities: For here also original works of Greek art gave distinction to the collection. But, inasmuch as the royal collection [that of Ludwig] retained from the beginning the historical point of view which continued to influence the arrangements of the Glyptothek, in this respect the Munich collection emphasises even in a greater degree than the British Museum the motive which should govern the future of all museums: a visible representation of the development of ancient art.30

Recent events have demonstrated how powerful this orthodoxy remained in museum practice throughout the twentieth century: reorganisations along thematic, rather than chronological, lines at such museums as Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Getty Villa in Malibu all attracted press controversy in the years after 2000. Thus the two sets of Marbles – the Aeginas in particular, but also the Elgins – played a crucial role in establishing basic principles of museum display that still haunt curatorial decisions today. Furthermore, museological practices that were initially developed with specific reference to establishing a history of ancient art have made their impact well outside the study of classical antiquity, including museums of modern and contemporary art. The museum displays have also had a reciprocal impact on classical scholarship. If the sway of chronological organisation over museum practice now seems to be at an end, it is not difficult to imagine how exciting it must have been when it was first introduced – when displays such as that of the Glyptothek pulled the history of ancient art off the printed page, and gave it vivid, three-dimensional actuality. Indeed

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Newton, when he made his survey of European collections, expressed some vexation that it was impossible to bring all of the antiquities together into one great museum that could more fully realise the historical project; as an alternative, he suggested a comprehensive gallery of casts.31 While cast-collecting was a long-established practice, and obligatory for academies of art, where the casts served as examples for the students’ emulation, it was still a new idea to use such a collection to demonstrate the chronological development of ancient art, as in a number of university collections established in the nineteenth century.32 But the simpler alternative was to return to the book, where photographic reproduction could bring the new museum displays back to the printed page, using photographs supplied by the museums themselves. Thus the nineteenth-century growth of museum collections goes hand in hand with a burgeoning practice of photographic illustration in books that could economically integrate the chronological displays of the various museums into more comprehensive historical accounts. By 1914, even a textbook for non-specialists, Furtwängler and Urlichs’s Greek and Roman Sculpture, included 133 illustrations. A few sculptures of older fame, from the Roman collections, still appear, but they are relegated to the later stages of the historical narrative. The most extensive suites of illustrations are those of the Elgin and Aegina Marbles, which continue to serve their exemplary roles for archaic and classical sculpture respectively. And the same remains broadly true for more recent surveys, such as Andrew Stewart’s comprehensive Greek Sculpture: An Exploration of 1990. There, the massive volume of 881 plates includes 14 from the Aeginas and about 50 from the Elgins, as well as numerous examples from other ensembles of architectural sculpture such as the Temple of Zeus at Olympia (excavated in the later 1870s) and the Pergamon altar (1878–86). The illustrations show sculptures, generally detached from their architectural contexts. Nonetheless, they owe their prominence to the fact that they came from buildings, for which documentary, epigraphic or physical evidence can supply reliable dates. Thus the illustrations of detached architectural sculptures, besides their simple numerical preponderance, play the vital role of sustaining the overall historical narratives of the books, by pinning down the chronology at key dates. In Stewart’s book, the freestanding sculptures that had

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been famous before the nineteenth century are relegated to the later stages of the narrative, and even then their dates are often admitted to be conjectural or disputed. It might be said that the Aegina and Elgin Marbles appeared at just the right moment, when nineteenth-century historical positivism was beginning to demand a degree of accuracy that was simply impossible to achieve with the sculptures that had previously been known. Today’s surveys and textbooks still work largely within the conventions of that historical method. Within those conventions, it no longer matters whether the Aegina and Elgin Marbles have any aesthetic value. Their value as historical evidence simply trumps all the considerations that vexed the Commons Select Committee. The result is a new history of ancient art that is more historically accurate, at least in the limited sense of positivist methodology, than was possible before the Aeginas and Elgins appeared. Moreover, the new history appears to construct a firmer relationship between physical objects and the textual story of ancient art as a narrative of continuous development. It unites the historiographical approach of Pliny and Winckelmann with actual objects, thus rendering the history of ancient art visible and material to a degree previously impossible – even for Winckelmann, much as he wanted to make it so. It can do so, however, only by means of a thoroughgoing change in what can be considered a work of art in the first place. Ancient references to works of sculpture or painting normally identify them by reference to the names of their authors. Thus the standard paperback collection of ancient ‘sources and documents’, J.J. Pollitt’s The Art of Ancient Greece, organises its multifarious texts, widely disparate in date, under the artists’ names, as the most convenient mode of reference. The books on art in Pliny’s Natural History trace a chronology not of works, styles or movements, but of artists, and works of art appear in other kinds of ancient writing because they are linked to great names – there is no place, in such texts, for the anonymous productions of architectural sculpture. Perhaps the only notable exception is Pausanias, who in his guidebook to Greece of the second century ad mentions notable sculptural programmes on buildings when he comes across them, and sometimes names a sculptor; yet there is little sense that the architectural sculptures can compete with the important freestanding

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statues by the most famous artists.33 Even Pausanias, while he mentions the pedimental sculptures on the Parthenon (he is, indeed, the only ancient writer to do so), simply notes their subject-matter – and he does not attribute them to Pheidias.34 He mentions the temple on Aegina, but not the sculptures.35 By and large, architectural sculpture is conspicuous by its absence from such ancient texts as have come down to us. By and large, again, the great Greek sculptures enumerated in Pliny or given high status in other ancient texts have not come to light, except (perhaps) in later copies whose status is perennially debated. There is, then, a significant mismatch between the body of sculptures given highest value in our textbooks and those which the ancients valued (at least as far as the surviving literary evidence indicates). Such considerations help to explain the harping on Pheidias in the questions put to witnesses by the Select Committee in 1816, and also the higher status accorded to the Elgin Marbles over not only the Aegina Marbles, but all other ancient sculpture. Here there was a real possibility of a match between one of the very greatest names and objects we actually possess (it is still almost the only such possibility, as later chapters will show). But as several witnesses pointed out, ancient texts do not make Pheidias the author of the architectural sculptures on the Parthenon, though they invariably assert his authorship of the freestanding cult statue of Athena, in chryselephantine, within the temple. True, Plutarch says that Pheidias was in charge of Pericles’s building programme,36 and there was much debate about what that might mean. Most of the witnesses were prepared, in the end, to concede that it was plausible that Pheidias had designed the sculptures, even though it remained unlikely that he had actually executed them. That would make his practice like that of a modern sculptor such as Antonio Canova, who maintained a large studio where assistants did much of the actual physical work.37 Canova’s own high esteem for the Elgin Marbles was cited several times in the Select Committee Report.38 Famously, he refused to take on the job of restoring them on the grounds that it would be sacrilege to touch them, whereas his arch-rival, the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, did restore the Aegina Marbles.39 Canova’s refusal to restore not only enhanced the glamour of the Elgin Marbles: it also bolstered the argument that these sculptures were uniquely suited to become public property,

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since it was assumed that, in their weatherbeaten and fragmentary state, they were unsuitable for commercial sale and display in a private house. What seemed at first to make them unattractive to a private collector – their shattered condition – became the proof of their superiority to the merely commercialised objects traded on the art market for purposes of interior decoration. The idea that Pheidias designed, rather than executed, the marbles made an ingenious solution to the problem of authorship. But the problem was a real one. The new history of ancient art was achieved only by changing the basic status of the marbles, from architectural adjuncts to sculpture proper; yet this involved abandoning the canon as it was known from ancient texts, an issue that we shall see in Chapter 2 continued to haunt scholarship. Could the new history have been written without detaching the marbles from their temples and displaying them in museums? The question involves all the difficulties of counterfactual analysis. What did happen is that the display of the marbles had an impact on the way the history of ancient art is constructed that is now irrevocable. But it also had a reciprocal impact on what we think of as sculpture. The process of removal and display made the marbles into sculpture – but this was not sculpture in the old sense of the selfcontained, autonomous object. It was sculpture ‘in the expanded field’, to borrow Rosalind Krauss’s term for a very different development of the later twentieth century.40 Early responses show just how startling this expanded notion of sculpture looked, before it became normalised within the history of ancient art. There is much more to be said about how the circumstances of display created new aesthetic possibilities. The sumptuous interiors of the Glyptothek provided a multicoloured, rich visual environment. Since these were destroyed by bombing in the Second World War, we can only guess at the effect from surviving photographs (Fig. 10); how different is the stark, modernist display introduced when the Glyptothek reopened in 1972, at which point Thorvaldsen’s restorations were also removed (Fig. 11). At the British Museum, too, the installation of the Elgin Marbles in a new suite of galleries funded by Lord Duveen was interrupted by the war, and opened only in 1962 (Fig. 12). In both museums, the successive redisplays result in new configurations of the relationships between

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solid marble and void space that make these sculptures so different from the traditional freestanding figure of the supposed classical ideal. The witnesses’ testimony to the Select Committee in 1816 vividly illustrates the difficulty of accommodating the Elgin Marbles to existing notions of the classical ideal. Nonetheless, the final Report came down decisively in favour of purchase, and the final paragraph offers a stirring justification: Your Committee cannot dismiss this interesting subject, without submitting to the attentive reflection of the House, how highly the cultivation of the Fine Arts has contributed to the reputation, character, and dignity of every Government by which they have been encouraged, and how intimately they are connected with the advancement of every thing valuable in science, literature, and philosophy.41

The British have often been called a philistine people, but it is hard to imagine anything less philistine than these words. They make today’s rhetoric of knowledge transfer, and the economic impact of the arts, sound lame and defensive. Our governments, and the funding bodies for the arts and humanities, would do better to recover this confidence: not just isolated incremental gains, or commercial advantages, but ‘every thing valuable’ across the whole spectrum of endeavour, in ‘science, literature, and philosophy’ alike, may proceed from ‘the cultivation of the Fine Arts’.

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Photograph of the current display of the West Pediment from the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina, in the Glyptothek, Munich.

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Photograph of the current display of the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum, London.

TEACHINGS FROM THE ELGIN MARBLES

A prevalent scholarly view has it that the Elgin Marbles failed to effect the revolution in artistic practice that many of the Select Committee witnesses so confidently predicted.42 As Bernard Ashmole put it in the 1960s: I suspect that the only great work of art directly inspired by the Elgin Marbles was not a piece of sculpture at all: and even then its inspiration … came only in part from the marbles, and in part from second rate Roman vases. I mean of course Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ which he first recited to [the painter Benjamin Robert] Haydon as they strolled through the Kilburn meadows.43

There is a hint of patrician hauteur in this passage – ‘of course’ Ashmole’s properly educated auditors know that Keats’s poems, but not Roman vases or Haydon’s paintings, are canonical masterpieces. Such views,

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moreover, are based on the overly simplified procession of ‘isms’ that tended to characterise art-historical methodologies of the high modernist period: ‘Neoclassicism’ is understood to have come to an end about the time of the fall of Napoleon, when it was succeeded by ‘Romanticism’, ‘Realism’, and then by the familiar litany of avant-garde movements from ‘Impressionism’ onwards. And, of course, the later movements have in common the rejection of classical reference that marks the putative sea change in Western art from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’. Yet this history, attractive as its easy flow may be, construes artistic reception too narrowly. If, as argued above, the Elgin Marbles could be received as a different kind of art-form from the freestanding sculpture of the Graeco–Roman tradition, then it might be a mistake to seek their impact in ‘a piece of sculpture’, or in discrete works that encapsulate the putative ‘classical ideal’ – the ‘perfectly autonomous and whole work of art’, ‘underpinned by its symbolic significance as the representation of a human subjectivity at one with itself ’.44 If the Elgins could win their way into the canon through their undeniable provenance in Periclean Athens, once there they could promote values strangely at odds with the socalled ‘classical ideal’: the ‘romantic’ fascination with fragmentation and ruin, the ‘realist’ exploration of the human body as a living and moving organism, or the ‘avant-garde’ rejection of the traditional boundaries of the work of art – the framing of a painted scene as a coherent whole, or the contour-line as the defining principle of the freestanding sculpture. Whereas the traditional view would have it that the Elgin Marbles appeared too late, when the art world was ready to turn away from Neoclassicism, a revised account might place them, paradoxically, at the origin of the whole host of developments in modern art that reject the exemplarity of the classical ideal. That could result in another grand narrative, no less compelling than the familiar succession of ‘isms’, in which the Elgins become responsible for an artistic ‘revolution’ far more wide-ranging than the usual arthistorical procedures of ‘source-spotting’ and tracing of ‘influences’ could capture. Ashmole’s invocation of Keats’s ‘Ode’ perhaps acknowledges this, in roundabout fashion. The lesson of the Elgin Marbles breaks the confines of ‘imitation’ narrowly conceived as the appropriation of a motif or reference. Keats instead transforms the spatial array of figures, on an

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imaginary sculptured urn or the Parthenon frieze, into the temporal progression of his five stanzas. Perhaps, as the Keats scholar Ian Jack has proposed, the sacrificial procession in stanza four, with its ‘heifer lowing at the skies’, recalls a slab from the South Frieze of the Parthenon.45 Yet there is little point in trying to pin the poem’s resonances to such ‘sources’, since the poem has left behind that method of ordering its elements. The possibility of such a transformation may be hinted in the miscellany of detached fragments that constitutes any display of the Elgin Marbles, quite apart from any scene or figure to which verbal reference might be made, and the moral of the penultimate line makes clear reference to the wider issues raised unexpectedly by the Elgins: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’.46 When Keats asks, ‘What men or gods are these?’ he recalls questions raised in the Select Committee evidence about the identification of particular figures – as whether the so-called ‘Theseus’, a man, can be compared with a statue of a god such as the Apollo Belvedere.47 More broadly, the poem’s unanswered question suggests the wider implications involved in wondering just what it is that we are looking at. From the start, the Elgin Marbles were promoted as a school for artists. Almost as soon as they were unpacked at his house in Park Lane, Elgin gave permission to draw from them to sympathetic artists including the young Benjamin Robert Haydon, the celebrated portraitist Thomas Lawrence, and the President of the Royal Academy, Benjamin West (this led, in later years, to an engaging debate about who had been the first to enjoy the privilege).48 Haydon documented his fascinated response in his journal, and in written reminiscences over the decades until his suicide in 1846. Although there is no reason to doubt his claim that the first sight of the marbles came as a revelation, his writings show nonetheless that it was only through an extended, indeed near-obsessive, process of contemplation and reflection that he was able to cast off the preconceptions inculcated by the normal student practice of drawing from the freestanding Graeco– Roman sculptures; what is notable is the sheer tenacity with which he pursued this project, to arrive at an altogether different, and radical, understanding of their aesthetic character.49 His lecture of 1840 ‘On the Elgin Marbles’ recapitulates the process, referring to his younger self in the third person:

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Often has he remained fifteen hours in the pent-house, Park Lane, which sheltered their beauty, with his lanthorn and his drawing board, examining every foot, every hand, every limb, every breathing body, by moving his solitary candle about, above, or underneath them; and when he has placed his glimmering light on the ground beneath the mighty back of the Theseus, a vast, broad, and silent shadow, dark and dim, has stretched across the whole gallery; whilst here and there a transcendent limb, here and there a shattered head, or fighting figure, instinct with life, have trembled into light, and seemed ready to move, so evident was their life and circulation.50

Even in this short passage, Haydon captures many of the qualities noted above as distinctive to the new aesthetic of the Elgins. He emphasises his own mobility around the sculptures to allow a panoply of views, not only through the entire 360 degrees around them but also from above and below; the view of the back of a figure; the relationships of the marbles to the surrounding environment; his manipulation of lighting to enhance not only the variety of views but also his sense of the sculptures’ vitality. (Stains of what appears to be candle-grease on some of the surviving drawings confirm his claim to have been ‘moving his solitary candle about’ as he worked.) A characteristic not only of Haydon’s but of other contemporary writing on the marbles is the repetition of the word ‘every’, to capture not only the realism of the minutest detail but also the sense that the vitality of the marbles infuses even the slightest fragment. Compare, for example, the passages from Hegel quoted above, or William Hazlitt: ‘The veins, the wrinkles in the skin, the indications of the muscles under the skin … , the finger-joints, the nails, every the smallest part cognizable to the naked eye …’51 Haydon’s innumerable drawings, now preserved in the British Museum, give some sense of this process of study.52 A drawing dated June 1808 (Fig. 13) shows the figure known as ‘Theseus’ from an angle – looking over the figure’s left shoulder – that would be difficult to adopt in relation to today’s display, which elevates and aligns the figures as on the original cornice. Comparison with the sculpture shows how faithfully Haydon has imitated every carved form: the pectoral muscle curving into the armpit, the ridges of the ribcage, deeper creases at the waist and below the abdomen. Perhaps he has slightly exaggerated the bulk of the

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shoulder, as he makes the most of the chosen angle to study how the figure’s weight, on the supporting elbow, puts pressure on the musculature of the shoulder – the nearest part of the body to the spectator, in this view, while the head turns away in lost three-quarter profile as if gazing into some unfathomable distance. The drawing studies the sculpture from just one of the myriad possible angles, many of which Haydon explored in other drawings; as an imitation of the sculpture it is both exact and partial. The blank expanse of light-brown paper, on which the figure is placed off-centre, as well as the telltale splotches of candlegrease at the top-left corner, acknowledge the provisional character of this particular interpretation of the sculpture. Yet the same brown paper that creates a flat backdrop surges into amplitude within the contour lines, as if the volumes were animated from within, by the breath of a living being and the pull of tensed muscles against the weight of the massive body. The drawing has something to say about the workings of the body as an organism with its own internal logic, as well as about how they appear from this unusual viewpoint.

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Benjamin Robert Haydon, Drawing of ‘Theseus’ (East Pediment D, Fig. 7), 1808.

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Haydon’s drawings circulated among his students, who were also encouraged to draw from the marbles themselves once they had reached a sufficiently advanced stage; yet his teaching methods were idiosyncratic, and his well-publicised writings on the marbles may have been more widely influential on succeeding generations.53 As Ian Jenkins has shown, practices in art education were slow to change, and drawing from whole sculptures or casts was preferred by teachers at the Royal Academy and elsewhere, at least through the middle of the nineteenth century. In his testimony to a Parliamentary Commission of 1857, the Museum’s Keeper of Antiquities, Edward Hawkins, was asked whether students studied the marbles: [F]ormerly the Royal Academy had a rule which prevented their students ever working in the Elgin Room at all. They insisted upon the students bringing a copy of a perfect statue. Now, the Elgin Marbles do not afford a perfect statue and, therefore, though I think the Elgin Marbles are more valuable than all the sculptures in the world put together as a school of art, yet they were never much used by the students.54

Hawkins’s paradox – the Elgin Marbles as a ‘school of art’ that was at odds with academic authority – was later echoed by the artist George Frederic Watts, who contrasted the true educational value of the Elgins with what he saw as the tired and routinised teaching of the Royal Academy Schools, where he had enrolled in 1835. According to his wife and biographer Mary Seton Watts, ‘when speaking of this time he would say that he learnt in no school save one, that of Pheidias, and in that school he had never ceased to learn.’ Watts described himself as a ‘pupil’ of Pheidias, and his statements imply something more than a process of self-education through study of the marbles. He selected Pheidias as a personal mentor, who seemed to speak to him across the ages, in a master-and-pupil relationship that bypassed the normal routines of the academies and art schools. Again according to Mary Watts, when he visited a retrospective exhibition of his own work in 1897, he commented, à propos an early work: ‘I think Pheidias would have said, “Go on, you may do something”.’55 The sense that the Elgin Marbles could provide direct access to the teaching of Pheidias, without the intermediary of academic tradition, is expressed in a different way in two works by the

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photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, a member of Watts’s artistic circle, entitled Teachings from the Elgin Marbles (for example Fig. 14). Both photographs place models in the poses of the so-called ‘Fates’ (Fig. 8); the two photographs reimagine the heads, missing from the sculptures, in different positions. The photographs respond to the startling realism seen in the Elgin Marbles in a literal way, by substituting living models for the marble figures; at the same time they demonstrate how the marbles could teach principles of composition and ideal beauty, to transform the photographs from mere life studies into works of art. As noted above, much of the early discussion on the Elgin Marbles centred on the male figures that were easiest to compare with traditional points of reference such as the Apollo Belvedere, and many of the witnesses to the Select Committee were uncomfortable with the deep cutting and broken edges of the draperies on the female figures. In part this represents a gendered hierarchy, already evident in Winckelmann’s Reflections of 1755 and still found in twentieth-century textbooks, that gave the nude male figure priority over the draped female.56 Cameron arranges the folds of her draperies to correspond to the pediment figures; interestingly, though, the real cloth in the photographs is too stiff to attain the intricacy of the ripples in the marbles themselves. Watts was fascinated by this aspect of the sculptures’ style, but it took a striking exercise in lateral thinking for him to make sense of what had been largely uninterpretable for the previous generation. On a trip to Italy in autumn 1853, he visited Venice for the first time, and was bowled over by Titian, Giorgione and the other Venetian Renaissance painters. Stopping at Padua on the return journey to see the Arena Chapel, Watts was suddenly reminded of the Elgin Marbles. A few months later, in a memorandum on the journey, he wrote: Haydon remarks upon the really strange resemblance some of [Giotto’s] heads bear to the heads of the frieze of the Parthenon, and concludes that he must at second hand have received instruction from Pheidias. He supposes that some wandering artist had made him acquainted either with some fragments or some drawings from the Panathenaic procession…57

Although Watts goes on to dismiss this as improbable, it points to a problem that had emerged in the notion of a classical tradition since the

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Julia Margaret Cameron, Teachings from the Elgin Marbles, 1867.

dramatic appearance of the Elgin Marbles. If Raphael and the other Renaissance artists who were taken in academic theory, and indeed in Winckelmann, as the bearers of the classical tradition into modernity had never seen really Greek sculpture, a disturbing rupture had suddenly appeared in what had formerly seemed a seamless process of transmission. Winckelmann had already been aware of the problem, and in the Reflections claimed that Raphael had ‘sent young artists to Greece in order to sketch for him the relics of antiquity’ (the same anecdote also appears in the Select Committee evidence).58 Such legends were unlikely to persuade in the more positivist climate of the mid-nineteenth century. Watts solves the problem with a sidestep, discarding the notion of direct influence altogether and substituting one of transhistorical affinity, which he immediately extends to the Venetian painters who had so impressed him: ‘In this quality of luscious breadth and richness of surface, [Pheidias’s] style later comes out gloriously; for Giorgione and Titian are wonderfully Pheidian in texture of flesh and drapery.’59 This is a simple move, but it introduces a radically new

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perspective on the classical ideal. Abruptly, it switches the associations of classicism away from Vasarian disegno – from form, design and the intellect, qualities attributed to the Roman and Florentine Renaissance – to colorito, with its resonances of sensuality and luxuriance, the province of the Venetians. The startling analogy gives the Elgin Marbles new purchase as an alternative classicism, in opposition to the mainstream version of Raphael and the academic tradition in post-Renaissance art and theory. Watts goes on to elaborate the point with particular attention to drapery: The drapery of Raphael has been justly celebrated for its grandeur and simplicity, but excellent as it is, it looks academic and like new blanket by the side of the Greek and the Venetian. It is remarkable that this quality of ease, flexibility, and richness seems to have been entirely overlooked in the Parthenon fragments, if indeed they have not been regarded as defects, which perhaps is most probable. No sculptor has seemed to consider that the great master intentionally cut up his drapery; yet what profound knowledge of both nature and of his materials has he not displayed!… By cutting up the drapery with innumerable folds, he gave the idea of flexible material, covering, but not trammelling the wearer, worn for ornament and use; by flowing lines he gave grace, by difference of surface he suggested a different material, by many folds he took away the importance of the mass, leaving the head and limbs free and uninterfered with, simple, massive, and important.60

This extraordinary passage suggests a whole new theory of Pheidian sculpture, and with it, inevitably, of the classical ideal. Watts was prepared to countenance the idea, still controversial in some quarters, that ancient sculpture had been adorned with painted colour or ‘polychromy’, but for him the colouristic qualities of sculpture do not depend on literal colouring; they are to do, instead, with ‘ease, flexibility, and richness’ in the carving, words he often repeats. Flaxman, he opines, lacked this sense of colour, and thus failed to understand the Elgin Marbles: ‘In the best sculpture you feel the palpitations of colour, the elements of a picture; you unconsciously see it painted!’61 Although Watts states that Pheidias ‘intentionally cut up’ his draperies, he is also responding to the modern appearance of the marbles, fragmented and broken in numerous places, frayed and weatherbeaten throughout. In his monumental sculpture

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Physical Energy (Fig. 15), on which he worked intermittently from 1870 through to his death, he used a distinctive rough plaster, cast in bronze, to produce a rugged, pocked surface reminiscent of the Elgins, but aesthetically transformed to enhance the dynamism of the allegorical subject.62 The composition, too, throws the images of youths on horseback, from the Parthenon frieze, into movement. The experimental techniques of Watts’s later paintings, with their crumbled, variegated paint surfaces, perhaps attempt to translate the ‘flexible’ or ‘cut up’ effect of the marbles into the medium of painting. Watts’s ‘Pheidian’ alternative to the classical ideal, then, is altogether opposed to the smooth, polished and pure white surfaces of neoclassical or Graeco–Roman sculpture; and it is applicable to painting as much as sculpture. But it does not lack the grandeur invariably attributed to Pheidias in ancient sources. In the passage quoted above, Watts suggests that the ‘innumerable folds’ of Pheidian drapery are more consistent with grandeur of design than large, Raphaelesque masses, which might

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George Frederic Watts, Physical Energy, c. 1870–1904, bronze cast (erected 1907).

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distract the eye. Later he advanced a ‘theory of curves’, which, in Mary Watts’s words, he liked to demonstrate by pointing out the bounding line of Greek form either upon the cast of the Theseus [Fig. 7] or that of the Ilissus [Fig. 6], both of which always stood upon the mantelpiece of his studio. Every part of the outline of these figures he saw to be fractions of very vast circles. In the flatness of the curving outline of these Pheidian sculptures he therefore perceived a suggestion of immensity.63

Both aspects of Pheidian style are evident in a painting which contemporaries and early biographers saw as one of Watts’s masterpieces, Endymion of about 1868–73 (Fig. 16). The figure of Endymion, in the eternal sleep that preserves his youth, appears as a reversed quotation of the ‘Theseus’, with the moon-goddess circling above him in the endlessly rippling draperies of the Elgin female figures. The figures’ malleable flesh is also Pheidian in Watts’s interpretation, and the hue of the goddess’s flesh and draperies seems to conflate the whiteness of Pentelic marble with the suggestion of moonbeams. The circling form is an obvious reference to the shape of the moon, yet it also relates to Watts’s theory of curves; the mythological subject-matter and the formal principle of Pheidian design are at one in this composition. The love story is expressed as the intersection of two curves, which bound the bodies of Endymion and the moon-goddess and are echoed in the disposition of the rippling draperies. The curves are also segments of much larger circles that extend far beyond the borders of the picture: we see only the fragmentary sections of two magnificent arcs forming circles of cosmic dimensions. Watts’s new interpretation of Pheidian sculpture, along with his frequent exhortations to younger artists to study the Elgin Marbles, gave a decisive impetus to what has been called the Victorian Classical Revival of the 1860s and later decades; endlessly rippling ‘Pheidian’ draperies begin to appear in the works of such artists as Frederic Leighton, Albert Moore, James McNeill Whistler and Simeon Solomon from the middle of the 1860s. But this was not a ‘revival’ in the sense that it returned to some familiar version of the classical ideal. It was based, instead, on the ‘teachings’ of the Elgin Marbles, in the direct sense implied in the

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photographs of Cameron, and on the anti-academic or ‘Venetian’ interpretation of them that seems to have originated with Watts; contemporary art critics were as likely to note affinities to Titian and Giorgione as to ancient sculpture in the work of these artists.64 Whistler is ordinarily treated in the art-historical literature as a proto-modernist rather than a classicist. Yet his artistic manifesto, the ‘Ten O’Clock’ lecture of 1885, gives prominence, alongside references to Velazquez and Japanese art, to two examples of ancient sculpture – both of them, however, representatives of the new generation of really Greek sculptures, the Venus de Milo and the Elgin Marbles. In the lecture, Whistler argues vehemently against the idea that great art is a product of its milieu, and he chooses his points of reference in the art of the past for contrast, certainly not to advocate ‘tradition’ in any form, ‘classical’ or otherwise. Whistler’s is a defiantly avant-garde position: the artist of the future may spring up anywhere, and there is no way to predict what form his art will take. Nonetheless, Whistler’s admiration for the

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George Frederic Watts, Endymion, c. 1868–73.

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works of the past he singles out is genuine, and in his peroration he perhaps suggests some elusive form of transhistorical affinity that does not depend on conventional notions of influence: We have then but to wait – until, with the mark of the Gods upon him – there come among us again the chosen – who shall continue what has gone before. Satisfied that, even were he never to appear, the story of the beautiful is already complete – hewn in the marbles of the Parthenon – and broidered, with the birds, upon the fan of Hokusai – at the foot of Fusiyama.65

In his work of the 1860s, Whistler experimented with ‘Pheidian’ drapery, blended with reminiscences of the Japanese prints he was beginning to collect. The enigmatic ‘Six Projects’, begun around 1868 and never finished, present an array of female figures in rippling draperies, with ‘Japoniste’ sprays of flowers, fans and parasols. The swaying poses and the lines of the windblown drapery demonstrate an unexpected affinity between the ‘ease’ and ‘flexibility’ of Pheidian sculptural style and the aesthetic of Japanese prints. The six panel paintings may have been intended as parts of a decorative scheme, but it remains unclear – and may never have been determined – how they were meant to be ordered, or whether the groupings of the figures have any narrative or message to convey.66 One of them represents a single female nude, reminiscent of the Venus de Milo in stance, on the seashore, like the traditional subject of Venus Anadyomene, born of the sea, but without specific attributes (Fig. 17). The others show groups of female figures in various configurations, reminiscent of the Parthenon frieze but without the consistent orientation of a procession. Perhaps the ensemble can be seen as a meditation on the frieze, a fragmentary part of some larger decorative scheme that remains forever mysterious. The Elgin Marbles did, then, serve as a school for artists, although not in quite the ways that their original proponents expected. Another fervent admirer was the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, who returned countless times to study them after his first visit in 1881; they should be accounted a crucial ingredient in the process by which Rodin, in his later work, moved away from the traditional freestanding figure towards freer, more flexible and often fragmentary sculptural configurations that have usually been seen in terms of modernist experimentation. As

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Chapter 3 will explore, the marbles made a quite different impact on a later visitor, Pablo Picasso, who seems to have responded, instead, to their massiveness and solidity (see for example Fig. 48). The sculptures were too complex, too damaged, and perhaps too formidable to be simply added to the repertoire of art-school examples. In that sense they were truly ‘inimitable’, and responses to them did not necessarily resemble them closely. That suggests that, far from being irrelevant to the modern art that reputedly turned away from ‘classicism’, the Elgin Marbles may be better understood as catalysts to that very process.

THE VENUS DE MILO

In Whistler’s ‘Ten O’Clock’ lecture the Elgin Marbles and the Venus de Milo (Fig. 18) are implicitly linked, as the two ancient works that Whistler was prepared to admit to his idiosyncratic canon – the same

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James McNeill Whistler, Venus (from the ‘Six Projects’), c. 1868 (later retouched).

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two sculptures singled out by Ludovic Vitet in the excerpt copied by Delacroix in 1860 and quoted as the epigraph to this chapter, and the same two that figure in Pater’s essay of 1867 on Winckelmann, as we saw in the Introduction. It is interesting that the Aegina Marbles do not figure in these contexts, although they do appear in the drier enumeration of ‘really Greek’ sculptural discoveries, for example, in Carl Ottfried Müller’s authoritative ‘manual of the archaeology of art’, Ancient Art and its Remains (first published in German, 1830, and frequently updated).67 National rivalries are surely an element, and we shall see that French writers consistently valued the Venus higher than German ones did. However, as we have already seen, it was also the case that the ‘archaic’ Aegina Marbles took much longer to enter the repertoire of sculptures admired for aesthetic, rather than merely historical, reasons. At first thought the Venus de Milo, a freestanding sculpture of a seminude figure, might seem easier to accommodate to the traditional canon than the sprawling ensembles of the Elgin and Aegina Marbles, and indeed numerous quotations of the Venus’s distinctive stance and silhouette can readily be found in the contemporary art of any moment after her discovery, down to the present day. On further investigation, though, the Venus posed many of the same problems that haunted the reception of the Elgins, plus one more formidable. Whereas the Elgin and Aegina Marbles came from buildings that could be securely dated, and thus historically contextualised, on the basis of external evidence, the Venus suddenly materialised without credentials of any sort, on a Greek island that had no ancient reputation as an artistic centre. Thus she had the potential to disrupt the emerging sense that it might be possible to construct a history of art with solid positivist credibility even before that project got off the ground. From that perspective, the superb quality of the sculpture only complicated matters: if one of the very best extant sculptures cannot be historically positioned with any certainty, even to the nearest century, then how can one pretend to have any grasp of the history of ancient art? What is more, the march of scholarship has not resolved that question, even today; while a rough-andready consensus has emerged about the sculpture’s date, its mysteries still vastly outweigh any ascertainable facts about it. How, then, should we go about studying this icon of ancient sculpture? The following discussion explores three possible options.68

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Venus de Milo, c. 100 bc.

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Option I First, it is necessary to consider a traditional art-historical approach to the object, one which might be called ‘positivist’ or ‘historicist’ and which aims to discover as much as possible about the object’s making, the social and historical contexts in which it was made, and its meanings within those contexts. In the case of the Venus de Milo there is very little to be done along these lines. In common with the vast majority of objects that survive from the ancient past, there is no documentary or textual evidence that can securely be associated with the work; it is not mentioned in any of the ancient writings on art and was wholly undocumented until its discovery on Melos in 1820. Moreover, the examination of its physical and stylistic characteristics has failed to produce a scholarly consensus about the circumstances of its creation.69 A fragmentary inscription on a block found with the sculpture perhaps records part of the sculptor’s name (‘… andros of Antioch on the Maeander’), but the interpretation of the inscription has always been disputed and in any case the block was misplaced (conveniently, as some have thought) at some point after its arrival in the Louvre. Some have seen the deep undercutting of the drapery folds as similar to the Parthenon sculptures; the facial type has often been called Praxitelean, and the fine working of the marble is a documented aspect of Praxitelean style; yet the specificity of rendering, both of flesh and drapery, appears Hellenistic to many eyes. Scholarly consensus now tends to identify it as dating from around 100 bc, but reflecting some kind of revival of an earlier style or styles; since there is no independent evidence for this interpretation, a strict historicist might be tempted to regard it as a compromise. A fragment of a hand bearing an apple, also found near the statue, has suggested to some that the subject might be Venus with the apple of Paris, to others that it is a deity of the island of Melos, but again it is disputed whether the apple belongs to the statue. The sculpture has also been seen as a Muse, a Nemesis, a Sappho, an Amphitrite, a toilette of Venus, or a bather surprised; as Salomon Reinach observed in 1890, it may be preferable simply to call it, with Henrich Heine, ‘Notre-Dame de Beauté’.70 In sum, there is too little positive data about the work to write more than an impoverished history of the traditional art-historical kind. Moreover, a similar conclusion, mutatis mutandis, is inevitable for virtually all other freestanding sculptures of the

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kind cited as masterpieces in ancient texts. There is, then, a serious argument to be made that it is not possible to write a history of ancient art at all, along the positivist lines of traditional art-historical enquiry. Most of those who have studied the sculpture since 1820 have acknowledged it to be exceptionally fine in workmanship and aesthetic impact. But that judgement has no bearing on the work’s original status. We simply do not have enough surviving sculptures to decide whether it is better or worse than average – and even if we did, we know too little about ancient methods of estimating sculptural quality to be sure that our judgement would correspond to those of its original viewers. Recent scholarship has been increasingly honest about such limitations to our knowledge, but with a result that can only be called bizarre. The Venus has fallen out of favour, in relation to works universally acknowledged to be of lower technical quality, so long as those can be linked in some way to documentary evidence. Most recent textbooks give considerable space to sculptures presumed to be later copies of Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos (a work mentioned prominently in ancient sources, Fig. 19),

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Copy after Praxiteles, Aphrodite of Knidos (mid-fourth century bc), ‘Colonna’ version.

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but mention the Venus de Milo only briefly, if at all.71 Yet the Melian is a fine example of ancient sculptural technique and of the articulation of the female body, while everyone admits that the putative copies of the Knidian are comparatively feeble. Surely this is evidence of a persistent prejudice against the visual; the merest fragment of text is permitted to override the kinds of knowledge that the eye can provide. That raises a different kind of problem: how can we account for the Venus de Milo’s undeniable, and undiminished, capacity to fascinate its audiences? If we find we can make no progress in establishing data about the sculpture itself, then perhaps we should reorient the enquiry, to explore instead the responses of the sculpture’s viewers.

Option II A second approach might then be to explore the history of the work’s reception since its discovery. It is immediately obvious that this can provide a much richer narrative, not only because of the sheer abundance of scholarly, literary and artistic interpretation of the sculpture since 1820, but also because we know a great deal about the social and cultural contexts for these modern interpretations. Thus the reception history of the Venus de Milo has just the qualifications that the history of its origins lacks for treatment according to the dominant art-historical method of the late twentieth century: the social history of art. The sculpture’s acquisition by the French state just a few years after the defeat of Napoleon placed it at the centre of the nationalist cultural politics of the period. It instantly took pride of place in the Louvre, struggling to maintain its status after the forced restitution of the works Napoleon had plundered from Italy, and after the British Museum’s acquisition of the Elgin Marbles. Thus the question of just how good the sculpture was had implications far beyond classical scholarship. A related issue, whether the work was an original or a copy, had ramifications no less far-reaching in an art world where questions of artistic originality were assuming central importance; indeed the Venus has remained a focus for such questions down to the present day. Writers of the 1820s were right, then, to compare the discovery to those of the ancient sculptures unearthed in the Renaissance.72 Like the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere, the Venus de

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Milo has played a crucial role in the cultural and artistic debates of the modern world ever since the time of its discovery. Within months of the sculpture’s arrival in the Louvre, three distinguished French scholars produced detailed interpretations: AntoineChrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, Permanent Secretary of the Institut des Beaux-Arts; the Comte de Clarac, the Louvre’s curator of antiquities; and Toussaint-Bernard Éméric-David, an eminent art historian who had collaborated on the catalogue of the antiquities of the Musée Napoléon. Understandably, all three were concerned to establish the status of the new French acquisition; it is telling that they all referred to the Elgin Marbles early in their papers.73 But the three scholars agreed on nothing else, and for good reason: apart from the Elgins themselves, there were no secure points of comparison for this really Greek sculpture. Moreover, the absence of the arms, which creates the distinctive silhouette so important to the statue’s modern celebrity, also permits the most extravagant range of conjecture about the figure’s action, and thus its subject-matter and meaning. Quatremère reasoned from the figure’s gaze to her left, and the less finished drapery on that side, that she must originally have appeared in a group with a figure of Mars; this conveniently explained the loss of the arms, which Quatremère argued must have been broken when the two figures were separated, for unknown reasons, some time in antiquity. Quatremère drew on extant Graeco–Roman sculptural groups and Roman coins to describe this subject as Venus Victrix, or Vénus victorieuse: Venus victorious over Mars. Thus he could allegorise the subject in a way that had clear contemporary relevance, as ‘peace succeeding war’. Ingeniously, too, he supplied the textual authority that the undocumented statue signally lacked: it may have been just such a group, he declared, that inspired Lucretius to write his invocation to Venus.74 Éméric-David easily picked out the flaw in Quatremère’s argument: if the sculpture is to be prized as a Greek original, then how could Quatremère justify his identification through the use of Roman evidence? He countered with a moral argument: the Greeks, he claimed, would not sanction the adulterous relationship between Venus and Mars in an important sculptural monument (even though the decadent Romans might have done so). Moreover, the assertive movement of the figure and the firm contours of her body, which for Éméric-David suggested ‘quelque chose de mâle’, did

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not answer to the Greek character of Venus, always youthful, smiling and passive, awaiting her lover in repose. Instead, he proposed that the sculpture represented the tutelary deity of the island of Melos.75 Then as now, each interpreter was able to emphasise the aspects of the archaeological evidence that suited his case; thus Éméric-David accepted the authenticity of the hand holding an apple, dismissed by Quatremère because of its inferior workmanship, since the fruit could refer to the name of the island. Clarac, by contrast, was the only one to dwell on the inscription.76 But if this names the sculptor, there are implications for the date; although the name is half-missing, the inscription clearly indicates that he came from Antioch, not founded until the third century bc. In keeping with the romantic subject he proposed, as well as the fine working of the marble, Quatremère had attributed the sculpture to the circle of Praxiteles, in the mid-fourth century.77 For Éméric-David the masculine character of the figure, as well as the resemblance of the drapery to that of the Parthenon sculptures, suggested an even earlier date, midway between Pheidias and Praxiteles.78 Thus these three preliminary estimates of the sculpture differed in date, in attribution and in the identification of the subject (Clarac implausibly but engagingly suggested that it might be a later work influenced by Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Kos, the draped counterpart to the nude Knidian, showing Venus victorious in the Judgement of Paris).79 Each of these three experienced scholars made a thorough study of the archaeological evidence and of such comparisons as were available; their observations, although not their conclusions, are very similar to those of today’s scholars (indeed they are more detailed and precise than most). No doubt there was considerable pressure to demonstrate an early date, which would give the Venus a status comparable to the Elgin Marbles. But a larger issue was also involved: that of the sculpture’s originality, and by extension of the importance of originality in the evaluation of a work of art. Since he accepted the inscription, Clarac disputed the importance of originality; as he observed, even the Parthenon sculptures are not from Pheidias’s own hand, but productions of his school.80 Éméric-David, although he could not name a sculptor, considered his date of c. 420–380 bc to add special interest, since that was a period from which there were few if any surviving examples.81

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Quatremère acknowledged that the evidence was insufficient to resolve the question of originality, observing that such was the case not only for ‘the most beautiful antiques’, but even for much of the art of more modern periods. But he suggested that there might be a different way to think about originality: If, however, we understand this word in a sense relative to the superiority in merit among the doubles of the same composition, there will be no reason, I think, to doubt that the Venus of Melos … was the original of those which we have cited. The distance that separates them is without measure.82

Thus Quatremère, unlike most of today’s scholars, is prepared to permit a judgement of quality to take the place of positive evidence in confirming his conclusions. Quatremère was right in one respect: despite the notable absence of consensus on the sculpture’s author, date, or subject-matter, its quality quickly established it as one of the most famous antiques in Europe. Whether or not it had been an ‘original’ in antiquity, it certainly became one in modernity, as it was constantly reproduced in all of the media available in the nineteenth century. Casts were disseminated in the traditional way, but the sculpture was also taken up in new reproductive media: photography, from the moment that medium became available in 1839, as well as mechanical reproduction in bronze, in a variety of reduced sizes.83 Thus its celebrity as an antique was inextricably linked to the reproductive techniques of modernity, and from the start it was addressed not only to scholars and connoisseurs but to audiences of all social levels. In the Greek Court at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, opened as a popular attraction in 1854, a cast of the Venus was presented as number one in the catalogue: ‘One of the finest statues that has ever been discovered. It may be regarded as the utmost extent to which grandeur of form can be united with feminine beauty.’84 The Crystal Palace was a commercial venture, but its displays also aimed at public education; accordingly the cast was juxtaposed with others of half-draped female nudes, for comparison.85 Quatremère had successfully recommended that the arms should not be restored, on the grounds that without the figure of Mars he

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believed had originally accompanied the Venus, the action of the arms would appear unmotivated. The consequence, perhaps unintended, was that (like the Elgin Marbles) the Venus helped to initiate a new taste for the fragmentary and time-worn.86 Its armless silhouette was both immediately recognisable, in whatever form it was reproduced, and specially resonant for the sensibility of the Romantic period; thus its visual appearance was modern, in one way, as well as ancient in another. The poet and critic Théophile Gautier noted another advantage: ‘it seems that, if one were to rediscover the arms, they would hamper the pleasure of the eye by preventing the view of this superb chest and this admirable breast.’ Gautier was the leading art critic of the Romantic generation, and it is telling that in his guidebook to the Louvre he singled out the Venus as the sole ancient sculpture worth discussing. So dazzling was its effect, for Gautier, that it eclipsed all the sculptures traditionally revered as exemplars of classical form; having seen it, one could only look ‘distractedly’ at all the Apollos, Fauns, Graces and the rest of the Louvre’s antiques – even the Borghese Gladiator, that ‘marvel of anatomy’ (Fig. 2). Moreover, Gautier does not assume that its popular appeal requires an attribution to a famous name; instead he marvels that ‘in the temple of a little island there shone forth this masterpiece of an unknown sculptor’.87 The sculpture’s mysteries here become a source of its fascination. Thus we find a paradox similar to that of the Elgin Marbles: despite the approbation of scholars and the rapid rise of the Venus to iconic status, she could nonetheless serve as a counterpoise to the traditional academic ideal. As Vitet put it, ‘This type of beauty ran counter to all our traditions.’ At the École des Beaux-Arts, stronghold of the French academic system for training artists, the male nude remained fundamental, both in the repertoire of ancient sculptures favoured for study and in life drawing; it was not until the École was removed from the control of the Academy in 1863 that female models were employed, and not until 1934 that it acquired a cast of the Venus de Milo.88 Furthermore, the Venus de Milo differed in startling ways from the previous exemplar of ancient female beauty, the Venus de’ Medici. At two metres tall, as opposed to the Medici’s one-and-a-half, she was commanding in stature; her proportions were strikingly more massive than the dainty forms and cinched waist

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of the earlier favourite. The abrupt breakages and the rugged surface texture particularly of the draperies (comparable, as many observers noted, to those of the Elgin female figures) were in stark contrast to the smooth polish not only of the Venus de’ Medici, but also of other heavily restored semi-draped figures that might seem superficially comparable, such as the Venus of Arles in the Louvre, the Venus of Capua at Naples, or the Townley Venus of the British Museum. Such characteristics, again like the Elgin Marbles, could seem to present what Vitet called ‘an unbearable mixture of the ideal and of the real, of elegance and of force, of the noble and the natural’. A leaflet of the French Anti-Corset League in 1909 illustrated the Venus de Milo to demonstrate the beauty of a healthy body untrammelled by corsetry – surprisingly, the ‘ideal’ classical sculpture becomes the epitome of the ‘natural’ female body.89 But the robust physical type did not appeal to all tastes. As late as 1914, when Pierre-Auguste Renoir asked a friend to measure ancient statues to assist his design for a bronze Venus Victorious, he dismissed the Venus de Milo as ‘an old gendarme’ and expressed a preference for the more demurely feminine Venus of Arles or Venus de’ Medici.90 Renoir’s preference might be described as misogynistic, or at least lubricious, and it would have been conservative even in his own youth. In the 1860s his friend and a member of the same artistic group that would later become known as ‘Impressionists’, Frédéric Bazille, drew the Venus with a pipe in her mouth – an early example of the way the statue’s celebrity could encourage parody, but perhaps also a response to the aspect of the sculpture that Éméric-David called ‘quelque chose de mâle’.91 Drawings of the Venus survive from across the spectrum of nineteenthcentury French artists, from the sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye in the 1820s through to Paul Cézanne in the 1880s, and indeed there is much evidence that the Venus was the ancient sculpture of preference among artists now seen as progressive or avant-garde. Auguste Rodin wrote a rhapsodic essay in praise of the sculpture, also an inspiration for some of his own work, including a projected Monument to Whistler (c.1905–10); in this case the Venus served as a shared point of artistic reference for the two artists.92 Whistler himself was one of numerous artists known or reputed to have kept casts of the Venus in their studios or houses, among them Théodore Chassériau, Edouard Vuillard, Walter Crane,

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and E.W. Godwin, who (according to Oscar Wilde, also an enthusiast) kept a censer burning before his cast.93 The distinctive female type, with its ‘masculine’ connotations of robustness, domination or grandeur, recurs in contexts associated with many of the successive artistic movements of the nineteenth century. A poem of 1852 by Leconte de Lisle turned the Venus into an icon for the ‘Parnassian’ reaction against Romantic emotionalism. Gustave Courbet’s painting of 1853, The Bathers, has routinely been seen ‘to subvert the academic tradition of the Salon nude’.94 Perhaps there is a hint of the Venus in the stance of the half-draped nude, whose chunky bodily forms might be interpreted either as parody of the antique (the view of some contemporary critics, including Gautier)95 or as an extension of the Venus’s challenge to normative femininity; at the Salon exhibition of 1853 the painting was exhibited together with one of two male nudes, The Wrestlers, which might be seen as an analogous transformation of the ancient sculpture also known as ‘The Wrestlers’, in the Uffizi. At the same Salon exhibition, Chassériau drew on the Venus for the majestic central figure of The Tepidarium, a complex scene of female homosociality set in ancient Pompeii.96 A large watercolour drawing from the middle 1860s by Honoré Daumier shows Un amateur, an aging connoisseur surrounded by his collections and lost in the contemplation of a reduced-scale reproduction of the Venus. The drawing hints at the possibility of erotic engagement with the sculpture, but also at the continuing fascination of the antique in the modern world. At about this date, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was beginning to develop his ‘Symbolist’ transformation of Neoclassicism, pared down to utmost simplicity of figural form and muted colour, in allegorical compositions where precise meanings remained elusive. A recurring element in these scenes is a half-draped figure, sometimes seen from behind, with the left shoulder elevated and the weight on the right leg; these figures can perhaps be understood as multiple repetitions of the Venus de Milo, inexplicit symbols of a majestic ideal of silent grandeur amidst the variously grouped classical figures of Puvis’s rarefied Arcadian world. In Puvis’s paintings the recurrence of the Venus might be related to its status as a French cultural icon, yet the sculpture was equally important across the channel, in the classical revival of the 1860s and beyond. The Venus of Whistler’s ‘Six

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Projects’ (Fig. 17) emphasises the suggestion of movement in the pose and surrounds the figure with windblown draperies. At about the same date, Albert Moore made a more literal reference to the sculpture, in a painting exhibited in 1869 with the title A Venus (Fig. 20); perhaps the indefinite article hints at the mysteries surrounding the statue, or the vexed issue of distinguishing an original from a copy (we know that this is ‘a’ Venus, but not which one, precisely). Whistler and Moore were working in close association at this date, and it is tempting to speculate that they drew from the same cast of the Venus. Yet their interpretations emphasise altogether different aspects of the sculpture: classical balance and poise in the Moore, movement and drama in the Whistler. Later, in the ‘Ten O’Clock’ lecture, Whistler made the sculpture into a symbol of Aestheticism, a visible proof of the superiority of art to mere nature: ‘and the Gods stand by and marvel, and perceive how far away more beautiful is the Venus of Melos than was their own Eve.’97 These are just a few among countless examples of the wide range of interpretations that had accrued to the Venus within a few decades of her discovery, as if in compensation for the dearth of definite data about her origin. A female image had come to supplant such traditional male representatives of the classical ideal as the Apollo Belvedere and the Belvedere Torso. This might be attributed in part to contingent factors: Paris, the dominant centre for modern art in this period, happened to acquire a female sculpture as its star ancient object, most vigorously promoted by French scholars and artists (as well as Francophiles such as Whistler and Moore). Even if chance played a part, however, the Venus participated in the conspicuous surge of attention to the female figure characteristic of vanguard art as the nineteenth century progressed (we have already seen a parallel development in the increasing interest in the female figures among the Elgin Marbles). Furthermore, the sculpture proved capable of assuming the resonances of grandeur and sublimity formerly reserved for the Greek male ideal. The French patriotic associations of the Venus did not prevent fears of German appropriation, as nationalist politics resurfaced in dramatic fashion at the time of the Franco–Prussian War. When the Germans approached Paris, the Louvre’s curator of antiquities, Félix Ravaisson, thought it advisable to protect his most famous work from plunder;

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under cover of night, he removed it to the basement of a police building, where it was hidden behind a wall, distressed to look old.98 Heaps of official documents were then deposited and a second wall, similarly distressed, was erected, on the theory that the German troops, if they penetrated the outermost wall, would assume that only the documents were being concealed, and would never discover the more precious artistic treasure behind the farther wall. In the event the Venus survived intact. Nonetheless, the incident had important consequences. When the sculpture was recovered from its hiding place, Ravaisson discovered that its two blocks had been assembled on a slight slant when they first arrived at the Louvre, so that the upper section leaned forward to the right.99 He commissioned casts both of the assemblage of 1821 and of the rebalanced form he thought more authentic. Gautier, who was among the scholars and critics invited to compare the two versions, noted a striking difference of effect: the newly equilibrated version seemed to Gautier younger, more svelte, less voluptuous, more a goddess and less a woman. For the moment, it was decided that the French public needed the reassurance of seeing their icon in its familiar form, and the statue was not restored to equilibrium until 1883, when the slight repairs of 1821 were also removed.100 Once again, the Venus was in the forefront of the latest thinking on restoration, increasingly non-interventionist as the nineteenth century progressed. In a reception history, though, it is important to remember that the sculpture we see today is not quite the one that viewers experienced between 1821 and 1883. As Gautier put it, the sculpture in its equilibrated state is no longer the Venus, ‘adorablement épuisée’, of which Goethe had spoken.101 From this period, French and German opinions of the sculpture began to diverge more markedly, and sometimes acrimoniously. The nationalist dimension of this scholarly disagreement is hinted at in a short story of 1873 by the realist novelist Champfleury, ‘Les bras de la Vénus de Milo’, with an unpleasant caricature of an overzealous German archaeologist, whose experiments in reconstructing the original appearance of the sculpture lead to disaster. Twenty years later a real German scholar, Adolf Furtwängler, published a detailed account of the Venus de Milo, in his magisterial demonstration of the techniques of Meisterforschung (attribution) and Kopienkritik (comparison of extant versions of the same

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sculptural composition), translated into English in 1895 as Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture. By this date, Furtwängler was able to draw on these new techniques, developed in the second half of the nineteenth century (and to be explored further in Chapter 2), for comparing the Venus to a wider range of examples, including avowed Roman copies. The result was abruptly to demote the sculpture, which Furtwängler saw as a late and derivative copy, unsuccessfully attempting to amalgamate two prototypes that were better represented in other copies.102 It may seem suspicious that Furtwängler’s scrupulous archaeological scholarship coincided so neatly with nationalist politics, to discredit the star sculpture of the French so comprehensively in relation to examples in German collections, or unearthed in recent German excavations. Similarly, it comes as no surprise that the leading French archaeologist, Salomon Reinach, refused to accept Furtwängler’s conclusions. As late as 1907, in a new edition of his widely disseminated handbook to the history of art, Apollo, Reinach still defiantly positioned the Venus de Milo as the culmination to his chapter on the greatest age in Greek sculpture. Admitting that ‘the majority of modern archaeologists pronounce it to be a work dating from about 100B.C.’ Reinach clung to his conviction that it was ‘a masterpiece of the school of Phidias’ three centuries earlier. His rationale may seem subjective next to Furtwängler’s display of archaeological evidence: ‘we find in it all the qualities that go to make up the genius of Phidias, and nothing that is alien to it.’ Yet Reinach’s view of the sculpture also responds to the reinterpretation of the ancient female ideal that had been so powerfully reinforced by the artistic receptions of the nineteenth century: ‘The Venus of Milo is neither elegant, nor dreamy, nor nervous, nor impassioned; she is strong and serene.’ He then clinches the case with an echo of the most famous line from Winckelmann, followed by an evocation of the sculpture’s special appeal under the circumstances of modernity: Her beauty is all noble simplicity and calm dignity, like that of the Parthenon and its sculptures. Is not this the reason the statue has become and has remained so popular, in spite of the mystery of the much-discussed attitude? Agitated and feverish generations see in it the highest expression of the quality they most lack, that serenity which is not apathy, but the equanimity of mental and bodily health.103

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This is skilful rhetoric. But it is also a progressive interpretation of the sculpture, from a scholar who was sympathetic to the experimental art and literature of his cultural milieu (Reinach was also a leading proponent of Jewish rights and the brother of Joseph Reinach, advocate for Alfred Dreyfus). Current scholarship tends to favour Furtwängler’s positivism over Reinach’s aesthetic evaluation of the sculpture, even though aspects of Furtwängler’s argument have subsequently been called into question, as we shall see in Chapter 2. For Furtwängler the inferiority of the Venus was inextricably linked to its late date, and although current scholars no longer despise the Hellenistic, it is arguably the case that the Venus’s reputation has never quite recovered – at least in classical archaeology and scholarship, where the German critical techniques of the later nineteenth century remain authoritative for questions of attribution and dating. The reverse is true of the Venus’s status as cultural icon.104 The utterly distinctive – original? – silhouette of the armless statue remains ‘ideal’ for use in advertisement and caricature. In the early twentieth century the Surrealists were fascinated both by the statue’s mutilation and by its status as a paradigm of the classical ideal, on which artists such as Max Ernst, René Magritte and Salvador Dalí could draw in paradoxical subversion of the modernist mainstream.105 In 1962 Niki de Saint Phalle shot bullets of paint at a plaster reproduction of the Venus in a performance that manifested, perhaps, both feminist and anti-establishment anger.106 In recent decades the Venus de Milo has attracted, if anything, a growing variety of rich and subtle responses from contemporary artists in all media. The Irish performance artist Mary Duffy has photographed herself in a haunting series of images that reconfigure perceptions of disability through reference to the beauty of the Venus.107 The French artist Arman cuts through the body of the Venus, in bronze replica, with industrial wheels or film reels, repeating the breakage of the ancient original with modern technology. Photographers explore the marble in close-up or distant views, sharply focussed or suggestively veiled, sometimes including the mesmerised audiences of tourists.108 In Bernardo Bertolucci’s film of 2004 The Dreamers, a character mimics the armless figure.109 The American artist

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Jim Dine has replicated a decapitated Venus de Milo in media ranging from coloured woodcuts to monumental public sculpture.110 Dine’s Looking Towards the Avenue of 1989, at 1301 Avenue of the Americas in New York, is composed of three magnified Venuses de Milo (14, 18, and 23 feet tall) in rugged, textured bronze; soaring above the street corners, the Venuses recreate their ancient majesty on the scale of the modern city. Examples could be multiplied. The sculpture has proved supremely adaptable to the concerns of the art we call ‘postmodern’, such as celebrity, replication, normativity and deviance in the representation of the body. Yet these may also be seen as versions of the perennial concerns of the study of ancient art: high cultural status, copying versus originality, the ideal human figure. At the present moment, it seems to be practising artists, rather than classical scholars, who maintain faith in the intellectual and aesthetic power of the Venus de Milo.

Option III The previous section offered only the barest preliminary sketch of the sculpture’s reception history, but even that is enough to demonstrate its importance not only to the history of modern scholarship on ancient art, but also to the history of modern art, up to and including the contemporary. Nonetheless, we are entitled to ask whether such an approach tells us more about the sculpture’s interpreters – from Quatremère to Saint Phalle – than it does about the sculpture itself, particularly since the various responses seem often to contradict one another. If the sculpture can be seen either as ‘the eternal feminine’ or as ‘male’,111 as ideally chaste or sensually enticing, as high culture or kitsch – can we learn anything of value from its reception? It is here that theories of reception may be of use. Each of the receptions of the Venus is ‘subjective’, yet each is also a response to the object. Moreover we cannot have the one without the other; since Kant’s Critiques we have come to accept that we cannot understand, or even see an object (such as the Venus), except insofar as it is we who do so, with our peculiar intellectual and sensory capacities. But we should not forget the other side of Kant’s insight: it is the Venus (in our example) that puts our capacities into fruitful play. Thus, at a minimum, we can

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say that each reception potentially has something to tell us about the Venus, as well as something about the subjective perception of the receiver. Take, for example, Éméric-David’s perception that there is ‘quelque chose de mâle’ about the sculpture. This is clearly to do with the gendered assumptions of Éméric-David’s historical period; for him, the action of the left leg, elevated on some object (now lost), connoted pride of possession or some form of command, which he associated with masculinity. But the perception also relates to the clearly articulated body parts and internal markings of the figure, characteristics more often seen in male than female nudes from antiquity. Thus a recent scholar remarks, à propos copies of the Knidian Aphrodite (Fig. 19), ‘The soft forms of the body have few of the points and internal lines of articulation that helped so much in the replication of male statues, and the effect of the copies is varied, often weak.’112 It is not quite clear whether this refers to the representation of the female body in Greek art, or to the female body in real life. Should we attribute the stronger bodily articulation of the Venus de Milo to its superior quality among ancient statues, to its status as an ‘original’, to the rising social prominence of women in the Hellenistic period, or even, perhaps, to the unique personal style of the unknown sculptor? Should we relate the perception that this is a ‘male’ characteristic to the patriarchal society of ancient Greece, to that of early-nineteenth-century France, to that of our own time, or to the essential characteristics of the gendered human body? Given the limitations of our data, we shall never be able to provide final answers to these questions. The virtue of a reception study is that it encourages us to ask them. Albert Moore’s A Venus emphasises this aspect of the sculpture; indeed contemporary critics complained that its internal markings were too prominent. But Moore has thought deeply about the articulation of the body in the ancient work. He represents the torso and the action of the legs quite faithfully, although in reverse (this may suggest that he consulted an engraved reproduction). However, he also carefully corrects the ‘error’ in the balance of the sculpture that Ravaisson would not identify until two years later: a plumb line from a point midway between the clavicles falls directly to the malleolus

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Albert Moore, A Venus, 1869.

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internus of the supporting foot. In this respect Moore’s picture is closer to the sculpture as it has been displayed since 1883 than it is to the one he actually saw on visits to the Louvre or in contemporary reproductions. He also reorients the head and invents a plausible action for the missing arms, which again helps to balance the pose. This is a sophisticated exploration of a crucial aspect of ancient art and its reception, the ideal or normative presentation of the human body. For Ravaisson, it seemed important to restore the sculpture to normative equilibrium – to bring it closer to what he understood as the Greek ideal. But Moore’s painting still looks more stable than the Venus de Milo itself, even in its ‘correctly’ restored state. This is partly an effect of the unequal severing of the missing arms; again, we shall never be certain about how the sculpture looked ‘originally’. Salvador Dalí’s witty reinterpretation provided the figure with a series of open drawers at the front, intensifying the sense that it might topple forward. The revision makes the sculpture ‘Surrealist’. But it also responds imaginatively to a genuine problem in the scholarly interpretation of the sculpture; at the same time, it reminds us that our notions of the ideal classical body may be oversimplified. Moore’s painting decisively rejects theories such as Quatremère’s, which would make the sculpture part of a group and supply a focus for her faraway gaze. Moore’s figure is autonomous, self-sufficient and expressionless. In these respects it accords with Hegel’s characterisation of the classical artform, succinctly paraphrased in Pater’s essay on Winckelmann, published two years before Moore’s painting was exhibited: But take a work of Greek art, – the Venus of Melos. That is in no sense a symbol, a suggestion, of anything beyond its own victorious fairness. The mind begins and ends with the finite image, yet loses no part of the spiritual motive. This motive is not lightly and loosely attached to the sensuous form, as its meaning to an allegory, but saturates and is identical with it.113

This is an eloquent description of the Venus as it now appears, stripped of its original colouring and jewellery, and deprived also of specific subject-matter. But Pater knew that this was only one aspect of the sculpture, and five years later he presented a different view:

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What time and accident, its centuries of darkness under the furrows of the ‘little Melian farm,’ have done with singular felicity of touch for the Venus of Melos, fraying its surface and softening its lines, so that some spirit in the thing seems always on the point of breaking out, as though in it classical sculpture had advanced already one step into the mystical Christian age, its expression being in the whole range of ancient work most like that of Michelangelo’s own: – this effect Michelangelo gains by leaving nearly all his sculpture in a puzzling sort of incompleteness, which suggests rather than realises actual form.114

The startling transhistorical comparison, so different from the careful Kopienkritik of the German scholars whose work Pater read attentively, nonetheless has a serious point to make about the Venus. The over-lifesize sculpture has a sublime aspect that may be described, in modern terms, as Michelangelesque; the grandeur of its limbs can be compared to the ignudi or Sibyls of the Sistine ceiling, while its roughened surface and unstable pose seem to make more sense when Michelangelo’s unfinished Slaves come to mind. Perhaps Pater hints, too, that the sculpture might postdate the height of the classical age; at the same time, though, he negates the importance of the date of origin by identifying the aesthetic of the sculpture with its time-worn condition. This could be called a ‘romantic’ interpretation – or a ‘Hellenistic’ one, for it responds to qualities of the sculpture that scholars tend to characterise as Hellenistic, such as the surface texture of the marble or the chiaroscuro of the drapery folds. In a painting of the same year as Pater’s comment, the Prussian artist Adolph Menzel represented the fragmentary and brilliantly lit cast of a Venus, in startling oblique perspective, hanging on a studio wall with other casts, life and death masks (Fig. 21). The malleable texture of the plaster and the nuanced shadows give the cast a startling realism that makes the abrupt fractures the more disturbing. The painting thus explores a crucial issue in the Venus’s reception, the relationship between real and ideal, as well as that constant theme, the relationship between original and copy. Menzel’s painting might also be called a Hellenistic interpretation, while Moore’s is a classicising one – but each responds to something observed in the Venus de Milo itself. Moreover, it is precisely the apparent stylistic discrepancies that have caused scholarly disagreements about the sculpture; the Venus is valuable above all

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Adolph Menzel, Studio Wall, 1872.

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for challenging our preconceptions about the orderly progression of styles in ancient art, and the various visual receptions can help to clarify the stylistic points at issue. Thus the receptions are not merely new interpretations; they are also serious explorations of the ancient sculpture itself, including all of the problems that have troubled the scholars. What they do not do is to solve those problems. But do we want to solve them? To discover the supposed historical ‘truth’ about the sculpture would be to foreclose further interpretation – our own, as well as that of others. Furtwängler’s account of 1893 has threatened to do just that; its debunking tone, its air of demystifying or deromanticising the sculpture, have perhaps lent it greater authority than its often debatable arguments should warrant. Furtwängler states forthrightly that we ought to ‘find out, not what the statue ought to have been or how it would answer best to our preconceived notions, but what it actually was’.115 This is a classic statement of historical positivism, instantly reminiscent of Ranke’s famous phrase, ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’.116 But why should we limit our interpretations to what we can prove with hard evidence? Since the evidence inexorably diminishes in the passage of time, what we have left is merely a minimum – not the ‘original’ meaning of the sculpture at all, but something much less, something lamentably impoverished. The receptions of the Venus – scholarly, literary, artistic – constantly range beyond what Furtwängler thought permissible. But the imaginative collaboration of many minds produces a fuller account of the statue than the bare minimum our ‘facts’ can provide. Such an account may be closer in its richness and complexity to the ‘original’ import of the sculpture. Vitet, in the passage copied by Delacroix, found both the Venus de Milo and the Elgin Marbles to confound expectations not merely because they differed from preconceptions about the classical ideal, but because they did so in an ‘unbearable mixture’ of contradictions: ‘of the ideal and of the real, of elegance and of force, of the noble and the natural’. The apparent inconsistencies among the various receptions need not, then, make them irrelevant. On the contrary, they are the best safeguard against bending the sculptures to ‘our preconceived notions’.

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A REFLECTION ON METHODOLOGY

The preceding section presented three methods for studying the Venus de Milo in what I believe to be ascending order of merit. So far, I have attempted to persuade the reader by example: now I need to justify my methodological preferences more explicitly. It may seem strange, at this late date, to dwell on the shortcomings of ‘positivism’; few of today’s historians would claim, with Ranke and Furtwängler, to have evacuated their own concerns from their enquiries, so as to make the historical object reveal itself in its purity, as it ‘actually was’ in its original context. Today’s histories of ancient art are often avowedly informed by the interests of the historians who write them – in sexuality, for example, or in the social and political contexts for art production. Nonetheless, in practice, and in the style of presentation, the historiographical mode remains resolutely ‘objectivist’ or ‘realist’: the historian attempts to show how her concerns were operative within the ancient context that she is describing, independently of her own description of them. It is true that reception studies such as the one I have presented in Option II above have begun to proliferate in classical scholarship (although less so in the art history of later periods). For the most part, though, these simply substitute the contemporary context of the reception (Napoleon’s France, say, or Hitler’s Germany) for that of the production of the ancient objects in question. I believe, on the contrary, that it is only by bringing forth the reciprocity between ancient sculptures and their modern receptions, as in Option III above, that we can begin to escape the pitfalls of positivist historiography. Whenever contemporary contexts (whether they are those of the ancient object’s production, or of its modern reception) are bracketed off as a closed historical system, we are in danger of reverting to the illusion that we are contemplating the past as it really was, in itself. Yet the explanatory value of contemporary context is accorded something like reverence, not only in the study of ancient art but also in art history generally. To quote James Porter (speaking of a different historiographical problem, to which we shall return), ‘we are having to do here no longer with an academic thesis, and not even with an orthodoxy, but with a dogma.’117 One reason is that the notion of contemporary

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context is underpinned, although often in occluded fashion, by strong moral and political presuppositions loosely derived from the Marxian theory of base and superstructure. On this view works of art, considered as superstructural elements, have their meaning and value only in relation to the economic base (together with its attendant social relations) of the period in which they were made. Thus the receptions of later generations lose their political and moral force once the economic base has changed; indeed, they become meretricious, or positively pernicious, since the delight they take in the object seems to reflect some form of nostalgia for an outmoded set of social relations. This view makes classicising artistic projects appear inherently reactionary when they occur in modern, capitalist societies; hence the superior status of the realist novel and the ‘painting of modern life’ in so many studies of nineteenth-century literature and art. The assumption would seem to be that the value of the art object is not transferable from one historical context to another, even though Marx himself demurred from this view in a manuscript fragment of the later 1850s: ‘But the difficulty lies not in understanding that Greek art and epic poetry are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still give us aesthetic pleasure and are in certain respects regarded as a standard and unattainable model.’118 The wording would seem to imply that the alternative to a consideration of the object in its contemporary context is a universalising account that places it above or beyond historical change, and it is often assumed that classicism necessarily invokes some claim to universal value. My view is that the value of the art object is transferable, not because it is universal, but rather because historical agents choose at particular moments to engage with older works. Part of my argument, above, is that the Elgin and Aegina Marbles and the Venus de Milo cannot responsibly be excluded from a history of modern art: through reception, they become part of the myriad contemporary contexts that unfold from the early nineteenth century onwards. But it is equally the case that the modern receptions of the sculptures cannot be excluded from a responsible history of ancient art, at least insofar as that is understood to include the objects as we see them. In the absence of the receptions, the sculptures could be no more than inert matter, devoid of either ‘historical significance’ or ‘aesthetic value’, to use Jauss’s terms.119

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The ancient historian might object that her concern is not with the object as a work of art – something still available for aesthetic experience – but rather with the object in its relations to the society in which it was made. Contemporary context, again, but here it comes with more formidable weaponry: ancient society, according to a prevalent view, did not have a ‘conception of art comparable to ours’, so that placing the sculptures in a Jaussian chain of receptions is not just irrelevant to their contemporary context, but a positive falsification. ‘This view is practically a cliché and widely held,’120 observes Porter in a recent critique of the position, which he traces to Paul Oskar Kristeller’s contention, advanced early in the 1950s, that the construction of ‘art’ as a category for analysis became possible only in the late eighteenth century, when it was linked to the classification of particular kinds of object as ‘fine art’. Porter quotes a passage from the introduction to a recent collection of essays: [T]he later associations of the words ‘art’ and ‘artist’ are inappropriate for the pots and potters who provide most of the source material for Greek imagery. The general term ‘art’ also tends to obscure the very different frames in which the images of Greek culture occur. It may be of major importance – even for ‘identification’ – whether an image is found on a temple – public, state-funded, religious display – or a cup designed for the male world of private drinking parties; or on a perfume flask for male or female use. How images are framed affects recognition. There is a danger in using the general word ‘art’ in that significant nuances of contextualisation may be effaced.121

Given current scholarly conventions, this sounds like common sense, and I partly agree with it. In my account of the Elgin and Aegina Marbles I have argued, precisely, that to consider ancient architectural sculptures as ‘art’ is to subscribe to a modern system for the classification of artforms (the irony, here, is that it was only by virtue of this modern classification that it became possible to write a rigorously historicised account of Greek sculpture). The same would be true of vase-painting, which later in the nineteenth century went through a similar process to that of architectural sculpture: the images on vases came to serve as a proxy for ancient painting, not only because they are conveniently datable on technical grounds, but also because none of the works of the celebrated Greek painters survive. Thus the developmental sequence of

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extant vase-paintings has come to stand in for the history of ancient painting, just as the sequence of extant architectural sculptures stands in for the history of ancient sculpture. Yet the textual evidence that has come down to us offers no warrant for thinking that the ancients placed specially high value on either architectural sculpture or vase-painting, whereas there is abundant evidence that they did value works of both sculpture and painting, much as we now understand those art-forms. It is unnecessary to assume that a conception of ‘art’ in the abstract is required for the appreciation of particular forms of material production that exhibit similar characteristics in modernity and antiquity (carving or modelling of stone or metal, pigments on a two-dimensional surface). A dogmatic historicism may carry the danger of ‘overestimation of historical singularity’.122 As Porter notes, the claim that the ancients had ‘no conception of art comparable to ours’ rests on the assumption that our conception invariably regards ‘art’ as having autonomous value in its own right, apart from its social or other contexts. Yet Porter argues that autonomy is not necessarily integral to modern views of art at all, and the discussions of this chapter bear that out. In the nineteenth century, the Elgin and Aegina Marbles and the Venus de Milo were valued in all manner of non-autonomous ways – as instruments of nationalist cultural politics, as means of public education, as a school for artists. I agree with Porter: none of those kinds of valuation has made the sculptures unavailable for aesthetic experience, understood in its most basic sense as sensory experience of an object (not necessarily an object designated ‘art’ in any particular historical context) that is accompanied by delight, wonder or awe. Nor is there any reason to believe that ancient kinds of nonautonomous valuation – different from ours in some respects, and similar in others – precluded such experience; indeed there is abundant ancient testimony for the delight, wonder and awe that accompanied contemplation of highly regarded sculptures and paintings, such as Pheidias’s Athena of the Parthenon or Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos. If it were the case that the modern museum context had provided architectural sculptures and vase-paintings with an autonomous aesthetic value inconceivable in antiquity (something that in my view can neither be proven nor disproven, on the basis of the available evidence) – that

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would be all to the good. In the words of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, commenting on a classicising painting by Albert Moore in 1868: ‘one more beautiful thing is achieved, one more delight is born into the world; and its meaning is beauty; and its reason for being is to be.’123 We shall never know, in the case of architectural sculptures or vase-paintings (or the Venus de Milo, for that matter) whether our delight is a first birth or the rebirth of an ancient aesthetic experience, perhaps one too common to attract comment from the authors. Surely, though, it would be needlessly puritanical to dismiss it on those grounds. It would also be historically obscurantist: if the sensory perception is of our day, it is in these cases the only means of access to the ‘past-ness’ of the object. In response to my imaginary ancient historian, then, I should maintain that it is no more anachronistic to value the object as art than it is to value it as evidence of ancient social relations; if art is a modern concept, so is the social history of art (and more so insofar as it depends on a Marxian account of how art and society are related). A reception history has no quarrel with either approach. I should, however, argue that what is revealed in reception is not the timeless or universal aesthetic potential of the object, but rather its aesthetic power in a specific historical encounter (always triangulated with our own reception): Watts’s Venetian reception of the Elgin Marbles, or Dalí’s Surrealist reception of the Venus de Milo, both partial but also revelatory responses to their ancient objects. In this respect I differ from Marx (although the manuscript fragment should probably not be taken as a definitive view on the issue). As already noted in the Introduction, I also demur from Jauss’s view that the receptions of an object accumulate in a fashion metaphorically expressible as a chain (even though the chain may be unfinished at any moment of the historian’s reflection). Jauss is careful to avoid either universalising claims or a teleological account, but his notion of reception still exhibits a progressive logic. He works forwards in time, from an initial reception that evaluates the new work against the expectations created by works already in existence, through subsequent receptions that accommodate the work to changing horizons of expectation (in which the work itself now participates), up to the present – although not final – moment of the historian’s encounter with the work.

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While Jauss acknowledges that ‘the reappropriation of past works occurs simultaneously with the perpetual mediation of past and present art and of traditional evaluation and current literary attempts,’ his emphasis is on how the ‘reappropriation’ of the past work can contribute to a forwards trajectory; the traces of a ‘modernist’ logic are discernible.124 The study of ancient sculpture can serve as a corrective by virtue of its empirical deficiencies: it is practically impossible to trace a Jaussian chain for ancient sculpture, not only because we know too little about the initial receptions of ancient works to establish any reliable starting-point, but also because the subsequent receptions are radically discontinuous. That discontinuity is masked by the supposition that there is such a thing as a ‘classical tradition’, something handed down from generation to generation that preserves (however tenuously) a continuous descent from antiquity itself. In this chapter I have attempted to dispel this notion by emplotting the data in an intentionally dramatic way. In my account, the appearance of certain really Greek sculptures at the beginning of the nineteenth century marks a rupture in the putative ‘tradition’ – a paradigm change, to use a term from Thomas Kuhn’s study of scientific revolutions.125 I have offered empirical data, including the testimony of contemporary witnesses – Vitet, Elgin, Whistler and multifarious others – to support this plot. Nonetheless, it would be possible to construct an entirely different plot, for example one in which the Elgin and Aegina Marbles and the Venus de Milo merely reinforced the longstanding tradition of according high value to works of ancient sculpture. No doubt it is possible to configure any chronological sequence of events in terms of either change or continuity; such is the complexity of human affairs that both will probably be operative in any period. If I have chosen to emphasise change over continuity, that is to demonstrate that the value of ancient sculpture need not be construed as universal, as teleological, or as accumulative. To be sure, the receptions enter into dialogue, and sometimes conflict, with one another. But they may also operate independently and in defiance of chronological sequence, without losing cogency: Pheidias’s style ‘comes out gloriously’ in Giorgione and Titian, with Watts as intermediary, while the Venus de Milo and Michelangelo may interpret one another, without intentionality on either side.

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I am aware that, in order to emphasise the early-nineteenth-century rupture, I have constructed an artificially coherent ‘classical ideal’ for the preceding period. In this respect my account remains a ‘modernist’ one, based on the premise of a radical break from the past. Alex Potts well describes the historiographical device: ‘Classicism has long functioned in modern discussions of the visual arts to signify the mythic configuration of some stable other to a modern, complex, potentially destabilising art.’ A ‘mythic configuration’ might be a perfectly legitimate form of classical reception; at times it may be productive to cast the precedent in negative terms, as something to rebel against. The problem occurs when the historian elides the mythic configuration with historical reality, something from which Potts’s account of modern sculpture is not quite free. He wants to present Canova as making a break from the classical ideal of the past, but in the process he reifies that ideal: ‘My claim here is that Canova’s work, while playing to classicising understandings of sculpture, engages a viewer’s interest partly by undoing them.’ In this sentence, the mythic configuration of the historian suddenly metamorphoses into ‘classicising understandings’ actually operative in Canova’s world, with which he is able to play, and eventually to ‘undo’. Moreover, the mythic configuration also turns out to have material embodiment: ‘at the time when Canova was launching his career, the paradigmatic form envisaged as an object of aesthetic contemplation was antique Graeco–Roman sculpture of a nude or semi-nude figure.’126 The modern work (Canova’s sculpture) appears in its conventional role, pitted against the ‘stable other’ of Graeco–Roman sculpture. My account is vulnerable to the same charge, with one difference: the complex and destabilising works that make the modernist break are ancient sculptures (the Elgin and Aegina Marbles and the Venus de Milo), so that the antithesis between ancient and modern can no longer be conflated with the historical period of the works’ origin. Thus the antithesis is an interpretative manoeuvre, not a historical fact. Nonetheless, I too have elided a mythic configuration – the Greek ideal as Winckelmann bequeathed it to the next generation – with the actual sculptures that made their way from Rome to Paris and back again. I might excuse myself by noting that this particular elision was historically functional in the period under examination, for instance in the testimony

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to the Parliamentary Select Committee of 1816. But Pater was more skilful in 1867, when he refused to equate Winckelmann’s ‘finding of Greek art’ with the sculptures actually available to him. Moreover, Pater reminds us that those sculptures, too, were destabilising once, at the time of their Renaissance discovery. Pater also shows how Winckelmann can make them destabilising again: ‘Winckelmann here reproduces for us the earlier sentiment of the Renaissance.’ The essay sets up a complex chain of receptions, backwards from Winckelmann to the Renaissance and to antiquity itself, as well as forwards to the Elgin Marbles and the Venus de Milo, to Goethe, Hegel, and Pater’s readers. Yet the chain is energised by the ruptures between its links, as when ‘at the Renaissance, in the midst of a frozen world, the buried fire of ancient art rose up from under the soil’, or when Winckelmann’s ‘actual results’ come into conflict with new discoveries of more ancient sculptures.127 Pater emphasises how difficult it is for us, ‘[f ]illed as our culture is with the classical spirit’, to recapture the moments of discovery, the times when the Greek tradition ‘has started to the surface’.128 We could, of course, content ourselves with building, brick by brick, on the positivist edifice that began to be constructed when the Elgin and Aegina Marbles provided the first securely datable monuments to serve as cornerstones; as the following chapters will show, the archaeologists of succeeding generations have added immeasurably to the databank, and even Jauss concedes that ‘historical objectivism … remains a convenient paradigm ensuring the normal progress of … research’.129 Bit by bit, scholars are now adding, too, to the reception histories of ancient art in the modern period. But in themselves these methods, valuable as they are, contribute only data, not new insights; in Herder’s words, quoted by Jauss, they ‘[step] through nations and times with the quiet tread of a miller’s mule’.130 The more exciting possibility, adumbrated by Pater, is to make the ‘tiger’s leap into the past’, in Walter Benjamin’s arresting phrase – to blast the Elgin and Aegina Marbles, and the Venus de Milo, out of the continuum of history.131 To set the imagination free in that manner, and thus to avoid a naïve historicism, we cannot afford to ignore even the most wayward of their modern receptions.

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2 the artist, ancient and modern

Architecture…has purified the external world, and endowed it with symmetrical order and with affinity to mind; and the temple of the God, the house of his community, stands ready. Into this temple, then, in the second place, the God enters in the lightning-flash of individuality, which strikes and permeates the inert mass, while the infinite and no longer merely symmetrical form belonging to mind itself concentrates and gives shape to the corresponding bodily existence. This is the task of Sculpture.

G.W.F. Hegel1

I

t is a commonplace to note the enormity of Hegel’s impact not only on the fledgling discipline of philosophical aesthetics, but also on the development of art history as a scholarly enterprise. In one sense, Hegel’s Berlin lectures of the 1820s diverted the historical study of art away from its exclusive focus, in Winckelmann, on classical antiquity: in Hegel’s vast timescale, classical art became the second phase in a larger development that extended from the most primitive beginnings of human creativity through to the arts of the modern age. Hegel’s aesthetics, then, set up the terms for the modernist rejection of classicism as a universal principle for art. Yet that is only part of the story: while in Hegel’s scheme the classical art-form was relegated to a past stage of development, it did not lose its ascendancy over art in general. For Winckelmann in 1755, the Laocoon

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was exemplary because of the balance it preserved between physical pain – the expressiveness of Laocoon’s body – and the nobility of his soul.2 Hegel builds this conception of the classical ideal into his larger system, not just of the arts (the immediate concern of the lectures on aesthetics) but of the world-historical development of what he calls Idea. The beauty of art is the version of Idea that is one with sensuous form, and the classical art-form is the stage of art that most fully realises this unity. Thus the classical ideal is still, as it was for Winckelmann, characterised by a perfect relationship between sensuous embodiment and spiritual content. Indeed the relationship is so close that it is misleading to use contrasted words such as ‘embodiment’ and ‘content’. In dealing with the classical art-form there is no way to conceptualise a ‘content’ that is independent of its ‘embodiment’, or a sensuous form that ‘contains’ something distinguishable from itself. As Hegel says, ‘For this reason the sensuous element itself has here no expression which could not be that of the spiritual element, just as, conversely, sculpture can represent no spiritual content which does not admit throughout of being adequately presented to perception in bodily form.’3 In Hegel’s expanded historical scheme, the classical art-form is a necessary, but not a final, stage in the longer development of Idea, which will eventually transcend its union with the sensuous (and with it the beauty of art) as it moves towards religion and philosophy. The romantic arts (painting, music and poetry) go beyond the classical art-form, but only because they are beginning to move beyond art itself, towards the higher versions of Idea that are no longer limited to the sensuous. Thus the classical art-form remains the best exemplification of the sensuous version of Idea that characterises art itself: it is the best as art, that is, as the Idea in sensuous form. This helps to account for the striking epiphany of the God, in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter. This is the most – perhaps it is the only – dramatic event in Hegel’s extended narrative of gradual development through numberless ages. The emphasis is needed to mark the crucial moment at which art reaches its summit or perfection – when art, so to speak, becomes itself. Idea can and will go further, but art has reached its culmination in the classical art-form: the perfection of art reached its peak [in the classical art-form] precisely because the spiritual was completely drawn through its

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external appearance; in this beautiful unification it idealised the natural and made it into an adequate embodiment of spirit’s own substantial individuality. Therefore classical art became a conceptually adequate representation of the Ideal, the consummation of the realm of beauty. Nothing can be or become more beautiful.4

Hegel’s philosophical prose can seem so forbiddingly abstract that it is tempting to say that he has transformed Winckelmann’s concrete observations on sculptures such as the Laocoon into dematerialised speculation. But that is not the case. In the classical art-form there is no way to conceptualise the Idea apart from its sensuous embodiment, and this provides the clue to a distinctive innovation of Hegel’s aesthetics: the central role he accords to sculpture. In previous theories of the arts, sculpture could seem restricted in its expressive potential by the obduracy of its physical materials, stone or metal; its productions could seem too literal in their occupation of three-dimensional space to give adequate freedom to the imagination. But the newly tight connection of Idea and material embodiment, in Hegel’s classical art-form, turned these drawbacks into virtues: the excessive physicality of sculpture could now be reconfigured as the most suitable vehicle for Idea in its fully sensuous version. Thus the epiphany of the God figures not only the momentous achievement of ideal beauty, but also (and indivisibly) its concretisation as a sculpture of the human body in all three dimensions of physical space. Hegel therefore retains, and interprets, Winckelmann’s earlier insight about the fundamental importance of the body in the art of the Greeks. The body is of course not merely a material object, a heap of flesh and bones, but includes the mind or spirit that makes the body alive and human – what Hegel calls ‘the lightning-flash of individuality, which strikes and permeates the inert mass…and gives shape to the corresponding bodily existence’. This is not the final version of Idea, which will eventually go beyond its limitation to the body, but perhaps it is as much of Idea as belongs to the human individual, the spiritual entity that corresponds to a singular human body. The romantic arts may go on to explore ideas of community, or any kind of idea that goes beyond the individual human being; but sculpture’s special task is to give expression to human individuality in all its spiritual dimensions, indivisibly from the three dimensions of its bodily materiality.

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At the same time, then, as he relegated sculpture, the characteristic medium of the classical art-form, to the irrevocable past, Hegel also gave it a compelling new interpretation. This left a complex legacy to artists which had all manner of ramifications in succeeding generations, and perhaps has not yet been exhausted. To be modern, one would need to be a painter, a musician or a poet; but to be an artist, in the fullest sense, one would have to be a sculptor. And while modernity may have raised new issues, it could not simply discard the humanism of the previous stage; rather, it would need to raise this to a new level. If one wished to explore what it means to be human, could it be the case that sculpture was still the best medium for doing so? Or, at least, that an artist in any medium who wished to do this would need to engage at some level, and in some way, with classical sculpture? The legacy was just as complex for all students of ancient sculpture (including, of course, artists). Did Hegel’s writings make ancient sculpture, as an outmoded art, merely of antiquarian interest? Certainly, scholarship on ancient art has become an increasingly specialised discipline in the generations from Hegel’s to our own. This chapter will show that this history has been glorious, in generating scholarly methods and results of stunning sophistication and refinement, in some respects unimaginable in previous ages. It has also been blinkered, and perhaps increasingly so, not only in its loss of contact with (and therefore influence upon) the wider intellectual and artistic worlds, but also in its hermetic devotion to a range of scholarly methods so narrow that they may compromise the validity even of their own conclusions. Yet the stock picture of the decline of the classics is itself blinkered. Attentive only to the specialised concerns of a narrow scholarship, it misses the multifarious and complex kinds of engagement that may have widened the field. If Hegel meant to relegate ancient sculpture to the past, he did not succeed, and his own lectures on aesthetics had much to do with the vastly expanded range of possibilities that opened up in subsequent decades.

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The Artist

With the achievement of the classical art-form, spirit comes to animate inert matter. Perhaps there are echoes of ancient legends about the sculptors Pygmalion, whose statue came to life, or Daedalus, ‘the first to represent the eyes open and the legs separated as they are in walking’, so that his statues ‘were exactly like living beings’.5 Hegel first figures this animation as the entry of the God into his temple, in the introduction to his lecture course. Later, when he comes to consider sculpture within the developmental sequence of the particular arts, the Elgin Marbles mark the point when sculpture attains its full ‘liveliness’; as we saw in Chapter 1, this occurs when the artist becomes able to create freely out of his own spirit. This recalls Winckelmann’s emphasis on Greek political freedom, but also gives Greek sculpture a crucial role within Hegel’s larger aesthetic system. Hegel’s first move, in the introduction, is to limit aesthetics to the beauty of art, precisely because (unlike the beauty of nature) it is ‘born of the spirit and born again’ through the free and self-conscious activity of the human artist.6 While Greek sculpture, again, does not represent the final stage in the development of the arts, it does mark the critical moment at which the artist becomes capable of animating his productions with his own spirit, so that – like the sculptures of Daedalus – they transcend the stiffness of their inert materials. As we saw in Chapter 1, the Aegina Marbles are poised on the brink of this development, so that their incomplete liveliness seems deceptive or disconcerting; it is with the Elgin Marbles that the living spirit of the artist and the sculptural object become fully unified. In one sense, Hegel’s conception of the free and self-conscious artist is distinctively of his modern age, closely related both to contemporary theories of genius and to the material circumstances of an art world in which artists increasingly worked as autonomous individuals. Yet the motif of the celebrity artist is also a feature of ancient writing on art; as we have already seen, Pliny’s history of art is above all a sequence of famous individual artists, each of whom makes a distinctive contribution to the progress of the arts. It may, then, seem surprising that Hegel’s historical account of ancient art includes very few names – indeed, he is scrupulous about the authorship of the Parthenon sculptures,

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‘masterpieces ascribed to Phidias or necessarily recognized as belonging to his period and chiselled by his pupils’.7 Hegel accurately reflects the state of scholarship: at the date of his lectures, scarcely any of the extant ancient statues could be associated with an artist famed in ancient texts. Thus his references to particular sculptures take one of two forms: either they name an important work ascribed to a famous sculptor in an ancient text but not extant (such as Pheidias’s Athena of the Parthenon) or they note a well-known existing sculpture without an artist’s name (such as ‘the famous group of Niobe and her children’, in the Uffizi).8 Moreover, Hegel readily concedes the recent demotion in status of sculptures revered by Winckelmann, such as the Venus de’ Medici and the Apollo Belvedere.9 Paradoxically, just as his own theory called attention to the importance of the artist in the genesis of the classical art-form, the canon of sculptures that could plausibly be identified as productions of the great ancient masters was dwindling, as the new generation of authentically Greek sculptures dethroned the Graeco– Roman sculptures of previous fame. Perhaps, indeed, the canon reached its smallest extent in the generation after Hegel’s death. Charles Newton’s report of 1849 on the antiquities collections of Europe demonstrated just how dramatically the superior authenticity of the Elgin Marbles had discredited the other sculptures formerly assigned to a similar period: The new standard of criticism furnished by the Elgin marbles has shown that, among the countless statues and bas-reliefs in the museums of Europe, very few can be pointed out worthy to take their place by the side of the undoubted works of Phidias. The works in the Vatican and other collections of Italy, which the antiquaries of that country still continue to assign to the school of the great artist, are, in the majority of instances, evidently copies, recollections, and translations of earlier designs.

Things were even worse with the celebrated sculpture of the century after Pheidias, for which no monument had yet emerged: No period in the history of Greek art is so obscure as the age of Praxiteles and Scopas. We have, from Pliny and other authors, names and incidental notices of some of the works of these artists and their contemporaries. We have, again, in different museums, works which correspond in subject with these names and notices; but we have no great historical monument like the Parthenon, declaring, once for all,

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those main features of style which we seek in vain to gather from mere verbal descriptions, or to discern in works from which, in the process of copying, the spirit of the original art has passed away.10

Arguably, we are still in much the same boat as Newton: apart from a very small number of new discoveries which have come with epigraphic or secure physical evidence, scholars are still arguing over the interpretation of the ‘mere verbal descriptions’ – often a short phrase, or even a single Latin word – and debating the terms on which an extant sculpture may be identified as a copy of a celebrated lost original. Yet the pressure to identify a new canon, in the generation after Hegel, led to an array of techniques and procedures which – although their results remain highly dubious with respect to the positive knowledge at which they aim – constitute a glory of scholarship. When Newton wrote his report, he could not confidently describe the personal style of any artist mentioned in ancient texts, except for Pheidias. But a series of attributions, supported by diverse kinds of evidence, followed in rapid succession: Myron and Lysippos in the 1850s, Polykleitos in the 1860s, Praxiteles in 1877, Scopas in the 1880s. Suddenly, names that for centuries had existed only in textual form became living artists, as their styles started into visibility ‘in the lightning-flash of individuality’. As this chapter will argue, it is no accident that this coincided with an increasing awareness of personal style in contemporary artistic production as well. If Pheidias was the teacher of G.F. Watts, Polykleitos and Praxiteles became artistic brothers of such as Renoir and Rodin – recognisable, at a glance, by their personal styles. None of these attributions went undisputed either at the time or subsequently; yet the writers of the numerous histories of ancient sculpture that proliferated in the later decades of the nineteenth century nonetheless felt able to characterise the personal styles of each of the ancient sculptors with steadily increasing precision.11 The development was led by a new generation of rigorously trained German scholars; both its methods and its results were summarised, triumphantly, in the magisterial volume of 1893 by Adolf Furtwängler, Meisterwerke der griechischen Plastik (an English translation, edited by Eugénie Sellers, appeared two years later under the title Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture). While some subsequent scholars have questioned the value of authorship

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as the primary basis for the historiography of ancient art,12 Furtwängler’s method remains authoritative, more than a century later, for any scholarly project that relies on naming the great artists of antiquity – as the ancients themselves did. Olga Palagia and J.J. Pollitt, the editors of a volume published in 1996, Personal Styles in Greek Sculpture, avow their allegiance to Furtwängler. The volume’s five chapters review the evidence for the styles of Pheidias, Polykleitos, Praxiteles, Lysippos and Damophon with utmost rigour, and judicious scepticism. Nonetheless, as the editors acknowledge, the premise remains that of the later nineteenth century: a conviction that the styles, at least of the five chosen sculptors, ‘can be recaptured today thanks to the cumulative efforts of several generations of scholars’.13 As this chapter will argue, the premise remains tendentious in the extreme; yet the benefits of the scholarship carried out under its authority are equally undeniable, and perhaps more far-reaching in their implications than either classicists or historians of modern art have suspected.

Three Decades of Attribution

The two basic techniques of attribution were not new, as Newton’s report demonstrates, and both depended on comparison of the not-yetattributed work with some authority for determining the characteristics of a named artist. The authority might be an ancient text naming the artist, which would entail the difficult process of comparing visual evidence (the work to be attributed) with verbal evidence (the Greek or Latin words in the text); for shorthand, I shall call this technique ‘philological comparison’. Or it might be another physical object already attributed to the artist on some basis, which would entail the equally difficult process of deciding which visual features count as determinants of personal style, and how close a resemblance is required; this I shall call ‘stylistic comparison’. (The physical object might be another sculpture, or something else – a coin, for example – for which a relationship to the work of a named artist can be demonstrated.) While these techniques were to be refined almost beyond recognition in the succeeding decades, they had already been used in certain striking cases. Indeed, it is notable

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that they had not yet been applied more widely; it took the new pressures of the later nineteenth century to call them into systematic use. Thus the composition of Myron’s Discobolos had been identified by Italian scholars in relation to a marble copy unearthed in 1781 (Fig. 22).14 This was a special case, since the distinctive pose of the original statue had been described with unusual specificity by the second-century Greek author Lucian (Philopseudes 18): ‘the discus-thrower, who is bent over into the throwing position, is turned toward the hand that holds the discus, and has the opposite knee gently flexed, like one who will straighten up again after the throw.’15 Apart from the Laocoon, scarcely another ancient sculpture had been described precisely enough to be matched in this way to extant objects (once identified, the fairly complete version discovered in 1781 could be linked to other copies of the torso already available).



22

Discobolos, traditionally considered a Roman copy after a bronze by Myron (mid-fifth century bc), ‘Lancellotti’ version.

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Thus the attribution remains among the most plausible, even though other discus-throwers, in different poses, survive. Yet the attribution did not lead quickly to any attempt to use the second technique, to add other sculptures to Myron’s oeuvre by stylistic comparison to the Discobolos. It was not until 1853 that Heinrich Brunn, one of the German scholars who pioneered the development of attribution, identified a sculpture of a bearded satyr, in the Lateran collection in Rome, as a copy of Myron’s Marsyas, ‘supported by a reference in Pliny, by an Athenian coin, and a lost Athenian relief. Five years later Brunn could definitely confirm the identification by a thorough stylistic analysis.’16 Meanwhile, a superb marble sculpture of an athlete, scraping oil and dust from his arm, was unearthed in the Trastevere district of Rome in 1849, and added to the Vatican collections (Fig. 23). Pliny mentions two statues of men scraping themselves (destringens se; the modern literature prefers the Greek term, apoxyomenos), one by Polykleitos, the other by Lysippos. The new find could not be either of these original Greek statues, both of which were bronzes. Almost as exciting, though, would be to identify it as a later marble copy of one of them, and in 1850 another of the German pioneers, Emil Braun, published his argument in favour of the statue’s derivation from Lysippos’s version.17 The Vatican statue’s proportions seemed to correspond to Pliny’s description (again an unusually specific one) of Lysippos’s style: his figures had relatively small heads and slender bodies, which made them appear taller. They differed from the ‘square’ figures (quadratae staturae) of older artists – such as Polykleitos, whose figures are called ‘square’ (quadrata) in Pliny’s account of that sculptor’s works, just a little earlier in the text.18 Since both Polykleitos and Lysippos made statues of a man scraping himself, the word echo is of obvious importance in establishing grounds for identifying the Vatican statue as derived from Lysippos’s, rather than Polykleitos’s, version. (The less interesting, though not implausible, possibility – that the subject of a man scraping himself was so common in antiquity that the Vatican sculpture need not correspond to either of the celebrated originals – has never attracted much scholarly attention.) But in 1850 the contrast must have been conjectural, since the personal style of Polykleitos had not yet been established. Not for long: in 1863 yet another German scholar, Karl Friedrichs, published his claim that a marble

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23

Apoxyomenos, traditionally considered a Roman copy after a bronze by Lysippos (fourth century bc).

copy in the Naples Museum derived from Polykleitos’s most celebrated work, the Doryphoros or spear-bearer (Fig. 24). A few years later stylistic comparison permitted the identification of another sculpture, discovered in 1862 at Vaison in France and acquired by Newton for the British Museum in 1869, as a copy of Polykleitos’s Diadoumenos, a victorious athlete binding a fillet around his head (Fig. 25).19 It will be obvious that, while stylistic comparison was a theoretical possibility before the new wave of attributions began (and is duly mentioned by Newton in the passage quoted above), it became steadily more useful as more attributions were made, and therefore available for comparison – or contrast. Suddenly, Pliny’s words make visual sense: the stocky musculature and strong internal markings of the torso, in the copies associated with both the Doryphoros and the Diadoumenos, render vivid the term ‘quadratus’, and seem to confirm Braun’s hunch about the Lysippan derivation of the Vatican Apoxyomenos, slenderer and more elongated in dimensions, and more mellifluous in the transition from form to form. All of these sculptures display the classic configuration

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24

Doryphoros, traditionally considered a Roman copy after a bronze by Polykleitos (mid-fifth century bc).

known as contrapposto, with the weight on one leg, a slight elevation of the hip on that side, and a balancing lift of the opposite shoulder. Yet the sculptures associated with Polykleitos stand squarer; from a side view the two shoulders are aligned, and the front plane describes a nearly perfect straight line from clavicle down through the weight-bearing leg. By contrast the shoulders of the Apoxyomenos turn in response to the arm gesture, which punctures the front plane of the marble to extend the composition into the space before the figure. Perhaps the differences among these ideal male nudes, virtually neutral in facial expression, are slight; but with the aid of Pliny’s account of Lysippos, the torsion of the Apoxyomenos comes to seem dynamic and innovative, positively avantgarde in its departure from Polykleitan stability. In turn, the Doryphoros and Diadoumenos appear conservative or academic. That seems to endorse Polykleitos’s ancient reputation as the codifier of a system of principles or rules of proportion, the so-called ‘Canon’, the title of a (lost) written treatise by the sculptor, tantalising phrases from which were quoted by the much later authors Plutarch and Philo Mechanicus. The

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25

Diadoumenos, traditionally considered a Roman copy after a bronze by Polykleitos (midfifth century bc), ‘Vaison’ version.

medical writer Galen claimed that Polykleitos also made a statue to embody the principles of his treatise. Pliny seems to conflate the statue and the treatise when he claims that the statue was itself the Canon: ‘he alone of men is deemed to have rendered art itself in a work of art.’ Other sources have been taken to imply that the statue exemplifying the Canon was the Doryphoros.20 Thus the identification of the Doryphoros, in 1863, permitted the distinction between the ‘academic’ Polykleitos and the ‘avant-garde’ Lysippos, implicit in Pliny’s text, to start into visible actuality. It was in the same year that a similar conflict in modern art came to a head: in response to mounting attacks on the exclusionary practices of the Paris Salon, the official exhibition for new works of art, Napoleon III ordered a Salon des Refusés to allow the public to decide for themselves whether the rejected works were victims of academic prejudice. Among the works shown at the Refusés were Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and James McNeill Whistler’s The White Girl, paintings which have come to figure as monuments of the nineteenth-century avant-garde. Perhaps the

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coincidence in date is of merely symbolic significance. Yet the same issue of academic authority versus progressive innovation was at stake in the classical scholars’ activities as in the debates on contemporary art. In the current scholarly literature, the two arenas of ancient and modern art are so thoroughly segregated that it may seem merely capricious to propose a link between them. Seen from a different perspective, however, both the distinction between Polykleitos and Lysippos in classical scholarship, and that between academic authority and avant-garde innovation in modernist art criticism depend on a similar historiographical pattern: a reconfiguration of the progressive logic that informs older histories of art (including Pliny’s, still a conspicuous point of reference for the classically trained art critics of the nineteenth century) into a dialectical structure more reminiscent of Hegel’s historicism, in which change is generated by the clash of opposites. It would be wrong, furthermore, to place the new canon of ancient artists on the ‘academic’ side of this nineteenth-century divide: the new identifications were producing a group of artists who were like progressive contemporary artists in having strongly differentiated personal styles and identities, even though they happened to have lived more than two thousand years ago. No longer could ancient sculpture represent some universal classical ideal, such as the European academies of art were seen to uphold, and the new German scholars were no traditionalists, but instead stressed the modernity of their methods. The minute discriminations required for attribution called attention to the considerable variety in proportion, contrapposto and handling that obtained even among statues of the ideal male nude. Just two decades, then, after Newton published his dispiriting remarks on the difficulty of distinguishing personal styles, it seemed possible to identify the styles of Myron, Polykleitos and Lysippos, as well as the school of Pheidias. Admittedly, this depended largely on ignoring Newton’s stricture about copies in which ‘the spirit of the original art has passed away’. But the most striking discovery of all was to come in 1877, in the course of German excavations at the Greek site of Olympia. This sanctuary was renowned in antiquity for its abundance of sculptures, religious images as well as innumerable statues commemorating the victors in the games. The longing to explore it had been strong for

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generations; as we saw in the Introduction, Winckelmann dreamed of standing in the Olympic Stadium with all the statues before him, and Lord Elgin had abandoned his plans to excavate there with the greatest reluctance, when his funds ran out.21 The German excavations, begun in 1875, intentionally set a new standard for rigour in archaeological technique; nonetheless, most of Olympia’s sculptures proved elusive, long ago carried away, or melted down in the case of innumerable bronzes. Imagine, then, the excitement when a superb marble sculpture of a beautiful male nude, cradling an infant, was unearthed in the remains of the Temple of Hera (Fig. 26). Better still, the findspot corresponded to the place where Pausanias had seen a statue by Praxiteles representing Hermes and the infant Dionysus.22 Best of all, the new statue looked compellingly like a Praxiteles. Here, at last, was a genuine original by one of the greatest names in Greek sculpture, which came with an unassailable link to an ancient text. The Hermes became the methodological and aesthetic cornerstone for Furtwängler’s Meisterwerke, the single example that validated the entire scholarly project. An additional advantage, perhaps, was its discovery in a German excavation; Furtwängler did not hesitate to deploy it in a stylistic comparison that demoted the French masterpiece, the Venus de Milo, to an anonymous Hellenistic production, displaying only distant and ill-integrated reminiscences of the great Greek sculptors. But why did the Hermes look so Praxitelean? The problem still haunts today’s scholarship, and the more so since the sculpture’s other credentials have been severely tested. Some scholars believe that its physical characteristics point to a date considerably later than Praxiteles’s lifetime, and there has been much debate about how Pausanias might have been misled, or mistaken, about the authorship of the sculpture he saw at Olympia.23 Furthermore, pace Furtwängler, it has proved difficult to bring the Hermes into coherent relationship with the other body of evidence that has definite claim to represent Praxiteles’s style: the numerous sculptures, fragments and coins that since the late eighteenth century have been thought to reproduce the composition of Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos, or ‘Knidia’ (Fig. 19).24 The Hermes appears just once in ancient literature (the passing reference in Pausanias), the Knidia countless times, and in the most stirring of circumstances. The latter

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Hermes with the infant Dionysus, attributed to Praxiteles.

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was apparently a striking artistic innovation, the first cult statue of a female nude. It would seem to have been the most sensual sculpture of antiquity, modelled (according to Athenaeus) on Praxiteles’s own lover, the celebrated courtesan Phryne, and capable (according to Pliny and Lucian) of arousing the spectator’s desire.25 These ancient literary anecdotes help to account for the moral reservations about Praxiteles common in nineteenth-century writing, where his style is often characterised as ‘voluptuous’ or excessively appealing to the senses.26 Yet to a modern eye, the copies of the Knidia appear anything but erotic: if the stolidity of its proportions, the artificiality with which the small breasts seem affixed to the torso, and the dry and generalised surface texture can be blamed on the copyists, they scarcely permit the viewer to imagine the fascination of the original to its ancient audiences, attested over at least five centuries after its creation. The Hermes, on the other hand, displays mellifluous musculature, perfectly attuned to the graceful sway of the body towards the lively infant, and its surface texture is deliciously supple, so that marble seems to metamorphose into yielding flesh. If, in 1877, it looked so much like a Praxiteles, that must have been largely because it made sense in relation to Praxiteles’s ancient reputation for sensuality. Thus it also resembled a number of sculptures of ‘androgynous types’, in Newton’s phrase,27 that were already associated with the fourth-century sculptor on much more tenuous evidence – for example, the Apollo Sauroctonos, known to Winckelmann in several copies which he linked to Pliny’s mention of an Apollo lying in wait to slay a lizard,28 and several fauns or satyrs, a subject ascribed to Praxiteles in more than one ancient source. One of the latter became particularly famous after its celebration in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel of 1860 as The Marble Faun, but the ancient descriptions are scarcely specific enough to justify an attribution to Praxiteles on the basis of subject alone.29 Thus there was a considerable element of wishful thinking in the ascription of the ‘androgynous types’ to Praxitelean prototypes. Yet the Hermes – as if by magic – echoed the lilting sway of these sculptures, balanced off-centre with a support to one side. By a strange reversal, their Praxitelean credentials are now often bolstered by stylistic comparison to the Hermes. In an equally strange slippage, the ‘androgynous types’ – now including the Hermes – seem to epitomise the aspect of Praxiteles’s

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style, its sensuality, most closely associated in antiquity with the Knidia but difficult for modern observers to discern in the putative copies of that statue. The latter slippage also involves a shift in gender. With the discovery of the Hermes, the risky eroticism of Praxiteles’s style – already morally problematical for some modern writers – shifts from the female to the male figure, and from a heterosexual context to one at least potentially homoerotic or homosexual. Clearly the discovery of the sculpture, in the course of the rigorously scientific excavations at Olympia, and the startling coincidence of its findspot with Pausanias’s account are events independent of the concurrent development of discourses on same-sex sexuality, including the coinage of the term ‘homosexual’ (by Karl Maria Kertbeny, in German, shortly before the discovery).30 Yet that development was closely associated with classical scholarship, in both Germany and England, and it would be naïve to isolate it from the reception of the Hermes or the impact that had on the emerging characterisation of Praxiteles’s personal style. Perhaps, indeed, there is an occluded sexual politics in the scholarly debates, up to the present day, about whether the Knidia or the Hermes should be taken as the standard for attribution to Praxiteles. If many of today’s classical scholars prefer the Knidia, that is partly due to an increasing preference for ‘hard’ archaeological evidence over more ‘subjective’ perceptions of stylistic resemblance; but it may be not inconvenient that the preference supports a heterosexual characterisation of a sculptor who must be regarded among the very greatest, unless we discard altogether the estimate of the ancients. The verdict of artists has been different. Occasionally an artist has taken inspiration from a putative copy of the Knidia. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, for example, would seem to have drawn on the sculptural type for his Salon nude of 1870, La Baigneuse au griffon (Fig. 27).31 The reference might be called a parody, deliberately anti-academic in its abrupt modernisation of a celebrated ancient sculpture; the figure has shed her fashionable clothes in a setting, on the banks of the Seine, strongly associated with modern suburban leisure in the painting of Renoir’s ‘avant-garde’ artistic circle (the little dog, wittily perched on the discarded clothes, is surely the pet of a modern Parisienne). Yet the figure is an

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27

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Baigneuse au griffon (Bather with a Griffon), 1870.

undisguised portrait of Renoir’s lover, Lise Trehot: does Renoir, boldly, cast himself as a modern Praxiteles, reenacting the creation of the Knidia with Lise in the role of Phryne? That would be a heterosexual interpretation, and the painting of course predates the discovery of the Hermes. But it is an unusual example; as we saw in Chapter 1 modern painters and sculptors of the female nude overwhelmingly preferred the Venus de Milo as a model, despite the anonymity of her sculptor. And the ‘androgynous types’, including (after 1877) the Hermes, have also had a rich artistic reception, from the figure of Patroclus in Ingres’s successful entry for the Grand Prix de Rome in 1801, The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the Tent of Achilles (École des Beaux-Arts, Paris), through to the sensualised male nudes in later-nineteenth-century painting and sculpture, to be explored below.32 Perhaps, as many of today’s scholars believe, the copies of the Knidia have a better claim to relate to the historical sculptor of ancient Greece. But by far the more compelling artist is the one who made the Hermes and the other ‘androgynous types’. In aesthetic terms, he is the real Praxiteles.

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The discovery of the Hermes marked a triumph for the new German practice of attribution, as its crucial role in Furtwängler’s Meisterwerke demonstrates; it led, too, to further attributions via stylistic comparison, among them several marble heads much admired by the artists of the next, early-modernist generation. When the personal style of Scopas was described, on the basis of pedimental sculpture found at Tegea in 1880, the last of the sculptors Newton had listed as ‘obscure’ was revealed.33 Perhaps the story is most fittingly closed in 1892, however, with an identification that comes full circle: Franz Winter proposed that the Apollo Belvedere was a copy of an original by the Athenian sculptor Leochares.34 Before the nineteenth century, the Apollo Belvedere had been the watchword for the most famous ancient sculpture, and at that period it did not matter overmuch that it could not be associated with one of the famous sculptors mentioned in ancient texts. The recognition that it must be a copy, evident in the testimony to the Commons Select Committee of 1816, did not at first dethrone it; but it heralded the nineteenth-century drive to identify a more reliable canon. With the attribution to Leochares – still considered the most plausible alternative by many scholars – the Apollo Belvedere was at last able to rejoin the list of canonical works, on the new basis that it could be linked to a named sculptor. Yet the attribution also confirmed the statue’s permanent demotion from its former glory: Leochares was a respectable enough artist, but his name had nothing like the lustre of his more glamorous contemporary, Praxiteles.

Theory and Practice in Attribution

Just after the turn of the twentieth century, the classical archaeologist Adolf Michaelis reviewed the events that had passed in A Century of Archaeological Discoveries.35 Michaelis, Professor in the University of Strasbourg, had himself participated in some of the excavations and discoveries he described, and he was a progressive; he celebrated the use of ‘scientific’ techniques in excavation and the role of the new technology of photography, both as an aid to stylistic comparison and as a means of disseminating archaeological results to wider

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audiences.36 In an engaging anecdote he remembers the bemused responses of his colleagues when he used vase-painting – still considered an inferior art-form – to illustrate his lectures on the history of Greek art in the 1860s.37 Michaelis displays a certain bias towards what he sees as the scientific rigour of German excavation techniques, and sometimes betrays a note of vexation when he is obliged to admit that an unsystematic French or a maverick English excavation made a significant discovery. Yet he sees the later nineteenth century as a period of archaeological collaboration among the European nations, eventually including the Americans, who began to enter the field towards the end of the century. For Michaelis, ‘archaeology may be classed among the conquering sciences of the nineteenth century.’38 Yet when he comes to consider the paradigm shift from philological to stylistic analysis, he is prepared to concede intellectual leadership to the historians of medieval and modern art. While the younger discipline ‘learnt much’ from the study of ancient art in the early stages of its development, it led the way in the refinement of techniques for stylistic analysis, ‘which can best be designated by the name of Morelli’, the most famous connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art: Archaeology has thus been influenced by the history of modern art in proportion as the former has endeavoured to keep questions of style and art in the foreground … Under these influences a revolution has taken place in archaeology in regard to scientific observation and treatment.39

At first thought, Michaelis’s concession seems uncharacteristic of him, and indeed his chronology appears shaky: he identifies Heinrich Brunn as the leader of the ‘revolution’ in the study of ancient art, yet we have already seen that Brunn had identified Myron’s personal style in the 1850s, well before Giovanni Morelli’s work began to appear in 1874.40 Yet Michaelis is eager to emphasise a significant difference between the studies of ancient and modern art: he sees the latter as having at its disposal ‘infinitely richer and more trustworthy material’, with respect to both securely authenticated works and archival evidence. This difference may seem merely a matter of degree, but it proves to be inseparable

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from a more fundamental distinction: the study of modern art had not ‘passed through a philological stage’.41 Thus the paradigm shift in the study of ancient art is marked not merely by the appearance of stylistic analysis but pertinently also by the rejection of ‘the old philological point of view’: It is a well-known fact that a new movement is most intolerant to the one just preceding it. Consequently the well-developed archaeology of style now depreciates the archaeology of the philological period. Only works of art are of importance, all [written] tradition is useless, in fact often cannot withstand the higher criticism.42

Put this way, the intellectual priority of Morellian connoisseurship appears logical: as Morelli puts it in his methodological introduction, ‘The only true record for the connoisseur …is the work of art itself ’.43 But Michaelis’s point is that the adoption of this principle, derived from the study of modern art, is theoretically inadmissible for ancient art, due to the absence of any reliable evidence for authorship apart from the philological tradition: ‘Those who speak thus do not realize that they are about to saw off the branch on which they are sitting. For how could we have built the history of art upon stylistic grounds, if we had not documentary evidence?’ It is telling that Michaelis chooses, as his example, the very first of the attributions discussed above: ‘Let us only compare the assurance with which we recognize the Diskobolos of Myron, and use it as a criterion, on the strength of two clear literary evidences, with the great insecurity which exists as soon as we only have stylistic analysis as a guide.’44 Michaelis perhaps underestimates the methodological contribution of the archaeologists of Brunn’s generation to the development of stylistic analysis in art history more widely; and perhaps he overestimates the independence of Renaissance connoisseurship from documentary evidence, pace Morelli. But the problem is a real one, and Michaelis is clearly right to point to the logical inconsistency in the very notion of a connoisseurship of ancient art. If we assume, with Morelli, that the aim of connoisseurship is attribution, there is no way to proceed except to refer to the philological tradition. True, a number of inscribed bases (including many found since Michaelis’s lifetime) name famous

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sculptors, but since the statues themselves do not survive, they cannot serve as a basis for stylistic comparison.45 On the other hand, the names in inscriptions on extant sculptures prove with uncanny regularity not to correspond to the great sculptors listed by the ancient authors (something that was already evident to Winckelmann, as we saw in the Introduction). If attribution were to be possible in the study of ancient art, it would need a special theoretical justification for establishing a link to the philological tradition. The scholars of Brunn’s generation, rigorous investigators of the empirical evidence, rejected the old traditions that had fancifully made the Graeco–Roman sculptures into Greek originals of the best periods. But it required just one move, of breathtaking simplicity, to reinstate the link between the philological tradition and extant sculptures. What if the extant sculptures could be reinvested with value, not indeed as the original masterpieces revered by the ancients, but as faithful copies of those very works – second-hand evidence, perhaps, about the masterpieces, but the best available? Some such reasoning was implicit in the earliest attributions, but it was steadily developed in what might be called the second generation of archaeological connoisseurship, most authoritatively exemplified by Furtwängler’s Meisterwerke (dedicated ‘in respectful devotion’ to two scholars of the first generation, Brunn himself and the director of the excavations at Olympia, Ernst Curtius). Furtwängler presented his conclusions as empirically based, in keeping with the procedures of the natural sciences: ‘I have never been able to see any use in talk about method, much less in boasting about it…Method can be shown only by application.’46 Yet his linkage between extant sculptures and the philological tradition depends utterly on prior assumptions that cannot be empirically demonstrated. Michaelis objected to one of these, the assumption that the choice of antique statues which has come down to us [in copies] should correspond with the history of art, which Pliny compiled out of second-hand authorities, or with the works mentioned by Pausanias in his guide-book of Greece. How do we know that the taste of the Romans at the end of the Republic or at the beginning of the Empire – that is about the time from which most of our copies date – was the same as that of the sources of these writers?47

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Furtwängler also made a further assumption: that the sculptures he regarded as later Roman copies provide better evidence about the masterpieces they are presumed to reflect than Greek originals contemporary in date with the masterpieces, but inferior in quality. Presumably architectural sculptures would fall into the latter category, as workshop productions rather than creations of the great masters themselves. Nonetheless, in the absence of the lost masterpieces themselves there is no empirical test for the assumption. The conventions of more recent art history, indeed, might support the opposite view: that the ‘period style’ even of an inferior contemporary work will reveal more about the best sculpture of its own age than a much later work, even if the latter is assumed to have been made with the specific intention of copying the earlier masterpiece. This points to a distinctive feature of laternineteenth-century archaeological connoisseurship: its overwhelming faith in the authority of the greatest Greek masters, less important not only to more recent art historians but also to the scholars of the eighteenth century and earlier, who were often content to admire sculptures in Italian antiquities collections that were not associated with a great name. Perhaps one source for the new glamour of the Greek sculptor-geniuses was the importance accorded to the Elgin Marbles as exemplars of Pheidian style; but it is also in tune with the emphasis in the new connoisseurship of Renaissance and later art on distinguishing the work of the greatest masters from lesser hands. The longing to link extant objects with the great names, known only from the ancient authors, had been strong since the Renaissance itself. Nonetheless, Michaelis may have been right that it was the new techniques developed for the nineteenth-century connoisseurship of modern art that finally provided the methodology for interpreting the physical characteristics of actual objects with a view to establishing authorship. Interestingly, Furtwängler justifies his assumption through a comparison to the study of modern art: Among these copies it is that we must look for the masterpieces mentioned by the authors, for the statues that made epochs or initiated movements. Were we to possess only copies of the noble creations of a Raphael, a Michelangelo, or a Rembrandt, these would certainly be better worth one’s study than the hosts of other originals of the time.48

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However, the logic is counterfactual: we do, in fact, possess securely authenticated originals by Raphael, Michelangelo and Rembrandt, and it is only by comparison with these ‘true records’ that a Morellian method can get off the ground. Hence, perhaps, the crucial role given to the Hermes from Olympia – the ‘true record’ that appears, as if by magic, to validate the comparative procedures that had already attributed a personal style to Praxiteles through putative copies. Yet the Hermes exposes the fault-line in Furtwängler’s method. We have seen that archaeological evidence, accepted by many subsequent scholars, calls into question Furtwängler’s insistence on the sculpture’s Praxitelean authorship. Whether right or wrong, though, the ascription to Praxiteles depends ultimately on the passing reference in Pausanias, the one link between the famous name and the extant object. Even in the case of the Hermes, then, archaeological connoisseurship requires a significant revision to Morellian procedure, to permit a primary link to the ancient philological tradition to play the role of the ‘true record’ in establishing a starting-point for attribution. Furthermore, in virtually all cases other than the Hermes itself, a second revision is required, to allow the extant copy to stand in for the masterpiece actually mentioned in the ancient literary source, and this second revision proves to have important entailments for how connoisseurship can proceed in practice. In Morellian connoisseurship, the aim is to distinguish the style of one individual artist from that of the contemporaries or followers closest to him. But the archaeological connoisseur has the opposite aim: to assimilate the work of a follower – the copyist – to whatever is known of the style of the predecessor he is copying. Thus the Renaissance connoisseur attends to those features of the work that are least amenable to imitation – the ones that betray the individual’s stylistic handwriting, so to speak, rather than the characteristics of his school. But the archaeological connoisseur must attend, instead, to the features most amenable to copying – the ones that betray the allegiance of the copyist to his predecessor’s style, not his own personal habits. Moreover, it is precisely those features that constitute the aesthetic merit of the work – the ones that can give us a glimpse, if only at second hand, of what the original masterpiece might have been like.

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This basic difference between archaeological and Renaissance connoisseurship is borne out in an essay by Morelli’s disciple Bernard Berenson, ‘The Rudiments of Connoisseurship’, written about the time of the publication of Furtwängler’s Meisterwerke although not published until 1902. Unsurprisingly, the features Berenson finds relatively unimportant for attribution in his own field, Italian Renaissance art, are precisely the ones most valued in archaeological connoisseurship, particularly the overall composition and the ‘structure, pose, and movement’ of the human figure – characteristics that Berenson sees as shared among the members of an artistic milieu or school.49 Indeed, Berenson considers the nude figure poor evidence for individual authorship, partly because of its rarity in Italian art of the period that most interested him, but also because he thought that ‘nothing is easier than to reproduce the mere outline of a nude figure, and its mere pose’.50 Yet archaeological connoisseurship depended above all on identifying patterns of contrapposto balance, body type and pose in sculptures of the nude figure. In a larger sense, the two procedures represent opposite sides of the same coin: both depend on a set of assumptions about how the unique personality of an individual manifests itself, perhaps unconsciously, in the objects he makes by hand. Critics of connoisseurship in Renaissance and modern art have objected to such assumptions as based on questionable psychological theories; it remains unclear how the personal idiosyncrasies demonstrated unconsciously in handwriting, for example, are reflected in intentional artistic production.51 Perhaps the archaeological connoisseur has a certain advantage in this respect: by comparing a number of surviving copies of a single sculptural composition, it is possible empirically to distinguish traits that belong to many or all of the copies from those that appear in only one or a few, and thus to hypothesise that the former are more likely to derive from the common original, while the latter reflect the idiosyncrasies of the particular copyist. It may be objected, though, that for all we know Roman copyists altered their originals in systematic ways, so that the traits observed in all copies are traceable, not to the original at all, but rather to Roman copying practices. The unique qualities of the original – the ones that account for their special merit as masterpieces – might

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then be precisely ones that appear in none of the copies, and that therefore remain radically unknowable, and invisible, to the modern scholar. Thus the empirical investigations of the archaeological connoisseur can establish, with exceptional subtlety and nuance, the minute points of resemblance and difference among extant versions of a sculptural composition. But they cannot demonstrate a link between these and a putative lost original except on the basis of assumptions that cannot be empirically tested and which must accordingly rest on theoretical principles: a theory of how sculptural copying worked in antiquity, special to classical archaeology, as well as a theory shared with the connoisseurs of more modern art, about how individual idiosyncrasies manifest themselves in objects crafted by hand.52 Berenson’s essay might be read simply as discrediting the possibility of archaeological connoisseurship, for reasons similar to Michaelis’s more specific reservations at about the same date. For Berenson, as for Morelli, ‘the works of art themselves are the only materials of the student of the history of art’; written sources can be used only to bolster the results of connoisseurship, never as the primary basis that was required in archaeological connoisseurship.53 Moreover, the writings of such as Pliny and Pausanias would not even qualify as ‘documents’ in Berenson’s scheme, but only as ‘tradition’, all the weaker since centuries had elapsed since the creation of the works they described.54 ‘An art that has failed to transmit its masterpieces to us is, as far as we are concerned, dead, or at the best a mere ghost of itself ’55 – Berenson’s example is ancient Greek painting, but the point applies with nearly equivalent force to ancient sculpture. And the clinching factor in Berenson’s procedure is a judgement of quality, which overrides all other tests in finally determining an ascription to one of the greatest, or a lesser, artist. This criterion is practically useless when dealing with copies, which often vary widely in quality even among those seen to relate to a single prototype. However, Berenson also offers a definition of connoisseurship that suggests another possibility: ‘the comparison of works of art with a view to determining their reciprocal relationship’.56 Might it be possible, then, to construct a system of relationships among extant works that could verify one another reciprocally, even though none of them could be proved, on its own merits, to correspond to one of the great works

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of antiquity? Arguably this might be what was achieved through the attributions of the second half of the nineteenth century. The system of differences among the copies variously attributed to the originals of Polykleitos, Praxiteles, Lysippos and the others might be taken to correspond closely enough to the developmental narrative plotted in Pliny’s books on ancient art that the system could be accepted as a whole, on the basis of its internal consistency, even though no one of its data points was capable of unassailable proof on its own. Crucially, the system depends above all on placing varieties of contrapposto disposition – qualities assumed to be observable in copies – into a logical sequence from a stolid stance on both feet, still reminiscent of the primitive sculptural block, through ever-freer experiments with unequal balance. This sequence can be linked to key points in Pliny’s narrative, from the legendary Daedalus, who first separated the legs, through Polykleitos’s invention of classic contrapposto, to Lysippos’s revolutionary new system of symmetria.57 Although any of the data points can be (and often have been) challenged, the logic of the entire sequence is powerful enough to override considerable doubt about its details. Some such argument often seems, at least informally, to underlie recent discussions of extant sculptures, which – despite persistent scholarly wrangling over the interpretation of the archaeological evidence – largely continue to rely on the attributions made in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus Charles M. Edwards, the author of the chapter on Lysippos in Palagia and Pollitt’s Personal Styles in Greek Sculpture, writes: Unless unexpected evidence appears, absolute proof that the Vatican Apoxyomenos copies Pliny’s destringens se by Lysippos will never exist. Still, the Vatican statue agrees with Pliny’s description of Lysippos’ proportional system better than any other apoxyomenos that has come down to us, and the statue’s composition is an appreciable break with the Polykleitan scheme.58

Thus the later identification of Polykleitos’s personal style has retrospectively become an element, perhaps indeed the clinching one, in justifying Braun’s previous attribution of the Vatican Apoxyomenos to Lysippos. This could be described as a stroke of luck, or more

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generously as confirmation that Braun’s original insight was wellconceived. More broadly, Edwards is able to draw on abundant subsequent research, of various kinds, to flesh out the bare bones of the attribution: not only the subsequent identification of Polykleitan sculptural types, for contrast, but additional attributions to Lysippos for comparison, and generations of detailed visual analysis, applied to both sculptors’ putative works (or, rather, the works of their putative copyists) and extending from overall bodily proportions and balance of limbs to minutiae of hairstyle, shape of facial features such as eyelids and brows, and patterns of musculature. All of this is a marvel of scholarly enterprise: but to what extent is the elaboration indebted to the original identification of the Apoxyomenos, and thus an exercise in circular reasoning? The paths taken in subsequent research, various as they have been, are dictated to a great extent by the primary assumption that we are dealing with a copy of Lysippos’s statue of a man destringens se. If certain other sculptures, a decade later, looked ‘squarer’ than the Vatican Apoxyomenos, then it was easier, at least, to associate them with Polykleitos; the styles of the two sculptors are mutually interdependent in modern scholarship. On this system of visual differences, which eventually permitted a panoply of putative copies to gather around each artist’s name, rests the complex story of generational change, from the traditional, or even conservative, Polykleitos to the innovative Lysippos, as well as more than one theory of Greek masculinity. These in turn inflect our perceptions of the sculptures: would the gesture of the Vatican Apoxyomenos appear a dynamic departure from the older tradition of contrapposto balance if the observer were not already thinking of the sculpture as a work of the innovator Lysippos? And how much of the developmental narrative hangs on the interpretation of a single word echo in Pliny’s text – quadrata to characterise Polykleitos’s figures, then quadratas, used antithetically to distinguish Lysippos from the older generation? Again, the attention to hairstyle, which generated remarkable feats of close observation and comparison, depends on a prompt from Pliny, who remarked that Lysippos ‘is said to have contributed much to the art of casting statues by representing the hair in detail’.59 This also begs the question of how a marble copy would be able to reproduce a technique

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designed for casting in the malleable medium of bronze. Yet the fact that we are dealing not with sculptures actually made by the artists whose names validate them but rather with putative copies permits any inconvenient discrepancies between the extant object and the literary description to be explained away as interpolations of the copyist. Since Furtwängler’s time, a small number of genuine originals has come to light, for example the two magnificent bronzes recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the Italian coast near Riace in 1972.60 These provide valuable evidence about ancient statuary in bronze, the medium of all of the famous works enumerated in Pliny’s Book 34, of which none survive; but like the other examples, preserved by happy accidents such as the shipwreck, they come without any archaeological evidence of authorship, date or even school. The paucity of surviving bronzes, moreover, makes it difficult to use the features that distinguish them as originals – details of the workmanship or techniques of casting, for example – to place them historically. Thus the only alternative is to insert them into the pre-existing history, based on the characteristics of later marble copies and particularly on contrapposto (a characteristic assumed to be transferable from bronze to marble). The Riace bronzes display a more even balance between the weight-bearing and free legs than the presumed copies of Polykleitos’s statues, so that their contrapposto appears less developed. Thus they are often (though not always) dated slightly earlier, and their quality is so high that some scholars have attributed them to the young Pheidias.61 In a recent textbook, Robin Osborne leaves the Riace figures authorless, but he does not hesitate to pit the original bronze, known as Riace ‘A’ (Fig. 28), against the marble Doryphoros (Fig. 24). Yet the personal style of Polykleitos, in Osborne’s account, remains close to its nineteenth-century characterisation. ‘Polykleitos was famous for the doctrine that there was a single fixed set of desirable proportions for the representation of the human body, and he wrote a book about this called the Canon,’ writes Osborne.62 This is a tendentious interpretation of the literary tradition, which credits Polykleitos with a system of proportions but assuredly not with a ‘single fixed’ one. Indeed the line from Polykleitos’s treatise (‘For “perfection,” he says, arises para mikron through many numbers’),63 which Osborne quotes from Philo Mechanicus later in the same sentence, has often been

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28

‘Warrior A’ (found at Riace), perhaps midfifth century bc.

taken to imply the opposite – that Polykleitos’s proportional system was exceptionally flexible and nuanced. Nonetheless, the assertion establishes the idea that Polykleitos was a rule-bound academic. In comparison to the less developed contrapposto of Riace ‘A’, the Doryphoros ‘has an easy naturalism’: But we no longer look here upon a ‘real man’: we cannot square the overdeveloped musculature with the clear skin of the face; we know that we look upon a construct, whose airy gaze contrasts to the intensity seen in the eyes of Riace ‘A’ and further discourages the viewer from creating a particular story for this figure. Polykleitos’ Canon was an idealist work, and his self-absorbed Doryphoros makes no direct contact with the experiences of the viewer.64

It is interesting that the ‘academic’ quality of the Doryphoros, formerly seen as a conservative characteristic in relation to a later, more ‘avantgarde’ sculpture (the Apoxyomenos), now appears as an ossification of tradition in relation to an earlier, more vital style. This, as we shall see in Chapter 3, is characteristic of a development in twentieth-century

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taste, which came to prefer earlier, more ‘primitive’ styles to later, more refined ones. Yet the argument is circular: the Riace figure can only be dated earlier than the Doryphoros on the basis of the internal consistency of the system that traces a continuous line of development – one might call it a ‘single fixed’ line – from a more equal balance of limbs to a freer contrapposto disposition; and it is only the logic of that system that can establish the Doryphoros as a copy of Polykleitos, in relation to the still freer contrapposto of the copies traced to Lysippos. Moreover, Osborne’s aesthetic judgement is dependent on two words from Pliny, who calls the Doryphoros a ‘virile-looking boy’65 – this gives Osborne the clue to his criticism, that the ‘over-developed musculature’ (that of a mature man) is contradictory to the ‘clear skin of the face’ (that of a boy). Surely Osborne is taking Furtwängler’s faith in the evidential value of copies a step too far, when he is prepared to base a judgement of aesthetic quality on a comparison of the Doryphoros copy to a superb bronze original. Edwards admits that there is no ‘absolute proof ’ that the Vatican Apoxyomenos is a copy of an original by Lysippos; Osborne does not attempt to argue that the Riace bronzes are the works of one of the great masters mentioned in ancient literature. Yet both writers remain committed to the logic of linear development of contrapposto that validates the link between Pliny’s chronology of sculptors and the attribution of extant examples to Polykleitos, Praxiteles and Lysippos in turn, with the Riace bronzes inserted at the beginning. Positivistic proof is no match for the narrative drive of this storyline, or indeed for its visual coherence: arrayed in order, the progression from the stolid stance of the Riace bronzes, through the confident relaxation of the Doryphoros’s free leg, to the off-centre balance of the Hermes and finally the spacedefying gesture of the Vatican Apoxyomenos becomes fascinating.66 It may be objected that the narrative is bound to its nineteenth-century provenance, but are the alternatives more historical? The eminent American archaeologist Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway has questioned the traditional identifications with scrupulous honesty: I can no longer state with a clear conscience that the Hermes of Olympia is by the fourth-century Praxiteles, nor can I show the students the ‘Roman copies’ of the Athena Lemnia by Pheidias, or speak of the Laokoon as

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a typical example of Hellenistic sculpture. As long as an element of doubt exists, I shall rather exemplify Praxiteles’s work with the replicas of the Knidia, ‘Pheidian’ style with the architectural originals from the Parthenon, and Hellenistic art with the Pergamon Gigantomachy.67

Yet the sole merit of Ridgway’s hodgepodge of indifferent replicas and architectural sculptures is that each of them can be securely authenticated; as an ensemble they are a random and ill-assorted collection of data points, utterly lacking the narrative coherence of the sequence of male figures established by the nineteenth-century attributions. What could ‘the students’ learn about ancient art, or about why the ancients valued sculpture, from this collection of sculptures, linked together only by accidents of survival into the modern world, quite irrelevant to their status in antiquity? Another alternative, initiated in 1960 by Rhys Carpenter’s Greek Sculpture: A Critical Review, is to discard authorship as a relevant criterion. This permits the exploration of a wider range of ancient cultural products; but it ignores the importance of the great artists to the ancients themselves, something abundantly documented in authors ranging from Aristotle and Plato to Cicero and Quintilian. If Furtwängler’s attempt to link the literary evidence to the extant sculptural record is fatally flawed, it is scarcely an improvement to abandon the literary evidence altogether. And if the canon of masters, based mostly on putative copies, betrays its nineteenth-century provenance, these alternatives betray their twentieth-century ideologies with equal force. Can we hope that the archaeology of the future will eventually supply definitive proof to solve at least some of these problems? One recent scholar writes optimistically, ‘Epigraphy might one day give us the answer.’68 Yet the inscriptions, painstakingly compiled by the German nineteenth-century scholars and much augmented by subsequent discoveries, display a depressing failure to correspond to the evidence from the major ancient authors. Often they name artists otherwise unrecorded, and therefore difficult to insert within existing narrative histories. In cases where inscriptions refer to an artist known from the mainstream literary tradition, as with several statue bases that name Praxiteles, the statues themselves have long since disappeared.69 Thus the epigraphic evidence, far from resolving the nineteenth-century dilemma about the relationship between the literary tradition and extant objects,

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merely adds a third body of evidence, just as difficult to relate to either of the other two. Indeed the non-correspondence among the three bodies of evidence is so thoroughgoing as to appear positively suspicious. Can it be explained simply as a function of the quantity of sculptural production in the ancient world, so vast as to make it plausible that there are no points of contact among the small percentages of survival in each of the three bodies of evidence? Or were there historical factors – Christian loathing for pagan gods, perhaps, or the fire of 476ad at the Lauseion in Constantinople, with its collection of sculptural masterpieces – that systematically destroyed the best works, the ones the ancients revered the most? Or have modern scholars misunderstood the literary tradition altogether, by assuming that the ancient authors were writing about art objects; do their narratives relate, instead, to legends or traditions about artists and artistic achievement that were never based, in the manner of modern art history, on observation of concrete objects? If it seems far-fetched to propose that the down-to-earth Pliny and Pausanias were engaging with a literary tradition about art rather than with actual artworks – as has been suggested for the more rhetorical art writings of Philostratus, for example – is that any more improbable than the uncannily total mismatch among objects, inscriptions and texts that the raw data present? These problems remain unresolved, despite the accumulation of a truly intractable quantity of disparate empirical evidence that serves as a smokescreen, concealing by its very abundance the gaping holes among the discrete data points. Most recent histories of ancient sculpture, or ancient art, take a middle course between the extreme scepticism of Ridgway and an uncritical acceptance of the canon constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus the names of Pheidias, Polykleitos, Praxiteles and Lysippos still feature, although some of the works given to them in the nineteenth century have become authorless again, and they appear alongside countless unattributed monuments. Arguably that compromise has destroyed the powerful narrative coherence of the late-nineteenth-century canon of masters without significantly enhancing its positivist rigour. At the very least the recent histories must be regarded as intellectual hybrids, paying allegiance to more than one historiographical principle without attempting to reconcile

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them. And the compulsive recurrence to Pliny and Pausanias has scarcely disappeared, as the examples quoted above demonstrate; Michaelis was wrong, perhaps, only in his assumption that the ‘philological stage’ had been superseded. The painstaking efforts of the later-nineteenth-century scholars would seem to have been in vain. Or did they have more valuable results beyond the confines of positivist scholarship?

The Nude Male Athlete

Broadly speaking, the events of the early nineteenth century had turned attention away from the traditional freestanding statue, as the Graeco– Roman marbles beloved of Winckelmann fell from favour. But ‘as in the hippodrome, at the end of the track it is necessary to turn the corner’.70 In the second half of the century the wave of new attributions brought scholarly attention back to the freestanding male nude. By a route he could scarcely have anticipated, Hegel’s classical art-form would seem to have attained concrete reality in the sequence of Roman marble figures now believed to copy the masterpieces of fifth- and fourthcentury Greek sculpture. The new identifications revealed the human body, in all three spatial dimensions, no longer merely as a generalised ideal, but now as a differentiated series of free and self-conscious creations by the sculptors of antiquity, each of them animated by ‘the lightning-flash of individuality’. The figures were individual in another sense too: many of them (the Hermes excepted) were understood to be representations of human athletes or warriors, not gods. Their nudity therefore recalled another theme of Winckelmann’s, the reverence for physical exercise among the Greeks – the beautiful trained bodies of the Greek athletes could be seen again in the newly identified sculptures. We have seen how the physical characteristics of the nude could seem specially adapted to archaeological connoisseurship, on the theory that they were amenable to imitation; the new scholarly procedures called attention to the distribution of limbs in contrapposto, the proportions of parts of the body to one another and to the whole, patterns of musculature. Thus Winckelmann’s old idea about Greek athletics came together with Hegel’s conception of the spirit’s individualisation in the

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three-dimensional human body and with the technical requirements of archaeological connoisseurship to focus attention on the sculptural representation of the nude male athlete. Alongside these researches there emerged, towards 1880, a new attention to the sculptural male nude among contemporary artists, widely diffused across the increasingly international art world. As the sculpture scholar David Getsy has argued, Rodin in France, Leighton in England, and Adolf von Hildebrand, a German sculptor long resident in Italy, produced striking new interpretations of the ideal male nude in sculptural works exhibited in the years around 1880.71 Their contemporaries and followers – the ‘New Sculptors’ in England, and the sculptors of the Symbolist generation throughout Europe – extended this exploration of the male body into all manner of sculptural media, at scales from the statuette to the public monument. To these works should perhaps be added the attention to the male nude among painters such as Thomas Eakins in America, Simeon Solomon and Henry Scott Tuke in England, Gustave Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes in France, Hans von Marées and Anselm Feuerbach in Germany, to name only a few examples. While the male bodies of these sculptures and paintings displayed a system of differences wider-ranging than that of the ancient sculptures, it is not unreasonable to propose a reciprocal pattern of influences between classical archaeologists and artists. A particular concern in both arenas was the workings of contrapposto – a perennial topic given new cogency as the new identifications seemed vividly to reveal the systematic development of contrapposto among the ancient sculptors famous for inventing it in the first place. The later-nineteenth-century exploration of the male nude remained strangely invisible in twentieth-century histories of modern art. It suffered under a triple disadvantage: it seemed irrelevant to the mainstream shift of attention, in progressive art practice, towards the female nude; thus it appeared conservative in some ill-defined sense; and it carried with it implications, again largely unexamined, of homoeroticism. When the studies of gender and sexuality began to inform art history towards the end of the twentieth century, it proved easier at first to recuperate the male nudes in the art of David and his neoclassical followers.72 Perhaps, indeed, this reinforced the sense that the later-nineteenth-century

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development was somehow conservative – a reversion to the idealist tradition, vital enough in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, but outmoded and ‘academic’ by the later decades of the century. Only recently has a new generation of scholars begun to question the unacknowledged prejudices that underlie this scholarly neglect, and to bring a more theorised understanding of sexual and gender politics to bear.73 These scholars have done crucial work in the wider project of critiquing the modernist prejudice against anything tinged, however vaguely, with the ‘academic’; they have made compelling cases for the modernity of the artists they study. But how did the new trend in contemporary art relate to the simultaneous scrutiny of the male nude among classical archaeologists? The artists in question engaged in very different ways with classical scholarship. Leighton’s Addresses to the students of the Royal Academy, as well as the contents of his library, demonstrate a thoroughly up-todate awareness of the scholarly literature on the history of art, and A.S. Murray (Newton’s successor as Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum), remarked that ‘it was an extremely difficult thing to ascertain what [Leighton] did not know about Greek art and archaeology’.74 Rodin, less scholarly, also displayed a continuous fascination with ancient sculpture throughout his career. In several articles published after 1900, and in his famous conversations of 1910 with Paul Gsell, he dwelt on the unique insight of the practising sculptor, as opposed to the archaeologist, into ancient sculpture.75 At the same time he was forming an extensive, though idiosyncratic, collection of antiquities (now held at the Musée Rodin, Paris); he thus participated (along with other artists) in the development of the antiquities market after 1900. Hildebrand is best known as a sculpture theorist, the author of an influential treatise, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst, published in 1893 and translated into English in 1907 as The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture; this situated Greek sculpture within a universal art theory based on human perception, and was widely influential on both scholars and artists. All three of these artists – the English scholar, the French aesthete and collector, the German theorist – were alive in different ways to the various currents of contemporary interest in ancient sculpture. Yet their engagement with ancient

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sculpture has been marginalised in the scholarly literature on nineteenth-century art, again in different ways. Rodin’s classicism has proved difficult to square with his towering reputation as originary sculptural modernist. Leighton’s, on the other hand, has seemed all too easy to explain away as ‘academic’ and traditionalist, while Hildebrand’s few ideal sculptures have never made their way into general discussions of modern art. Underlying all of these occlusions, of course, is the received idea that classicism had become simply old-fashioned by the later nineteenth century. But that is to reckon without the new developments in classical scholarship and archaeology. Can those, and the contemporary sculptures, illuminate one another?

Comparisons Since Pliny’s account of the Canon of Polykleitos, in Book 34 of his Natural History, the possibility that a work of sculpture might serve simultaneously as a theoretical statement about sculpture has been available, at least in principle. Indeed, Leonard Barkan produces a compelling reading of the Plinian passage in the context of the rediscovery of ancient sculptures in Renaissance Rome: [Pliny’s] account is precisely focused on the mirror relations between theory and practice, between making art objects and establishing the rules by which they should be made. We know that Polyclitus also wrote a theoretical treatise in which he expounded his theories. But either Pliny was unaware of this (which, considering the number of ancient references to the work, seems unlikely) or else he deliberately wished to present the sculptor as having transcended the distinction between theory and practice. Such seems to be the burden of Pliny’s remarkable claim that ‘solusque hominum artem ipsam fecisse artis opere iudicatur’ (‘alone among human beings he is judged to have created art itself out of a work of art’). Pliny is telling his readers that Art as an abstract universal category (with a capital A, as we would say) was created – and therefore can be seen – in a work of art. He is also (though very elliptically) characterising this Art. It is a statue that is also a ‘rule,’ and Pliny has to

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have recourse to Greek for the word Κανω´ν which he seems for the first time here to be domesticating into Latin. This collective object belongs to artists themselves (‘quem canona artifices vocant’). And it is transitive; that is, artists use this work of art to go on to make other works of art – a fact confirmed by accounts of the Polyclitan canon in both Cicero and Quintilian.76

Barkan makes this brilliant reading of Pliny’s brief passage tell in relation to his study of Renaissance aesthetics. However, as he acknowledges, the sculpture we now call the Doryphoros, and associate with the Canon of Polykleitos, could not ‘be seen’ in Renaissance Rome. Immanuel Kant, too, referred conspicuously to the Doryphoros as a paradigm for the ‘normal idea’ of the human figure, in section 17 of his founding text for philosophical aesthetics, The Critique of Judgement of 1790; but at this date the work was still a textual motif, unassociated with a physical object or visual image. Did it make a difference that, after 1863, artists could see a sculpture that could be equated with ‘art itself ’ (Fig. 24)? Did Friedrichs’s identification, in other words, make the Doryphoros ‘transitive’ in Barkan’s sense? In this context, it matters little whether the identification was correct, or indeed whether Pliny was justified in conflating the Canon with the statue. Rodin, Leighton and Hildebrand all made significant statues of the male nude between the mid-1870s and mid-1880s, that is, in the second decade after Friedrichs’s identification. Each of these works, too, has the character of a manifesto or, as David Getsy has well argued, a theoretical statement about the nature of sculpture. To that extent, they are like so many modern versions of Polykleitos’s sculptured Canon in Pliny’s interpretation. H.W. Janson even describes Hildebrand’s Standing Man (Fig. 29), completed in 1884, as ‘a modern counterpart of the Doryphorus’.77 This is a casual reference in an introductory textbook; but Hildebrand’s preoccupation with theory (The Problem of Form was already underway at this date) suggests that it may be pertinent. Getsy, too, begins his account of the sculptures of Rodin, Leighton and Hildebrand with a reference to Polykleitos’s Doryphoros, again a general one. His principal concern is to present his three sculptors as ‘foundational cases that helped to determine the form of modern sculpture in France, Britain, and Germany’. For Getsy these are anything

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Adolf von Hildebrand, Stehender junger Mann, 1881–84.

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but conservative throwbacks to the classical ideal; yet his preliminary genuflection to the Doryphoros is more apposite, perhaps, than he suspects. In his analysis, the sculptures point to distinctive concerns of modern sculpture theory: the abandonment of narrative content, the ‘phenomenal encounter between viewer and sculpture’ and the ‘physical presence of the statue as material body’.78 Any of these ideas might have been suggested as powerfully by the experience of seeing the Doryphoros, or the other newly attributed sculptures of the later nineteenth century, suddenly transformed from textual motifs into concrete presentations of the nude male body. But is this merely an intriguing coincidence, one among innumerable striking new experiences in the fast-moving international art world of the later nineteenth century, with its vast exhibitions of all manner of artworks, past and present? To make the discussion more specific, we might attempt a stylistic comparison among the Doryphoros and the nineteenth-century sculptures. Hildebrand’s Standing Man appears quadratus in its proportions, particularly when compared to the slenderer – Lysippan? – body types of Rodin’s Age of Bronze (1877–80, Fig. 30) and Leighton’s The Sluggard (1886, Fig. 31; Leighton’s earlier bronze, Athlete Wrestling with a Python of 1877, Fig. 32, appears more Polykleitan in proportions, and in the strong internal markings of the torso, although its pose suggests quite different concerns, to which we shall return). If the rugged surface texture of Rodin’s figure appears less ‘academic’ than the smoother surfaces of Hildebrand and Leighton, that might be described as post-Pheidian as much as proto-modernist, particularly in view of Rodin’s well-documented devotion to the Elgin Marbles; the bodily markings, and perhaps even the sense of tension in the upper body, give some hint of the Ilissos (Fig. 6), reoriented to become an upright statue. Indeed a critic of The Age of Bronze at its first showing commented, ‘This is realism, a realism that comes directly from the Greeks.’ References to the antique were commonplace in nineteenth-century sculpture criticism, but this one makes specific reference to the Parthenon metopes and the Ilissos; the comment refers not to a generalised notion of the classical ideal, but rather to the special realism observed in the Elgin Marbles since their arrival in London.79

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Auguste Rodin, L’Âge d’airain (The Age of Bronze), 1877–80.

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Rodin scholars, to be sure, have emphasised Rodin’s fascination with Michelangelo, for which there is documentary evidence in the drawings after Michelangelo made on his trip to Italy in 1875–76, when The Age of Bronze was in progress. Yet Michelangelo and Pheidias were intertwined, at least in Rodin’s later thinking on sculpture, as indeed they were for his contemporaries, Watts and Pater.80 The scholarly neglect of the classical aspect of Rodin’s statue may reflect a strong presupposition, that classicism and innovation were necessarily at odds in this period. In an article of 1904, Rodin recalled a different experience of his Italian pilgrimage: [A]fter I had finished my Age of Bronze I travelled about Italy, where I came upon an Apollo whose leg was in exactly the same position as that of my Age of Bronze, which had taken me six months of work to achieve. I examined it carefully and saw that while on the surface it appears to have been executed in summary fashion, in reality each muscle is contained within it and all the details emerge one by one.81

French artists were trained to scrutinise ancient sculptures; nonetheless Rodin’s close looking also recalls the new procedures of the archaeological connoisseurs, particularly in its attentiveness to the musculature of one leg. The Age of Bronze, at some stage in its genesis, was designed to hold a spear in its clenched left hand; thus it is literally a Doryphoros, or spearbearer. Rodin’s decision to omit the spear (which caused some critics to complain that the figure’s action was incomprehensible) has been explained as a practical decision, to enable better views of the body.82 Yet that is both to call attention to the distinctive ponderation of the figure, the overriding concern of archaeological connoisseurship, and to recall the appearance of ancient sculptures from which the attributes have been lost, including, of course, the spears of the Doryphoros copies. Rodin would later experiment frequently with ideas of fragmentation, avowedly inspired by the broken state of surviving ancient sculptures. Already the absent spear of The Age of Bronze hints at the enigmatic or radically unresolved quality of the fragmentary sculpture, either of antiquity or in Rodin’s later work. By the time of his conversations with Gsell, Rodin was fully conversant with the implications of Polykleitan contrapposto, which he demonstrated

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with reference to a plaster cast in the Louvre of the British Museum’s Diadoumenos (Fig. 25).83 Much earlier, The Age of Bronze, Leighton’s Sluggard and Hildebrand’s Standing Man all take as fundamental Polykleitos’s distinctive innovation, ‘to have his statues throw their weight on one leg’.84 More specifically, they display the positioning of the free foot slightly behind the weight-bearing one that the new historical sequence of ancient sculptures marked as Polykleitan – rather than, say, the far-flung free foot of Michelangelo’s David, which comes to look slightly theatrical in comparison. In this respect, it must make a difference that the ancient contrapposto systems could now be observed in concrete examples, rather than merely conjectured from such brief references as Pliny’s on Polykleitos and Lysippos. Here, though, the system of differences begins to fascinate, just as it does in the sequence of ancient sculptures explored earlier in this chapter. Hildebrand reduces the distinction between weight-bearing and free legs to a minimum, as if to choose the point at which the possibility of contrapposto first dawns; perhaps the work can even be called pre-Polykleitan. But the upper body of the figure is close to the Polykleitan paradigm, with only the slightest elevation of weightbearing hip and opposite shoulder, the latter carefully balanced against the inclination of the head towards the weight-bearing leg. The Standing Man preserves the unbroken front plane of the Polykleitan model; this, indeed, is in keeping with the working procedure Hildebrand describes in The Problem of Form, to which we shall return. Rodin’s figure, perhaps surprisingly, appears Polykleitan not only in the distribution of weight between the legs but, despite their slenderer proportions, in the outline of the leg muscles. But the upper bodies of both Rodin’s Age of Bronze and Leighton’s Sluggard depart from Polykleitan rule to turn in space. The Sluggard must be informed by Rodin’s earlier statue as well as by classical prototypes.85 With respect to the pose with raised arms, an extended historical sequence might even be traced from the Diadoumenos, where the front plane is preserved as the arms open wide to the sides, through the moderate torsion of The Age of Bronze, to the surprisingly supple twist of The Sluggard. Leighton and Rodin, like Lysippos, are willing to break the front plane, and their sculptures encourage circumambulation, a characteristic specially associated with both Lysippos and Leighton

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Frederic Leighton, The Sluggard, 1886.

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in modern scholarship;86 the disposition of legs in The Sluggard is also strongly reminiscent of the Apoxyomenos (Fig. 23). None of these sculptures is obedient to a single ancient prototype, even though it seems reasonable to call Hildebrand’s Polykleitan, Leighton’s Lysippan, and Rodin’s, perhaps, Pheidian in broad terms. Each sculpture conducts its own exploration of the classical art-form as Hegel described it, ‘in ideal forms of the human figure, and … in all three spatial dimensions’.87 But they are not eclectic either: they do not mix and match elements from the contrapposto tradition arbitrarily. Each sculpture makes a logical and integrated choice from the repertoire of characteristics observed in the ancient sculptures: the distribution of weight between the two legs, the degree of torsion in the upper body, and the relationship of sculpted forms to the notional front plane. A recurring anecdote in art writing since the Renaissance revolves around a fantasy in which the archaeologists of some distant future come upon a long-buried work of modern art, and mistake it for an antique. Suppose a future archaeologist were to discover the three nineteenth-century sculptures, with no trace of their authorship or provenance; suppose, too, that the archaeologist of this future age will have somehow managed to preserve the habit of classifying objects into historical sequence. She might reasonably discover a progressive logic, with Hildebrand’s Standing Man just emerging from archaic rigidity, Rodin’s Age of Bronze realising the creative freedom of artistic maturity, and Leighton’s Sluggard displaying the elegance and grace of a ‘refined and comely decadence’.88 This would not quite be an accurate history of later-nineteenth-century sculpture, according to positivistic procedures of dating, but it would have another kind of truth, and possibly a more important one.

Redoing the ideal nude after nature In the Rodin literature, and generally in writing on modern sculpture, there is a strong presupposition that nineteenth-century naturalism constitutes one way to cast aside the classical tradition; yet the debates about the Elgin Marbles are enough to demonstrate that naturalism might

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just as easily mean a new kind of engagement with ancient sculpture. All of the nineteenth-century sculptures we have been exploring display a programmatic engagement with contemporary debates about sculptural naturalism in general, and the life model in particular. Beside the copies of the Doryphoros, Hildebrand’s sculpture looks startlingly realistic – as Janson puts it, ‘it is indeed the classic athlete, redone from nature’.89 Rodin’s Age of Bronze – his first essay in the full-scale figure, produced after a laborious period of research and experimentation – has become famous for the controversy it aroused, a classic version of the stock anecdote about the misunderstood avant-garde artist. When first exhibited in Brussels in 1877, and again when it was seen at the Paris Salon of the same year, it appeared so life-like that critics accused Rodin of making it from life-moulds. Although the charge was false, it responded to Rodin’s aim and working procedure: as model, he had used a young soldier named Auguste Neyt to attain a freshness of pose that he found impossible to observe in professional models, trained to adopt poses dictated by studio convention. In other words, the aim was precisely to reject the artistic tradition for representing the ideal male figure; what is interesting is how difficult this was, both for the sculptor to devise, and for the critics to interpret. As Herbert Read puts it, the critical response shows how ‘truth is often stranger than fiction, fiction being, in this case, the prevailing academic conventions’.90 Yet the debates around Rodin’s beloved Pheidias, again, show that it would be wrong to equate ‘the prevailing academic conventions’ with ancient sculpture in any simple sense. In his article ‘The Lesson of Antiquity’, Rodin would write ‘there is only one school: the School of Nature’ – only to follow it with his resounding conclusion: ‘That is my understanding of the Antique and the reason why I love it so passionately.’91 An anecdote also circulated about Leighton’s The Sluggard, supposedly inspired by the chance attitude of the model Giuseppe Valona, stretching to relax tired muscles.92 These anecdotes conform to a pattern which can be traced to Pliny’s account of Lysippos, and indeed further back to Pliny’s more ancient (lost) source in Hellenistic art writing: Douris says that Lysippos of Sikyon was not a disciple of any other artist, but that he was at first a bronze-worker and undertook a career in the fine arts upon hearing a response of the painter Eupompos. For when

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that man [Eupompos] was asked which of his predecessors he followed, he pointed to a crowd of men and said that one ought to imitate nature itself, and not another artist.93

Thus the very anecdotes that stake the artist’s claim to reject artistic precedent depend on a precedent in the history of ancient sculpture, and the most determined efforts to replace the ideal classical nude with the real-life model revert, compulsively, to ancient sculptural tradition. Leighton, at least, might well have been aware of the irony, and indeed the anecdote about Lysippos was widely familiar in the nineteenth century, both in its original form and in its frequent adaptation as a stock anecdote in artists’ biographies. But it is unnecessary to suppose an intention to emulate Lysippos: any nineteenth-century representation of the male nude could scarcely avoid orienting itself to the body of the model, on the one hand, and to the tradition of the ideal figure on the other. Hildebrand’s Standing Man immediately brings to mind thoughts of the nineteenth-century model; yet it is the fact that the sculpture reads so logically as a version of the classical freestanding figure that makes this extreme realism tell. This suggests that what we are seeing, in all of these sculptures, is not a simple importation of nineteenth-century realism into the medium of sculpture, in the manner of such sculptors as JulesAimé Dalou, or the portrait sculptors who dominated the exhibitions. Rather, we seem to have a second-order reconfiguration of the terms on which the real human body of the model and the artistic tradition of the ideal sculptural figure can be brought together. This might be described as one way of creating art itself out of a work of art.

Marble and bronze The newly identified ancient sculptures were marbles, but almost invariably they were interpreted as Roman copies of Greek works made originally in bronze – all the more valuable since only a handful of bronzes, none of them among Pliny’s masterpieces, had survived antiquity.94 The struts and tree-stumps of the marble figures could be explained as interpolations of the copyist, needed to support the heavier marble structure. Ugly as they could be, they were crucial evidence that

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the marbles were indeed copies of compositions originally designed for bronze, and could thus be linked to one of the masterpieces enumerated in Pliny’s Book 34, his account of bronze statuary.95 By the same token, though, the struts and stumps called attention to a new problem, one likely to interest practising artists: the different capabilities of the two sculptural materials, as well as their different aesthetic potential. Pliny maintained a strict separation between bronze statuary, discussed in Book 34 of his Natural History, and marble sculptures, discussed in Book 36; painting appeared in the intermediate Book 35. Indeed the organisation suggests that the distinction between two- and three-dimensional media was not fundamental to his classification of art-forms. His primary organising principle depended, instead, on the materials from which the artefacts were made; thus the sequence from metals in Book 34 through the minerals used to make pigments, in Book 35, to stone in Book 36 made sense. But Pliny’s Latin terms hint at a further distinction: statuaria, the art of bronze statuary, implies something raised or set in an upright position, whereas sculptura, marble sculpture, designates something carved. The practice of making marble copies of compositions designed for bronze produces an inevitable confusion between the two techniques, of which the ugly struts and stumps are just the most obvious sign. Not only is marble incapable of the nuances of surface detail that a bronze can capture (as in Pliny’s comment on the detailed working of hair in Lysippos’s casts), and of the weight-defying compositions of the lighter material. The marble copies also fail to realise the special qualities of their own medium, such as the integrity of the marble block or the deep cutting, with its chiaroscuro effects, of stone-carving (the workmanship of the Elgin Marbles shows just how exciting this could be). A sculpture such as the Apollo Belvedere (Fig. 4), with its dramatic extended arm and sweep of drapery, must have involved an equally dramatic waste of marble, to cut away the block above and below the draped arm. Thus the sculpture is easy to interpret as a copy of a bronze original (as noted above, it was linked in 1892 to a bronze by Leochares); yet that leads inevitably to the realisation that the aesthetic effect, for example, of the heavy stone cloak must differ from the thinner, more flexible, and shining folds of the original. Thus the new attributions brought presence and loss in complex mixture.

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Even as the newly identified copies held forth the tantalising prospect of revealing the Greek masterpieces to sight, their marble stolidity called attention to what remained lost: the original bronzes. The Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a keen student of classical archaeology, mused on these problems in his meticulously painted genre scenes from the later 1860s onwards. The paintings bring the ancient world back to life in vivid detail, including sculptural works in all scales and media, based on extant artefacts but restored to pristine perfection. In key instances, Alma-Tadema shows a sculptural composition now known in a marble version, but translates it back to its putative original medium of bronze.96 Perhaps the bronzes of Leighton and Rodin can be seen as analogous in some way: they recreate the lost bronze masterpiece, not after AlmaTadema’s fashion of archaeological reconstruction, but in works that explore in general (theoretical?) terms what the bronze statue of a male nude might look like. Leighton’s first statue, Athlete Wrestling with a Python, makes a dramatic demonstration of the unique capabilities of bronze: a complex composition spiralling through space, and touching the ground on just three points – the back foot, the toes of the front one, and the tapering end of the scaly snake. The composition would be simply impossible in marble, as Leighton attempted to convince Carl Jacobsen, the Danish brewing magnate, who wanted to commission a marble copy for his Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek in Copenhagen. Jacobsen prevailed, but the obtrusive support that had to be added to stabilise the heavy marble deprived the pose of its logic, confusing the balance of man and snake with an inert third presence, and clogging the expressive void between the legs.97 Lost, too, was the nuanced surface detail at which critics of the bronze marvelled when it was first exhibited. Here was dramatic proof that bronze and marble were not interchangeable. In a significant sense, they were two different art-forms, as they had been in Pliny’s Natural History. At nineteenth-century exhibitions it was routine for sculptors to present their compositions in plaster models, in hopes of attracting a commission that would permit realisation in the expensive materials of either bronze or marble. Leighton showed his Athlete (and later The Sluggard) already cast in bronze; he could afford it, but critics

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Frederic Leighton, Athlete Wrestling with a Python, 1877.

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immediately understood him also to be providing an object lesson in the capabilities of the material. Rodin showed his first full-scale male nude in plaster, at first in Brussels early in 1877, where its title was Le Vaincu (The Vanquished). Perhaps in response to criticism of its melancholy aspect, Rodin chose the new title, L’Âge d’airain (The Age of Bronze) for its showing, shortly afterwards, at the Paris Salon. That title is usually interpreted as a reference to the third age of mankind, after the Gold and Silver Ages, when men take to war, and perhaps that is its primary meaning, resonant in the years following the French defeat in the Franco–Prussian War. In that sense it retains some of the meaning of the first title, Le Vaincu.98 Again, though, the conventions of current art history are responsible for interpreting the statue too simply in terms of its significance within contemporary French politics; Rodin scholars often forget that the sequence of ages of man is derived from Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or from Hesiod’s Works and Days. Ironically, the statue was still a plaster when it acquired the title The Age of Bronze. Yet in the course of Rodin’s three-year struggle to have it realised in bronze, a second meaning perhaps accrued to the title: in its final material, the statue can be seen as the representative of the great age of bronze in Greek art. The Apollo Rodin saw in Italy may well have been a marble, but as he examines it he seems to take it back, in imagination, to the bronze original from which it might have derived: I examined it carefully, and saw that while on the surface it appears to have been executed in summary fashion [a characteristic often noted of Roman marble copies], in reality each muscle is contained within it and all the details emerge one by one. That is because the ancients studied everything through the prism of successive profiles, each of them in turn, because in any figure or fragment of a figure, in reality no profile resembles another: when each of them is studied separately, the whole seems simple and alive. That is the whole secret. You see – and this is where the great error of the neo-Greek school lies – what is antique is not the type, but the modelling.99

The wording is revealing: not the type – which could be copied – but the modelling, the characteristic of the original bronze, cast from a model shaped in a malleable material such as clay. In this article and other texts, as well as his recorded conversations, Rodin uses the term

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‘modelling’ freely to denote plastic qualities in any sculptural material (including his rapturous observations on marbles such as the Venus de Milo and the ‘Warren head’ of Aphrodite, which some wished to ascribe to Praxiteles),100 and some of his own work was executed in marble. But Rodin’s primary technique, even for works that ended up in marble, was modelling in clay rather than carving. His conception of the threedimensional sculptural figure, as the passage on the Apollo suggests, involved an endlessly varying succession of views – a modelling conception, developed by building up the clay in all directions from a central mass, and shaping it with the hands to exploit the malleability of the soft material. Hildebrand also worked in bronze, but his Standing Man seems calculated to demonstrate the different possibilities of carving in marble, which he was simultaneously analysing in his treatise The Problem of Form. Like Polykleitos, then, he made a sculpture and wrote a treatise that complement each other, and at least one passage suggests he was aware of the relationship. Just a few fragments from Polykleitos’s lost Canon have come down through quotations or references in other ancient authors; one, from Philo Mechanicus, was quoted above. Another is a paraphrase in a medical text by Galen, which discusses harmonious relationships among the parts of the body: Beauty…arises not in the commensurability of the constituent elements [of the body], but in the commensurability [symmetria] of the parts, such as that of finger to finger, and of all the fingers to the palm and the wrist, and of these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the upper arm, and, in fact, of everything to everything else, just as it is written in the Canon of Polykleitos [Galen goes on to observe that Polykleitos made a statue to demonstrate the tenets of his treatise].101

Hildebrand echoes this passage when he describes the process of translating the inherent forms of objects (that is, their forms understood independently of their contexts and the viewpoint of the observer) into impressions unified in visual experience (an essential step, in Hildebrand’s theory, towards designing a unified work of visual art): When I look at a finger, I form an impression of the relations between its parts. When I look at the entire hand, I see the finger in relation to the

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whole hand and form a new impression, namely, of the relation between finger and hand. When I then look at the hand together with the arm, the impression again changes; and so on ad infinitum.102

Yet Hildebrand’s exploration of the organisation of forms in perception turns out to lead inexorably, not to Polykleitos’s medium of bronze, but rather to free carving in marble, the medium of his Standing Man. At first glance, the sculpture appears to accept at least some of the conditions of the Roman marble copy – most obviously the tree-stump that supports the right leg, but also a certain surface generalisation, often associated with copying. Yet in Hildebrand’s thought such generalisation might become a way of unifying naturalistic detail into an overall image calculated to cohere from a distant vantage point. The figure appears startlingly life-like; yet this is not a matter of finicky detail, as in some nineteenth-century realist sculpture, or of the nuanced surface texturing of bronzes like those of Leighton and Rodin. Its naturalism is rather a matter of volumes, anatomically exact, yet smoothed to the perfect finish of which marble is specially capable. Hildebrand’s treatise advocates not simply the use of stone, but what he calls ‘free cutting’.103 Nineteenth-century practices for making marble sculptures ordinarily began (as in Rodin’s case) with making a clay model, which was then cast in plaster and transferred mechanically to the stone block. Hildebrand recommended an altogether different procedure, based on direct cutting of the block: the design would first be drawn on the front face, then cut into successive layers of depth, eventually to reach the back, preserved as long as possible as a limiting background plane. This meant that the sculpture was wholly conceived and executed on the terms of carving into a block, the integrity of which remained fundamental; it was not an imitation or copy of a figure that had been built up by modelling in clay. The Standing Man appears to have been executed this way. The figure is compact, so that its corporeal volumes seem to extend, as nearly as possible, to the full dimensions of the original block. This volumetric amplitude helps to account for the ‘liveliness’ displayed by the sculpture, despite its quiescent pose. Thus Hildebrand’s sculpture demonstrates what a work conceived as a marble ‘original’ might look like, just as Leighton’s and Rodin’s statues demonstrate what a bronze ‘original’ could look like. Both

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approaches are faithful to the possibilities of their respective materials, so they produce very different results: Leighton and Rodin exploit the capacity of bronze to expand into three-dimensional space, as well as its nuances of surface texture, while Hildebrand maintains the integrity of the marble block, as well as the smooth transitions from form to form of which marble is uniquely capable. For Heinrich Wölfflin, the great German art historian of the next generation, Hildebrand’s approach was necessarily antagonistic to Rodin’s, and although Hildebrand replied with a protestation of his admiration for the French sculptor, there is some truth to the allegation.104 Hildebrand’s zeal for ‘free cutting’ led him to denigrate modelling as incapable of achieving the unity required for artistic creation – something that had a crucial impact on the artists and theorists of the first modernist generation.105 Just after 1900, indeed, free carving seemed to represent the most exciting new possibility, fortified by recent discoveries of ‘original’ Greek marbles of the archaic period (to be examined in Chapter 3). But we should not forget the equally compelling possibility of the later nineteenth century: the new opportunity to imagine what the Greek bronzes of Pliny’s Book 34 might have looked like. One way to do this was by comparing extant marbles, presumed copies, to piece together data about the possible characteristics of the bronze originals. Another was through the contemporary statues that explored the potential of the bronze medium. In an essay entitled ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’, published just before his death in 1894, Walter Pater explored both possibilities. He takes Myron’s Discobolos as an example: We have but translations into marble of the original in bronze. In that, it was as if a blast of cool wind had congealed the metal, or the living youth, fixed him imperishably in that moment of rest which lies between two opposed motions, the backward swing of the right arm, the movement forwards on which the left foot is in the very act of starting.106

In historical chronology, the action of the living athlete was first captured in bronze, then repeated and fixed more permanently in durable marble. But Pater reverses this chronology, to take his readers from contemplation of the extant marbles, in the present, back to the moment when the liquid bronze first congealed, and finally to the even

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briefer instant when the athlete shifts his weight for the throw. By the date of the essay such motions could be captured in photography, for example in the photographic sequences of Eadweard Muybridge; Pater shows how the Greek sculptor could conceptualise an action too quick for ordinary perception. Pater had already explored Renaissance connoisseurship in ‘The School of Giorgione’ of 1877, where he pays elaborate deference to recent attributions of Italian paintings, yet regrets the imaginative loss entailed by ‘scientific’ testing of the art object’s credentials. ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’ perhaps attempts something similar with respect to archaeological connoisseurship. He acknowledges the excitement of discovery when he recounts the story of the identification of the Athenian bronze group of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, from marble copies: But in fact the very images of the heroic youths were become but ghosts, haunting the story of Greek art, till they found or seemed to find a body once more when, not many years since, an acute observer detected, as he thought, in a remarkable pair of statues in the Museum of Naples, if freed from incorrect restorations and rightly set together, a veritable descendant from the original group of Antenor.107

Yet the wording hints at scepticism: ‘they found or seemed to find’; the ‘acute observer detected, as he thought’ (this was in fact Karl Friedrichs, in 1859, four years before his identification of the Doryphoros). Thus the final phrases, ‘a veritable descendant’, ‘the original group’, read with a touch of irony, and indeed Pater is at least being economical with the truth when he mentions the attribution. There had been some debate about whether the Naples sculptures copied the earlier group by Antenor, or its later replacement by Kritios and Nesiotes (both recorded by Pausanias), but by the date of the essay scholarly opinion favoured the latter identification (still the consensus view).108 As so often with Pater, it is difficult to decide whether he was simply making a mistake, or whether he was calling attention to the insecurity of such attributions. But his larger point, here and throughout the essay, is that dwelling on the dry fact of an attribution risks losing sight of something more important about the work of art – in this case the ‘celebration’ of the two youths ‘who had vindicated liberty with their lives’.109 Throughout the

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essay he cites the references in Pliny and Pausanias upon which the archaeological connoisseurs relied – ‘hints and traces in the historians of art’, as he puts it.110 But the presiding spirit is that of Pindar’s Odes, the poetic counterpart to the statues of ‘prizemen’ made in the next generations. While Pliny and Pausanias may provide data points about the ancient statues (or not, as the case may be), they do not show us how the representation of an athletic victor might be inspiring: ‘We are with Pindar, you see, in this athletic age of Greek sculpture.’111 Pater follows Winckelmann, on whom (as we saw in the Introduction) he had written an important essay at the beginning of his career, in celebrating the athletic exercises, as well as the political liberty, of the Greeks. But he also suggests that the athlete might be a glorious image for the present day, in repeated comparisons between Greek victors and English cricketers, which may put today’s readers in mind of the adulation paid to footballers. Pater avoids the didactic; nonetheless, he hints unmistakably that it may be as well for a modern age, as for fifthcentury Athenians, to make heroes of their athletes rather than their warriors. Nor is the point narrowly political. The athletes of the Olympic and other Greek games become figures for disinterested striving in any endeavour, including art: For the most part, indeed, it is not with youth tasked spasmodically, like that of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and the ‘necessity’ that was upon it, that the Athenian mind and heart are now busied; but with youth in its voluntary labours, its habitual and measured discipline, labour for its own sake, or in wholly friendly contest for prizes which in reality borrow all their value from the quality of the receiver.112

Between the lines of Pater’s essay the reader can detect considerable scepticism about the positive value of the new sculptural identifications. Yet the more important point is that the labours of the archaeological connoisseurs may be narrowly, or even meanly, goal-oriented; in their zeal to classify or pigeonhole the work of art by name and date, they may forget its inspiring messages together with its aesthetic impact. It is in this respect that Pindar’s Odes are better able to interpret the statues of athletes – even though they were made after Pindar’s death – than the ‘ancient literary notices’ that merely identify artists’ names and

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subjects.113 In the passage on the Discobolos, Pater reminds the reader that the marble copies remain inert until the observer, through an act of imagination, reanimates the aesthetic impulse that made such works powerful in antiquity. Towards the end of the essay he expands the point to include the work of contemporary artists: Ah! the more closely you consider the fragments of antiquity, those stray letters of the old Greek aesthetic alphabet, the less positive will your conclusions become, because less conclusive the data regarding artistic origin and purpose. Set here also, however, to the end that in a congruous atmosphere, in a real perspective, they may assume their full moral and aesthetic expression, whatever of like spirit you may come upon in Greek or any other work, remembering that in England also, in Oxford, we have still, for any master of such art that may be given us, subjects truly ‘made to his hand.’114

Pater’s writings have often been interpreted as advocating some universal aesthetic, or evoking some timeless vision of the classical ideal. But that would be at odds with the rest of this essay, which concentrates entirely on ancient sculptures that had been discovered or identified since the middle of the nineteenth century (except for the Discobolos – although that sculpture, as we have seen, played a key role in the new wave of attributions). Pater’s predilection anyway is for precise points of transhistorical contact, each of them specific, although they may be separated by centuries or even millennia of historical time. The essay singles out two Greek statue types in particular: Through the variations of the copyist, the restorer, the mere imitator, these works are reducible to two famous original types – the Discobolus or quoit-player, of Myron, the beau idéal (we may use that term for once justly) of athletic motion [Fig. 22]; and the Diadumenus of Polycleitus, as, binding the fillet or crown of victory upon his head, he presents the beau idéal of athletic repose, and almost begins to think [Fig. 25].115

On the modern side of the transhistorical comparison, Pater is silent, as usual with him; but the essay encourages the reader to make an attribution. An obvious candidate is the series of male nudes in English sculpture of the 1870s through the 1890s which the sculpture scholar Ben Read has traced to the influence of Leighton’s two statues: ‘athletic

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males’ proceeding from Athlete Wrestling with a Python (Fig. 32) and ‘static males’ that descended from The Sluggard (Fig. 31).116 The names of their sculptors – apart from Leighton himself, and Alfred Gilbert – are only now emerging from a modernist oblivion not unrelated, perhaps, to their frequent preference for bronze.117 If these male nudes have also seemed somehow to suggest the homoerotic, that involves the same problematic, so closely did free carving become identified with virility, and modelling with effeminacy, in the next generation, a point to which we shall return in Chapter 3. Pater was a friend and frequent correspondent of Edmund Gosse, the critic who gave the name ‘New Sculpture’ to the works of these sculptors in a series of articles published in the same year as ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’.118 The coincidence comes almost as close to positive fact as any of the researches of the archaeological connoisseurs, in demonstrating that Pater was thinking of Leighton’s two sculptures, and their immediate descendants, as the transhistorical counterpart to the Discobolos and Diadoumenos (like Rodin, he chooses the latter statue rather than the Doryphoros, perhaps because the prime version was in the British Museum, which also possessed a good copy of the Discobolos). Was it, then, a fascination for the beautiful male nudes of the New Sculptors that prompted Pater to return in 1894 to his explorations of Greek sculpture, taking up where his essays of 1880, ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’ and ‘The Marbles of Aegina’, left off? Or did Pater, the classics don, incorporate his coded allusions to contemporary art in an attempt to demonstrate the continuing relevance of his dryasdust ancient subject-matter to the general readers of the Contemporary Review, much as classicists today make allusion to the war in Iraq, for example, to persuade readers that Hadrian’s military campaigns may still be of interest? As in the case of the Apoxyomenos, these questions will remain open unless unexpected evidence appears. But perhaps they are wrongly formulated. Pater’s essay weaves its story about ancient sculpture so intricately with his own concerns as an intellectual writing in 1894 that it is pointless to ask which came first. In Pater’s reverse history, Leighton’s statues might make the starting-point for a train of reflection that reaches back through the marble copies, identified so recently, to the Greek bronzes, then to the Odes of Pindar a generation

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before, and finally to the living Greek athlete, who may then return us in a breathtaking moment of intellectual time-travel to his double, the English cricketer. Or we may choose any of these points of entry to the complex, non-chronological history that attempts to account for the strange fascination of marbles and bronzes, either to the ancients or to us. To prescribe a hierarchy that would privilege either end of the spectrum – Leighton’s Athlete or Myron’s, the war in Iraq or Athenian democracy – would be to enforce an a priori narrative that could never account for the distinctiveness of any of its own data points. It would be, in words Pater used in another context, ‘to sleep before evening’.119

A Reflection on Methodology

This chapter has included some stringent critique of the methods of scholars both past and present, in particular methods I have stigmatised as ‘hybrid’, as pretending to a purer form of empiricism than warranted by their unacknowledged presuppositions, or as overly positivist. Yet I am aware that, in the attempt to suggest wider ways of thinking, I have myself engaged in a good deal of what might be called ‘method-mixing’. From past experience, I am also acutely aware that readers will receive my work in ways that I did not intend. I am certainly guilty of recidivist positivism, whenever I have introduced data that promote some historical link between the study of ancient art and the practice of modern art, for example the facts that Rodin analysed the contrapposto of the Diadoumenos, that Furtwängler made reference to Renaissance connoisseurship in justifying his own methods, or that Pater was friendly with the critic who christened the New Sculpture. My prime motive was to combat received ideas with data. I have tried to show that such old saws as the imputation of conservatism to any form of later-nineteenth-century classicism, or the independence of ‘hard’ archaeological evidence from modern intellectual trends, cannot be squared with the historical evidence. The danger is that my argument will be taken to be itself a positivist one, aiming for example to ‘prove’ that Rodin incorporated recent developments in classical scholarship into his work on The Age of Bronze, or that Furtwängler was

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‘influenced’ by Morelli. An undergraduate student might take those points to be facts; a more mature scholar might dismiss them as insufficiently supported by the evidence, or simply wrong. I have tried to make my data as accurate as possible, but they are partial. My project aims to link several academic specialisms, each of them of considerable technical complexity. I am not myself a specialist in all of them; for the purposes of this chapter, indeed, I can legitimately claim to be a specialist on Leighton, but not on any of the multifarious other areas on which the chapter touches – Rodin, Hildebrand, the history of nineteenth-century classical archaeology, Morellian connoisseurship, or the present state of research into ancient art. But that is beside the point: even if I were much more learned in all of these areas, there would be no scope for a more complete data set drawn from any of them in a chapter that aims to present a coherent argument. It would be possible for a group of scholars to collaborate on writing an encyclopedia comprising all that is known of the relations between archaeology and contemporary art in the nineteenth century, and I certainly believe that would be worth doing; but such a work could not present a compelling argument about why those relations matter – and its data would still be partial. They would also be overtaken by the march of empirical research as soon as they were published. One of my objections to much current scholarship on ancient art is its overabundance of data – a sign, to my mind, that it has lost its raison d’être. It is not just that such scholarship is impenetrable to someone who is not a specialist in the discipline. The accumulation of positive data, for example on inscriptions and statue bases that refer to Praxiteles, is logically inconsistent with the stories that scholars are able to tell about Praxiteles as an artist, since there are virtually no data (acceptable according to positivist rules of evidence) on the artworks he made. Surely the Hermes of Praxiteles is one of the strangest historiographical problems known to scholarship: at once the ultimate Praxiteles and the example least accredited by positive data. If the argument were strictly limited to what we can learn about the historical Praxiteles from the inscriptions and bases, and made no attempt to interpret his artistic practice, then it would have integrity (although it would bore any reader who did not have an obsessional interest in ancient epigraphy). But scholars seldom avoid the temptation to mix such data with some kind of art-historical

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analysis. I find the latter interesting, and perhaps especially so when it is highly conjectural (that is, imaginative in the best sense); but the display of empirical data serves too often to misrepresent the conjecture as data-driven (by association), and thus to underplay its imaginative flair. With respect to the nineteenth-century attributions to the great Greek sculptors, we should accept that we are in fantasy-land. I believe that is a more exciting place to be, intellectually, than the dryasdust world of positive fact; certainly it is better than a dryasdust world where the facts are randomly assorted due to accidents of survival, and anyway disputed. What, then, does my chapter aim to achieve, if not to correct the historical record in positivist fashion, by providing more accurate, or at least more apposite, data? And why have I not pared my own data to the minimum, as I am apparently recommending to my classicist colleagues? ‘Compliquons les choses,’ as Jacques Derrida recommends.120 I am hoping to combat the simplicity of narrative histories of both ancient sculpture and modern art, through the promiscuous mixing of kinds of data that ordinarily seem irrelevant to one or the other discipline, sometimes to both. Pater does something of the kind in ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’ with an economy at which I can only marvel: he draws in Pindar to challenge the assumption that ancient art can be reduced to factual data, and the New Sculpture, perhaps, to confound those purists who believed Hellenism to be an ideal unapproachable in modernity. I have tried to demonstrate that data taken for granted as relevant within one disciplinary specialism – say, the techniques outlined in Berenson’s ‘Rudiments of Connoisseurship’, the precise wording of Pliny’s anecdotes, or critical debates that pit ‘academic’ against ‘avantgarde’ – may illuminate the concerns of another – in these cases the identification of Roman marble copies, the formation of modern artists’ identities, the relative merits of Polykleitos and Lysippos. Perhaps the intellectual model for this procedure is something like Foucault’s ‘archaeology of knowledge’, but I do not wish to build my data sets into an account of power and knowledge within the later nineteenth century. A famous article by Carlo Ginzburg traces a fascinating series of interconnections among detective fiction, criminology, psychoanalysis and connoisseurship, and persuasively demonstrates a conjunction of special significance around the 1880s; its intriguing title is ‘Clues:

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Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes’.121 I could add ‘and Furtwängler’; but where would that additive process stop, or become so generalised as to lose purchase on the historical field it aims to describe? Scholars of modern art may object that I have overprivileged responses to ancient sculpture in my account of the later-nineteenthcentury male nude, that I have unwarrantably ignored other contexts that may be more important, such as politics or sexuality. That view, I should argue, is too obedient to current scholarly fashion. No one would complain if I limited my discussion of The Age of Bronze to French politics in the 1870s; but my interpretation in relation to ancient sculpture will seem far-fetched to some. I suspect, too, that a classical interpretation will seem more jarring in relation to the virile Rodin than to Pater or Leighton, so tenacious are the connotations of effeminacy that attach to classicism in modernist contexts. I should have easier work if I were to propose that Pater and Leighton had a concealed agenda to validate their own homoerotic impulses through their explorations of the male body in sculpture (either in contemplation, in Pater’s case, or in making, in Leighton’s). That kind of interpretation has become acceptable only in the past decade or two, supported by important theoretical work in gay and lesbian studies and queer theory. This has been liberating, both with respect to debates on sexuality in our own world and with respect to historical research. Indeed, it can be argued that incorporating Pater and Leighton into discourses on sexuality has rescued them, and their work, from what formerly seemed their conservatism. Yet the risk here is that sexuality may become a new master discourse – that the homoerotic dimension that can now be characterised as a progressive element in later-nineteenth-century male nudes will seem a sufficient explanation. The most enterprising scholarship in this area calls attention to the queer possibility in artistic practice regardless of the sexual orientation of its practitioners – in Rodin, that is to say, as much as in Leighton. Yet there is a strong positivist pull in the recent proliferation of studies of sexuality, or ‘the body’, in both ancient and modern contexts. As with political explanations, the recourse to sexuality is underpinned by a common-sense logic that limits interpretation to factors seen as empirically operative in the historical context under consideration (the French defeat in the Franco–Prussian War, or the coinage of the

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term ‘homosexuality’, for example). As argued in Chapter 1, the form of historicism with which we currently operate values tight historical contextualisation on political (which easily elide with moral) grounds, which presuppose a loosely Marxian understanding of history. Yet transhistorical relationships cannot simply be excised from our enquiries. We have seen that the ancient literary tradition plays a major role in authorising an interpretation of Praxiteles in relation to ‘modern’ discourses about sexuality. My question has been, does this make a difference? And does it make a difference that the nineteenth-century discussions have to do with specific works of art, not generalised ideas? My wish is not to write a rich account of a historical moment, politically correct or otherwise. It is, instead, to explore the possibilities for thinking across time – across a great deal of time, from antiquity to modernity, and vice versa. The methodology is indebted to Pater. My project is not to reduce this vast expanse to what might be called the lowest common denominator of historical study, universal human nature. Instead it attempts to describe, with as much precision as possible, specific points at which something ancient and something modern may intersect in a way that stretches the boundaries of current thinking. Hence the need for quite a bit of empirical data: it is a guard against universalism. Our scholarly traditions may encourage us, wrongly, to think that a link across time necessarily implies causality. The second of Kant’s analogies of experience, in the Analytic of Principles of the Critique of Pure Reason, reads, ‘All Changes take place according to the law of the Connection of Cause and Effect.’122 Our intellectual habits encourage us to interpret temporality as if it were in necessary relation to causality. A common-sense objection to reception is that it operates against demonstrable time sequences. To say that Polykleitos influenced Rodin is unusual, but not scandalous; to say that Rodin influenced Polykleitos is contrary to common sense. Or is it? It all depends on how you construct your time sequence, something that Kant would surely have appreciated. Should we date Polykleitos’s Diadoumenos to the ninetieth Olympiad (Pliny’s date), to the Roman period of the copies of it that we can actually see, to 1871 when Helbig identified the Vaison copy (and when, therefore, its visual

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characteristics became available for modern scholarly discussion and artistic emulation), or to 1910 when Rodin described it thus to Paul Gsell: Here you can observe the four directions that I indicated the other day in my clay sketch. Look at the left side of this statue; the shoulder is slightly forward, the hip back, the knee again forward, and the foot back. This results in the soft undulation of the whole. Now, notice the counterbalancing of the lines; the shoulder line tilts to the right, the hip line tilts to the left. Note the axis that passes through the middle of the neck and falls on the malleolus internus of the right foot. Notice the unengaged position of the left leg …123

And what is this passage about? Is it about Polykleitos and his contrapposto system, something that was of considerable importance in antiquity, as we have good literary evidence for believing? Or is it about Rodin’s art, the context in which the passage has been read by countless scholars and students since 1910? If Rodin did not influence the ‘real’ Polykleitos, he surely influenced how we can now think about Polykleitos. What is the relationship between Frederic Leighton’s painting Daedalus and Icarus (Fig. 33) and the Hermes of Praxiteles? Several scholars have noted Praxiteles’s influence on Leighton, and the figure of Icarus certainly appears to be informed by the delicate sway of the Hermes’s contrapposto, perhaps even more by the voluptuous surface texture of the flesh, with its mellifluous transitions from form to form. Yet it is a fact that Leighton’s painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1869, whereas the Hermes was not unearthed until 1877. The resemblance might be explained in terms of a shared relationship to the ‘androgynous types’ in Roman collections, certainly known to both Leighton and the scholars who greeted the Hermes with rapture as an original Praxiteles. Yet the nuanced, fleshy forms of the Leighton are more like the Hermes, in a sensuous smoothness that makes the viewer long to touch them, than they are like the stony hardness and unmodulated surface textures of the ‘androgynous types’. Is it then conceivable that the Hermes looked so like a Praxiteles, when it was uncovered in 1877, because in important respects it resembled Leighton’s painting, and others of the period that were frequently designated ‘Praxitelean’ in the contemporary art press? In that case we could justly say that Leighton

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33

Frederic Leighton, Daedalus and Icarus, 1869.

had influenced Praxiteles, or at least any version of Praxiteles that is available for visual experience. (Leighton’s painting might also be interpreted as a critique of the Apollo Belvedere, demonstrating how the relationship between the fleshy body and drapery stuff would look if it were not constrained by the heavy weight of marble.) These examples constitute something of an intellectual game, in which the paradoxical formulations – Rodin’s influence on Polykleitos, or Leighton’s on Praxiteles – are meant to shock. But I do not want to limit the possible relationships among these ancient and modern artists to ‘influences’ in either direction. I do not wish to prejudge cause and effect, or even to privilege causality as the main principle of historical investigation. In practice classical scholars and archaeologists are very comfortable indeed with a reception principle of reverse temporality: they routinely discuss Roman copies as part of the history of Greek sculpture. But Roman is to Greek as modern is to ancient. Why should a Roman interpretation, in marble, of a Greek bronze be any more relevant to the study of Greek art than a painting by Leighton – a supremely sophisticated observer of ancient sculpture? The temporal

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distance between the modern painting and the Roman marble might be sixteen centuries; that between the Roman marble and the Greek bronze might be only six centuries or so. But how long a lapse disqualifies comparison? My argument is that no temporal lapse, however long, should be permitted to impede our explorations of ancient sculpture. If it could, we should be obliged to give up the study of ancient art altogether, for our own distance from the Greek bronze is even longer – and the bronze anyway is (for us) an idea, not a concrete work of art. Even if we were to assume, as most of today’s scholars implicitly do, that what we see, when we look at an extant ancient sculpture, bears some cogent relation to what the ancients saw when they looked at the same work as it appeared two millennia or so ago, we should be guilty of appalling arrogance if we were to pretend that what we saw were somehow superior to what Leighton, or Rodin saw; or that our ideas about the bronze were somehow more accurate than those of Pater, or Furtwängler.

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3 modernism

A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

Filippo Marinetti, ‘Manifesto of Futurism’, 19091

Regarding this pother about the Greeks: Some few of us are at last liberated from the idea that ‘THE BEAUTIFUL’ is the caressable, the physically attractive. Ezra Pound, The Egoist, 19142

Those damn Greeks.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s ‘refrain’, any time c.19143

He declared art to be a magic purge gave the clyster to Venus of Milo and allowed ‘Laocoon & Sons’ to absent themselves at last after they had tortured themselves in the millennial fight with the rattlesnake. Hans Arp, The Isms of Art, 19254



I know now that most books on Greek sculpture and the Greek sculptors are nothing but emotive propaganda; and that we do not recognise this propaganda as propaganda because we have all absorbed it in childhood and youth as part of our ordinary education.

R.H. Wilenski, The Meaning of Modern Sculpture, 19325

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The invention of beauty by the Greeks, that is, their postulate of beauty as an ideal, has been the bugbear of European art and European aesthetic philosophies.

T

Barnett Newman, ‘The Sublime Is Now’, 19486

he story of modernism in the visual arts can be told as a sequence of repudiations, more or less violent, of the Greek ideal in general, and ancient sculpture in particular. Indeed the excitement of the modernist project – of ‘making it new’ – would seem oddly compromised by an obsession with debunking the old. If the Greek ideal, and ancient sculpture, had really come to seem boring, irrelevant or meretricious, why keep harping on about them? The very attacks suggest the continuing potency of ancient sculpture. The artist and critic R.H. Wilenski, whose attack in his book The Meaning of Modern Sculpture of 1932 was perhaps the most violent of all, at least provided a clear rationale for harping on about ancient sculpture. For Wilenski the ‘Greek prejudice’, which ‘consists in the notion that the Greeks achieved the final and only possible perfection in sculpture, derives its power from a world-wide organisation vitally concerned with its continuation’; the result was to impede the development of modern sculpture.7 This might appear merely paranoid, and in fact that most powerful of establishment organisations, the BBC, was prepared to give Wilenski a platform for his engaging diatribe, in a radio discussion with the leading classical archaeologist Professor Bernard Ashmole, duly published in the Listener for 23 November 1932. Yet the surrounding pages of the Listener suggest that Wilenski’s conspiracy theory was not as far-fetched as it might now seem. The discussion appeared in the context of a series of nine talks by Ashmole entitled ‘Art in Ancient Life’, and the classics were well covered in other articles – in the week previous to the Wilenski–Ashmole discussion, for example, the Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge, F.M. Cornford, contributed a piece entitled ‘How Greece Reconciled Ethics and Science’. Clearly the ‘pother about the Greeks’ had not yet lost its cultural authority in 1932. Wilenski, born in London of Jewish parents, had left Oxford without taking his degree, to study painting in Munich and Paris; his previous book, The Modern Movement in Art of 1927, had established him as an

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advocate of new art, and something of a maverick. But he had done his homework about ancient sculpture, and his cross-examination of his learned adversary brought out all the defects in the positive data that were noted in Chapter 2; Ashmole was forced to concede considerable ground. Here is just one exchange: R.H.W.: …When Pausanias went round Greece in the second century A.D. he saw thousands of statues in the sanctuaries of the Greek temples and other places, and wrote a sort of Baedeker of Greece; but even then thousands of other statues in the round had already been destroyed or stolen by the Romans. Do any of those thousands of statues now exist in a complete state as they were then? B.A.: Oh yes – a certain number. R.H.W.: How many of these are original works by the celebrated Greek sculptors whose praises the historians of Greek sculpture are always dinning in our ears? How many are original statues by, say, Calamis or Myron, or Phidias, or Polyclitus, or Scopas, or Praxiteles or Lysippus? I put it to you, as barristers say, that we have not got a single one complete or semi-complete. B.A.: I, personally, believe that the Hermes of Olympia is an original by Praxiteles, but I must admit that many people question it. R.H.W.: One doubtful incomplete statue by Praxiteles is all you can produce!8

Wilenski’s purpose, however, was not merely to correct the historical record. His complaint was that excessive reverence for a spurious ideal of Greek sculpture acted as an impediment to artistic freedom in the present day: ‘From the time of Reynolds onwards every sculptor everywhere has been told that the Greeks achieved the final perfection in sculpture and that it was his duty to try and imitate it though he would never be able to equal it.’ Ashmole had the last word, and denied that such was ‘the modern view’: ‘I think the present tendency is to judge everything – ancient and modern – on its own merits, and to find out what it is, rather than to make it what one would like it to be’.9 Reasonable enough – but the maverick had caught the Professor out. The original announcement of Ashmole’s radio series, a month earlier, had read: Does Classical Art mean anything to us to-day? In this series of nine talks Professor Ashmole (who holds the Yates Chair of Archaeology in

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the University of London) will aim at explaining how the classical ideal in the plastic arts was gradually evolved until it formulated the aesthetic standards by which we still tend to judge to-day.10

The classicists who reviewed Wilenski’s Meaning of Modern Sculpture dismissed his denigration of archaeological scholarship as crankish and uninformed, but not only was the art critic able to hold his own against the most learned of archaeologists on the factual points at issue; he forced him to rescind the original premise of his radio series, that ancient art still set the standard for aesthetic judgement in the modern world. Yet Wilenski can scarcely have been satisfied by Ashmole’s concession, that everything can now be judged ‘on its own merits’. If Wilenski thought it necessary to devote nearly fifty pages, almost one-third of his entire book, to his tirade against ancient sculpture, that was not because he wanted pluralism and diversity to replace the ‘Greek prejudice’. On the contrary: Wilenski sought the ‘permanent’ and ‘universal’, two words that constantly recur in his text – only they characterise the work of the modern sculptors, not of the ancients. Indeed, the problem with Greek sculpture, at least in the fragmentary and compromised form that the archaeologists and restorers had delivered it to the twentieth century, was that it was not permanent and universal enough; it lacked precisely the qualities traditionally ascribed to the Greek ideal, but which Wilenski now found only in the work of the modern sculptors. This might be described as an alternative classicism, one in which the debunking of Greek sculpture’s pretensions to universal values only reinforces the need for those values. It should come as no surprise, then, that Wilenski turns, for philosophical sanction, to Greek antiquity itself. He quotes the famous passage from Plato’s Philebus, where Socrates argues that beauty resides not in the representation of attractive objects, merely ‘relatively beautiful’, but rather in a ‘beauty of form’, something ‘eternally and absolutely beautiful’, manifest in ‘straight lines and circles, and the plane or solid figures which are formed out of them’ through ‘arithmetic, mensuration, and weighing’.11 At least one of Wilenski’s classicist reviewers – Stanley Casson, of whom more later – delighted in pointing out this ‘illogical recourse to Socrates and Plato, who appear, despite the distressing fact that they were surrounded by Greek art, to have enunciated in a few sentences

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what Mr. Wilenski tries to say in 164 pages’.12 But Wilenski needs the Philebus, just as he needs the vehemence of his diatribe against the standard canon of Greek sculptures, to make good his claim for modern art. It is not enough, for Wilenski, to claim that modern art is valuable ‘on its own merits’, or as an adequate expression of its own cultural milieu; he wants it fully to sustain the claims to permanence and universality embedded (for better or worse) in the classical tradition. That the ancient sculpture actually available in the twentieth century is incapable of sustaining such claims is only half of his argument; to make good the other half, that modern art is capable of sustaining such claims, he needs further authority. Obviously the test of time is not yet available for the brand-new art; ‘permanence’ must be demonstrated otherwise. The passage from Plato offers a way of thinking about beauty from first principles, without depending on artistic precedent or tradition; but it is not irrelevant that it dates back to antiquity itself. A sanction in modern philosophy – Henri Bergson, for example, or Wilhelm Worringer, to take two names much in the air at the time – would not quite do the job, for then the claim for modern art might be diminished to one of merely contemporary, rather than universal, relevance. It was not so easy, then, to get rid of the Greeks. Back in 1914 Ezra Pound had denounced the ‘caressability’ of Greek sculpture by contrasting it to the aesthetic power of Greek tragedy: the Greeks, he wrote ‘had Praxiteles to make them super-fashion plates; immortal and deathless lay-figures, and they had tragedy to remind them of chaos and death and the then inexplicable forces of destiny and nothingness and beyond.’13 (Later, in The Meaning of Modern Sculpture, Wilenski echoed this quip of Pound’s by illustrating a wax and rubber shop-window mannequin with the caption: ‘In the “Praxitelean” tradition’.14) The strident denunciations of Greek sculpture by Pound and the French-born (but London-based) sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, in the pages of the avant-garde ‘little magazine’ The Egoist in 1914, derive energy from their dispute with the poet and critic Richard Aldington, who continued to favour the Greeks. In his memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound referred to this ‘perpetual, acrimonious, and fundamentally amical dispute as to whether Greek art and civilization were worthy of serious consideration. Aldington being all for “Hellas,” and Brzeska’s refrain, “Those damn Greeks.”’15 Whether

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in positive or negative terms, the Greeks keep rearing their beautiful heads in these modernist texts. It might be argued that the recourse to the Greeks made sense in these examples only because the cultural authority of the classics still held in the earlier twentieth century, as the Listener of 1932 demonstrates. But the habit of recurrence to antiquity persisted in critical writing on modernism long after classics had forfeited its privileged position in such institutions of general culture as the BBC, and had seemingly retreated to enclaves of scholarly specialism in university departments or research institutes. As late as 1996, the motif is still prominent in Charles Harrison’s essay on ‘Modernism’, in the influential volume Critical Terms for Art History: Alike in all the arts, modernism is at some point grounded in the intentional rejection of classical precedent and classical style. Modernism is always and everywhere relative to some state of affairs conceived of as both antique and unchanging. However else its parameters may be established, ‘modern history’ is defined as the history of a period including the present but excluding the Greek and Roman epochs.16

At first thought this seems to suggest merely the banal point that modernism can claim innovatory power only by positing a decisive break with the past, and indeed that the past may be constructed retrospectively for the purpose; the Greeks and Romans may seem simply the most convenient shorthand for everything that went before the break. But the vicious universality of the classical – ‘conceived of as both antique and unchanging’ – is in counterpoint with the virtuous universality of modernism, ‘alike in all the arts’, ‘always and everywhere’. As in Wilenski and the Egoist debate, modernism is locked together with the Greek ideal not merely because the cultural authority of the latter needed to be overthrown to make way for the new, but more significantly because the modern needs to measure up to antiquity if it is genuinely to achieve its break with the past. Moreover, measuring up does not simply mean reaching an equivalent standard; it also means staking a claim to be foundational for art in general, as Greek sculpture had been in Hegel’s Aesthetics. Some such claim is already evident in a text often taken as inspirational for modernism, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ of 1863, where

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Baudelaire speaks of the need for ‘any “modernity” to be worthy of one day taking its place as “antiquity”’. 17 The discussions of this chapter will show that, for all the stridency of the repudiations, modern art never purged itself of the habit of reference to ancient sculpture. Not only was the trajectory of modernist experimentalism interrupted at regular intervals by episodes of classical revival, such as the ‘recall to order’ after the First World War, the Surrealist engagement with myth, the propagandistic deployment of ancient sculpture by the twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, or the ‘postmodern’ enthusiasm for classical allusion of multifarious kinds. The ‘museum without walls’, first in photographic reproduction, then in film and television (and now on the internet), made common currency of a vastly expanded range of ancient objects, which duly percolated into every remote corner of modern art production, including the mainstream modern ‘isms’ as well as the classical revivals. The multifarious classical allusions in modern art have been relatively neglected, perhaps due to an increasing scholarly specialisation that makes them hard for those without archaeological training to recognise, perhaps because of the persistence of the myth of a total break; nonetheless, they are easy enough to recover using the normal procedures for art-historical research. Modernism’s declaration of independence from the classical tradition must therefore be taken with a considerable pinch of salt.18 Perhaps, then, it is the other side of modernism’s struggle with antiquity that still requires critical investigation – the side represented, in Wilenski’s book, by the invocation of the Philebus, rather than the splenetic repudiation of classical precedent. If the modernist break with the past were simply to mean discarding the outmoded concerns of antiquity in favour of new ones relevant to our own age, then ancient sculpture could be safely left to the specialists, and we should be free to enjoy modern art after Ashmole’s fashion, ‘on its own merits’; in that case, we should not be unduly perturbed by stray classical allusions, which could easily be decoded for their contemporary relevance. But according to the proponents already cited, and others to be explored below, modernism aims not merely to succeed ancient art in chronological sequence, but rather to re-found artmaking on an altogether different

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principle – one that is in no way derived from the classical tradition, but that can nonetheless stand comparison with it. It might be argued that the modernist aspiration to make art that was both brand-new and permanent was not just logically contradictory but wrongheaded, and much recent scholarship has preferred the modern side of the project to any hint of universalism. To overprivilege the modern side, though, runs the risk of promoting a notion of art as merely fashionable, or even disposable once its moment has passed; that comes uncomfortably close to endorsing the ‘throwaway’ culture of late consumer capitalism. Perhaps the claim to permanence is overweening, as well as paradoxical; without it, though, modernist art would be of merely antiquarian interest, as the expression of a Zeitgeist now outmoded in its turn. The question for this chapter, then, is not whether the various modernist movements succeeded in rejecting ‘classical precedent and classical style’; like the other artistic developments considered in earlier chapters, they did at times, and in certain ways, not at other times or in other ways. The more important question is whether modernism’s aspiration to validity beyond its ephemeral circumstances deserves to be taken seriously. If it does, then it makes sense that its proponents, sooner or later, came to measure it against antiquity – the sternest available test of permanence – whether as archetypal adversary (as in Harrison) or by virtue of some deep affinity (as in Wilenski’s invocation of Plato). And if it does, then the test of permanence will itself have undergone irrevocable alteration: sooner or later, ancient art too will need to be measured up against modernism’s different principle.

Beginning at the beginning

Wilenski does not deny that modern sculptors study the art of the past, as well as that of other cultures; indeed he devotes considerable space to the expanded range of sculptural arts that informs the new practices. But he insists that these studies only come after a preliminary birthmoment, when there is no precedent. The modern sculptors, he writes, ‘began by assuming … that no one had ever made sculpture before and that it was their own task to discover the nature of the activity in which

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they were about to be engaged … They began, that is to say, at the beginning.’19 Wilenski presents his sculptors as starting from the basics of three-dimensional form, ‘the sphere, the cube and the cylinder’; this leads him quickly to the passage from the Philebus, introduced not as a precedent for, or influence on, the modern sculptors’ way of proceeding, but as a parallel exercise in thinking from scratch.20 But Wilenski’s wording also compulsively recalls the famous dictum of Cézanne, ‘Everything in nature is modeled after the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder’,21 which immediately calls attention to the fact that this beginning, thoroughgoing as it may seem, already has a history. Cézanne’s dictum was cited in a lecture, ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, delivered in January 1914 by the philosopher T.E. Hulme.22 It was this lecture that prompted Pound’s article on ‘The New Sculpture’ in The Egoist the next month and the engaging debate that ensued in the magazine’s correspondence columns. Hulme’s thinking also looms large in Wilenski’s text of 18 years later. But neither Pound nor Wilenski were quite able to match the rigour with which Hulme confronted the logical problem of how to conceptualise a beginning. Wilenski’s claim that the modern sculptors ‘began at the beginning’ was perhaps compromised from the outset by the assumption that there was already a category called ‘sculpture’ – even if the modern sculptors were able to proceed as though no one had ever made one before. Hulme deftly sidestepped such problems by acknowledging that it was impossible directly to conceptualise, still less to verbalise, a beginning: ‘The critic in explaining a new direction often falsifies it by his use of a vocabulary derived from the old position.’23 Yet we have no other vocabulary, or at least not one that could be intelligible, for intelligibility would require some reference to existing concepts that are shared between speaker and auditor. Pound was perhaps complimenting Hulme, then, when he described his lecture as ‘almost wholly unintelligible’: that was the mark of its utter newness.24 If this problem with language were decisive, though, there would be at best the possibility of gradual development, not radical change – and radical change was what Hulme wanted to theorise, in the widest sense of a wholly new ‘general attitude towards the world’. Art, for Hulme, offers a way out of the conundrum: ‘The fact that this change comes first in art, before it comes in thought,

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is easily understandable for this reason. So thoroughly are we soaked in the spirit of the period we live in … that we can only escape from it in an unexpected way, as it were, a side direction like art.’25 It might be objected that Hulme is making the same mistake as Wilenski, by assuming that the category ‘art’ is already there, and that he then compounds this by introducing ‘archaic’ art as a counterpoise to ‘the art which is natural to you, Greek art and modern art since the Renaissance’.26 But the argument is more complex. Hulme sets up a dialectic between two permanent tendencies; here he explicitly acknowledges his debt to the German theorists, Alois Riegl and (especially) Wilhelm Worringer. One of these tendencies, associated with classical Greek art and art since the Renaissance, is characterised as ‘vital and organic’,27 naturalistic, humanist; this is the one ‘natural’ to his hearers. The new art he prophesies is different in kind, not merely in degree; it is ‘geometrical’, ‘often entirely non-vital’, and displays a ‘tendency to abstraction’28 (Hulme attributes the last phrase to Worringer; the two tendencies are succinctly contrasted in the title of the latter’s seminal work of 1908, Abstraction and Empathy). Hulme’s new art is just being born, but it also represents the re-emergence of the geometrical tendency, otherwise manifest in such arts as the Egyptian, Indian, Byzantine, the art of ‘primitive’ peoples – and the archaic art of Greece. At first thought this may seem similar to certain methods of the nineteenth-century avant-garde, the Pre-Raphaelites for example, who sought to break the authority of the post-Renaissance tradition by means of a reversion to an earlier artistic era, that of the period before Raphael. In a larger spectrum, archaic Greek art might be substituted, as something more basic and originary, for the mature classicism of the fifth- and fourth-century sculptures emphasised in nineteenth-century archaeological connoisseurship; as we shall see, the archaeology of recent decades had obligingly provided a spectacular range of preclassical Greek sculptures as new points of reference. Thus Hulme could find in archaic Greek sculpture an example of the geometrical quality, the ‘tendency to abstraction’ that also characterised the new art of his own day.29 But does this merely substitute an older for a more recent tradition, and thus fail to constitute a total break with the past? In one sense

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Hulme had protected himself against this charge, by acknowledging at the outset that there is no alternative to seeking terms from the existing discourse – and that turns out to apply also to the non-verbal discourse of art practice. Artists cannot, as Wilenski would try to assert, simply ‘begin at the beginning’, but must choose some point of reference to get the project off the ground. At least they may choose something older, more foundational or originary, than what has come to seem ‘natural’: ‘A certain archaism then, just as it is at the beginning helpful to an artist though he may afterwards repudiate it, is an almost necessary stage in the preparation of a new movement.’30 This gives a more solid explanation for how the new could be generated than Wilenski’s later assumption, that sculptors could simply pretend that ‘no one had ever made sculpture before’. The archaic would serve as a propaedeutic or heuristic – a kind of research method for discovering the genuinely new direction, at which point it could be cast off in its turn. But how would this research process work? And how could we detect its traces, if the sign of its efficacy is the repudiation of the archaic, once its initial ‘helpfulness’ has been exhausted?

Modernism and Archaic Sculpture

In fact it is easy enough to find traces of archaic ‘influence’ in the modern art practices of the early twentieth century. In particular, the compact and simplified body forms of the archaic figures at first called Apollos and Maidens (later kouroi and korai) find numerous echoes, more or less direct, in the figure types of early modernist painting and sculpture. The signature feature of the archaic figures, the pinning of the arms to the sides of the figure, is invariably noted in the writings of both modern art critics and classicists. Take for example Hulme, explaining the ‘geometrical’ character of this art-form: ‘In archaic Greek sculpture, for example, the arms are bound close to the body, any division of the surface is as far as possible avoided and unavoidable divisions and articulations are given in no detail.’31 Or Ernest A. Gardner, Ashmole’s predecessor in the Yates Chair of Archaeology, describing ‘a typical example of the first period of Greek sculpture’ in 1890: ‘It clearly represents what is

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commonly called the archaic “Apollo” type, a nude male figure, standing up stiffly, with the left leg advanced and with both arms pinned down to the sides.’32 Any number of early-twentieth-century figures, in either painting or sculpture, might be responses to the compelling simplicity of this compact form; among famous works of early modernism might be cited Constantin Brancusi’s The Kiss, or some of Picasso’s nudes of 1905–6 (compare Fig. 41, a later nude by Picasso). In contrast to this integrated presentation of the human form, the outflung arm of the Apollo Belvedere becomes nothing short of an aesthetic scandal. Yet the motif of arms to sides can also be found in African sculpture, routinely called ‘negro sculpture’ in the early twentieth century, and many of the other sculptural traditions that the modernists studied. Another method of making a decisive break from ‘the art which is natural to you’ could be a sideways swerve to the art of non-European cultures, and Wilenski dwells at some length on the modern sculptors’ study of Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Sumerian and African sculpture; in each of these he finds elements, at least, that are to be preferred to the standard Greek repertoire. It should be stressed, though, that modernist interest in alternative sculptural traditions encompassed many art-forms from within the Mediterranean world, such as Cycladic figurines (represented in the sculptor Jacob Epstein’s collection), the recently excavated Iberian sculptures exhibited at the Louvre in 1906 and admired by Picasso, the Minoan artefacts brought to light in such excavations as those of Arthur Evans at Knossos in the first decade of the twentieth century, and Etruscan sculptures such as those discovered at Veii in 1916.33 The modernist artists can often be faulted for ignoring the specificities of the cultures from which the objects derived, but not for setting up an absolute dichotomy between Western modernity and non-Western exoticism. As Hulme thought, it was again due to the difficulty of finding words and concepts for what was not ‘natural’ to them that people tended to use slighting terminology to refer to ‘archaic art generally’ – vocabulary such as ‘naïve, fresh, charm of the exotic, and so on’.34 Gaudier-Brzeska found stronger language, when he took issue with Aldington in a letter to the Editor of The Egoist: The archaic works discovered at Gnossos [Knossos] are the expressions of what is termed a ‘barbaric’ people – i.e. a people to whom reason is

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secondary to instinct. The pretty works of the great Hellenes are the productions of a civilised – i.e. a people to whom instinct is secondary to reason.

Gaudier then makes the backwards move, to reject the familiar classical tradition in favour of the older example: The modern sculptor is a man who works with instinct as his inspiring force…That this sculpture has no relation to classic Greek, but that it is continuing the tradition of the barbaric peoples of the earth (for whom we have sympathy and admiration) I hope to have made clear.35

Gaudier’s word ‘barbaric’ was likely to be inflammatory in 1914, when debates about the primitive or childlike character of the modern art presented in Roger Fry’s two Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 were still fresh in the memory. No doubt Gaudier meant to shock; nonetheless it is notable that he is prepared to propose a transhistorical analogy among the ancient Minoans, the modern sculptors of his own generation, and ‘the barbaric peoples of the earth’. Perhaps he is suggesting that the ‘barbaric’ is a permanent tendency, like Hulme’s ‘geometrical art’; it is both immeasurably older than ‘the pretty works of the great Hellenes’ and capable of fresh development in the present day. Antiquity here plays a role in sanctioning current practice similar to Wilenski’s invocation of Plato, although Gaudier’s version is more extreme both in chronological distance and in ideological resonance. The term ‘primitivism’, widely used in art history, implies an assumption that the non-Western arts are somehow backwards and underdeveloped; Hulme’s more neutral word ‘archaism’ may be preferable in that it does not necessarily entail inferiority. Yet if Greek archaic art could be lumped together with the arts of ‘primitive’ peoples, that suggests that some sort of immaturity might be ascribed to both, whether it was figured negatively (as for those classicists who thought archaic Greek sculpture underdeveloped in relation to the mature sculpture of the Periclean age) or positively, as a state of innocence or naturalness untrammelled by the unjust social relations of mature civilisations. The arms pinned to the sides of the body make an apt figure for this immaturity: the sculptor early in a tradition, it might be argued, has not yet developed the skill to cut deep into the block of stone or the cylinder of wood. Some such

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notion goes all the way back to the ancient legend of Daedalus, the first to separate the limbs from the block: ‘For the artists who preceded him used to make their statues with the eyes closed, and with the arms hanging straight down and attached to the ribs.’36 Or, in an alternative morality, the early sculptor expresses himself simply and honestly, in a manner congruous with his natural materials, as opposed to the oversophistication with which the sculptor of the Apollo Belvedere imitates the flexibility of bronze in marble. But Hulme rejects any such argument out of hand: It is ridiculous to suppose that the masons who carved the face of an archaic figure did not possess the capacity to separate the arms or legs from the body. The fact that they did so later in classical Greek art was not due to a progress in technical ability. The Greeks left behind the intensity of these cubical forms and replaced the abstract by the organic simply because, as their attitude to the world changed, they had different intentions. Having attained a kind of optimistic rationalism they no longer felt any desire for abstraction. They did not create gods like these earlier ones because they no longer possessed any religious intensity.37

The religious dimension introduced here should warn against the assumption that ‘abstraction’, in this context, means absence of spiritual content, a point to which we shall return. First, though, it is important to note that Hulme sees archaic sculpture as a fully developed example of the geometrical tendency; it is not to be valued for its earliness, but rather as a fully adequate ‘analogy’ for the emergence of the same tendency in modern art. This hints at a new basis for how a modern work might relate to the art of the past, which need no longer depend on concepts that imply a cause-and-effect relationship, such as ‘influence’, ‘tradition’, or even ‘appropriation’. The chronological priority of archaic art makes it available to the modern artist as an example, as a matter of course; but it does not prescribe a hierarchy in which the modern artist either plays the subservient role of imitator, or asserts his own mastery through appropriation: Though both the new Weltanschauung and the new geometrical art will have certain analogies with corresponding periods in the past, yet it is not for a moment to be supposed that there is anything more than an

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analogy here. The new geometrical art will probably in the end not in the least resemble archaic art, nor will the new attitude to the world be very much like the Byzantine, for example. As to what actually they both will culminate in, it would obviously be ludicrous for me to attempt to say…One can only make certain guesses at the new attitude by the use of analogy.38

On this view, we should not expect to see the modernist artist taking archaic sculpture as an influence, a model, a prototype, or even an inspiration; we should not search the modernist work for anything ‘resembling’ archaic art (indeed, resemblance as a principle belongs to vital art, not to geometrical art at all). That creates the possibility that modernism can have a significant relationship to archaic art, by way of ‘analogy’, which yet does not preclude a radical form of originality. The ‘analogy’ will be apparent, not in the form of resemblance, but rather in the perception – indeed it is only a ‘guess’ – that both the past and present work relate somehow to the kind of Weltanschauung that accompanies geometrical art: a ‘feeling of separation’, altogether opposed to the ‘happy pantheistic relation between man and the outside world’ that characterises vital art.39 Nor does the analogy even need to be conscious. Although Hulme does not make the point explicitly, a corollary would be that the modern artist need be no more aware of the analogy than the ancient one could have been. Even though the former might have seen the work of the latter, whereas the latter could never have seen that of the former, the principle of analogy makes them equals. Chronology and temporality are not exactly denied, but they make no difference to the way the analogy functions. Towards the end of his lecture, Hulme introduces the work of the painter Wyndham Lewis: ‘It is obvious that the artist’s only interest in the human body was in a few abstract mechanical relations perceived in it, the arm as a lever and so on.’40 The motif of the ‘arm as a lever’ might be traced to such archaic figures as the Maidens (now called korai; see Fig. 34) found on the Acropolis in the 1880s, which have one arm extended at right angles from the body to hold some kind of offering. In a painting of about 1919 by Pierre Bonnard, The Bowl of Milk (Fig. 35), a draped female figure assumes the characteristic pose of the Maidens, and with it, perhaps, some of the connotations of archaic immobility or repose, as

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Kore (Maiden), late sixth century bc.

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35

Pierre Bonnard, Le Bol de lait (The Bowl of Milk), c. 1919.

well as the vertical fall of the drapery folds.41 But Lewis’s figures (Fig. 36), like those of Fernand Léger in the 1920s, resemble modern machinery, not ancient sculptures; in their different configurations, Lewis’s leverlike and Léger’s cylindrical or conical, the arms recall machine parts, tooled with such precise geometry that they are interchangeable. It is not necessary to suppose that the analogy with the Maidens had ever occurred to Lewis or Léger, even subconsciously; if it had, it has already been repudiated. According to Hulme’s way of thinking, the analogy is discernible only in the fact that both the modern and the ancient works can be seen to exhibit the ‘tendency to abstraction’ found in any geometrical art. The character of their respective abstractions – the one reminiscent of modern machine tooling, the other the product of ancient handcraft – bears no resemblance. In a final aside, Hulme demolishes another cause-and-effect explanation, that modern artists use ‘mechanical lines’ because they inhabit ‘an environment of machinery’.42 Indeed his initial observation, that radical change comes first in ‘a side direction like art’, would preclude not only ‘materialist’ explanations like that of the Marxian base-and-superstructure model, but also ‘culturalist’ explanations. The change in ‘general attitude’ might seem somehow more fundamental than the change in art, even if it takes longer to manifest itself, but Hulme is careful not to ascribe causality on either side. Ever mindful of the tendency of language to reinforce ‘the

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old position’, he chooses his words and grammatical constructions with extreme care. The subject-and-predicate form of the normal sentence requires one element to come first, when he attempts to relate the two changes, that in art and that in ‘general attitude’: ‘this change from a vital to a geometrical art is the product of and will be accompanied by a certain change of sensibility, a certain change of general attitude.’43 Momentarily, the change in art is an effect (‘the product’) of the change of attitude. Immediately, though, a shift to the future tense and to the passive mode makes the cause of this effect doubtful: the effect ‘will be accompanied by’ what ought to have caused it. The verb ‘accompany’ here functions like the word ‘analogy’ in Hulme’s discussion of the relation between past and present art-forms. Neither form of temporal priority, the chronological precedence of archaic art or the appearance of change in art before that in thought, can be taken to imply causality. By the same token, Hulme refuses to posit some malaise of modern civilisation that might bring about, or even create the conditions for, the feeling of separation from the world that accompanies the new geometrical art. He makes no attempt to explain why the geometrical



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Wyndham Lewis, Portrait of an Englishwoman, 1913–14.

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tendency should reassert itself just now. In retrospect, it is difficult not to see in Hulme’s prediction of radical change a premonition of the world war that was to erupt just months after the lecture was delivered, and in which Hulme himself would be killed, as would Gaudier-Brzeska. There could be no more chilling proof of Hulme’s contention, that a change seen first in art might be ‘the precursor of the re-emergence of the corresponding attitude towards the world, and so, of the break up of the Renaissance humanistic attitude’.44 The anti-humanist aspect of geometrical art accompanies a tendency to abstraction, but not thereby a loss of spiritual or religious import. Such art would no longer express the ‘happy pantheistic relation between man and the outside world’ characteristic of mature Greek and Renaissance art, but it would still need to satisfy a ‘need’ – as Hulme put it, the ‘desire to create a certain abstract geometrical shape, which, being durable and permanent shall be a refuge from the flux and impermanence of outside nature’.45 Hulme’s lecture was delivered at a meeting of the Quest Society, a group formed by the theosophist G.S.R. Mead, which met to discuss artistic and philosophical questions, including ideas about mysticism, the occult, pagan and esoteric religions; such interests were much under debate in London avantgarde circles at this date, and also appear in the pages of The Egoist. In this context, the ‘abstract mechanical relations’ of the new art, while wholly of the new Weltanschauung, can bear analogy with the immeasurably old religious traditions that accompany archaic art: ‘In the reproduction of natural objects there is an attempt to purify them of their characteristically living qualities in order to make them necessary and immovable. The changing is translated into something fixed and necessary.’46 Before the First World War had even begun its work of destruction, Hulme had described the art that could serve as a ‘refuge’ from it. And archaic sculpture, if it was not to be taken as a prototype or influence, had at least survived – tangible proof that art could be something ‘durable and permanent’.

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The Discovery of Archaic Sculpture

Brunn’s criticism was most delicately refined in its description and its apprehension of the characteristics of early Attic art; and it has been wonderfully borne out by later discoveries. But it was practically based upon a single monument, the stele of Aristocles…47

Ernest A. Gardner refers here to Heinrich Brunn’s Geschichte der griechischen Künstler of 1853–59; the stele in question had been discovered in 1838. The comment occurs in Gardner’s article of 1887 on the archaic sculptures discovered within the past couple of years on the Acropolis in Athens, in the course of new excavations under Brunn’s pupil, the Greek archaeologist Panagiótes Kavvadías. All of a sudden, numerous original marble sculptures, undeniably Greek, were brought to light. Better still, they could be securely dated to the period before 480bc, when the Persians had sacked the Acropolis; the sculptures came from the lower strata of rubble, levelled after the Persian destruction to serve as the foundation for the new building programmes on the citadel. Just three decades after Brunn’s pioneering history, the picture of the development of Greek sculpture had changed dramatically and irrevocably. Arguably the earlier phases could actually be illustrated with better examples than were available for later fifth- and fourth-century sculpture: although (with one possible exception)48 the new finds could not be linked to named sculptors, they were certainly Greek originals. In the preface of 1890 to her translated edition of the Manual of Ancient Sculpture by the French archaeologist Pierre Paris, Jane Harrison observed that the histories of sculpture cited in the references and bibliographies were already out of date due to the new finds on the Acropolis. The text also emphasises the French discoveries of very early archaic sculptures on Delos from 1877 onwards: ‘Owing to a double series of important discoveries, the…history of Greek sculpture can now be written in a way that it was difficult to anticipate some years ago.’49 The Manual is typical of the many histories of Greek sculpture published in the last decades of the nineteenth century in that it routinely recorded the dates and circumstances of recent discoveries, thus capturing some of the excitement of that fast-moving period of archaeological enterprise. However, the practice largely disappeared

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in the twentieth century. Gisela Richter’s textbook, The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks, first published in 1929 and the target of Wilenski’s particular ire, presents in its first part (the part on ‘sculpture’) a complete account of the extant monuments, divided into thematic sections each of which traces a seamless pattern of stylistic development from the seventh century bc through to the Hellenistic period. While the second part (on ‘sculptors’) scrupulously acknowledges the non-survival of virtually all of the works by the named sculptors of the philological record, the generations of students who read the book in its numerous reprintings and new editions through to 1970 would scarcely have been able to guess that its apparently comprehensive narrative of stylistic development was based overwhelmingly, and particularly in its early stages, on very recent discoveries. The elegant chronology of sculptural development in Greek antiquity was achieved at the expense of totally obliterating the chronology of its construction through the archaeological researches of modernity, and the student would be forgiven for believing that the whole canon of Greek sculptural monuments, as it appeared in Richter’s 767 plates, had always already been there. Despite Richter’s own acknowledgements of the gaps in the archaeological record, the impression is one of plenitude and comprehensiveness. Richter’s title succinctly encapsulates the plan of her book, which she describes in the Preface as ‘a somewhat novel scheme’.50 The scheme relegates the literary evidence on ‘the sculptors’ firmly to second place, after ‘the study of the sculpture itself ’. That phrase immediately recalls the later-nineteenth-century archaeological connoisseurs, for whom (in Michaelis’s words) ‘Only works of art are of importance’, and Morelli’s dictum, ‘the only true record for the connoisseur…is the work of art itself.’51 Indeed Richter’s parents (of German origin, but thoroughly cosmopolitan) were experts in Renaissance connoisseurship; her mother, Louise M. Richter, had been the translator of the first English edition of Morelli’s Italian Masters in German Galleries, published in 1883, and Gisela, with her sister Irma, later edited the correspondence between Morelli and their father Jean Paul Richter, best known as a Leonardo scholar.52 Thus Richter was immersed from childhood in the tradition of nineteenth-century connoisseurship. But in her own writing there is a crucial difference. Far from using stylistic analysis as a means to make

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attributions, Richter sees it as an end in itself, from which the debates on authorship are merely a distraction: ‘It seemed desirable not to confuse this study with constant digressions concerning possible attributions to known artists.’53 That Richter can dispense with the glamorous names of the Greek sculptors for her principal discussion of ‘sculpture’ is a measure of how greatly the discoveries of the preceding decades had augmented the canon (although it also displays, between the lines, the incontrovertible fact that few if any of the finds could securely be linked with one of the great Greek masters). But the procedure also marks Richter’s text as a modernist one, in which formal analysis, by itself, can establish an adequate narrative of artistic development without reference to extraneous data; Richter was writing in New York in the decade before the most prominent formalist critic of modern art, Clement Greenberg, began his career. In Part I she organises her monuments into a series of sculptural types, within each of which formal changes can be traced throughout the entire history of Greek sculpture. These chapters are preceded by introductory chapters providing historical background and a general evaluation of the characteristics of Greek sculpture, as well as a basic chronology, and followed by specialised chapters on technique (to which we shall return), relief sculpture, and issues of copying and forgery. These discussions occupy two-thirds of the book, leaving the sculptors to be treated at half that length in the second part. The result is curiously reminiscent of Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art, with its general characterisation of the Greek world followed by detailed accounts of the visual characteristics of figure types, then of individual body parts; Winckelmann, too, leaves his chronology of sculptors, drawn from the literary record, to the last third of his History. Like Winckelmann, Richter idealises Athenian democracy and the cultivation of physical beauty through athletics, and she too gives pride of place to the nude male figure. Although Richter’s canon of monuments bears almost no resemblance to Winckelmann’s, since it draws mainly on discoveries since his time, her overall scheme continues to trace a pattern of rise, culmination and decline; with her expanded canon, she is now able to trace this in detail with each of her sculptural types in turn. However, there is a notable shift of emphasis towards the archaic. Each of the sculptural types follows the same narrative structure: a

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simple and effective formula or ‘pattern’ is first established in the archaic period, then brought to perfection in the classical age. Thus archaic and classical are united in one continuous development, which epitomises the best values of Greek sculpture as a whole: ‘It is not realism and truth to nature but perfection of form that the Greeks consciously strove for.’54 The fourth-century shift towards greater naturalism, exaggerated and even sensationalised in the Hellenistic period, thus comes as a departure from the Greek ideal in its most rigorous form – but the archaic now shares fully in the latter. A century earlier, as we saw in Chapter 1, the Aegina Marbles had been considered aesthetically inferior to fully fledged classical sculpture; now, in a striking change of taste, archaic sculptures even earlier than the Aeginas can be credited with the same aesthetic value as those of the classical period. Perhaps they are less developed, but their ‘simplicity’ – the word is a favourite with critics of modern art too – gives them special purity. The ‘beauty of form’ that is pre-eminent in the best Greek sculpture ‘is particularly strong in the archaic period when stylization took the place of correctness of modeling’.55 Thus in Richter’s chapter on ‘The General Characteristics of Greek Sculpture’, it is often an archaic sculpture that serves as the principal example of a ‘characteristic’. A particular favourite is the Apollo of Melos in the National Museum, Athens, which Richter dates to c. 550–525 bc. Richter fully appreciates its archaism, but she interprets it as what Hulme called ‘vital art’: In the Apollo of Melos, for instance, what a clear realisation we obtain of the anatomical structure …; the arms are not suspended from, but seem to grow from, the shoulders, the legs from the trunk, the head from the neck; and so on with every member. Moreover, the rendering is simplified; the important parts are made to stand out and there are no incidents, no superfluities. The result is that we have the impression of an organic whole which can function and live. And this is true of all Greek sculpture during its best periods.56

Although Richter had been born and educated in England, and worked at the Metropolitan Museum in New York for most of her career, her intellectual formation as an archaeologist was heavily influenced by the German tradition, something characteristic of her generation although

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no doubt reinforced by her German parentage. Her perception of ‘liveliness’ as the principal virtue of Greek sculpture clearly recalls Hegel – only it is now projected back from the Elgin Marbles to the sculpture of the archaic period. The Apollo of Melos had been unearthed only in 1891, and its moment of glory was brief. Its key role as an early archaic figure has been taken in more recent textbooks by a sculpture acquisitioned by Richter’s own institution, the Metropolitan Museum, in 1932, just too late to feature in her book – the ‘New York kouros’, dated to c. 590–580bc and thus even more archaic (Fig. 37).57 Modern taste delights in the symmetrical disposition of the slender body forms, the incisive modelling, the impassive dignity of the expression with its stylised almond-shaped eyes, and the vigorous working of the hair, simplified into a mesmerising geometric pattern of beadlike forms. The sculpture displays all of the formal qualities that Hulme associated with geometrical art, but these have become vital for today’s viewers – a kind of art it is natural for us to love. This new taste for the archaic is easy to describe as modernist, and parallel in broad terms to the preference for formal simplification seen in much early-twentieth-century painting and sculpture – also vital arts for today’s audiences, however forbidding and alien they could seem to their first viewers. Archaic Greek sculpture began to appear prominently in museums and publications in the 1880s, at about the same time as the art we now call ‘Post-Impressionist’, and both had the shock of the new. As noted above, Gaudier-Brzeska used the adjective ‘barbaric’, associated with Post-Impressionist art by its detractors, to link the latest developments in modern sculpture with the most ancient sculptures from Crete. In 1909, the Swiss archaeologist Waldemar Déonna published Les Apollons Archaïques, the first systematic study of the archaic male figures then known under the generic term ‘Apollos’. At about the same date the sculptor Aristide Maillol travelled to Greece to see at first hand such works as the sculptures unearthed at Olympia in the later 1870s and the Acropolis finds of subsequent years – these discoveries were as recent as the paintings of Cézanne, so influential on early-twentieth-century artists. Déonna’s book was still the main point of reference for Richter’s magnum opus, Kouroi: Archaic Greek Youths,

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Kouros, said to be from Attica, c. 590–580 bc.

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first published in 1942, although by then she was able to add many new examples. The change of name is telling: the Greek word for ‘youth’, kouros (plural kouroi), had been adopted as a kind of technical term for the figure type, although ancient writers had not used the word in this way. Similarly the Maidens came to be called by the parallel feminine term, korai; the jargon terms indicate the sculptures’ naturalisation in art-historical discourse. By 1929, in the ‘tentative chronology’ of The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks, Richter is able to list some seventy monuments datable to the period down to 480bc. Of these only a handful – the Aegina pediments, the stele of Aristocles, the archaic metopes from Selinus in Sicily, and just two or three others – had been known before 1850 (and none before the Aeginas appeared in 1811). Fewer than a dozen more emerged in the next quarter-century, and these were a random assortment, although they included some striking examples: the Apollo of Tenea, the first of the Apollos, discovered in 1846 and added to the Glyptothek collection in 1854; the Calf-bearer found on the Acropolis in 1864; and the Hera of Samos, discovered about 1875 and acquisitioned in 1881 by the Louvre, where it was much admired by artists. However, the vast majority of the works in Richter’s list derived from the sequence of major excavations of Greek sanctuaries and cities in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, carried out by the archaeological institutes and schools of all the major European nations, eventually joined by the Americans. Particularly notable were the excavations of the Germans at Olympia and the French on Delos in the later 1870s, the Greeks and Germans at Athens in the 1880s, and the French at Delphi in the 1890s, but there were many more. The chronological table printed in Michaelis’s A Century of Archaeological Discoveries is accordingly too complex to summarise simply, and ends with a panoply of excavations still underway at the time of publication in 1908: the Germans at Pergamon, the French on Delos, the British at Sparta, the Americans at Corinth and Crete, the Austrians at Ephesos.58 A few of the monuments in Richter’s chronology that had emerged after 1900 came from a new source, the antiquities market, and their origins were sometimes shrouded in secrecy. Richter took care to weave into her narrative objects from the collections of her own institution, the

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Metropolitan, and the other important American collection at that date, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; but these were mainly statuettes or fragments, quite different in character from the large-scale sculpture recovered in the main European excavations. When the New York kouros – a life-size sculpture, astonishingly complete – suddenly materialised, in mysterious circumstances, in 1932, ‘it seemed almost too good to be true’, as Richter later recalled, and was ‘accordingly suspected of not being authentic’.59 While doubts were resolutely quelled in this case, further controversies were inevitable as objects of uncertain provenance came into the market. The American institutions (including, from 1954, the Getty Museum in California)60 had enormous purchasing power, but they were latecomers to the game, and subject to the vagaries of the market, including its pressures for confidentiality; disputes both about the reliability of the objects’ provenances and about the legality of their acquisition are still simmering. Both reputable and illicit excavations, as well as chance finds that made their way into the antiquities market, yielded objects of multifarious kinds and dates – but archaic finds were conspicuous among them. For Wilenski, there was something suspicious about this. As he observed in his discussion with Ashmole, ‘nowadays museums admire archaic figures and want to buy them, and they also want to buy bronzes; and the discoveries nowadays tend to be either archaic figures or else bronzes – rescued from the sea. Don’t you think, Professor, that the coincidence is rather odd?’61 Late-nineteenth-century writers sometimes emphasised a mysterious element in the clustering of finds, as in this passage from Paris’s Manual: Happily, archaeological discoveries seem occasionally to obey some secret law of attraction. Hardly had attention been aroused by the discoveries of Delos, when monuments were pointed out from all parts which had scarcely been noticed before, and are strictly connected with the same type as well as the same period of Greek sculpture.62

The motif also appears repeatedly in Michaelis’s A Century of Archaeological Discoveries: first there is one striking find, then a host of others, similar in type, suddenly comes to light. There is of course a rational explanation, as Ashmole reminded Wilenski in their radio talk:

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What has always happened is that the things which people admired came into the market and the other things were just put on one side as of no interest or value. The books you like most are in the most accessible shelves; your set of eighteenth-century sermons, on the other hand, is tucked away at the top, in the dust, out of reach.63

But again Wilenski had forced Ashmole to concede too much: the rational explanation implies that archaeological discoveries do not initiate changes in taste; they are ‘just put on one side’ until some more fundamental cultural change has prepared the way for their appreciation. Had Wilenski chosen to pursue the point, he might have claimed that it was modern artists’ new interest in ‘archaic art generally’ that created the demand for archaic Greek sculptures, which archaeologists were only too happy to supply. Neither causal explanation is quite satisfactory, however, as Hulme would surely have pointed out. Which came first, the craving for archaic art-forms or the striking series of discoveries that revealed what preclassical art looked like? The empirical record is too complex to provide a clear answer to this question. For example, Maillol exhibited the plaster version of his compellingly simplified sculpture of a nude woman, Femme, at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1905 – the same exhibition that revealed the ‘Fauve’ works of Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck. Maillol’s sculpture prompted an article by the artist and theorist Maurice Denis, in which he described the sculptor as a ‘Primitif classique’.64 Later the figure, cast in bronze, became known as La Méditerranée (Fig. 38), hinting at its participation in an ancient tradition that embedded France in the Graeco–Roman world, and its clean outlines seem to recall such ancient prototypes as the pedimental figures from Olympia. But Maillol had not yet undertaken his journey to see the Greek originals when he exhibited his Femme, and Denis invokes a warrior from the Aegina pediment not as a comparison to the sculpture, but rather for its resemblance to Maillol’s own face, his ‘well-constructed forehead, straight nose, and rigid beard’.65 This suggests some deep affinity between Maillol and the early Greek sculptors, rather than any ‘influence’ of archaic sculpture on his work. As early as 1880 it had occurred to Walter Pater to propose early Greek art as a counterpoise to received notions of the Greek ideal, in

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38

Aristide Maillol, Femme (La Méditerranée), 1905 (plaster), bronze cast c. 1951–53.

a two-part essay called ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’. He begins with a critique of the conventional view: …students of antiquity have for the most part interpreted the creations of Greek sculpture, rather as elements in a sequence of abstract ideas, as embodiments, in a sort of petrified language, of pure thoughts, and as interesting mainly in connexion with the development of Greek intellect, than as elements of a sequence in the material order … Greek sculpture has come to be regarded as the product of a peculiarly limited art, dealing with a specially abstracted range of subjects; and the Greek sculptor as a workman almost exclusively intellectual, having only a sort of accidental connexion with the material in which his thought was expressed.66

Against this, Pater evokes the heroic age of Homer, a ‘world of material splendour, moulded clay, beaten gold, polished stone’.67 This is an even

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earlier Greek world than that of the archaic sculptures that would shortly be revealed in the Acropolis excavations, and it is one of sensuous richness and complexity, altogether unlike the austerity, ‘all dry and hard’,68 that would characterise the modernist view of the archaic. In 1880 Pater was obliged to conjure his vision of the earliest Greek art from descriptions of crafted objects in Homer, some of them imaginary or legendary – Achilles’s shield, the palace of Alcinous with its brazen walls – together with accounts of Heinrich Schliemann’s recent finds at Troy and Mycenae. He acknowledges the work of fantasy or imagination in creating a mental picture of the lost material world of the heroic age – ‘a period of which that flower of gold on a silver stalk, picked up lately in one of the graves of Mycenae, or the legendary golden honeycomb of Daedalus, might serve as the symbol’.69 In the event, the excavations of the next decades would uncover quite a different range of objects, monumental marble sculptures rather than the metalwork and ornament that Pater reimagined from literary descriptions. Nonetheless, Pater’s essay clearly adumbrates the fascination with ‘beginnings’ that would impel archaeologists to dig deeper on the Acropolis and elsewhere, and we shall see that his emphasis on sculptural materials also presages later developments. In his essay on the Aegina Marbles, published a month after the second instalment of ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, Pater sets up terms for revaluing the supposedly immature characteristics of early stone sculpture. To do so he makes repeated comparison to the arts of the pre-Renaissance: ‘As regards Italian art, the sculpture and paintings of the earlier Renaissance, the aesthetic value of this naïveté is now well understood; but it has its value in Greek sculpture also.’ And he concludes, ‘In a sort of stiff grace, combined with a sense of things bright or sorrowful directly felt, the Aeginetan workman is as it were the Chaucer of Greek sculpture.’70 The transhistorical comparisons suggest a way to reconsider stylistic features that had formerly seemed merely crude and underdeveloped in relation to the greater naturalism of mature classical sculpture. Perhaps, indeed, Pater is quietly rebuking Hegel for relegating the Aegina Marbles to an immature stage of development. Yet the engrained habit of regarding the Greek artistic achievement as a progressive advance in naturalism remained the most formidable

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obstacle to the recognition of archaic sculpture as valuable in its own right. In a book of 1900, translated into English in 1907 as The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, the German archaeologist Emmanuel Loewy confronted this problem head-on. The book is short, and its message is deceptively simple: the aim of the early Greek artists was not to imitate the ‘real appearance of objects’, but rather to reproduce, in the material form of artworks, the ‘mental images’ that human beings form to represent to themselves any objects of their attention. In place of Pater’s analogy between early Greek and medieval art, Loewy proposes a more comprehensive affinity among the arts of all ‘primitive’ peoples, both past and present. As Hulme would have appreciated, the constraints of the existing vocabulary and conceptual apparatus make it extremely difficult to avoid a note of condescension when speaking of ‘the primitive mind’, and Loewy does not attempt to argue that early art is superior to the naturalistic art of later ages. But it is exemplary in its demonstration of the psychic processes responsible for the basic human activity of forming images in the mind: ‘the more primitive the art, the more true is the rendering of the mental image.’71 Loewy was an experienced archaeologist, and by 1900 was able to illustrate an extensive range of archaic artefacts. His distinctive achievement, however, was to place this empirical material in a wholly new perspective by drawing on the formalist and psychological theories developed in the work of a broad range of art historians and aestheticians. Thus it is no coincidence that his interpretation of archaic art as altogether different in its aims from naturalistic art anticipates T.E. Hulme, who drew on the same intellectual tradition. Gisela Richter recalled that it was a series of lectures delivered by Loewy in Rome, when she was just 14, that inspired her to take up classical archaeology as a profession.72 In her major works on the archaic kouroi and korai, Richter continued to use the notion of a progressive advance in naturalism as the basic organising principle, and indeed this was not inconsistent with Loewy, who acknowledged the gradual replacement of the pure ‘mental image’ with naturalistic observation as art matured. Yet the high valuation of the New York kouros, at the very beginning of Richter’s chronological sequence (this object has pride of place as number one in her catalogue of kouroi), marks the achievement of a paradigm shift as momentous as the supposed modernist break with the past. Now

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the ‘beginnings of Greek sculpture’, in Pater’s phrase, could seem more valuable than the sophistication not just of the Apollo Belvedere, but even of Polykleitos and Lysippos, who remain more gingerly admired in today’s textbooks on Greek art. The archaic finds prove that Greek sculptors, like Wilenski’s modern sculptors, can be seen to have ‘begun at the beginning’: the archaic sculptors can be figured as the avant-garde of ancient art. In 1933 the Parisian critic and publisher Christian Zervos devoted an issue of his journal, Cahiers d’Art, to ‘L’Art Ancien Grec’. He notes the enthusiasm among artists and intellectuals of his generation for African and Polynesian sculpture, in contrast to which the Greek art of the classical period has come to seem tired and academic. He blames the art historians of the previous generation for regarding archaic art as immature, something to be skated over as quickly as possible to reach the perfection of the fifth century: ‘Thus, without positively falsifying Greek art, the historians have enfeebled it by showing it to us less daring in its inventions, less incisive, more rational than moving, stripped of the power and richness which are its essential elements.’73 This is close indeed to the argument Pater had made in ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, half a century earlier. Cahiers d’Art was a progressive art journal, widely circulated among the Parisian avant-garde, and Zervos believes that the ‘spiritual gymnastic’ undergone in recent art has opened the way for a new appreciation of archaic Greek art. After the introductory essay, the issue was composed of over two hundred photographs of early Greek art, from Neolithic terracottas and Cycladic figurines through to the korai of the Acropolis, entirely drawn from Greek collections (Zervos was Greek-born, and his text culminated in a eulogy of the Greek landscape). These were almost exclusively recent finds, notably including those from the French excavations at Delphi and Delos. As Roger Fry wryly observed when he reviewed the expanded book version published the next year, ‘In the whole book there are only two or three reproductions that would have been recognised by previous generations as belonging to the Greek art they admired.’74 Richter’s and Zervos’s books, published within half a decade of one another, both show that the dramatic revaluation of archaic art had come

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of age, but they do so in entirely different contexts: Richter’s at the centre of classical scholarship and museum connoisseurship, Zervos’s within the artistic milieu of the Parisian avant-garde (the book version included essays by such figures as Le Corbusier and Léger). Both books rely on the spectacular series of archaeological discoveries at Greek sites in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth. At the same time, though, they also depend on the new ways of thinking, and looking, developed among intellectuals, artists and theorists working within the distinctive ambiance of the early twentieth century that can loosely be called modernist. Thus far, we have seen the two worlds – that of archaeological research and discovery, and that of modernist theory and practice – coming into contact only at points that might be called tangential, through a common interest in German aesthetic theory, for example, or by way of analogy, as when Denis thought Maillol to resemble one of the Aegina warriors. But there was one area in which ancient and modern artistic practice could come into direct comparison: what Pater in 1880 called ‘the actual working of the stone’.75 With the Acropolis and similar finds, archaeologists at last had a repertoire of original marble sculptures – sculptures designed to be in stone, not translations of bronze originals into marble copies. There were even some sculptures in a state of partial completion, so that the marks of the tools could still be seen. Little wonder that scholars quickly began to scrutinise them for what they could reveal about Greek sculptural technique. As soon as 1890, Ernest Gardner published his findings on ‘The Processes of Greek Sculpture, as Shown by Some Unfinished Statues in Athens’, and they were unequivocal. The sculptures Gardner examined were ‘quite free-cut’ (the word immediately recalls Hildebrand’s ‘free cutting’):76 ‘Of the existence of a finished clay or plaster model, from which points were taken by a mechanical process to help its exact reproduction in marble, there is not the slightest indication. This fact is of great importance.’77 This is à propos a fourth-century sculpture, but it applies to sculptural technique down to that period, and Gardner’s first example is an unfinished ‘Apollo’. Unexpectedly, archaeology had provided a glorious confirmation of Winckelmann’s old notion of Greek freedom, of the most literal and tangible sort: the Greek sculptors of the earliest and best ages were revealed as free carvers.

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La taille directe ou la mort

When Wilenski asked ‘I believe I am right in saying that all the famous Greek sculptors were workers in bronze and not in marble?’ Ashmole did not hesitate to reply, ‘That is so’ (even though, as we saw in Chapter 2, it is an oversimplification; Praxiteles, for example, was equally famed as a marble sculptor).78 But the substantial chapter on technique in Richter’s The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks dealt above all with stone-carving – inevitably, as she freely admits, since her data derived almost exclusively from marble sculptures.79 Again, though, subsequent generations of students might be forgiven for assuming that marble was the characteristic medium of the ancient Greek sculptor; and indeed more recent works, such as Sheila Adam’s The Technique of Greek Sculpture in the Archaic and Classical Periods of 1966, continue to stress stone-cutting – Adam barely makes reference to bronze, and assumes her readers will know why. (As noted in Chapter 2, the Riace bronzes permitted a new attention to bronze technique, but they were not discovered until 1972.)80 Although there has been some debate about when mechanical reproductive processes were first introduced, a general consensus has prevailed over the long period since Ernest Gardner’s article of 1890: earlier Greek sculpture was directly carved, and copying by mechanical means from the clay model was a later development, indicating a more commercialised market for sculpture in the later centuries of antiquity, and particularly in Roman times.81 The hierarchy is moral as well as aesthetic, even in the driest of technical discussions. Direct carving means that the sculptor had artistic freedom, that he did his own work rather than relegating it to exploited assistants, and that the execution of the sculpture is consistent with its design, since both were thought through in relation to the marble block. Mechanical reproduction means that the sculptor who originated the design had easier work in making a clay model, and left the hard labour to subordinates who had no part in the creative process, so that the resulting work is bound to display routinised craftsmanship. Moreover, the process of design, which takes place through the additive process of moulding malleable clay, is fundamentally inconsistent with the subtractive carving technique used for the subsequent marble; the

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resulting work is a hybrid, attempting to mimic in carving what had been conceived in modelled form. Roman mass production of marble copies, whether derived from bronze or marble originals, adds to these other demerits the stigma of commercial greed. Direct carving also plays a crucial role in discussions of modernist sculpture, and here too moral considerations are wound in with aesthetic ones. Perhaps it was inevitable that sculptors of the next generation – many of whom had worked in Rodin’s own studio – should turn away from modelling in the effort to free themselves from the overwhelming influence of the master. The prestige of direct carving (‘taille directe’ in French) was enhanced, too, by the notorious Rodin forgery case of 1919. After the sculptor’s death in 1917, the problem of distinguishing between works carved to Rodin’s design in his own studio and ‘forgeries’ created by others became acute (since Rodin himself had not carved either type of work, the distinction was difficult to establish in legal terms).82 Somehow, the standard nineteenth-century practice for making marble sculptures, in which artisan carvers were employed to do the actual stone-cutting from the sculptor’s model, no longer seemed satisfactory. In fact the Rodin case was a late example of a series of controversies surrounding the practice: Canova had come under repeated criticism for leaving the work of carving to assistants; in the 1860s the American sculptor Harriet Hosmer was similarly accused; and an acrimonious libel case of 1882–84 in London revolved around the use of assistants in the studio of the sculptor R.C. Belt.83 Before the outbreak of the First World War a number of sculptors had taken up direct carving, and the practice was fully international: Eric Gill, the American-born Jacob Epstein and the Frenchman GaudierBrzeska were carving direct in London, while the Romanian Brancusi and the Italian Amedeo Modigliani, along with a number of their French contemporaries, were doing the same in Paris. In Germany, direct carving in wood was favoured among Expressionists such as Ernst Barlach and Ludwig Kirchner, with reference to German wood-carving traditions, and in New York Robert Laurent began to carve directly, first in wood, then in stone. Some of these sculptors came from artisanal backgrounds, or had been trained as stone-carvers, and prided themselves on their working-class affiliations. In an essay first published

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in 1917, Gill called for a ‘revolution’ in the economic and social relations of production, to be led by the working stone-carvers.84 This was just one of many manifesto statements published by the sculptors themselves, or by supporters who reported their views. Pound called GaudierBrzeska ‘a sculptor who held so much by his material, who never cut in one sort of stone a work more fitting another sort, and who cut direct’.85 Jacques Lipchitz later recorded the view held in progressive circles in Paris around 1913: ‘Modigliani, like some others at the time, was very taken with the notion that sculpture was sick, that it had become very sick with Rodin and his influence. There was too much modelling in clay, too much “mud”. The only way to save sculpture was to begin carving again, directly in stone.’ Joseph Bernard was quoted as saying, ‘The artist must understand and love stone, carve it himself, and not allow the modeller to come between it and his idea.’ Most pithily, a critic summarised Joachim Costa’s view: ‘La taille directe ou la mort’.86 By 1932, then, there was a well-established body of thinking on direct carving, which Wilenski was able to summarise in his chapter on ‘the modern sculptor’s creed’, in The Meaning of Modern Sculpture. According to Wilenski, the modern sculptors ‘hold that the carving should be done from start to finish by the sculptor himself and that it is most likely to have sculptural significance if the sculptor has worked without a full-size clay model’. He emphasises the fundamental difference between the ‘putting on’ and ‘taking off ’ concepts of modelling and carving respectively. Thus carvings made from clay models are aesthetically ‘hybrid’ or even ‘fakes – because they pretend to be the result of stone or marble concepts when they are really the result of concepts in clay’. That does not mean simply that the sculptor should respect the difference between modelled and carved work. Modelling, for Wilenski, is inherently inferior since it does not permit ‘collaboration between the sculpture and the substance’. Clay is merely ‘mud in process of becoming dust’, too flimsy and malleable to give inspiration to the sculptor and thus to enter into collaboration with ‘his idea’. Moreover the labour of carving stone has a special rectitude – Wilenski calls it ‘discipline’. The work is slow and difficult: Since in direct carving they cannot work rapidly, [the modern sculptors] tend to think of the substance as collaborating with themselves in the expression of deliberate and considered concepts of permanent

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and universal significance; as they work with substances which are permanent in character, and as they cannot improvise in carving, they find themselves concerned with concepts that in emotional quality tend to be grave, impersonal, controlled and sustained; and these tendencies seem to increase as the scale of resistance advances from wood to marble and from marble to the hardest stone.

Clay, by contrast, is the ‘ideal material for the naturalistic sculptor who aims at fashioning a work with meaning residing in its imitation of some particular physical objects or concrete things – the pretty breasts and buttocks, for example, of some healthy young woman’.87 The final comment raises the moral stakes: working in clay is meretricious not only because it is easy but also because it encourages eroticism of a similarly facile kind. Wilenski makes no explicit reference to the earthier sexuality found in the work of many of the modern sculptors, but the gendered language is consistent throughout the entire passage. The modern carvers are disciplined; they work with the hardest, most resistant materials; they use judgement rather than intuition or spontaneity – in short, they are aggressively male in every respect. Wilenski illustrates, with approving comment, one carving by Barbara Hepworth, whose work could cause difficulties for other critics who used the masculinist vocabulary of modernism. But the argument does not depend on the biological sex of the sculptor: if Hepworth is the lone example, in Wilenski’s book, of a woman who works in the masculine mode of carving, there are plenty of male sculptors who choose the effeminate route of modelling – modern academic sculptors and followers of Rodin, and of course the Greek masters of bronze. In Wilenski’s context, direct carving is a modernist practice, specifically opposed to the sculpture of the Greeks. But Wilenski needs the Greeks not just as effeminate modellers to pit against the virile modern carvers. The terms of his argument depend heavily on the dichotomy between carving and modelling that had been most fully developed in relation to debates about Roman marble copies of Greek bronzes. In later writing on modernist sculptural technique, this intellectual dependence would pass into oblivion, but in Wilenski’s text its traces are still obvious. Unwittingly, the archaeological connoisseurs had contributed a powerful element to the aesthetic demotion of the works they studied, through the very

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sophistication of the methods they had developed for detecting signs of modelling conception in carved copies. For them, as we saw in Chapter 2, these methods helped to establish the copies’ derivation from a work originally cast in bronze (and thus based on a clay model). Now, though, the same methods could be used to demonstrate the aesthetic inconsistency of any work carved in imitation of a clay or plaster model. Thus the controversy over Rodin could rebound on the ancients. If the aesthetic value of works carved by others from Rodin’s models could be called into question, then the same might apply to the marbles based on the bronze originals by Polykleitos, Lysippos and the others. Already in Richter’s Sculpture and Sculptors, the supposed copies of bronzes had lost status in relation to original marbles by anonymous Greek sculptors, and that trend has continued in more recent textbooks on Greek art. So strong was Wilenski’s antipathy to the ‘Greek prejudice’ that he refused to make an exception even for the original marbles by the archaic Greek sculptors. But it is obvious that the resonances of direct carving in the classicists’ accounts of archaic Greek sculpture are analogous to those in accounts of modernist sculpture, including Wilenski’s. Moreover, the two literatures were intertwined in the early twentieth century, although subsequent scholars have lost sight of the cross-references. Thus the art-historical literature on modernist sculpture often cites two books by Stanley Casson, Some Modern Sculptors of 1928 and XXth Century Sculptors of 1930; in the literature on Greek sculptural technique Casson is cited, instead, as the author of The Technique of Early Greek Sculpture of 1933, the first full-length book on the subject in English (following Carl Blümel’s monograph in German, Griechische Bidhauerarbeit of 1927). For Casson, a Reader in classical archaeology at Oxford, the two areas of study were clearly linked (and Oxford University Press published his books in both). The same was true of Gisela Richter, who acknowledged the assistance of her artist sister, Irma, in the preface to The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks.88 In her discussion of ‘simplification’, among ‘The General Characteristics of Greek Sculpture’, Richter observes, ‘The Greek sculptor felt that to translate the human body into a work of art he must harmonize the constant change and restlessness of nature and create a unity.’ The phrasing recalls Hildebrand’s The Problem of Form so strongly that the

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reader begins to suspect that Richter’s authority for this view came from modern sculptural theory rather than any ancient source, and this is confirmed three sentences later, when Richter appends a note to Hildebrand. She then applies Hildebrand’s formal test for a unified sculptural composition to her favourite archaic Apollo of Melos: if it were placed between two sheets of glass ‘the space occupied by the statue would be uniform; no part would unduly protrude; the whole figure is designed as a compact whole.’89 Thus Hildebrand’s universal theory informs Richter’s thinking on the characteristics of Greek sculpture, and he is cited again in her chapter on sculptural technique. Indeed the student would be forgiven for inferring that Hildebrand’s book was a scholarly study of Greek sculpture, rather than a general treatise on aesthetics; it appears in the bibliography under the heading ‘General Works on Greek Sculpture’.90 Hildebrand’s advocacy of direct carving must, then, be accounted an influence on the interpretation of Greek carving techniques in classical scholarship, as well as on the practice of direct carving in modernist sculpture. But the link is not just a matter of a common source. Richter notes that she gained ‘a new insight’ into her own subject by attending the stone-cutting classes of Robert Laurent, the leading American exponent of direct carving, at the Art Students’ League in New York.91 When discussing the perplexed question of whether the Greek sculptors made use of clay models, she observes in a footnote: Personally I hesitate to assume large, carefully worked out models for the reason admirably stated by the English sculptor, Eric Gill…: ‘It is not desirable to make exact models in clay, because the sort of thing which can be easily and suitably constructed in clay may not be, and generally is not suitable for carving in stone…Modeling is a process of addition; whereas carving is a process of subtraction. The proper modeling of clay results in a certain spareness and tenseness of form and any desired amount of “freedom” or detachment of parts. The proper carving of stone results in a certain roundness and solidity of form with no detachment of parts. Consequently a model made to be full size of the proposed carving would be, if modeled in a manner natural to clay, more of an hindrance than a help to the carver, and would be labour, and long labour in vain…The finished work is not a piece of carving but a stone imitation of a clay model.’

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Richter ends the note with a comment of her own: ‘Greek Sculptures all seem “thought out” in stone.’92 In The Meaning of Modern Sculpture, Wilenski repeatedly quoted Richter’s book, contemptuously, as ‘propaganda’ for the ‘Greek prejudice’;93 but his views on direct carving were very close indeed to hers. Texts such as Casson’s and Richter’s suggest that it would be reasonable to look for considerable cross-fertilisation between the ideologies of direct carving developed in relation to Greek and modernist sculpture, respectively. Yet many of the modernist direct carvers preferred instead to stress analogies between their work and primitive or folk-art traditions, medieval or Indian sculpture – anything but ‘those damn Greeks’. Thus the recent scholarly literatures on sculptural modernism and Greek sculpture discuss direct carving without reference to one another; the links that seemed natural to Richter and Casson have disappeared from view. Perhaps that is because such links come into conflict with a powerful received idea, one which the soberest of scholars share with Wilenski: modernism is invariably defined as anti-academic in its very essence, while Greek sculpture remains overwhelmingly associated with academic authority. We have already seen that Pater, as early as 1880, attempted a counterargument to this ‘academic’ view of Greek sculpture, and he did so by calling attention to what might be described, in Wilenski’s phrase, as the ‘collaboration’ between the sculptor and his material. According to the received tradition that Pater is criticising, the Greek sculptor is fancied to have been disdainful of such matters as the mere tone, the fibre or texture, of his marble or cedar-wood, of that just perceptible yellowness, for instance, in the ivory-like surface of the Venus of Melos; as being occupied only with forms as abstract almost as the conceptions of philosophy, and translateable it might be supposed into any material – a habit of regarding him still further encouraged by the modern sculptor’s usage of employing merely mechanical labour in the actual working of the stone.94

At this date, Pater would not have been able to draw on archaeological evidence that early Greek sculptors carved direct. Nonetheless, he clearly outlines the logic for an ‘anti-academic’ view of Greek sculpture based on the sculptor’s engagement with his material, and opposed to

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the modern practice of mechanical reproduction, with its assumption that the design can simply be ‘translated’ from one material to another. By the time of the Egoist debate, in 1914, Pater had come to be regarded as a representative of academic orthodoxy on Greek sculpture, and he was cited in that role by both Pound and Aldington.95 Nonetheless, Gaudier-Brzeska’s defence of direct carving, à propos the work of Epstein, Brancusi and Ossip Zadkine (as well as his own), echoes Pater’s ‘anti-academic’ view: ‘The sculpture I admire is the work of master craftsmen. Every inch of the surface is won at the point of the chisel – every stroke of the hammer is a physical and a mental effort. No more arbitrary translations of a design in any material.’96 By 1914 the word ‘translation’ had become so thoroughly naturalised in debates about fidelity to materials that it could be forgotten that it was Pater who had given it this association, in the opening sentence of his essay of 1877 on ‘The School of Giorgione’: ‘It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting – all the various products of art – as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting; of sound, in music; of rhythmical words, in poetry.’97 It should be noted that in the passage quoted above Pater speaks of Greek sculpture in general, and even chooses an example – the Venus de Milo – that no one thought pre-classical (although, as discussed in Chapter 1, its precise date was disputed). No doubt Pater’s larger aim was to combat the ‘academic’ view of Greek sculpture generally. Nonetheless, the essay initiates the project by imagining ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’ as a counterpoise to received ideas based on later Greek sculpture. The archaeological discoveries of the next decades created the possibility, at least, that Greek archaic sculpture could be seen as anti-academic on the same terms as modernist sculpture – that is, because it was directly carved, and thus opposed to the ‘academic’ practice of mechanical reproduction from a clay model (whether in later ancient work or in modern ‘academic’ sculpture). That possibility is already adumbrated in E.A. Gardner’s article of 1890: ‘the process followed in making [the archaic Greek sculpture] is precisely that followed by a beginner in sculpture now – or at any time

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– when he has to set to work on a rectangular block of marble and to hew a statue out of it.’98 Stone-carving here appears as a universal mode of creative expression, and the same assumption is still in play in Adam’s book of 1966 on Greek sculptural technique. A corollary assumption is that the carver’s tools – the punch and mallet for preliminary blocking out, then a range of chisels and rasps, and abrasives for giving the final polish – have been unchanged in essentials since antiquity. Writers on Greek sculptural technique from Gardner through Blümel and Casson to Adam reinforce this assumption with schematic line drawings of tools. Casson acknowledges that the archaeological evidence for Greek tools is ‘of extreme rarity’ (indeed, he recounts an anecdote in which Charles Newton orders the disposal of ancient tools discovered by Flinders Petrie at Naukratis since ‘they were ugly things’ – amusing proof of Ashmole’s rational explanation, quoted above, for why archaeological discoveries only come to notice when they are valued).99 Although a greater number of ancient tools has been discovered and preserved since Casson’s time, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that the line drawings represent standard types of tool rather than specific Greek artefacts (Casson himself acknowledges that many of his drawings are based on modern tools). The drawings look like scientific or technical illustrations, and no doubt they strive to present economically such data as are available about ancient tools. Nonetheless, they resemble modern sculptural tools, and reinforce the sense that stone-carving is a universal creative practice, unchanged in its essentials since time immemorial. In fact what is oddest about Gardner’s claim is not that the ancients were already using the procedure he describes for hewing stone, but rather that modern sculptors were still doing so: in 1890, high-art sculptures were not ordinarily free-carved. The usual practice was the one to which Pater referred: to make a full-scale model in clay, then to cast it in plaster and cover it with ‘points’ or ‘puntelli’. With the aid of a mechanical pointing machine the three-dimensional positioning of the points was transferred by drilling into the marble block to the appropriate depth for each one. Then the artisan carver could simply cut away the excess stone to the depth of the drill holes; the final polishing might (although it need not) be done by the sculptor who had designed the clay model, and who took credit for authorship of the finished sculpture.

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Gardner himself refers to this process as characteristically Roman, and used in modern times; it is rather the ‘beginner in sculpture’ who uses the same technical procedure as the archaic Greek carver. And that procedure turns out to be very similar indeed to the one Hildebrand would recommend in The Problem of Form, published three years later. The sculptor makes a drawing on the face of the block, then cuts directly, using the drawing – but emphatically not a clay model – as a guide. Gardner’s archaic sculptor cuts back from the two side planes as well as the front, whereas Hildebrand advocates working systematically from front to back, but both assume that the back plane remains intact until the very end of the process.100 Where did Gardner get his assumption that modern beginners worked in this way? Perhaps he is describing a method used for training stone-carvers, but these would have been workmen, not academically trained sculptors. In 1913, when the Cambridge archaeologist Charles Waldstein (another target of Wilenski’s ire) lectured to the students of the Royal Academy on ‘Greek Sculpture and Modern Art’, he still took it for granted that their practice would be in modelling.101 Thus the modernist practice of direct carving was anti-academic in the literal sense that it could not be learned in an academy of art; Robert Laurent’s classes at the Art Students’ League in the mid-1920s were innovative, and the more traditional art schools did not offer instruction in stone-carving. A photograph of Gaudier-Brzeska shows him with the large block of marble he used to carve his outsize portrait head of Ezra Pound; the design is drawn in bold lines on its face (Fig. 39). Gaudier is positioned, mallet in hand, working on the back face of the block while the front is still largely uncut, contrary to the procedure of either Gardner or Hildebrand. Perhaps this was a pose for the photograph, designed simply to give a good view of both sculptor and block; alternatively, it may indicate that Gaudier, who was self-taught, was improvising rather than working to a system. Interestingly, the marble chosen by Pound and Gaudier for the portrait was Pentelic, the marble of the Parthenon sculptures, imported from Greece. Whether in earnest or parody, Gaudier, the ‘beginner in sculpture’, was measuring himself against Pheidias. As noted above, some of the modernist direct carvers were trained as artisan stone-cutters; others were really beginners in their craft, and the

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bold simplifications of their work owed something to their lack of skill. This might be seen as analogous to the archaic Greek sculptors, at the beginning of a sculptural tradition (although it must be admitted that the archaic carvers were far more skilled than their modern counterparts, at least in their early essays). In other words, the modernist direct carvers, with their ethos of working-class integrity, and the archaic direct carvers whose names had been lost to the historical record can be seen as brothers in their respective beginnings in sculpture. And both can be seen in opposition to academic orthodoxy, although with different chronologies – the archaic sculptors because the academic system had not yet been codified, the modernists because they repudiated it. In both cases the anti-academic logic asserts a materialist practice, based on direct carving, against the presumed idealism of academic tradition. Gill makes this explicit: ‘The artist is not trained to be a stonecarver, the stone-carver is not, or is not thought to be, an artist. The artist, therefore, becomes a mere designer, the stone-carver a mere



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Photograph by Walter Bennington of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska working on the bust of Ezra Pound, 1914.

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executant – the one losing himself in idealism, the other in technical dexterity.’102 But that is a false idealism, and when Gill exhorts stonecarvers to take control of the entire process he means that they should unite their materialist skills with universal values that have a strong Platonic cast: ‘By the word “Beauty” I do not mean merely the loveliness of the earth or of living things, but that absolute entity which, like Goodness and Truth is apprehended by conscience.’103 For Wilenski, too, the sculptural material is one half of a collaboration, the other half of which is the sculptor’s ‘idea’, and the result is something ‘universal and permanent’. He also quotes the sonnet by Michelangelo: ‘The finest artist has no concept which the marble alone does not contain within itself.’104 A number of modernist sculptors took up the mystical notion of some spiritual content imprisoned within the block, which it is the sculptor’s mission to free.105 Some critics have seen these invocations of universal or spiritual value as regrettable lapses into outmoded habits of idealist thinking, but that is to miss the radicalism of placing a material practice at the conceptual centre of thinking about art, Greek as well as modern. If Richter thought that Laurent’s classes in stone-cutting could help her to understand her ancient objects of study, that implies an assumption that carving is a universal form of human creativity – but it also involves an entirely new understanding of Greek sculpture as a material practice, just what Pater had called for in 1880 to combat ‘idealist’ interpretations of Greek art. By a complementary process, direct carving could be valued in modernist circles not merely as an anti-academic technical method, but as a universal aesthetic principle that, perhaps paradoxically, might be translated into other media. Gaudier and Pound differed from Aldington on the value of Greek sculpture, but not on carving as an aesthetic principle. Aldington’s article on ‘Modern Poetry and the Imagists’, published in the Egoist on 1 June 1914, enumerates ‘the fundamental doctrines’ of this modernist group. No 3 reads, ‘A hardness, as of cut stone. No slop, no sentimentality. When people say that Imagist poems are “too hard”, “like a white marble monument”, we chuckle; we know that we have done something good.’106 Perhaps the thought goes back to Théophile Gautier’s poem of 1857, ‘L’Art’:

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Oui, l’oeuvre sort plus belle D’une forme au travail Rebelle, Vers, marbre, onyx, émail. … Sculpte, lime, cisèle; Que ton rêve flottant Se scelle Dans le bloc résistant!107

It also looks forward to the great twentieth-century critic Adrian Stokes, for whom carving and modelling become permanent tendencies, like Worringer’s abstraction and empathy or Hulme’s geometrical and vital art, in a new version of psychological aesthetics informed by the work of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. For Stokes, ‘carving conception’ can be found not only in the sculptures of Barbara Hepworth and Agostino di Duccio, but in the paintings of Cézanne and Piero della Francesca and in such other media as architecture, poetry and dance. This is a universal principle, which Stokes eventually equates with the Kleinian depressive position, when the developing child becomes able to disengage her or his own identity from that of the mother, just as the carver is able to respect the material alterity of the stone. But the psychoanalytic extension of the idea, in Stokes’s writing after the Second World War, depends on his initial theorisation of carving in such early texts as Stones of Rimini of 1934. There, carving is already distinguished from modelling (‘plastic conception’, in Stokes’s terminology) by virtue of its acceptance of the otherness of the stone: Whatever its plastic value, a figure carved in stone is fine carving when one feels that not the figure, but the stone through the medium of the figure, has come to life. Plastic conception, on the other hand, is uppermost when the material with which, or from which, a figure has been made appears no more than as so much suitable stuff for this creation.108

If carving can eventually encompass any art-form, at any historical period, and even the universal processes of human psychological development, in Stokes’s later writing, that is not because it has somehow become ideal or dematerialised. On the contrary, it is precisely its material manifestation in stone that enables its wider resonances.

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Modernist art theories, then, could combine the new emphasis on materials with Platonic or universalist resonances, without losing their anti-academic credentials. In principle the same ought to have been the case with ancient direct carving, and some modernist critics and sculptors were willing to list archaic Greek sculpture, at least, among the sculptural practices they found consistent with their own. But these acknowledgements seem timid in comparison with the stirring denunciations of Greek art by such as Pound and Gaudier-Brzeska, and they have largely been forgotten in the secondary literature on modernist sculpture. Was the received idea about the academicism of Greek sculpture too strong to be challenged, even by the kouroi and korai? As we have already seen, Richter’s Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks emphasised the aesthetic continuity between archaic sculpture and the sculpture of the classical period that had traditionally held the highest status. Perhaps she should be charged with ‘academicising’ archaic sculpture in her very zeal to promote it. Yet that may be to underestimate the impact of the archaic sculptures, and indeed the continuing importance of ideas about Greek sculpture in general, which may be all the more potent when they generate conflict, rather than deference. If the vitality of early modernist debate about Greek sculpture has been forgotten in the subsequent literature, that may be because it was overtaken dramatically by events.

Ancient Sculpture and Modern Politics

Adolf Hitler’s campaign to acquire the prime version of the Discobolos was at first resisted by the Italian authorities; finally, though, German persistence won out, and in 1938 the sculpture was installed in the Glyptothek in Munich. Following the defeat of the Nazi regime, in a bizarre reprise of the restoration of Napoleon’s looted sculptures over a century earlier, the Discobolos was returned to Rome in 1948.109 In the meantime, though, it served as the exemplary Greek athlete in a German environment where physical culture and classicising sculpture made twin adjuncts to authoritarian politics. Leni Riefenstahl’s spectacular film about the Berlin Olympics of 1936 begins with a shot of the Discobolos,

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which dissolves into an image of the decathlete Erwin Huber in the identical pose.110 The stadium for those Olympic games featured new sculptures of athletes by German sculptors, in limestone and still reminiscent of the ‘archaic’ simplifications of early modernist sculpture, but the monumental bronze figures commissioned thereafter in conjunction with official building projects shifted the emphasis towards a more classical ideal for the body.111 Two exhibitions held in Munich in 1937 defined the twin poles of Nazi policy on the visual arts: violent hostility towards German Expressionism and other forms of modernism, held up to ridicule in the exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), and encouragement for new German art in which classical reference was conspicuous, seen in the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition), the first in an annual series that continued until 1944. While it may seem strange that the Nazi regime did not do more to promote German myth and history as subject-matter for the visual arts, another issue was paramount: the representation of the attractive, physically fit human figure, associated with Greek sculpture, and pitted explicitly against the figure types of modernism, denigrated as deformed, distorted or ugly.112 It is easy to detect signs of Nazi racial theory, not just in the denunciations of Jewish modernist artists, but more insidiously in the preference for figure types that conflate features defined as ‘pure’ Aryan with a form of neoclassicism. In his speech for the opening of the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung Hitler spoke not of a classical revival in art, but rather of a union of ancient and modern bodily beauty, closely linked to physical fitness: Never was Mankind closer than now to Antiquity in its appearance and its sensibilities. Sport, contests and competition are hardening millions of youthful bodies, displaying them to us more and more in a form and temper that they have neither manifested nor been thought to possess for perhaps a thousand years. A radiantly beautiful human type is growing up…

This human type is threatened by the figures of modernist art: ‘Deformed cripples and cretins, women who look merely loathsome, men who resemble beasts rather than humans, children that if encountered in real life would be viewed as a curse of God.’ Hitler’s is a ‘humanist’ vision, of a kind; it promotes a ‘vital art’ and commands the viewer to experience

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it as ‘natural’: ‘A walk through the Exhibition will allow you to find much that once again strikes you as beautiful, and above all decent, and that you will consider good.’113 Mussolini’s regime was not as hostile to modernism, but it also took up classical reference as an instrument of power politics. Sixty over-lifesized marble sculptures of freestanding figures adorned the Stadio dei Marmi in the Foro Mussolini north of Rome, inaugurated in 1932. In the Mostra Augustea della Romanità, an exhibition held to celebrate the two thousandth birthday of Augustus in 1937, a collection of sculptural fragments and two thousand plaster casts was assembled to demonstrate the seamless continuity of Roman achievement from Augustus to Mussolini. An inscription over the front entrance read: ‘Italians, let the glories of the past be superseded by the glories of the future.’114 This is a ‘modernist’ message, of a kind. The uses made of classical reference in Fascist and National Socialist contexts are routinely described as ‘appropriations’ in the scholarly literature.115 The word implies a usurpation of the classical tradition, a manipulation or perversion of it to modern ends – yet it is not strong enough to dispel the horrifying associations of twentieth-century totalitarianism. If Hitler loved ancient sculpture, surely there must be something rotten about it; a fortiori there must be something inherently corrupt about modern appropriations of the classical past. An allegorical statue by Arno Breker, representing The Party and commissioned in 1938 for the courtyard of the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin, makes a test case (Fig. 40). The figure is instantly recognisable as a nude male athlete in the tradition of Myron and Polykleitos; the idealised body forms, contrapposto stance, clearly marked musculature and smoothly polished surface make clear reference to the sculptures attributed in the nineteenth century to the Greek masters, often by German scholars. On closer examination, though, the statue begins to look less classical. Superficially the contrapposto is like that of the Doryphoros (Fig. 24). Somehow, though, it is both more rigid and more diffuse. Not only would a plumb line from the clavicular notch to the inside of the weightbearing ankle fall dead straight; the centre line never deviates from a strict verticality quite unlike the rhythmic sway of the Doryphoros around its central axis. Yet the free leg dangles in odd contrast to the

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rigid centre line, and the wide-flung arms strike an almost balletic pose, more extreme than the Apollo Belvedere. Strangest of all are the proportions, uncanonical in the extreme. The exaggerated breadth of the shoulders contracts dizzyingly below the arms to a cinched-in waist and slim hips, to make the torso form an inverted triangle; these are the proportions of comic-book characters, Superman or the Incredible Hulk, not the ‘quadratus’ of Polykleitos. The pectoral muscles and the nipples of the breast are unnaturally high, level with the armpits rather than one-third of the way down the torso as in the Doryphoros. Perhaps this helps to emphasise the breadth of the shoulders, but the sense of physical strength is counteracted by the resulting diminution in the vertical unit of measure; the whole torso is composed of six smaller vertical units rather than three grander ones (the nipped waist is also uncanonically low-down, leaving the lower abdomen oddly short). The statue is very big, but its internal divisions are mincing. If the statue repels us, is that because we are aware of its distasteful political function, or because of the way it represents the nude male body?



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Arno Breker, The Party, 1939, bronze, formerly New Reich Chancellery, Berlin (destroyed).

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And if the latter, is it because it is too slavish in its classicism, or not classical enough? These questions remain difficult to answer, more than half a century after Hitler’s downfall. And once the questions have been raised with respect to the official art of the Nazi state, they must also be asked of classicising projects that do not have such obvious political affiliations. Take another (nearly) nude male figure, the standing figure in The Pipes of Pan from 1923, at the height of what has been called ‘Picasso’s classical period’ (Fig. 41).116 Here there is a hint of the archaic kouros, with arms to sides; the contrapposto is just as normative as that of Breker’s statue, and indeed the divisions of the torso are much closer to those of the Doryphoros. The turn of the head towards the weightbearing leg and the almond-shaped eyes help to give a greater sense of the unified human subjectivity for which the classical ideal is traditionally renowned than the symmetrical frontality and impassive features of the Breker. Despite the ‘modernist’ simplification of form, quite extreme in this example, Picasso’s figure can reasonably be described as the more classical. But does that make it better, aesthetically, or does it only link it to the authoritarian tradition of academic classicism? Picasso’s turn to classical sculptural form in the years after 1917 has been seen in the context of a more widespread return to figuration in the



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Pablo Picasso, The Pipes of Pan, 1923.

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period of the First World War and its aftermath, interpreted in influential texts by such art historians as Kenneth Silver and Benjamin Buchloh as an ignominious retreat from the critical project of pre-war modernism, complicit at some level with the right-wing politics of the nationalist Action Française (in Silver’s account) or a more generalised European environment of growing authoritarianism and repression (in Buchloh’s). Thus Expressionism in Germany yielded to Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’), Italian Futurism to Pittura Metafisica, Cubism to a rappel à l’ordre (‘recall to order’) in France, and Barcelona Modernism to Noucentisme, with its strong links to Catalan nationalism. The more extreme capitulation to traditional classicism of the National Socialist and Fascist regimes lurks ominously close. These texts raise again the complex of problems explored in Hulme’s ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’: the relationship between art and the ‘general attitude’ of the world in which it is made, and how that might intersect with the way a new art relates to the art of the past. Both Silver and Buchloh take it for granted that the two questions are neatly aligned, and that conservatism in its basic sense of attachment to the past, to tradition, or (in Hulme’s phrase) to what is ‘natural to you’ works the same way in both areas. Thus any art that refers to the classical tradition (however that is understood) is conservative in the same way as a politics that calls for a return to traditional values (however those are understood). Buchloh repeatedly couples the word ‘classicism’ with the adjective ‘authoritarian’, to enforce the point. Another favourite phrase, ‘the myth of a new classicism’,117 seems at first thought self-deconstructing: if the new classicism were a myth, then it could scarcely play the role Buchloh attributes to it, of sustaining a political authoritarianism that is all too real. The phrase makes sense only on the assumption that what is mythical is the notion that any classicism could be new. Classicism would then be old by definition, and any artistic use of it could only be conservative in the basic sense of looking backwards. That view provides no way to differentiate between the classicisms of Breker and Picasso: both must be understood as fundamentally conservative, regardless of the conscious intentions, or actual political affiliations, of either artist. Many of the works cited by Buchloh have more obvious affiliations with the Italian Renaissance or the post-Renaissance academic tradition

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than with ancient art, and it might be argued that the notion of ‘classicism’ in these texts is simply too vague to sustain the weight of political responsibility it is asked to bear. Indeed the notion threatens to collapse simply into anything involving figuration. For Buchloh, both the Ingresque portrait drawing of the poet Max Jacob made by Picasso in 1915 and the same artist’s Three Musicians of 1921, in Synthetic Cubist mode, are examples of ‘authoritarian classicism’.118 It would be a short step to lump the latter together with the three classical goddesses seen in German representations of The Judgement of Paris, a favourite subject in the period of National Socialism. But Buchloh is more concerned to accuse the modernists of betraying the cause; his examples include works by artists as diverse as the former Italian Futurists Gino Severini and Carlo Carrà, the former Cubist Francis Picabia, the former Dadaist Christian Schad, the former Suprematist Kasimir Malevich, and the former Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko. This delivers a terrifying moral warning: anyone, no matter how radical, may regress into ‘authoritarian classicism’. Simply to charge anything figurative with ‘authoritarian classicism’, however, is modeller’s work, moulding mud into any shape that pleases for the moment. Buchloh’s moment, it should be added, is 1981. The impetus for his historical excursus is the new return of his own period to figuration in the art that was beginning to be called ‘postmodern’, which Buchloh sees as potentially complicit with a new phase of political repression (he assumes his readers will know what he means, but a quarter-century later it may be necessary to remind readers that Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980, and Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the general election of 1979). This kind of political criticism was exciting in 1981. Nonetheless, Buchloh’s argument and that of Silver in his book of 1989 resemble Wilenski’s in the paranoia with which they detect a conservative conspiracy in any twentieth-century classicism. The homogenising tendency of such views has been criticised by recent scholars, along with the circumstantial character of the supposed link between returns to figuration in art and conservative politics in the world around it.119 Another crucial problem, from our perspective, is that such views depend on naïve theories of classical reception. To divide

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twentieth-century art between a forward-looking modernism and a retrogressive classicism is merely to repeat the polarisation of Entartete Kunst and the Grosse Deutsche Ausstellung, even if the valuejudgements are reversed; and the equation of classicism with conservatism depends ultimately on a belief in a seamless classical tradition like that of the Mostra Augustea della Romanità. Neither the simplified polarity nor the notion of a seamless classical tradition can be empirically demonstrated, except on a very selective view of the evidence. Just before the First World War T.E. Hulme (usually seen, with some oversimplification, as a political conservative) proclaimed: ‘I want to maintain that after a hundred years of romanticism, we are in for a classical revival’120 – but his classicism, ‘all dry and hard’, with a ‘tendency to abstraction’, corresponds closely to the ‘modernist’ aesthetic preferences of Buchloh and Silver. Malevich’s Black Square of 1913, a work that for Buchloh epitomises the critical potential of modernism, might as easily be described as a classicism in its exemplification of the absolute beauty, based on geometric figures, of the Philebus, as well as in its foundational significance for modern art. And if the totalitarian regimes could bend ancient sculpture to their purposes, the Winckelmannian possibility of seeing Greek art as emancipatory could also be revived. Zervos, for example, argued in 1933 that the example of archaic Greek art could lead to a better politics, indeed a new ethics in which the elitist antagonism between individual and society would give way to a ‘collective conscience’ like that of the early Greeks, rooted in the life of the people.121 This is linked to the ideals of modern socialism or Communism, to which many of the artists associated with returns to classicism subscribed (both Léger and Picasso, for example, joined the Communist party at the end of the Second World War). Perhaps it is the case that the flaunting of ancient sculpture by the totalitarian regimes discredited it for a time. While further research is certainly needed, it may be that the years from 1945 through to the 1960s represent the lowest ebb for classical reference in modern art since the Renaissance. Nonetheless, Barnett Newman, shortly after proclaiming Greek beauty ‘the bugbear of European art and European aesthetic philosophies’, gave the Latin title Vir Heroicus Sublimis to a major painting of 1950–51, in a pattern of simultaneous disavowal and recuperation that

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strongly recalls the period of early modernist experimentation. From a longer perspective, the brief moment of the Fascist and Nazi appropriations of ancient sculpture appears an eccentric episode. Buchloh’s mistrust of returns to representation in the art of about 1980 now appears decidedly conservative in its turn. No one argues that competitive sports or physical fitness have been irrevocably tainted by the Nazi and Fascist enthusiasm for them; why should ancient sculpture fare differently? In short, neither political nor artistic conservatism can provide a powerful, or even an adequate, explanation for the constant recurrence of classical reference in twentieth-century art – or indeed for the continuing fascination of such ancient sculptures as the Discobolos or the New York kouros. It seems unlikely, in fact, that much edification is to be derived from such vague notions as ‘conservatism’ or ‘classicism’; in that respect, the political flag-waving of the 1980s has little more critical purchase than the blandest approbation for ‘the classical tradition’. If we find we can make no progress with generalities, then perhaps we should reorient the enquiry, to explore instead the specific roles given to ancient sculptures in the work of the modernist artist who recurred to them most compulsively, Pablo Picasso.

Picasso and Ancient Sculpture

Picasso began his artistic training in the time-honoured manner, by drawing from casts of ancient sculptures; in this respect, indeed, his education in minor Spanish art schools was somewhat retardataire. In the absence of the other influences that engaged art students in the major art capitals, Picasso’s early training was based more exclusively on ancient sculpture (or, rather, on the art-school repertoire of casts), and by the age of thirteen or fourteen he was as good as any artist in the post-Renaissance tradition at drawing ancient sculptures. A work such as his study of a cast of the Belvedere Torso made in the 1890s is, quite simply, a marvel of skill in a tradition of academic drawing that was already of the past in the avant-garde circles of the capital cities (Fig. 42). That fact is ordinarily mentioned in studies of Picasso, throughout the whole spectrum of writing on the artist from the most traditional

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life-and-works biography to the most daring revisionist account. And throughout the whole spectrum, too, it is narrativised consistently as a stage to be overcome.122 The modernist break takes extreme form in Picasso’s work, something that is visually obvious whenever the early drawings from casts are juxtaposed with any of the works Picasso made in the years immediately after 1900, which could appear simply crude or childlike to some among their early audiences. Even though this first reception began quickly to seem inadequate, it is worth attention. There is something spectacular, not to mention perverse, about Picasso’s willed jettisoning of a certain kind of skill, the kind honed by drawing after ancient sculpture. The change is as dramatic as the early medieval rejection of classical refinement and sophistication, but much more violent and sudden – it takes less than a decade. The initial, shocked reception marks the new work’s collision with the expectations of its audience, which are then transformed in a textbook example of the Jaussian chain of receptions. A century later, our horizon of expectations easily accommodates Picasso’s work of the



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Pablo Picasso, Study of Belvedere Torso (Fig. 3), 1892–93.

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early twentieth century; its ‘historical significance’ and ‘aesthetic value’ have been established. The process of reception would seem to have made good the break that the works initially proposed. Modernist experimentation has won out over classical training, and ancient sculpture has been superseded by modern painting. Thus Picasso’s work is, by itself, sufficient to stand for the birth moment of modernism, the decisive and irrevocable break with the classical tradition. The problem is that the break turned out to be anything but irrevocable. At regular intervals, Picasso returned to classical sculptural form. This happened, notably, in what has been called his ‘First Classical Period’ of 1905–6, again in the ‘rappel à l’ordre’ of the First World War and its aftermath, and yet again in connection with the exploration of classical mythology in the Surrealist period of the 1930s. At other moments he turned to making actual sculptures, and even in his later work episodes of flatness and angularity alternate regularly with recursions to volumetric ‘sculptural’ forms. We have already seen that some historians have elided these recursions with the periodic returns to figuration in the wider artistic context, cast as a betrayal of the modernist project and linked to external pressures that reasserted the conservative values of order, tradition or nationalism. But the timeframes do not move in concert: cataclysmic as the events of twentieth-century political history are, they proceed in slow motion when compared with the dizzying sequence of changes in Picasso’s work. A more cogent explanation might cast the oscillations in Picasso’s practice as complementary aspects of a modernist critique that addresses sculpture as well as painting, twin foundations of the Western artistic tradition equally to be challenged. In that case, Picasso’s student drawings might be something more than a stage to be overcome. The artistic problem they posed – how to represent three-dimensional volumes on a two-dimensional surface – can be seen to motivate his subsequent explorations both ‘modernist’ and ‘classical’. If Winckelmann’s observations about the complex sequencing of planes in the Belvedere Torso are recalled, Picasso’s student drawing might even be seen as an ‘influence’ on the development of Cubism, just as important as the example of Cézanne.123 Alternatively, the frequent returns to sculptural form might be seen as exploring the modernist break from the other

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side. Picasso enacts, within his own practice, the conflict about ‘those damn Greeks’ played out in the pages of the Egoist in 1914. So wide-ranging, indeed, is Picasso’s work of the early decades of the twentieth century that it can be used to exemplify any of the grand narratives that historians have proposed, or might propose, for how modernism relates to the classical tradition. These include, of course, total rejection; they also include seamless continuity. Anthony Blunt (not notably an advocate of right-wing politics) had no qualms about making Picasso the inheritor of the European classical tradition, in an article of 1968 entitled ‘Picasso’s Classical Period’: ‘We may, therefore, see Picasso as the last representative of a tradition which includes many of the greatest names in European art, and it is legitimate to suppose that he himself was conscious of this link.’124 Blunt’s method of supporting this assertion is of a kind that has come in the intervening period to seem old-fashioned or ‘connoisseurial’: ‘it may be of interest’, he says by way of introduction, ‘to analyse the classical elements in these works and to associate them with specific sources’.125 This is accomplished primarily through comparative illustration: the text is quite short (just two pages of the Burlington Magazine), but its primary data are displayed in 20 illustrations. The ratio of illustration to text is dramatically higher than more recent art-historical conventions (and publishers’ budgets) permit, and indicates that the argument rests overwhelmingly on visual resemblances between the modern works and their putative ‘sources’. The interpretative leap is a big one: Blunt and his editors assume that minimal verbiage is needed to make the bridge between the raw visual data provided by the illustrations and the grand claim that Picasso is ‘the last representative of a tradition which includes many of the greatest names in European art’. Blunt’s contention is more interesting, though, than the outmoded assertion of canonical orthodoxy it first appears to be, and not least because the data prove uncooperative in substantiating it. His most secure data point is a drawing of 1920 of a female head resting on a hand with splayed fingers (Fig. 43), clearly a quotation from the figure usually identified as Arcadia in a fresco from Herculaneum known as Hercules and Telephus (Fig. 44), which Picasso must have seen when he visited Naples in 1917. The same figure is the obvious source for the similar

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gesture of Ingres’s Madame Moitessier of 1856 – ‘and this fact,’ according to Blunt, ‘is symptomatic of Picasso’s relation to the whole classical tradition.’126 The relationship to Ingres permits Picasso’s singular quotation from the Herculaneum fresco to expand into a larger-scale orientation to the classical tradition extending from antiquity to modernity, and Blunt goes on to add intervening points: heads in the late work of Poussin, in the cartoons of Raphael, and in the frescoes of Masaccio (he also extends the quotation from the drawing of 1920 to the more important series of Classical Heads in pastel which Picasso made in 1921). This is indeed a tradition that links the greatest names in European art, and Blunt’s illustrations confirm that it makes visual sense: all of the heads resemble each other, particularly in the way they all establish a continuous plane that extends from a broad nose-ridge into the forehead. But there is a problem with this tradition: the Herculaneum fresco – the chronological starting point – was not unearthed until 1739, and was therefore unknown to Masaccio, Raphael and Poussin. Blunt is aware of the problem, as a slightly bizarre footnote half-acknowledges: ‘Poussin may have derived this conception of modelling from the study of ancient sculpture, but he certainly knew Roman frescoes which have



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Pablo Picasso, Head, 1920.

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44

Hercules and Telephus, from Herculaneum.

vanished since his time.’127 It is reasonable enough to propose that all of the great European artists drew inspiration from such ancient works as were available to them. But that would be to return to the bland notion of a generalised classicism, something quite at odds with Blunt’s methodology of proposing specific sources, and documenting them by comparative illustration. It also calls into question the seamlessness of the tradition, again asserted by the visual resemblances that link all of the illustrations. At the very least, the way the works by Picasso and Ingres relate to the classical starting point is altogether different from the way the Renaissance and seventeenth-century works relate to it. Since the entire chain was based, to begin with, on Picasso’s drawing from a specific ancient source, its logic is threatened, if not altogether lost, when that source proves to be a broken link. Moreover, the links at many of the later stages are also broken – frescoes that have vanished, or sculptures that remain unidentified. Blunt’s ‘classical tradition’ is not, then, a tradition at all, in the standard sense of something handed down from one generation to the next, but that need not invalidate it so long as we are prepared to reverse the time sequence. It can then be reconfigured cogently as a chain of

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receptions that is initiated by Picasso, and proceeds backwards in time. From this perspective, the visual resemblances are interesting indeed, but again it is Picasso who shows us, above all in the Classical Heads (for example Fig. 45) that the continuous nose-and-forehead plane can have an aesthetic significance apart from the mere fact that it is a standard feature in ancient representations of the human face. Blunt, indeed, insists that Picasso did not just borrow the motif from Ingres, but went back to the ancient source: ‘he followed the original more faithfully than Ingres, who softened the edges of the Roman head to give that rounded amplitude of form which is characteristic of his mature style.’128 That reasserts the primacy of the classical point of origin. One might just as easily say, however, that Picasso sharpened the edges of the planes to give an incisiveness informed by his Cubist practice – or indeed that he moved the facial type towards the sculptural. If the resemblance of any of the Classical Heads to the figure of Arcadia is compelling when the two are illustrated side by side, equally compelling comparisons can be made between the Heads and ancient sculptures of more than one type. Picasso’s observation of the formal features of sculptured heads is as precise and specific as Gisela Richter’s, and emphasises visually many of the same elements that Richter characterises in words, although Picasso freely combines features of different ancient styles. The thickness of upper and lower eyelids, the small mouth and ears, the ‘regular oval’ of the whole face, and the incisive cutting (the metaphor comes naturally) of the features are for Richter characteristics of fifth-century style, while the triangular forehead, the depth of modelling in the hair, and the broadened noseridge are fourth-century.129 Picasso’s biographer John Richardson has suggested that on his trip to Naples in 1917 the artist was struck by the colossal figures among the Farnese sculptures,130 and the over-life-size scale of the Heads perhaps captures something of this monumentality. The accentuation of the features is sculptural rather than fresco-like, and the texture of the pastel medium recalls weathered stone, or possibly plaster casts. Although each of the characteristics of the Heads can be traced to specific ancient sources, the combination is very much Picasso’s. The paradoxical result is something that appears more pure in its classicism than any of its putative prototypes, even

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Pablo Picasso, Classical Head, 1921.

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the ancient ones. At the same time, and despite the fact that the Heads are instantly legible as human female faces, the compositional simplification approaches very near indeed to the abstraction of two basic forms: the plane of the nose and forehead, counterpointed against a three-dimensional ovoid form reminiscent of Brancusi’s most abstract sculptures. Blunt would seem to have got it wrong on two counts, then, when he tried to ground Picasso’s participation in the classical tradition on his drawing from the Hercules and Telephus fresco: not only does the fresco invalidate the seamlessness of the tradition, but it cannot be said to be the unique source for the female heads of ‘Picasso’s Classical Period’. Nonetheless, the tradition Blunt constructs has persisted in the literature on Picasso. While Blunt’s determination to make Picasso the last ‘Great Man’ of the European tradition now seems old-fashioned (and patriarchal), subsequent scholars have invoked a very similar Great Man tradition to different purpose, as proof that Picasso could be co-opted (willingly or otherwise) into a conservative and nationalistic artistic genealogy that stretches all the way back to classical antiquity. Thus Kenneth Silver describes The Pipes of Pan (Fig. 41) as ‘Picasso’s attempt to revivify, to make intense and palpable again, a Mediterranean typology which stretches back in French art from Puvis de Chavannes, Ingres and Poussin to its Greco–Roman origins.’131 The addition of Puvis to the chain is telling; although Puvis’s star has risen since Blunt’s day, his work is still seen to have French-nationalist implications. Otherwise Silver’s chain matches Blunt’s, except that he narrows the focus to French ‘sources’ that support his nationalist argument, until the final – and tendentiously vague – leap to ‘Greco–Roman origins’. Silver does note the resemblance of the standing figure in The Pipes of Pan to an archaic kouros, but he shows no interest in the resonances of this specific reference, which might indeed contradict his larger narrative: as explored above, the archaic figure could stand, at this period, for an emancipatory politics or an anti-academic aesthetic. The amusing game of source-spotting can easily be taken further. Silver traces the pan-pipes in Picasso’s painting to a painting of 1891 by Puvis.132 But do they more closely resemble the set of pan-pipes immediately behind the head of Arcadia in the Hercules and Telephus fresco?

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The multiplicity of sources that can be proposed, more or less plausibly, may suggest that the game is beside the point. Picasso is as adept at visual quotation as any artist in the post-Renaissance tradition, but the promiscuity of his quotations hints that he is doing something very different from previous practices in which the visual quotation brings with it some authoritative meaning from its source, like a scholarly footnote. The pan-pipes do not unequivocally signify an allegiance to French nationalism (as a putative quotation from Puvis might suggest). Nor is it quite plausible that they signal a desire to join the great tradition of European classicism, in which the Hercules and Telephus fresco plays at best a minor role (something that its prominence in the Picasso literature tends to obscure). What, then, is the point of Picasso’s habit of quotation, promiscuous in relation to any number of prototypes from past art, but particularly, perhaps, in relation to classical antiquity? This is a difficult question, but it may be possible to make some preliminary observations. In the first place, Picasso does not display any special preference for works considered in his day to be canonical masterpieces over those of lower art-historical status, or for authentically Greek sculptures over Roman copies and heavily restored examples. If Picasso’s references to the Farnese sculptures have attracted little attention, that may be because those sculptures have sunk so low in arthistorical status that they are simply invisible to scholars.133 Even the most famous among them, the Hercules (Fig. 46) and the Bull (Fig. 47), are already demoted to late Hellenistic status in Richter’s Sculpture and Sculptors, where there is no mention of the others (presumably because Richter thinks them inferior Roman works or copies). Picasso, however, appears to delight in their ‘decadent’ characteristics, their vulgar overscale and the inelegant bulkiness of the Hercules – he simply loves what Richter considers Hellenistic exaggeration. Wilenski is scathing about sculptures restored so extensively that they become ‘concoctions’, and the Farnese Bull, in particular, is the product as much of its Renaissance restoration as of its ancient origin, something already obvious to Winckelmann.134 While the Hercules and Telephus fresco is one of the better-preserved examples of ancient wall-painting, it is nonetheless a minor Roman work by no means unequivocally admired in the scholarly literature, and again Picasso seems fascinated above all by the ungainly

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46

Farnese Hercules.

corpulence of the figure of Arcadia, echoed in a number of compositions of massive female figures in the early 1920s. He responds to the full range of new discoveries, such as archaic kouroi and korai, Iberian sculptures, Etruscan mirror engravings, and no doubt many others, but he also draws on a wide selection of old stalwarts such as the Elgin Marbles, the Spinario, the Farnese Hercules and Bull, and the Ariadne of the Vatican. That last sculpture was a particular favourite of Giorgio de Chirico, with whose work Picasso’s enters into complex dialogue,135 and the pose with the arm crooked over the head is echoed and transformed in Picasso’s work through to his late career. The selection procedure, which freely mixes high-status works with those that had fallen from favour by Picasso’s lifetime, scarcely suggests that his motive was to position himself as the inheritor of the great tradition of European classicism in any straightforward way. Picasso is remarkable, among the artists of his generation, for his exceptional responsiveness to ancient sculpture; but then he is remarkable for his exceptional responsiveness to past and present art of all kinds, and

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47

Farnese Bull.

it would surely be wrong to propose one overarching interpretation for so diverse a set of allusive practices.136 David Lomas puts this well: ‘That Picasso…draws upon a prodigious visual memory and operates in the mode of visual citation is well recognised, entitling us to view the image as overdetermined, as a dream-like condensation of more than one theme or motif.’137 Thus there is considerable justification for the view taken by some recent scholars, including Lomas, that Picasso’s contribution is to relativise the classical tradition, by making it just one among a bewildering array of points of reference available to the latecoming modern artist.138 This, it might be argued, saves ancient sculpture from modernist oblivion, at the cost of demoting it from its former role as the fons et origo of all Western art. Picasso seems to replace Wilenski’s anger at the failure of ancient sculpture to live up to its reputation for permanence and universality with a cheerful declaration that it need not on that account be discarded. In this respect he might be seen as the progenitor of postmodern classicism, with its willingness to select and recombine from all manner of sources. Moreover, Picasso’s practice deconstructs the

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canon of ancient sculpture from within, by ignoring the hierarchy between masterpieces such as the Elgin Marbles or the archaic kouroi and routine productions, or sculptures popular with tourists but scorned by scholars such as Richter. Yet this seems an inadequate explanation for that feature of the modernist engagement with ancient sculpture that Picasso’s work shows at its most powerful: the constant recurrence of the very forms and motifs that have ostensibly been rejected or relativised. The endless changes rung on motifs from ancient and more recent art in Picasso’s work suggest that what is under exploration is not so much the authority of the sources or their ‘original’ meanings as the process by which the artist transforms raw materials (whether from art or ‘nature’, two things that cannot easily be disentangled in Picasso’s work) into the new work of art. In this process both the forms and the meanings of the ‘source’ must be changed. That calls into question the explanatory potential of the usual art-historical procedures, source-spotting and iconographic decoding: finding out how the visual motif functioned, or what it meant, in its original context may have no bearing on its appearance in the new work. But does that mean that the sources are simply repudiated, cast off as in Hulme’s account of artistic innovation, once their propaedeutic assistance in generating a new form or a new idea has been exhausted? That would be one way of dealing with the anxiety of influence that haunts the artist in the modern age of museums and reproductions, and a famous statement by Picasso suggests something of the sort: ‘When I begin a picture, there is somebody who works with me. Toward the end, I get the impression that I have been working alone – without a collaborator.’139 On the other hand, it might be the case (whether or not it was important to Picasso himself ) that the transformation has the potential to discover something about the source that was not apparent in its untransformed state – that its defamiliarisation will put it in a new perspective. On a trip to London in 1917 Picasso saw the Elgin Marbles, and the paintings of the next few years suggest that he was struck by something that had not been prominent in the marbles’ nineteenth-century reception: the solid gravity of seated figures. Several paintings of seated female figures (for example, Fig. 48) draw attention to the massive, protruding knees, thus revealed as a notable feature of the female

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48

Pablo Picasso, Three Women at the Spring, 1921.

figures from the East Pediment (Fig. 8). The paintings shift the resonances of the Elgin figures away from classical poise and towards the ungainliness of the figure of Arcadia, and some of the figures (particularly those with crossed legs) also recall the Roman bronze known as Spinario, an old favourite. As usual, no special privilege is accorded to the more glamorous sources, and the classical grandeur of the Parthenon goddesses is transformed into the earthy solidity of figures who read as peasant women.140 Yet it would not be quite apposite to say that Picasso has merely abstracted an intriguing visual motif from its original context. A persistent concern with colossal or overlife-size scale is evident throughout Picasso’s explorations of ancient sculpture. Another point of reference may be the seated gods of the East side of the Parthenon frieze, enlarged so that their height when sitting matches that of standing humans, and the pediment figures are, like many of the Farnese sculptures, over-life-size. Picasso’s fascination would seem to be not so much with ancient sculpture as a norm for the human figure as with its potential to convey superhuman or overpowering scale. He moves the classical from the beautiful to the sublime; in the process, the exaggerations of Hellenistic and Roman sculpture are brought into surprising contiguity with archaic massiveness and simplification.

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This might be described as a modernist transformation of the classical ideal, in which the traditional connotations of grandeur, heroism and majesty are stripped away to concentrate on the sculptural basics of massiveness, solidity and sheer size. Ancient sculptors may have made colossal statues for religious reasons, or to dramatise imperial power; Picasso discards these original meanings to concentrate on what is left, the experience of the viewer when confronted with something larger or mightier than herself. In works of the 1920s Picasso devises myriad ways to make this experience happen: close views of heads larger than our own, limbs more massive than those of ordinary human beings, figures too big for the confines of the frame. The series of 46 prints called ‘The Sculptor’s Studio’, made in 1933–34, transforms the idea again into narrative form: a sculptor, his model, and sometimes other figures appear in all manner of poses and configurations, looking intently at, or simply cohabiting with, sculptures (Figs 49–51). In eighteen of the prints the sculptures are larger than life, and all but two of the others are life-size (measured by the scale of the human figures); in eight scenes a colossal head, bearded like the sculptor himself, serves as a kind of studio prop. All of the sculptures are Picasso’s own invention, but they are of standard ancient types – heads or busts on pedestals, single figures or more complex groups on low plinths – and the nudity of the human figures, often wreathed with vine-leaves or flowers, clearly indicates an ancient setting. ‘The Sculptor’s Studio’, incorporated into the collection known as the Vollard Suite, is Picasso’s most sustained exploration of ancient sculpture, and in some respects also his most sustained exploration of the process of artmaking. Its ‘classical’ line-drawing style, as well as some of the imagery, carry on from Picasso’s series of illustrations to Ovid’s Metamorphoses of 1931.141 Indeed ‘The Sculptor’s Studio’ could reasonably be interpreted as a further reception of the Metamorphoses, taking up and elaborating the parallels between the mythological metamorphoses and artistic creation that readers have often found in Ovid’s text. Yet with just two or three exceptions the prints do not show the sculptor at work, or the model in the act of posing. Nor are they making love. Other prints in the Vollard Suite present scenes of rape or revelry, and in other works (notably the series of prints made in 1968 in response to Ingres’s Raphael and the Fornarina)142 artmaking and

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lovemaking are interrelated. In contrast to the Dionysiac frenzy of those works, ‘The Sculptor’s Studio’ presents the Apollonian side of artmaking – rapt contemplation of a dreamworld of beautiful shapes which art can make into concrete reality.143 Picasso adapts the ‘symposium’ composition from ancient vasepaintings (a favourite with artists as diverse as Alma-Tadema and Léger), in which figures recline on couches parallel to the picture plane, with small tables laden with fruit and wine before them. Although the compositions are flexible and varied, the sculptures characteristically occupy the positions of the foreground tables in the vase scenes (Fig. 49). The reclining sculptor and model simply watch as the sculptures metamorphose in endless variations before their eyes. The sculptures themselves often recall mythological characters without quite representing any particular myth; similarly they are reminiscent of a wide variety of ancient prototypes without precisely quoting any one. One statue of a male figure, seen from the back, carries a schematic rod which could read as a spear (in which case he would be a Doryphoros) or a club (so he would be a Hercules). Several prints show complex sculptural groups



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Pablo Picasso, Vollard Suite 65 (4 April 1933).

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composed variously of horses, bulls, and writhing or flailing human figures. These strongly recall the Farnese Bull without quoting it; the one that appears closest to the Farnese sculpture (Fig. 50) places a horse at its centre, even though it is reasonable to suppose that it was precisely the bull that appealed to Picasso at a period when bullfighting motifs were conspicuous in his work. This print, though, shows why the Farnese Bull should not be discredited even though it may be a Renaissance concoction: the complex grouping and dramatic energy defy gravity to demonstrate a ne plus ultra for sculptural virtuosity, and the kneeling model must lean away to preserve her balance. In two prints full-length female figures on plinths lean or reach towards the sculptor and model who view them, in a manner that recalls nineteenth-century paintings of the story of Pygmalion, for example by Burne-Jones or Gérôme (no source can be discounted for Picasso, even one far from the approved modernist canon). Throughout the series, though, there is no psychological contact between sculptures and human beings: humans and sculptures live together in this sculptor’s studio, and they interact in any number of formal configurations, but the distinction between humans as observing subjects and sculptures as observed objects is always maintained. For once in his oeuvre, Picasso shows disinterested contemplation as a necessary component of the creative process. The Dionysiac element is not quite absent, as the symposium composition reminds us: intoxication and lovemaking may be another necessary component in the creative process, not quite forgotten when the sculptor and model recline to contemplate their work. Yet the emphasis, in these prints, is on the Apollonian perspective, in which the visible outlines of sculpture predominate. Even though they may come unbidden, as in dreams, the illusion is capable of becoming reality through the sculptor’s activity of making. It is irresistible to read autobiographical significance into these prints, and indeed the series constitutes perhaps the definitive example of a modernist artist measuring himself up against the archetypal ancient sculptor. The depicted sculptor is both like Picasso, a prolific and inventive creator, and unlike him, physically bigger, heavily muscled and (almost) always endowed with an abundant beard. He also has an internal alter ego in the colossal bearded head. It is tempting to identify the colossal head with Pheidias’s gigantic, bearded Olympian Zeus, known from

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Pablo Picasso, Vollard Suite 66 (5 April 1933).

images on coins, and to see Picasso identifying himself with the greatest sculptor of antiquity. If so, Picasso does not adopt the humble role of student, like G.F. Watts in the nineteenth century, but challenges the ancient sculptor at his own game. He also reduces him to the status of an object, sometimes a base for other sculptures or objects, or something for the human figures to lean on. In several of its appearances, though, the head reads as an economical quotation of the Farnese Hercules, instantly recognisable by its enormous, wobbling nose, its moustaches drooping to either side of the mouth, and its curly beard (Fig. 51). The Farnese Hercules has sometimes been associated with a documented statue of the ‘Weary Hercules’ by Lysippos.144 Again, it is tempting to conjecture that Picasso might be identifying himself with the ancient sculptor who, as argued in Chapter 2 above, can be seen as the prototype of the avant-garde artist. Lysippos was also famous for his plays on scale, and particularly in his representations of Hercules, which ranged from the colossal to the tiny.145 This fits well with the concerns of ‘The Sculptor’s

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Pablo Picasso, Vollard Suite 61 (1 April 1933).

Studio’ and indeed with the reception of ancient sculpture throughout Picasso’s work. Yet these clues to the traditional stories about ancient sculptors stop short of becoming explicit, like the quotations from particular sculptures and the hints of mythological story. ‘The Sculptor’s Studio’ teems with pointers to narrative, without curtailing the free play of imagination. The sculptures’ viewers within the scenes, like the viewer of the prints, must make up the stories for themselves. Nonetheless, it is the art object, and more precisely the activity of looking at the art object, that initiates the free play of imagination. If the prints are autobiographical, one thing they explore is Picasso’s own practice of looking at and transforming the art of the past, a process of reception that the viewer of the prints is invited to share. If ‘The Sculptor’s Studio’ has a message for the viewer, it is an exhortation to look at the art object, long and hard, from every angle and in every attitude; only in that way will meanings emerge, and they are not predetermined or finite. In that respect Picasso’s approach to ancient sculpture is not unlike that of Gisela Richter, for whom visual scrutiny is the basis for understanding. In their different ways, both of these are modernist approaches to ancient sculpture. And Blunt’s method, in which the primary data are visual comparisons, is thoroughly consistent with these approaches.

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For Richter, of course, comparative visual analysis was a way of getting at the historical truth about ancient sculpture, something that can scarcely have been of much interest to Picasso. His ancient sculptor is a modernist genius, who creates freely out of his own imagination. If he has affinities with Pheidias or Lysippos, they are at the level of some basic urge to create that makes no reference to the historical circumstances in which Greek sculptors made cult images, or memorialised the victors in the games. But Richter also thought that the modern sculptor’s studio could provide insights into ancient sculptural practice; and Picasso, despite his indiscriminate enthusiasm for the art of all periods and places, made the ancient sculptor’s studio the location for his extended meditation on the reciprocal process by which looking interrelates with artmaking. Arguably, the idea that artmaking is an aspect of universal human nature may have been stronger in the early twentieth century than either before or since. As much as modernist art theories depend on the notion of a break from the past, they also require a notion of artmaking as a fundamental human activity – otherwise the break might mean that modernity simply leaves art behind as a product of outmoded technologies, means of production, or social relations (Hegel’s Aesthetics had provided the intellectual rationale for that view a century earlier). That may help to explain why it was not so easy to get rid of the Greeks. The modernist artist might prefer to assert his kinship with ‘the barbaric peoples of the earth’ (in Gaudier-Brzeska’s phrase), but that too depends on an assumption that artmaking is a universal human ‘instinct’ (again, Gaudier’s word). Such ideas underpinned the early-twentieth-century study of ‘primitive’ art-forms, which threatened perhaps for the first time to displace Graeco–Roman antiquity from its foundational position in art theory. But universality would mean that the Greek sculptors, if no longer the fathers of art, had still to be accepted as brothers in artmaking, even if the sibling rivalries were intense. The bearded head of Hercules (or Pheidias or Lysippos) might be shunted around the studio, but it was still there to lean on – fragmentary and sometimes ignored, but nonetheless colossal. Nowadays, universalism is out of fashion, and both artists and scholars take a relativist view of both ancient sculpture and modernism. As noted above, Picasso’s own oscillation between classicism and

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modernism can be seen as prefiguring this position. But Picasso’s practice also shows that giving up the pretension to universality need not mean relegating ancient sculpture (or modernism, for that matter) either to a conservative nostalgia for some outmoded state of affairs, or to the dryasdust antiquarianism of the specialist scholar. If the Farnese Bull, for Richter the ‘low ebb’ of Greek art,146 can become aesthetically powerful again through its new reception in Picasso’s ‘Sculptor’s Studio’, then no work of ancient sculpture, or of past art, can be said to be dead. It is only a sleeping beauty, like Ariadne, awaiting the artist or scholar who can, like Dionysus, bring it to ecstatic, or intoxicated, life again.147

A Reflection on Methodology

In the subtitle to this book I have paired Winckelmann and Picasso as bookends for my consideration of the reciprocal relations between ancient sculpture and modern art, and in the final discussion of Picasso I have attempted silently to draw the parallel. Like Winckelmann, Picasso may be seen either as the last in an old classical tradition (that of the artist trained by drawing ancient sculptures) or the first in a new one (in this context it matters little whether modernism is figured as an outright rejection of the classical or as a new classicism – either way, a paradigm shift has occurred). Both bookends are intended to call attention to the provisional character of my book’s timeframe. There is a logic to considering the century or so after the fall of Napoleon as a unified period in the reception history of ancient sculpture, one that corresponds roughly to Michaelis’s ‘century of archaeological discoveries’. Arguably there is also a logic to considering the hundred and thirty years from the notional end of neoclassicism through to the Second World War as one in which the struggle of modern art to place itself in some new relation to the classical tradition appeared at its most vexed, and therefore most vital. Yet both boundaries are permeable, not just because the empirical data fail inevitably to divide so neatly, but for a more important theoretical reason: the chains of reception extend all the way forwards to the present-day viewer and all the way backwards to antiquity itself (in theory, at least, although the gaps in the data render these remote ends

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of the chains difficult to discern). Neither Picasso nor Winckelmann would have any place in this book if it were not for the fact that both of them break the boundaries on both sides: it is only insofar as they can triangulate in some significant way between ancient sculpture, on the one hand, and modern readers of this book on the other that they can be seen as relevant to this book’s project, or to one another. To put the problem in a different way: an underlying premise of the book, which has remained occluded until now, is Marx’s ‘difficulty’ – that Greek art still gives us aesthetic pleasure, to which we may now add the further difficulty that modernism still gives us aesthetic pleasure.148 I take the fact that the art of the past gives us aesthetic pleasure to be empirically proven – even Buchloh loves the art of the past, or at least some of it (Malevich’s Black Square, for example). This may or may not be an aspect of universal human nature; while there have been contexts in which the art of the past was not valued (the Taliban’s destruction of the medieval Buddhas comes quickly to mind), it is unclear whether this happens apart from circumstances of extreme ideological pressure. However that may be, there is enough evidence that people in modern societies love the art of the past to regard it as something worth critical investigation. Ancient sculpture is a test case not so much for the reason Marx adduced – that the works of the ancients are ‘regarded as a standard and unattainable model’, something that the modernist artists were probably successful in disproving – but rather because after the modernist assault there is less reason than ever to attribute our love of ancient sculpture to social and political factors operative in our own environment. In short, the modernists ought to have made ancient sculpture irrelevant; that they failed to do so is something that still requires investigation. Yet the scholarly methods of recent decades do not offer sophisticated ways of addressing the question, nor is this simply a matter of increasing scholarly specialisation. On the contrary, the more progressive historians of classical art have come to share the methods of historians of modern art such as Kenneth Silver, concerned above all with establishing the social and political contexts in which the art they study was created.149 As already discussed at the end of Chapter 1, a horizontal understanding of art’s relation to its contemporary context has attained the force of dogma

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in art history. This makes it very difficult indeed to account for why the art of the past continues to have power for present-day observers. In the absence of any theory for how artistic relationships might work vertically through history, common-sense chronology comes to the fore, and any later reference to an earlier art-form is bound to seem conservative, while any relationship of an earlier art-form to a later one will seem simply irrelevant to the earlier one. Thus the very art-historical methods which historians of modern art share with those of ancient art tend to send both groups back to their silos, each of them to study the original context in which their art was new and innovative. A recent comprehensive survey, Andrew Stewart’s Greek Sculpture: An Exploration of 1990, represents the culmination of a magnificent scholarly tradition that explores Greek art ‘in itself ’. The Preface begins by declaring an intention to carry on from Richter’s The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks. Stewart is able to add immense empirical detail to Parts II and III of his book, which follow Richter’s plan: close study of ‘The Sculpture’ in Part II, followed by Part III on ‘The Sculptors’ – now the dependence on the literary tradition is made more explicit, since the latter section is organised as a numbered sequence of the relevant fragments from ancient literature (although the selection inevitably raises questions about how relevancy is determined). However, Part I introduces something new: ‘The Sculptor’s World’. In some respects this might be described as an expansion of Richter’s background chapters, and it includes perennial topics that go all the way back to Winckelmann (Athenian democracy, Greek athletics, and so forth). But it is thoroughly recast in the mode of the dominant art-historical paradigm at the date of the book’s publication, the social history of art. In the Preface, Stewart declares his wish to place Greek art in its political and social context; the methodology is comparable to that of Silver in his book of 1989, which places the art of the Parisian avant-garde in the political and social context of the First World War and its aftermath. Stewart states that he shares a conviction with literary critics ‘that art, like literature, is a manifestation of cultural symbolism’, and this for him is paramount; hence the relegation of the old concerns of Richter’s book to Parts II and III, to give pride of place to the social and political context in Part I. Stewart explains: ‘While I try to be careful to preserve the integrity of

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the artwork, and to give due regard to the uniqueness of the creative act, I am nevertheless most comfortable when I contemplate the artist as a social being, and his work as a barometer of society’s concerns.’150 This is thoroughly in tune with much of the best art-historical writing of the last decades of the twentieth century, and the book takes a distinguished place in that scholarly literature. But it may be dangerous to be too ‘comfortable’. The methodology of the social history of art requires specifying a relationship between art and its social context – Stewart’s metaphor is the ‘barometer’ by which art measures ‘society’s concerns’. But the non-survival of virtually all of the art the ancients themselves valued (at least according to the literary evidence) makes this barometer distinctly unreliable. How can a random selection of monuments, preserved in lacunose condition and excluding all of the works held most important within the society itself, possibly serve as a barometer for that society’s concerns? The implications are inescapable: the empirical evidence we possess does not permit us to write a social history of art within its ancient context that can rise above mere conjecture. That does not, of course, mean that society and politics should be evacuated from our scholarly enquiries. But the objects available – including the literary evidence – have a vertical social history that cannot responsibly be omitted from the discussion. A historical narrative about them would need to consider the social and political issues surrounding their discovery, restoration and interpretation in the long history from antiquity to the present day. How can any study of the Discobolos, in relation to ancient Greek social practices surrounding athletics, claim to be unaffected by either Winckelmann’s or Riefenstahl’s views on the issue; and how could we take a view on it ourselves, without awareness of those dramatically different moral and political possibilities? A social history that did not take such considerations into account would be like the sculptures Wilenski calls ‘concoctions’: it would present, as if it were ancient, a narrative that is composed of elements from wildly disparate dates, like a fragmentary sculpture that has been restored and rerestored many times.151 The high proportion of non-survival makes the study of ancient art an extreme case, but on reflection it is not different in kind from the

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study of modern art, only in degree: we have relatively more data about both French art and French society in the period of the First World War, but those data are still incomplete, and complicated by their subsequent histories. This suggests that the horizontal premise of the social history of art is seriously flawed, and that the problem is not merely empirical. The restriction to one idealised moment, when a society and its art are presumed to be in coherent relationship with one another, not only begs the question of how that moment can be isolated from others with which it has intellectual and often material ties. It also calls attention again to the questions about historical causality that Hulme raised, and left deliberately unresolved, in 1914. How can we conceptualise a relationship between two such diverse things as art and society? If we believe we can observe a relationship between something artistic and something social, which of them is the ‘barometer’ of the other? While there is considerable variety of practice, the temptation to slip into a ‘reflection model’, loosely based on Marxian ideas of base and superstructure, is difficult to avoid. Buchloh attempts to resist. He wants to hold artists responsible for, and not merely complicit in, the authoritarian politics that haunt ‘capitalist economics and politics’ either in the period after the First World War or in the 1980s. But his critical language is too much indebted to a Marxian vocabulary for describing historical change to escape reminiscences of the base and superstructure model (something Hulme would have appreciated). Thus he speaks, for example, of current developments in art ‘in their nature as response and reaction to particular conditions that exist outside the confines of aesthetic discourse’; these developments, as well as the neoclassicism of the 1920s, are described as ‘a construct determined by extreme social and political factors’.152 Causality is imputed by the sentence construction and vocabulary. The premise, in both Buchloh and Silver, is that pre-war modernism of the most experimental kind had the potential to offer a genuine critique of the dominant ideology. In this respect they are in agreement with Hulme, who thought the new geometrical art predictive of a massive shift away from the humanist ways of thinking that had been dominant since the Renaissance (as seen above, he called this a ‘classicism’). And their aesthetic preferences, as we have already

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seen, are very much like Hulme’s, in favour of the art-forms of the prewar period that display a ‘tendency to abstraction’. The turn to figuration after 1915 can reasonably be described as a return to vital art, if it is understood in Buchloh’s and Silver’s terms as offering the comforts of familiarity and tradition, and it would entail a shift among artists from critique to complicity with the established order. But this again reverts to the reflection model. Politics, indeed authoritarian politics, are basic; art’s choices are restricted to critique or collusion, in each case a response or reaction. Paradoxically, this method of analysis, though ordinarily practised by critics with left-wing affiliations, would seem to be doomed to an inevitable conservatism, in which the power of authoritarian politics is taken for granted, and art can do no more than offer an ineffectual critique, inevitably followed in cyclical fashion by a reversion to tradition. The conservatism is built into the reflection model, just as it is built into the chronological common sense that makes any reference to the art of the past conservative. If the interpretative method is designed to place art in relation to its social context, then the only art that could be truly radical (rather than critical, but ineffectual) would be that accompanying an emancipated political and social context, and indeed some critics have seen the Russian art of the period immediately after the revolution of 1917 in such terms (there are hints of this in Buchloh’s article). But even in this case, authoritarian repression comes all too soon, and for the rest of the twentieth century the unjust social relations of capitalism are seen as dominant. Thus it is not just any version of modern classicism that is doomed to conservatism; the social history of art, with its dependence on some version of the reflection model, slips all too easily into conservative assumptions. Indeed, it matters little whether art reflects society or vice versa; in either case the emphasis is on the backwards pull. The structure is the same as that of classical reference, seen to look backwards in time. The modernist artists and writers thought differently: they thought it might really be possible to begin at the beginning, with nothing older or more traditional to reflect. And they had a methodology for doing so: direct carving. To begin again at the beginning is an overweening claim (and perhaps inherently contradictory, as suggested above); but even if the claim is vain, the methodological experiments it generates

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may make it worthwhile. For a time around 1914, indeed, it might have seemed as though sculpture was poised to become the paradigmatic art-form for modernism, in poetry as well as the visual arts – to take the place occupied in previous centuries by literature, at least in some accounts. The shift back to painting, for example in the criticism of Clement Greenberg from the end of the 1930s onwards, did not preclude some remarkable work in sculpture studies (one thinks immediately of Michael Baxandall’s The Limewood Sculptures of Renaissance Italy, Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood, and Rosalind Krauss’s ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’), yet the great books of Anglo–American art history in the second half of the twentieth century tended to focus on painting, with occasional forays into other two-dimensional media. The material circumstances of art-historical publishing, with their dependence on the two-dimensional reproduction (as in Blunt’s Burlington Magazine article) have no doubt played a part, and while the internet ought to help diversification in this respect, current technology remains depressingly tied to the flat image of the computer screen. One informing idea of this book has been the possibility that the study of sculpture might offer an alternative to the art-historical methods with which we have become too comfortable. Partly this is a matter simply of defamiliarisation, but I have also suggested that sculpture, with its ‘hundred different points of view’, might show the way towards a reception study in which the beholder has a transformative role to play. Always bearing in mind the limitations of our reproduction technologies, sculpture can help us to a more sophisticated understanding of how our own presence conditions even the most basic visual characteristics of the object: an altered point of view will change the visual relationships within the object, its relationship to its surroundings, and our own orientation to it. Picasso’s constant recurrence to the problems of three-dimensional representation, and his intense awareness of comparative scale, have lessons for the art historian. Every time we think we are getting the measure of the object of study, we should move around it to see what another view will reveal. Throughout the discussions of this book, I have tended, like Wilenski, to place considerable stress on the material objects that survive from antiquity, to make them somehow basic. Does this represent a residual

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positivism – a desperate desire to find something certain, even if it is only a weatherbeaten and fragmentary piece of stone, to set against the appalling lacunae in the historical record for ancient art? Or is it a kind of materialism akin to Pater’s, one with potential to combat the idealising tendencies of traditional views of classicism? The obdurate materiality of ancient sculpture, which has seemed a demerit in so much art theory, also holds out the promise of contact between presentday experience and the remote past. In a reception study, Wilenski’s disappointment that few if any ancient sculptures come down to us in their ‘original’ state can be transformed into a virtue: in their physical fabric, ancient sculptures bear traces of the chains of their reception. Art historians still tend to idealise their objects, to assume that what they are seeing corresponds in some straightforward way to the object as it was originally made. I believe that we should study, instead, the fascinating changes that objects have undergone, as a result either of human intervention or human neglect, in their long histories – physical changes, inseparable from intellectual changes in the objects’ reception. In this respect artists have much to teach us: Watts’s fascination with the weatherbeaten textures of the Elgin Marbles, Leighton’s with reimagining ancient bronze, Rodin’s with fragmentation, or Picasso’s with the strange power of ‘concoctions’ acknowledge the contingencies that may transform decay and dilapidation into new aesthetic ideas. The losses of meaning that ancient objects undergo when their authors and functions are forgotten, as they lie buried underground, are irreversible (at least until some future miracle of technology, as yet unimaginable, can find a way to transcend the depradations of time). Yet the interpretative ‘blanks’ open a space for the free play of imagination that ought to be welcomed.153 In much recent art history the base and superstructure model has undergone a strange transformation. In the Marxist model, the base is something material, the physical products and the processes for making and exchanging them that constitute economic reality; this material base is understood to have a determining or causative relationship to all of the immaterial ideas and fantasies that make up the superstructure, including such things as religion, or what Hulme called the ‘general attitude towards the world’. But the social history of art tends to transform

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this materialist understanding into a culturalist one (as noted above, Hulme offers a critique of this before the fact). Thus ‘society’s concerns’, political ideas and social attitudes, come to play the role of the base, determining the characteristics of artworks. But this strangely inverts the Marxist model: the ‘general attitude’, understood as a superstructural element in Marxist theory, has somehow become the base, while the material production of art is assumed to be superstructural. The logic of materialism is lost, and there is no rationale for why social and political attitudes should be considered more basic than the art production that is supposed to ‘reflect’ them. Indeed it seems distinctly strange to place the most concrete of objects in subservience to such malleable concepts as ‘attitudes’ – a common word in social history, as in ‘Victorian attitudes’ towards women or other races; one is reminded of ‘the primitive mind’. This is modeller’s work: it is too easy to find the ‘attitudes’ (nationalism, misogyny and the like) that one has presumed to be there in the first place. In practice the ‘attitudes’ present in any historical situation are bewilderingly diverse and contested. As William Empson observed, ‘the idea that everyone held the same opinion at a given date, “the opinion of the time”, is disproved as soon as you open a history book and find a lot of them killing each other because they disagreed.’154 I believe it would be preferable to make the material object the basis for enquiry. Of course we shall bring our prejudices to bear here too; indeed I have just recommended a reception study that permits free play to the beholder. But in a rigorous methodology, the interpretation will need continually to justify itself in relation to the object, which remains something other than what we want it to be. Adrian Stokes’s carving conception makes a suitable heuristic: we carve the stone ourselves, but the shapes we give it (if we are responsible historians) will respect its otherness. The ‘connoisseurial’ methods of such scholars as Blunt and Richter have gone out of fashion, and I have argued throughout this book that they cannot deliver the positive historical truth they were designed to reveal. But they are indispensable critical tools, which ought to be developed in more subtle ways, not discarded; otherwise art history becomes merely a minor branch of pragmatic history, with no methodology of its own, and objects become merely ‘illustrations’ of meanings determined by other kinds of evidence. That is by no means

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to say that other kinds of evidence – written texts, inscriptions, the data provided by the physical environment of a find, for example – should be discounted. But the art object has a complexity, designed at the time of its original production and augmented in its subsequent receptions, that can never be captured by data extraneous to its specification in its own material form. Materialism is accordingly necessary, in my view, but it is not sufficient: it is the base on which glorious superstructures are built. We have seen that the ideologies of direct carving, while they celebrated the sculptor’s materials, did not wholly subscribe to a materialist notion of causality, in which either the contingent physical character of the material itself or the historical means of production by which it was worked could determine the ultimate value of the work of art. Some critics have regarded this as a mark of insufficient radicalism, a reluctance to abandon outmoded habits of idealist thinking. But it might instead be seen as a genuinely new way to think about how technique functions in making art, in which it is neither relegated to an instrumental role (in which case it might just as well be left to an alienated worker, with the aid of a machine) nor attributed with causality, in which case there is no role for artistic freedom; it will be obvious that an oversimplified materialist explanation leads quickly to an extreme academicism, in which the artist is more than ever in thrall to his own training. Wilenski’s idea of collaboration between material practice and the artist’s capacity to innovate is more helpful. According to the argument of this chapter, we should pay more attention to the academic drawing practices in which Picasso was trained; but that will lead to a better understanding of the extraordinary transformation they underwent in order to produce the imaginative complexity of such works as the prints of ‘The Sculptor’s Studio’. In what seems a quintessentially virile modernist move, Picasso spoke of collaboration as something to be superseded in the process of making a work. On this principle, similarity is replaced by difference. Yet the viewer may always choose to work backwards, to rediscover with delight the ‘source’ that had been transformed in the artistic process. Reception can be figured in terms of either sameness or difference; the art-historical examination paper’s command to ‘compare and contrast’ two (or more) images is a valid reception method. In this chapter I have tried to show

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how slippery visual resemblance can be: any two images of a head, reproduced at the same size and juxtaposed on a page, will resemble one another, more or less. Hulme’s distrust of resemblance is salutary. The traditional art-historical method of searching for a ‘source’ and tracing its ‘influence’ overemphasises sameness. A truly reciprocal reception method, in which each work in a comparison informs the other, can help to overcome this homogenising tendency. Picasso’s free transformation of the Farnese Bull not only enables innovation to happen in his own practice; it also makes something different of the ancient sculpture – something that is undeniably there, in the otherness of the marble, and yet which was invisible until the juxtaposition with Picasso’s print brought it to the fore. A passage from T.S. Eliot that has often been cited in connection with theories of literary reception is worth quoting again here: The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.155

Eliot, good modernist that he was, is principally interested in the changes wrought to the entire order by the appearance of the new work, and we saw in Chapter 1 that Jauss’s emphasis is similar (his work, of course, is itself in a reception chain that follows Eliot). The difference I am proposing (in line with the practice in literary reception of my Bristol colleagues Charles Martindale, Duncan Kennedy and others) is to regard the old work – the ancient work, indeed – as capable of initiating the total reconfiguration that Eliot refers to the modern work, in a reciprocal collaboration that does not create a hierarchy in either chronological direction. In my account of the so-called classical tradition, there is no ‘existing order’. The system of relationships among works past and present must be invented whenever we give fresh attention to the old work, as

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well as when a new work is created. To borrow Schiller’s phraseology, the old and new works are reciprocally coordinated and subordinated, each to the other and vice versa, without deference either to chronological priority or to modernist supersession.156 I hope that at the end of this chapter it is no longer necessary to defend this method from the imputation of conservatism. A truly reciprocal method is very difficult indeed, and I have not always, perhaps not often, achieved it in the preceding discussions, due to the limitations both of a ‘vocabulary derived from the old position’ and of my own learning. Throughout the book I have recommended collaboration among scholars and artists to help to overcome such limitations, and I shall repeat it once more to bring the book to a close: we should abandon our silos. Yet there is one last point to be made about method, perhaps the most difficult of all: we should not shrink from making ‘preposterous’ claims, both in the etymological sense to which Eliot nods (the willingness to exchange ‘pre’ and ‘post’)157 and in the more colloquial sense of daring to make mistakes. Buchloh has come in for a good deal of criticism in this chapter, but his readiness to make interpretative leaps – in time, from the 1920s to the 1980s, and in frame of reference, from art to politics – genuinely disrupted ‘the quiet tread of [the] miller’s mule’ in the scholarship of his day.158 Some of my more outlandish assertions will no doubt raise hackles – that the Belvedere Torso might have been as important as Cézanne to the Cubist reconfiguration of the workings of planes, for example, or that Leighton’s Daedalus and Icarus created the framework within which the Hermes was received as a Praxiteles. Perhaps these go too far. But the worse danger, in a bureaucratic world of the early twenty-first century where risk-aversion has become the dominant principle, would be not to go far enough.

256

notes

Introduction

1

2

3 4 5

El Lissitzky and Hans Arp, Die Kunstismen: Les Ismes de l’Art: The Isms of Art, Erlenbach-Zürich: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1925; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1968, p.x. As entitled in Harry Francis Mallgrave’s translation of the first edition of 1764: Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006. G. Henry Lodge’s translation of 1849– 72 is ordinarily preferred here because it is based on the expanded German edition of 1776, more widely familiar in the period covered by this book: The History of Ancient Art: Translated from the German of John Winckelmann, Boston: James R. Osgood, 1880 (2 vols; facsimile reprint, vols 2 and 3 in Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art, ed. Curtis Bowman, London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005, 3 vols), cited hereafter as Winckelmann, History, with volume and page numbers, followed in parentheses by Winckelmann’s book, chapter and paragraph numbers (note: volume numbers are cited to correspond to the volumes in the Continuum facsimile edition, so that vols 2 and 3 correspond, respectively, to vols 1 and 2 in the Lodge edition; thus the citation Winckelmann, History 2: 117 refers to vol. 2, p.117 in the Continuum edition [which equals vol. 1, p.117 in the Lodge edition of 1880]). Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne, New York: Da Capo Press, 1986, p.13. Walter Pater, ‘Poems by William Morris’, Westminster Review, n.s. 34, October 1868, p.307. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, New York: Pantheon Books, 1953, pp.251–55.

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6

7

8

9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19

Reported by Maurice Denis, ‘Cézanne’, L’Occident, September 1907; repr. in Michael Doran (ed.), Conversations with Cézanne, trans. Julie Lawrence Cochran, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001, p.169. ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960), repr. in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 4, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p.87. As described by the Greek historian Diodorus (first century bc); see J.J. Pollitt, The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p.13. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn, London and New York: Verso, 1983, p.26; Charles Baudelaire, ‘Salon de 1846’, repr. in idem, Curiosités esthétiques: L’Art romantique: et autres Oeuvres critiques, ed. Henri Lemaitre, Paris: Garnier Frères, 1986, pp.187–88. Winckelmann adds, ‘and especially to my friend, Antonio Raphael Mengs’, Winckelmann, History 2: 117 (Preface, §25). Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Donald L. Hill, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980, p.147. Ibid., p.146. Ibid., p.141; See G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, vol. 1, p.63. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Winckelmann’ (1805), in H.B. Nisbet (ed.), German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp.239–40. Pater, Renaissance, p.142. Ibid., p.146. Winckelmann, History 3: 77–79 (VII, ii, §§16–17), 3: 341–42 (XII, ii, §3–5). Ibid., 2: 342 (V, ii, §3), 2: 361 (V, iii, §13), 3: 228–32 (X, i, §§11–17), 3: 263–65 (X, iii, §§15–17), 3: 265–66 (X, iii, §18), 3: 312–14 (XI, iii, §11), 3: 314–15 (XI, iii, §12–13), 3: 336–37 (XII, i, §20). For first recorded dates see Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1982, pp.325, 274, 243, 311, 229, 148, 221, 141. The recent literature on ekphrasis (ancient and modern) is extensive; I am particularly indebted to Don Fowler, ‘Narrate and Describe: The Problem of Ekphrasis’ (Journal of Roman Studies 1991, repr. in idem, Roman

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20

21 22

23 24 25 26

27

28

29 30

Constructions: Readings in Postmodern Latin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp.64–85, with extensive bibliography). See also note 56 below. Winckelmann, History 3: 341–42 (XII, ii, §§3–5). The Thetis was claimed by Napoleon’s agents, no doubt under Winckelmann’s influence, and remains in the Louvre (Ma2344), but it never attained the status of the earlier discoveries. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965, p.251. The Niobe group and the Farnese Hercules may be related in some way to famous versions of these subjects by Scopas (or Praxiteles) and Lysippos respectively; see Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, pp.95, 101–3; Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, pp.274–79, 229–32. However, none of the extant works can be shown to be the actual objects mentioned in ancient texts, with the possible exception of the Laocoon (for the difficulties in that case see Richard Brilliant, My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000, especially pp.95–96, and Chs 2 and 4). Winckelmann, History 3: 266 (X, iii, §18); on the signature of Apollonius see 3: 263 (X, iii, §15). Pater, Renaissance, p.155. Alex Potts, ‘Introduction’ to Harry Francis Mallgrave’s translation (cited in note 2 above), p.29; See pp.2–3, 28. Pater also mentions, briefly, a few works known to Winckelmann: the Laocoon, the bronze figure of a praying youth (adorante) in Berlin, and (in a passage never reprinted after the first publication of the essay in the Westminster Review) two figures of Hermaphrodites; see Pater, Renaissance, pp.173–74, 263. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935: Chosen by W.B. Yeats, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936, p.1 (see also the comment in Yeats’s ‘Introduction’, p.viii). Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987, pp.32–35. Winckelmann, History 2: 338 (V, i, §40). For a more complex account of this aspect of Winckelmann’s thought see Whitney Davis, ‘Winckelmann’s “Homosexual” Teleologies’, in Natalie Boymel Kampen, Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp.262–76.

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31 Indeed the sculpture is too heroic, for Winckelmann, to be a Gladiator at all; he thinks it a Greek warrior distinguished in battle (see Winckelmann, History, 3: 314–15 (XI, iii, §§12–13)). 32 Ibid., 3: 58 (VII, i, §16). 33 Iliad 24.347–48; Odyssey 10.278–79. 34 Winckelmann, History 2: 126 (Preface to the Notes, §15). 35 Ibid., 3: 228–32 (X, i, §§11–17); see also the passages referenced in notes 28 and 32 above. 36 See Katherine Harloe, ‘Allusion and Ekphrasis in Winckelmann’s Paris Description of the Apollo Belvedere’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 53 (2007), pp.243–47. 37 Winckelmann, History 3: 312–14 (XI, iii, §11). 38 Ibid., 2: 314 (IV, ii, §32). 39 Ibid., 2: 342 (V, ii, §3); for the impact of Laïs’s beauty on the painter Apelles see Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 13.588c-e. 40 Winckelmann, History 3: 264 (X, iii, §16); 2: 122 (Preface to the Notes, §10). 41 Ibid., 3: 342 (XII, ii, §5). The fragmentary sculpture was given a modern head and other restorations, in line with Winckelmann’s conjectures, by the sculptor and restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi; see Seymour Howard, ‘Albani, Winckelmann, and Cavaceppi’, Journal of the History of Collections 4 (1992), pp.27–38 (the Thetis is illustrated as Fig. 6). 42 Pater, Renaissance, p.147. 43 See Katherine Harloe, ‘Pausanias as historian in Winckelmann’s History’, and Maria Pretzler, ‘From one connoisseur to another: Pausanias as Winckelmann’s guide to analysing Greek art’, Classical Receptions Journal 2 (2012), pp.174–96, 197–218 (Special Issue: Receptions of Pausanias: From Winckelmann to Frazer, ed. Ja´s Elsner). 44 Winckelmann, History 2: 107 (Preface, §§1–2); on the ‘rise and decline’ system see Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1994, pp.50–54. 45 See Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982, pp.46–75 (‘History of Art and Pragmatic History’). 46 Winckelmann, History 3: 228 (X, i, §11). 47 Ibid., 3: 228 (X, i, §11). 48 Ibid., 2: 108 (Preface, §4). 49 Ibid., 3: 154 (VIII, iii, §19).

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50 51 52 53 54

55 56

57 58

59

60

Ibid., 2: 122 (Preface to the Notes, §10). Ibid., 3: 265 (X, iii, §17). Pater, Renaissance, p.147. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1975, p.107 (Discourse VI). Pater, Renaissance, pp.181–85. On Bildung see Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996, pp.24–36 and passim. Winckelmann, Reflections, p.5. In this respect I differ from Jaś Elsner’s recent claim, that both modern art history and its ancient sources should be understood as ‘nothing other than ekphrasis, or more precisely an extended argument built on ekphrasis’ (‘Art History as Ekphrasis’, Art History 33: 1 (February 2010), pp.11–27 (quotation on p.11)). My contention, which would require a much longer discussion to argue properly, is that to the extent that such generalisation is possible at all, it is an effect of Winckelmann’s deliberate (that is, non-inevitable) linkage between ancient literary practices and artefacts that exist in modernity. Winckelmann, History 2: 300 (IV, ii, §§2–3). Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ (1930), repr. in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 12, Civilization, Society and Religion, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. under the general editorship of James Strachey, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991, pp.257–58. See for example Charles Martindale, Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Duncan F. Kennedy, ‘A Sense of Place: Rome, History and Empire Revisited’, in Catharine Edwards (ed.), Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp.19–34; Neville Morley, Antiquity and Modernity, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009; David Hopkins, Conversing with Antiquity: English Poets and the Classics, from Shakespeare to Pope, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. There are, however, some important exceptions, such as the discussion of Titian in Martindale, Redeeming the Text, pp.60–64; of Velázquez in Charles Martindale, ‘Reception’, in Craig W. Kallendorf (ed.), A Companion to the Classical Tradition, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007, pp.303–9; Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History, New York and London: Routledge, 1997; and the exhibition I selected, with

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61

62

63

64 65 66

67

Michael Liversidge, at Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, Imagining Rome: British Artists and Rome in the Nineteenth Century, catalogue eds Michael Liversidge and Catharine Edwards, London: Merrell Holberton Publishers, 1996. See also Svetlana Alpers, The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2005, Ch. 8: ‘Velázquez’s Resemblance to Manet’; Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984; Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism: Or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996, Chs 2 and 3: ‘Manet’s Sources, 1859–1969’, ‘“Manet’s Sources” Reconsidered’; Jenny Graham, Inventing Van Eyck: The Remaking of an Artist for the Modern Age, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007; A. Richard Turner, Inventing Leonardo: The Anatomy of a Legend, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (eds), Critical Terms for Art History, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996 (2nd ed. 2003). Nelson’s chapter ‘Appropriation’ (1st ed., pp.116–28) deals with some of the issues but does not cite the theoretical literature on reception. In Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds), The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp.187–88. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, p.20. Ibid., pp.46–75. Jauss makes the more precise point that the data of literary (or art) history are ‘interconnected’ (rather than merely chronologically disposed) only in retrospect (ibid., pp.51–53). From the Comte de Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror (1869); see Fiona Bradley, Surrealism, London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1997, p.28.

Chapter 1

1

2

The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, trans. Walter Pach, London: Jonathan Cape, 1938, p.662. The article by Ludovic Vitet, ‘Pindare et l’art grec’, appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, tome 25, 1 February 1860, pp.711–26 (quoted passage on p.721). Winckelmann, History 2: 113 (Preface, §15).

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3

The terms ‘Elgin Marbles’ and ‘Aegina Marbles’ are used here, in accordance with nineteenth-century usage, to designate, respectively, the portion of the Parthenon sculptures brought to London by Lord Elgin and acquired by the British Museum in 1816, and the pedimental sculptures from Aegina purchased by Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria in 1812 and subsequently installed in the Glyptothek, Munich. The terms therefore emphasise the reception histories of both sets of sculptures, as they were encountered by visitors to the two museums, and should not be taken to refer to the original sculptural programmes at the Parthenon and the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina (both subject to further excavation later in the nineteenth century; about half of the Parthenon sculptures, moreover, remained in Athens, and smaller pieces were acquired by other museums, notably the Louvre). 4 See for example Alex Potts, ‘The Impossible Ideal: Romantic Conceptions of the Parthenon Sculptures in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain and Germany’, in Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan (eds), Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p.101; Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000, pp.13–17, 38–39. 5 See Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum 1800–1939, London: British Museum Press, 1992, pp.56–58, 75–101, 221–30; William J. Diebold, ‘The Politics of Derestoration: The Aegina Pediments and the German Confrontation with the Past’, Art Journal 54/2 (Summer 1995), pp.60–66. 6 Adolf Michaelis, A Century of Archaeological Discoveries, trans. Bettina Kahnweiler, London: John Murray, 1908, p.25. 7 See Richard Payne Knight’s evidence, Report from the Select Committee on the Earl of Elgin’s Collection of Sculptured Marbles, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, 1816 (161), ProQuest Information and Learning Company, 2006, pp.39–41 (cited hereafter as Select Committee Report). 8 Select Committee Report, pp.63, 61. 9 Jacob Rothenberg, ‘Descensus ad Terram’: The Acquisition and Reception of the Elgin Marbles, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1977, pp.349– 50, 330–32; William Hamilton’s evidence, Select Committee Report, p.28. 10 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, vol. 2, p.724.

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11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

28 29

Ibid., vol. 2, pp.723–24. Ibid., vol. 2, p.785. Ibid., vol. 2, pp.785–86. Ibid., vol. 2, p.724. Ibid., vol. 2, pp.724–25. Compare, for example, Benjamin Robert Haydon’s response to the Elgins, well summarised from Haydon’s voluminous writings in Rothenberg, ‘Descensus ad Terram’, pp.230–44 and passim. Select Committee Report, p.38. Quoted in Potts, ‘The Impossible Ideal’, p.104; on Visconti’s response see Rothenberg, ‘Descensus ad Terram’, pp.350–56. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, p.726. Select Committee Report, pp.31–32. Ibid., pp.36–37. A. Furtwängler and H.L. Urlichs, Greek and Roman Sculpture, trans. Horace Taylor, London: J.M. Dent; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1914, p.10. Walter Pater, Greek Studies: A Series of Essays, London: Macmillan, 1901, pp.266–67. Select Committee Report, p.9. Ibid., p.15. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987, p.5. See Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes, p.35. For a detailed history see Klaus Vierneisel and Gottlieb Leinz (eds), Glyptothek München 1830–1980, exhibition catalogue, Munich: Glyptothek, 1980. For an interesting discussion of the implications of the Glyptothek’s historical display see Wolfgang Ernst, ‘Framing the Fragment: Archaeology, Art, Museum’, in Paul Duro (ed.), The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp.111–35. For debates of the 1820s on historical organisation in Berlin see Steven Moyano, ‘Quality vs History: Schinkel’s Altes Museum and Prussian Arts Policy, Art Bulletin 72/4 (December 1990), pp.585–608. The Faun (now dated c.220bc) was acquired for Ludwig from the Barberini family in 1814 (see Vierneisel and Leinz, Glyptothek, pp.48–49, 72). Charles T. Newton, ‘Remarks on the Collections of Ancient Art in the Museums of Italy, the Glyptothek at Munich, and the British Museum’, The Museum of Classical Antiquities no III (July 1851), p.227 (the published article reproduces the ‘Summary’ from Newton’s handwritten report of

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30 31 32

33

34 35 36 37

38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45

January 1849, held in the library of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities). Michaelis, Century, p.45. Newton, ‘Remarks’, pp.226–27. See Peter Connor, ‘Cast-collecting in the Nineteenth Century: Scholarship, Aesthetics, Connoisseurship’, in G.W. Clarke (ed.), Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp.187–235. A good example is the discussion of Olympia in Books 5–6, where the pedimental sculptures of the Temple of Zeus are mentioned briefly (5.10.8) whereas Pheidias’s cult statue is described at length (5.11.1–9), and many of the statues of victors are singled out; see Jaś Elsner, ‘Structuring “Greece”: Pausanias’s Periegesis as a Literary Construct’, in Susan E. Alcock, John F. Cherry and Jaś Elsner (eds), Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp.8–18. For Pausanias’s views on art see Christian Habicht, Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985, pp.131–32. Pausanias 1.24.5. Pausanias 2.30.3. Plutarch, Pericles 13.4, 13.9. See Hugh Honour, ‘Canova’s Studio Practice: (I) The Early Years’ and ‘Canova’s Studio Practice: (II) 1792–1822’, Burlington Magazine 114 (March and April 1972), pp.146–59, 214–29. Select Committee Report, pp.7, 37, 68. Rothenberg, ‘Descensus ad Terram’, pp.185–89; on Elgin’s deliberations about restoration see also pp.163–69 and n. 301 on p.351. ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (first published in October, 1979), repr. in Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1986, pp.276–90. Select Committee Report, p.15. See Rothenberg, ‘Descensus ad Terram’, pp.390, 445–49. Bernard Ashmole, The Classical Ideal in Greek Sculpture (Lectures in Memory of Louise Taft Semple), University of Cincinnati, 1964, p.44. Both phrases are Alex Potts’s: ‘The impossible ideal’, p.101; Sculptural Imagination, p.16. Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967, p.219.

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46 See Frederic Will, ‘Two Critics of the Elgin Marbles: William Hazlitt and Quatremère de Quincy’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 14/4, (June 1956), pp.462–74. 47 For example in Flaxman’s evidence, Select Committee Report, pp.31–32. Paradoxically the figure is now routinely identified as the god Dionysus. 48 Rothenberg, ‘Descensus ad Terram’, pp.241–46. 49 See note 15 above. 50 B.R. Haydon, Lectures on Painting and Design, vol. 2, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1846, p.220. 51 William Hazlitt, Criticisms on Art: And Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England, London: John Templeman, 1843, p.245. 52 See Frederick Cummings, ‘Phidias in Bloomsbury: B.R. Haydon’s Drawings of the Elgin Marbles’, Burlington Magazine 106/736 (July 1964), pp.323–28. 53 See Frederick Cummings, ‘B.R. Haydon and His School’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes vol. 26, nos 3/4 (1963), pp.367–80. 54 Quoted in Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes, p.34. 55 M.S. Watts, George Frederic Watts, London: Macmillan, 1912, vol. 1, pp.26, 74, 90. See further Ian Jenkins, ‘“G.F. Watts’ Teachers”: George Frederic Watts and the Elgin Marbles’, Apollo 120 (September 1984), pp.176–81. 56 See for example Gisela Richter, The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1930, chs IV–VI; Andrew Stewart, Greek Sculpture: An Exploration, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1990, pp.75–78. 57 Watts, George Frederic Watts, vol. 1, pp.146–47; see the passage from Haydon’s journal for 1810 in Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, from his Autobiography and Journals, ed. Tom Taylor, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853, vol. 1, p.148. 58 Winckelmann, Reflections, p.5; Benjamin West’s evidence, Select Committee Report, p.59. 59 Watts, George Frederic Watts, vol. 1, p.147. 60 Ibid., vol. 1, pp.148–49 (from a manuscript fragment of 1854). 61 Ibid., vol. 1, p.141. 62 On Watts’s technique see Stephanie Brown, ‘Indefinite Expansion: Watts and the Physicality of Sculpture’, in Colin Trodd and Stephanie Brown (eds), Representations of G.F. Watts: Art Making in Victorian Culture, Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004, pp.95–103. 63 Watts, George Frederic Watts, vol. 1, pp.316–17.

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64 See further Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Between Homer and Ovid: Metamorphoses of the “Grand Style” in G.F. Watts’, in Trodd and Brown, Representations of G.F. Watts, pp.49–64; Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007, pp.135–39 and passim. 65 James McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1892), facsimile reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1967, p.159 (See p.146, on the Venus de Milo). 66 See David Park Curry, James McNeill Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art, exhibition catalogue, Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 1984, pp.107–10. 67 C.O. Müller, Ancient Art and its Remains; or a Manual of the Archaeology of Art, new ed., trans. John Leitch, London: A. Fullarton, 1850, p.265 (§253.2). 68 For a fuller discussion see Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Reception and Ancient Art: The Case of the Venus de Milo’, in Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (eds), Classics and the Uses of Reception, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp.227–49. 69 See for example the recent introduction to the sculpture by Ludovic Laugier in Jean-Pierre Cuzin et al., D’après l’antique, exhibition catalogue, Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2000, pp.432–33. 70 Salomon Reinach, ‘La Vénus de Milo’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1 May 1890, p.388. For interpretations of the subject see also Alain Pasquier, La Vénus de Milo et les Aphrodites du Louvre, Paris: Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1985, p.35. 71 For examples see Prettejohn, ‘Reception and Ancient Art’, note 7 on p.231. 72 See for example M. le Comte de Clarac, Sur la statue antique de Vénus Victrix découverte dans l’île de Milo en 1820, Paris: P. Didot, 1821, p.28. 73 Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, Sur la statue antique de Vénus, découverte dans l’île de Milo en 1820, Paris: Debure Frères, 1821, p.5; Clarac, Sur la statue, p.2; T.-B. Éméric-David, ‘Observations sur la statue antique de femme, découverte dans l’île de Milo, en 1820’, repr. in Histoire de la Sculpture Antique, Paris: Charpentier, 1853, p.189. 74 Quatremère, Sur la statue, pp.15–25 (quotation p.24). 75 Éméric-David, ‘Observations’, pp.195–226 (quotation p.190). 76 Clarac, Sur la statue, pp.48–55. 77 Quatremère, Sur la statue, p.32. 78 Éméric-David, ‘Observations’, pp.191–92.

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79 80 81 82 83 84 85

86

87 88 89

90

91

92

93 94

95 96 97

Clarac, Sur la statue, pp.43–46. Ibid., p.14. Éméric-David, ‘Observations’, p.192. Quatremère, Sur la statue, pp.26–27. For a selection see Cuzin et al., D’après l’antique, pp.444–53. George Scharf, The Greek Court Erected in the Crystal Palace, by Owen Jones, London: Crystal Palace Library and Bradbury & Evans, 1854, p.49. For a contemporary illustration see J.R. Piggott, Palace of the People: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham 1854–1936, London: Hurst & Company, 2004, p.71. See further Kate Nichols, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace, 1854–1936, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. See Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity, London: Thames & Hudson, 1994 (a classic study which does not, however, acknowledge the role of ancient sculpture). Théophile Gautier, Guide de l’amateur au Musée du Louvre, Paris: G. Charpentier, 1882, pp.191–92. Cuzin et al., D’après l’antique, p.456. See Claudine Mitchell, ‘Style/Écriture: On the Classical Ethos, Women’s Sculptural Practice and Pre-First-World-War Feminism’, Art History 25/1 (February 2002), pp.6–8. See Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910–1930, exhibition catalogue, London: Tate Gallery, 1990, p.227. Illustrated in Cuzin et al., D’après l’antique, p.434. This catalogue illustrates a fascinating series of artistic responses to the Venus de Milo, pp.434–99. Auguste Rodin, ‘Vénus: À la Vénus de Milo’, L’Art et les Artistes 10 (March 1910), pp.243–55. On the Monument to Whistler, see Catherine Lampert et al., Rodin, exhibition catalogue, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2006, pp.260–63. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987, p.204. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007, p.91. Quoted in ibid., p.129. See Sarah Betzer, ‘Afterimage of the Eruption: An Archaeology of Chassériau’s Tepidarium (1853)’, Art History 33/3 (June 2010), pp.466–89. Whistler, Gentle Art, p.146.

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98 For a vivid account see Théophile Gautier, Tableaux de Siège: Paris, 1870– 1871, Paris: Charpentier, 1871, pp.348–59. 99 Félix Ravaisson, La Vénus de Milo, Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1871, pp.3–24. 100 Reinach, ‘La Vénus de Milo’, p.387. 101 ‘adorably exhausted’, Gautier, Tableaux de Siège, p.357. 102 Adolf Furtwängler, Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture: A Series of Essays on the History of Art, ed. Eugénie Sellers, London: William Heinemann, 1895, pp.365–401. 103 Salomon Reinach, Apollo: An Illustrated Manual of the History of Art Throughout the Ages, trans. Florence Simmonds, London: William Heinemann, 1907, pp.54–55. 104 See for example Gregory Curtis, Disarmed: The Story of the Venus de Milo, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003; Dimitri Salmon, La Vénus de Milo: Un mythe, Paris: Gallimard, 2000. 105 See Cuzin et al., D’après l’antique, pp.460–67. 106 For this and other interesting recent examples see Sarah Wilson, ‘Monsieur Venus: Michel Journiac and Love’, in Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott (eds), Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000, pp.156–72. 107 See Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, pp.77–78. 108 For illustrations, see Cuzin et al., D’après l’antique, pp.477–99. 109 For a still see David Thompson, ‘Undress Rehearsal’, Sight and Sound 14/1 (January 2004), p.22. 110 See Cuzin et al., D’après l’antique, pp.468–76. 111 Gautier, Tableaux de Siège, p.349; Éméric-David, ‘Observations’, p.190. 112 R.R.R. Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture: A Handbook, London: Thames & Hudson, 1991, p.79. 113 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Donald L. Hill, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980, p.164; on Hegel see Ch. 2 below, pp.104–9. 114 Pater, Renaissance, pp.52–53. 115 Furtwängler, Masterpieces, p.384. 116 On Ranke’s famous phrase, and the attendant historiographical issues, see Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp.8–31.

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117 James I. Porter, ‘Is Art Modern? Kristeller’s “Modern System of the Arts” Reconsidered’, British Journal of Aesthetics 49/1 (January 2009), p.2. 118 From ‘Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 28, trans. Ernst Wangermann, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986, p.47. 119 See Introduction above, p.36. 120 Porter, ‘Is Art Modern?’, p.22 and note 52. 121 Quoted in ibid., p.21 (from Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne, Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p.7). 122 Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982, p.47. 123 William Michael Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868, London: John Camden Hotten, 1868, p.32. 124 Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, p.20. 125 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1962 (and frequently reprinted). 126 Potts, Sculptural Imagination, p.38. 127 See Introduction above, pp.8–11. 128 Pater, Renaissance, p.158. 129 Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, p.63. 130 Ibid., p.51. 131 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana/Collins, 1973, p.263. See also Jauss’s critique, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, pp.65–66.

Chapter 2

1 2

3 4

G.W.F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993, p.91. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987, p.35. Hegel, Introductory Lectures, p.91 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, vol. 1, p.517.

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5 6 7 8 9 10

11

12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19

20

J.J. Pollitt, The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p.13 (Diodorus 4.76.2–3). Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, p.2. Ibid., vol. 2, p.724. Ibid., vol. 2, p.768. Ibid., vol. 2, p.766. Charles T. Newton, ‘Remarks on the Collections of Ancient Art in the Museums of Italy, the Glyptothek at Munich, and the British Museum’, The Museum of Classical Antiquities 3 (July 1851), pp.209–10, 212. For an important recent discussion of this development see Miranda Marvin, The Language of the Muses: The Dialogue between Roman and Greek Sculpture, Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2008, especially Ch. 7. See especially Rhys Carpenter, Greek Sculpture: A Critical Review, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Olga Palagia and J.J. Pollitt, Personal Styles in Greek Sculpture (Yale Classical Studies, vol. 30), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. x. The odd sculptor out is Damophon, the evidence for whom was assembled in the late twentieth century; this chapter, by Petros Themelis, is different in character from the other four in the volume, all of which depend heavily on later-nineteenth-century research. Adolf Michaelis, A Century of Archaeological Discoveries, trans. Bettina Kahnweiler, London: John Murray, 1908, p.308. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, p.49. Michaelis, Century, p.309. See Paolo Moreno, Lisippo: L’Arte e la Fortuna, exhibition catalogue, Rome: Palazzo delle Esposizioni/Fabbri Editori, 1995, pp.201, 205 (entries by Paolo Liverani). Pliny 34.65 (Lysippos), 34.56 (Polykleitos), trans. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, pp.98–99, 75–76. See Michaelis, Century, pp.310–11, which credits the recognition of the Vaison sculpture to Wolfgang Helbig in 1871. Previously a sculpture from the Farnese collections, acquired by the British Museum in 1864 (1864,1021.4), had been associated with Polykleitos’s Diadoumenos, and Newton at first thought the new Vaison sculpture less faithful to the Polykleitan type (see the MS volume of Reports, British Museum Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 1867–69, pp.543–50). Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, pp.75–77 (quotation p.75).

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21 See A.H. Smith, ‘Lord Elgin and his Collection’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 36 (1916), p.285 and passim. 22 Pausanias 5.17.3, trans. in Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, p.89. 23 For a summary of the arguments see Aileen Ajootian, ‘Praxiteles’, in Palagia and Pollitt, Personal Styles, pp.103–10. While Ajootian states confidently that ‘the Hermes is now generally thought not to be a fourth-century original’, more recent research by Antonio Corso supports Praxiteles’s authorship; see Antonio Corso, ‘The Hermes of Praxiteles’, Numismatica e antichità classiche 25 (1996), pp.131–53. For a comprehensive account of the evidence on Praxiteles see Antonio Corso, Prassitele, Fonti Epigrafiche e Lettarie, 3 vols, Rome: De Lucca, 1988–91. 24 On the attribution (by Ennio Quirino Visconti in 1781), see Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1982, p.331. 25 Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, pp.84–86. 26 See Rosemary Barrow, ‘Drapery, Sculpture and the Praxitelean Ideal’, in Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn (eds), Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999, pp.57–61. 27 Newton, ‘Remarks’, p.213. 28 See Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, p.152; Pliny 34.70, trans. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, p.85. 29 See Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, pp.209–10; Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, pp.84–88. 30 See Whitney Davis, ‘“Homosexualism,” Gay and Lesbian Studies, and Queer Theory in Art History’, in Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds), The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, note 10 on p.137. 31 See Alain Pasquier and Jean-Luc Martinez (eds), Praxitèle, exhibition catalogue, Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2007, pp.12–13. 32 See Pascale Picard-Cajan (ed.), Ingres et l’antique: l’illusion grecque, exhibition catalogue, Montauban: Musée Ingres/Actes Sud, 2006, cat. nos175–76. 33 Michaelis, Century, pp.312–13. 34 Adolf Furtwängler, Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture: A Series of Essays on the History of Art, ed. Eugénie Sellers, London: William Heinemann, 1895, p.408. For a sceptical account see Ellen Perry, The Aesthetics of Emulation in the Visual Arts of Ancient Rome, Cambridge: Cambridge University

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35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44

45 46 47 48 49

50 51

52

Press, 2005, pp.1–6. On the Apollo’s changing reputation see Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, pp.148–51. Die archaeologischen Entdeckungen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Leipzig 1906; the English translation cited here is based on the second German edition of 1908. Michaelis, Century, pp.298–303. Ibid., p.324. Ibid., p.1. Ibid., pp.303–4. For an excellent short introduction see Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, ‘Connoisseurship’, Art History: A Critical Introduction to its Methods, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006, pp.40–64. Michaelis, Century, p.303. Ibid., pp.304–5. Giovanni Morelli, Italian Painters: Critical Studies of Their Works: The Borghese and Doria-Pamfili Galleries in Rome, trans. Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes, London: John Murray, 1892, pp.26–27. Michaelis, Century, p.305 (the ‘literary evidences’ are presumably the passage from Lucian, cited above in note 15, and Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 2.13.8–10, trans. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, pp.49–50). Ingenious efforts have been made to draw conclusions from traces of the positions of the feet on the bases, for example. Furtwängler, Masterpieces, p.ix. Michaelis, Century, p.307. Furtwängler, Masterpieces, p.viii. Bernard Berenson, ‘The Rudiments of Connoisseurship’, The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, London: George Bell and Sons, 1902, pp.122–44 (quotation p.139). Ibid., p.134. See for example Richard Wollheim, ‘Giovanni Morelli and the Origins of Scientific Connoisseurship’, On Art and the Mind: Essays and Lectures, London: Allen Lane, 1973, pp.177–201; Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes’, in Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok (eds), The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988, pp.81–118. For a more thorough exploration of the relationships between Roman and Greek sculpture, including the question of copying, see Marvin, The Language of the Muses.

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53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63

64 65 66

67 68

69

70

Berenson, ‘Rudiments’, pp.119–21 (quotation pp.119–20). Ibid., pp.111–19. Ibid., p.120. Ibid., p.113. For symmetria see Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, pp.98–99. Palagia and Pollitt, Personal Styles, p.138. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, p.98. For a list of ‘Extant Originals by Greek Sculptors Mentioned in the Literary Sources’ see Andrew Stewart, Greek Sculpture: An Exploration, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1990, vol. 1, pp.317– 18 (46 works listed, of which 22 are marked with queries); for a list of extant Greek bronzes see ibid., pp.315–16 (27 works listed, of which only one was discovered before 1800, and only nine before 1900). See Carol C. Mattusch, Greek Bronze Statuary: From the Beginnings through the First Century BC, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988, pp.207–8. Robin Osborne, Archaic and Classical Greek Art, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, p.163. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, p.77 (Pollitt refrains from translating the Greek phrase ‘para mikron’ on the grounds that its meaning is disputable; see his note 46 on p.77). Osborne, Archaic and Classical, p.163. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, p.75. Similar progressive sequences were created for the archaic sculptures discovered from the late-nineteenth century onwards; see for example Gisela M.A. Richter and Irma A. Richter, Kouroi: A Study of the Development of the Greek Kouros from the Late Seventh to the Early Fifth Century, BC, New York: Oxford University Press, 1942. Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, ‘The State of Research on Ancient Art’, Art Bulletin 68 (March 1986), p.21. Christian Habicht, Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985, p.56; see also Christian Habicht, ‘Pausanias and the Evidence of Inscriptions’, Classical Antiquity 3/1 (April 1984), pp.40–56. On the statue bases of Praxiteles and his family see Ajootian, ‘Praxiteles’, in Palagia and Pollitt, Personal Styles, pp.92–98. On the general problem see above, pp.9–10, 125–26. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, §20, p.23.

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71 David J. Getsy, ‘Encountering the Male Nude at the Origins of Modern Sculpture. Rodin, Leighton, Hildebrand and the Negotiation of Physicality and Temporality’, in Antoinette Roesler-Friedenthal and Johannes Nathan (eds), The Enduring Instant: Time and the Spectator in the Visual Arts, Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2003, pp.296–313. 72 See for example Thomas Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995; Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997. 73 See in particular the work of Jason Edwards, David Getsy and Michael Hatt. A leader in the field has been Whitney Davis; see for example his edited collection Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History, Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 1994. 74 James Ward, ‘Lord Leighton, P.R.A.: Some Reminiscences, and an Explanation of the Methods in which the South Kensington Frescoes were Painted’, Magazine of Art 19 (1896), p.373. 75 See Claudine Mitchell (ed.), Rodin: The Zola of Sculpture, Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004, Part 2 (‘The Kiss, or the Desire for Classical Art’, pp.121–59); Auguste Rodin, Art: Conversations with Paul Gsell, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984 (first published as L’Art: Entretiens Réunis par Paul Gsell, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1911). 76 Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999, pp.253–54. 77 Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Janson, Art of the Nineteenth Century: Painting and Sculpture, London: Thames & Hudson, 1984, p.491. For further information on Standing Man see Sigrid Esche-Braunfels, Adolf von Hildebrand (1847–1921), Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1993, pp.64–66. 78 Getsy, ‘Encountering the Male Nude’, p.297. 79 Jean Rousseau, ‘Revue des Arts’, Echo du Parlement, Brussels, 11 April 1877, repr. in Ruth Butler (ed.), Rodin in Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980, p.33. 80 See ‘Phidias and Michelangelo’, in Rodin, Art, pp.87–102; and (on Watts and Pater), pp.65–71, 92–93 above. 81 Auguste Rodin, ‘The Lesson of Antiquity’, trans. Maev de la Guardia, in Mitchell, Rodin, p.141 (first published as ‘La leçon de l’Antique’, Le Musée, Revue d’Art Antique 1 (January–February 1904)).

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82 See Ruth Butler, ‘Rodin and the Paris Salon’, in Albert E. Elsen (ed.), Rodin Rediscovered, exhibition catalogue, Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1981, pp.33–34. 83 Rodin, Art, pp.96–97. 84 Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, p.76 (Pliny 34.55). 85 It should be noted that all three of these artists may have known much more about one another’s work than current art history, still immured in a tradition of national schools, acknowledges. Leighton’s Athlete was on display at the RA in London in the same exhibition season (1877) as Rodin’s The Age of Bronze at the Paris Salon. When the Athlete reappeared at the Exposition Universelle in Paris the next year, it won a gold medal, and it seems unlikely that Rodin would not have noted it. In 1882 Leighton bought a version of Rodin’s Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose, which he displayed in the hall of his house; see Benedict Read, ‘Leighton and Sculpture’, in Stephen Jones et al., Frederic Leighton 1830–1896, exhibition catalogue, London: Royal Academy of Arts/Harry N. Abrams, 1996, p.88. 86 See for example Charles M. Edwards, ‘Lysippos’, in Olga Palagia and J.J. Pollitt, Personal Styles in Greek Sculpture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.153; Getsy, ‘Encountering the Male Nude’, pp.304–5. 87 Hegel, Introductory Lectures, p.92. 88 The phrase is Pater’s, in a different context; see Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Donald L. Hill, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980, p.xxiii. 89 Rosenblum and Janson, Art of the Nineteenth Century, p.491. 90 Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Sculpture, London: Thames & Hudson, 1964, p.18. 91 Rodin, ‘The Lesson’, p.142. 92 Jones et al., Frederic Leighton, p.202. 93 Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, p.98. For a fascinating discussion of this anecdote see Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1979, pp.14–22. 94 See note 60 above. 95 For a recent discussion of this vexed issue see Mary B. Hollinshead, ‘Extending the Reach of Marble: Struts in Greek and Roman Sculpture’, in Elaine K. Gazda (ed.), The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002, pp.117–52.

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96 See Edwin Becker et al. (eds), Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum/Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 1996, especially pp.182–86; Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Lawrence Alma-Tadema and the Modern City of Ancient Rome’, Art Bulletin 84 (March 2002), pp.115–29. 97 See Jones et al., Frederic Leighton, p.183. 98 See for example Butler, ‘Rodin and the Paris Salon’, p.34. 99 Rodin, ‘The Lesson’, p.141. 100 Auguste Rodin, ‘Vénus. À la Vénus de Milo’, L’Art et les Artistes 10 (March 1910), pp.243–55; Auguste Rodin, ‘Reflections on the Head of a Goddess from Chios, in the Warren Collection’, trans. Maev de la Guardia, in Mitchell, Rodin, pp.138–40 (first published as ‘La tête Warren’, Le Musée, Revue d’Art Antique 1 (November–December 1904)); see also Bénédicte Garnier, ‘The Sculptor, the Collector and the Archaeologist: Auguste Rodin, Edward Perry Warren and John Marshall’, in ibid., pp.121–33. 101 Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, p.76. 102 Adolf Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994, p.234. 103 Ibid., p.271. 104 See Rudolf Wittkower, Sculpture: Processes and Principles, London: Allen Lane, 1977, pp.244–49. 105 Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, p.275; see pp. 204–17 below. 106 Walter Pater, Greek Studies: A Series of Essays, London: Macmillan, 1901, p.287. 107 Ibid., p.277. 108 Michaelis, Century, p.309; for the passage from Pausanias (1.8.5) see Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, p.41. 109 Pater, Greek Studies, p.276. 110 Ibid., p.282. 111 Ibid., p.279. 112 Ibid., pp.278–79. 113 Ibid., p.283. 114 Ibid., p.296. 115 Ibid., p.284; for further analysis see Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘The Modernism of Frederic Leighton’, in David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry (eds), English

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116 117

118 119 120 121 122 123

Art 1860–1914: Modern Artists and Identity, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, pp.31–48. Read, ‘Leighton and Sculpture’, pp.89–91. Among recent studies see especially Jason Edwards, Alfred Gilbert’s Aestheticism: Gilbert Amongst Whistler, Wilde, Leighton, Pater and BurneJones, Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006; David J. Getsy, Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004. Edmund Gosse, ‘The New Sculpture: 1879–1894’, Art Journal 56 (1894), pp.138–42, 199–203, 277–82, 306–11. Pater, Renaissance, p.189. Quoted in an obituary by John Sturrock, Independent, 11 October 2004 (accessed online, 23 March 2010). See note 51 above. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn, rev. Vasilis Politis, London: J.M. Dent, 1993, p.172. Rodin, Art, p.96.

Chapter 3

1

2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909), trans. R.W. Flint, repr. in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992, p.147. Ezra Pound, ‘The Caressability of the Greeks’, Egoist 1 (16 March 1914), p.117. Quoted in Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, New York: New Directions, 1970, p.30. Hans Arp, ‘Dadaism’, in El Lissitzky and Hans Arp, Die Kunstismen: Les Ismes de l’Art: The Isms of Art, Erlenbach-Zürich: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1925, repr. New York: Arno Press, 1968, p.x. R.H. Wilenski, The Meaning of Modern Sculpture, London: Faber and Faber, 1932, p.xviii. Repr. in Harrison and Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–1990, p.572. Wilenski, Meaning, p.xviii. ‘Is There Any Greek Sculpture?’, Listener 8 (23 November 1932), p.754. Ibid., p.756. Cf. Furtwängler, quoted on p.95 above.

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10 Listener 8 (19 October 1932), p.545. 11 Wilenski, Meaning, p.87. 12 Stanley Casson, ‘An Iconoclast Among the Greeks’, Listener 8 (3 August 1932), p.161. 13 Ezra Pound, ‘The New Sculpture’, Egoist 1 (16 February 1914), p.67. 14 Wilenski, Meaning, Pl. 2b, facing p.21. 15 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, p.30. 16 Charles Harrison, ‘Modernism’, in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (eds), Critical Terms for Art History, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.142. See Potts, quoted on p.102 above. 17 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne, New York: Da Capo Press, 1986, p.13. 18 Two recent exhibitions demonstrate growing interest in reconsidering the relations between classical antiquity and artistic modernism: Christopher Green, Jens M. Daehner and others, Modern Antiquity: Picasso, De Chirico, Léger, Picabia, Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011; Kenneth E. Silver, Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy and Germany, 1918– 1936, New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2010. 19 Wilenski, Meaning, p.84. 20 Ibid., p.87. 21 Michael Doran (ed.), Conversations with Cézanne, trans. Julie Lawrence Cochran, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001, p.39. 22 T.E. Hulme, ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co., 1936, p.101. 23 Ibid., p.76. 24 Pound, ‘New Sculpture’, p.67. 25 Hulme, ‘Modern Art’, p.78. 26 Ibid., p.82. 27 Ibid., p.77. 28 Ibid., pp.82, 85. 29 Ibid., p.89. 30 Ibid., p.99. 31 Ibid., p.89. 32 E.A. Gardner, ‘The Processes of Greek Sculpture, as Shown by Some Unfinished Statues in Athens’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 11 (1890), p.129. 33 See Robin Barber, ‘Classical Art: Discovery, Research and Presentation, 1890–1930’, in Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52

Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910–1930, exhibition catalogue, London: Tate Gallery, 1990, pp.391–406. For British sculptors’ engagement with a wide range of ancient sculptural traditions see Penelope Curtis and Keith Wilson (eds), Modern British Sculpture, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2011, especially the section ‘Theft by Finding’, with catalogue entries by Penelope Curtis, pp. 52–83, and essay by Adrian Locke, ‘Looking Around at Leisure: Sculptors and the British Museum’, pp. 84–91. Hulme, ‘Modern Art’, p.93. ‘Mr. Gaudier-Brzeska on “The New Sculpture”’, Egoist 1 (16 March 1914), pp.117–18. J.J. Pollitt, The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p.13 (Diodorus 4.76.3). Hulme, ‘Modern Art’, p.90. Ibid., pp.91–92 Ibid., p.86. Ibid., p.106. See Cowling and Mundy, On Classic Ground, pp.39–40. Hulme, ‘Modern Art’, p.108. Ibid., p.91. Ibid., p.78. Ibid., p.86. Ibid., p.86. Ernest A. Gardner, ‘Recently Discovered Archaic Sculptures’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 8 (1887), p.160. The kore, discovered in 1886 (Acropolis Museum no. 681), which may belong to an inscribed base signed by Antenor; see G.M.A. Richter, Korai: Archaic Greek Maidens: A Study of the Development of the Kore Type in Greek Sculpture, London: Phaidon Press, 1968, no 110, pp.69–70. Pierre Paris, Manual of Ancient Sculpture, ed. Jane Harrison, London: H. Grevel, 1890, pp.vi, 113. Gisela M.A. Richter, The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks, 2nd ed., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1930, p.vii. See p. 125 above. See Ingrid E.M. Edlund et al., ‘Gisela Marie Augusta Richter (1882–1972): Scholar of Classical Art and Museum Archaeologist’, in Claire Richter Sherman (ed.), with Adele M. Holcomb, Women as Interpreters of the

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53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Visual Arts, 1820–1979, Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1981, pp.275–300. Richter, Sculpture and Sculptors, p.vii. Ibid., p.26. Ibid., p.26. Ibid., p.23. In later editions of this often reprinted book, the New York kouros is inserted in the chronology and mentioned among the early kouroi, but the general discussions remain unaltered. Adolf Michaelis, A Century of Archaeological Discoveries, trans. Bettina Kahnweiler, London: John Murray, 1908, p.352. Gisela M.A. Richter, ‘The Department of Greek and Roman Art: Triumphs and Tribulations’, Metropolitan Museum Journal 3 (1970), p.85. See Kenneth Lapatin and Karol Wight (eds), The J. Paul Getty Museum: Handbook of the Antiquities Collection, 2nd ed., Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2010. ‘Is There Any Greek Sculpture?’, p.756. Paris, Manual, p.120. ‘Is There Any Greek Sculpture?’, p.756. ‘Aristide Maillol’ (1905), repr. in Maurice Denis, Le Ciel et l’Arcadie, ed. Jean-Paul Bouillon, Paris: Hermann, 1993, p.109. Ibid., p.103. Walter Pater, Greek Studies: A Series of Essays, London: Macmillan, 1901, p.189. Ibid., p.223. T.E. Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co., 1936, p.126. Pater, Greek Studies, p.193 Ibid., pp.267–68. Emanuel Loewy, The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, trans. John Fothergill, London: Duckworth, 1907, p.67 (previous quotations pp.7, 47). Edlund, ‘Gisela Marie Augusta Richter’, p.279. Christian Zervos, ‘L’Art Ancien Grec’, Cahiers d’Art 8 (1933), p.254 (my translation). Roger Fry, ‘Greek Art Brought Up to Date’, Listener, 7 March 1934, p.388. Pater, Greek Studies, p.190

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76 77 78 79 80 81

82

83

84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

See pp.157–58 above. Gardner, ‘Processes’, pp.137–38. ‘Is There Any Greek Sculpture?’, p.754. Richter, Sculpture and Sculptors, p.140. For a good summary see Nicholas Penny, The Materials of Sculpture, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1993, pp.226–30. Gardner, ‘Processes’, p.138; for a more complex recent view see for example Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, Roman Copies of Greek Sculpture: The Problem of the Originals, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1984. For an excellent introduction to the issues around direct carving, see Penelope Curtis, Sculpture 1900–1945: After Rodin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp.73–104. See Benedict Read, Victorian Sculpture, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1982, pp.66–78; John Sankey, ‘The Sculptor’s Ghost – the Case of Belt v. Lawes’, Sculpture Journal 16/2 (2007), pp.84–89. I am indebted to Jason Edwards for calling these examples to my attention. Eric Gill, Sculpture: An Essay, repr. in Jon Wood et al. (eds), Modern Sculpture Reader, Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007, pp.56–63. Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, p.19. Quotations from Curtis, Sculpture 1900–1945, pp.77, 78, 89. Wilenski, Meaning, pp.96–102. Richter, Sculpture and Sculptors, pp.viii–ix. Ibid., p.27. Ibid., p.302. Ibid., note 56 on p.144. Ibid., note 43 on p.142. Wilenski, Meaning, pp.34–35 and passim. Pater, Greek Studies, pp.189–90. Pound, ‘Caressability’, p.117; Auceps (pseudonym of Richard Aldington), ‘The New Sculpture’, Egoist 1 (1 April 1914), p. 137. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, ‘Allied Artists’ Association Ltd.’, Egoist 1 (15 June 1914), p.227. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Donald L. Hill, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980, p.102. Gardner, ‘Processes’, p.131. Stanley Casson, The Technique of Early Greek Sculpture, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933, pp.vi–vii.

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100 Gardner, ‘Processes’, p.131; compare Adolf Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994, pp.272–78. 101 Charles Waldstein, Greek Sculpture and Modern Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914, pp.20–27. 102 Gill, Sculpture, p.60. 103 Ibid., p.57. 104 Wilenski, Meaning, p.95. 105 See Curtis, Sculpture 1900–1945, pp.84–89. 106 Richard Aldington, ‘Modern Poetry and the Imagists’, Egoist 1 (1 June 1914), p.202. On sculpture as a modernist paradigm see for example Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965; Elizabeth Bergmann Loiseaux, Yeats and the Visual Arts, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003, Chs 4, 7. 107 Théophile Gautier, Emaux et Camées, Paris: Gallimard, 1981, pp.148–50. 108 Adrian Stokes, The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2002, p.110. 109 See Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1982, p.199. 110 See Iain Boyd White, ‘National Socialism and Modernism: Architecture’, in Dawn Ades et al., Art and Power: Europe Under the Dictators 1930–45, exhibition catalogue, London: Hayward Gallery, 1995, pp.266–67. 111 Bernd Nicolai, ‘Tectonic Sculpture: Autonomous and Political Sculpture in Germany’, in Ades et al., Art and Power, pp.334–37. 112 Berthold Hinz, ‘“Degenerate” and “Authentic”: Aspects of Art and Power in the Third Reich’, in Ades et al., Art and Power, pp.330–33. 113 Adolf Hitler, ‘Peroration of Speech at the Great German Art Exhibition, 1937’, trans. John Willett, repr. in Ades et al., Art and Power, pp.338–39. 114 Tim Benton, ‘Rome Reclaims its Empire: Architecture’, in Ades et al., Art and Power, pp.121–27 (quotation p.122). 115 See Katie Fleming, ‘The Use and Abuse of Antiquity: The Politics and Morality of Appropriation’, in Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (eds), Classics and the Uses of Reception, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006, pp.127–37.

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116 Anthony Blunt, ‘Picasso’s Classical Period (1917–25)’, Burlington Magazine 110 (April 1968), pp.187–94. 117 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting’, October 16 (Spring 1981), p.42. 118 Ibid., pp.43–44. 119 For a penetrating critique of Silver’s argument see David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000, pp.103–4, 107. 120 Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, p.113. 121 Zervos, ‘L’Art Ancien Grec’, pp.256–58. 122 For an account of Picasso’s career that is unusually sensitive to his engagement with ancient sculpture see Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning, London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2002, pp.141–52, 537–51, and passim. 123 See above, p.25. 124 Blunt, ‘Picasso’s Classical Period’, p.188. 125 Ibid., p.187. 126 Ibid., p.188. 127 Ibid., note 3 on p.188. 128 Ibid., p.188. 129 See Richter’s chapter on ‘The Head’, Sculpture and Sculptors, especially pp.75–76. 130 John Richardson, with Marilyn McCully, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years 1917–1932, London: Jonathan Cape, 2007, pp.28–9. 131 Kenneth E. Silver, ‘At One Remove: Parisian Modernists on the Côte d’Azur’, in Sarah Wilson et al., Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900– 1968, exhibition catalogue, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2002, p.119. 132 Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, p.278. 133 See, however, Cowling, Picasso, p.549. 134 Wilenski, Meaning, pp.54–55 and passim; on the Farnese Bull see Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, pp.165–67. 135 See Christopher Green, ‘Classicisms of Transcendence and of Transience: Maillol, Picasso and De Chirico’, in Cowling and Mundy, On Classic Ground, pp.275–80.

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136 This aspect of Picasso’s practice has attracted increasing attention in recent years; see for example Laurence Madeline (ed.), Picasso Ingres, exhibition catalogue, Paris: Musée Picasso; Montauban: Musée Ingres, 2004; Elizabeth Cowling et al., Picasso: Challenging the Past, exhibition catalogue, London: National Gallery, 2009. 137 Lomas, Haunted Self, p.112. 138 Ibid., p.104. 139 From Christian Zervos, ‘Conversation avec Picasso’, Cahiers d’Art, 1935, repr. in Dore Ashton, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977, p.9. 140 For a different, and intriguing, interpretation see Alexandra Parigoris, ‘Pastiche and the Use of Tradition, 1917–1922’, in Cowling and Mundy, On Classic Ground, pp.301–4. 141 On both sets of prints, see Lisa Florman, Myth and Metamorphosis: Picasso’s Classical Prints of the 1930s, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2000. 142 See Madeline, Picasso Ingres, pp.150–57. 143 The terms ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysiac’ derive from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy of 1871, a text in vogue in the 1930s. I am indebted here to a suggestion in Christopher Green, ‘Classicisms of Transcendence’, pp.277–78. 144 See Charles M. Edwards, ‘Lysippos’, in Olga Palagia and J.J. Pollitt, Personal Styles in Greek Sculpture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp.145–49. 145 See Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, pp.100–3. 146 Richter, Sculpture and Sculptors, p.299. 147 See Pater, Renaissance, p.38. 148 For the quotation from Marx see p.97 above. 149 See for example R.R.R. Smith, ‘The Use of Images: Visual History and Ancient History’, in T.P. Wiseman (ed.), Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp.59–102. 150 Andrew Stewart, Greek Sculpture: An Exploration, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1990, p.xi. 151 It should be noted that Stewart has already taken the next step, in a book of 1997 entitled Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece, which begins its preface with a reference to Picasso and acknowledges its debt to recent theoretical work on the body.

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152 Buchloh, ‘Figures of Authority’, pp.41, 52; for his critique of the ‘reflection model’ see p.40. 153 See Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. 154 William Empson, ‘Mine Eyes Dazzle’, Essays in Criticism 14 (1964), p.85. 155 T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, London: Methuen, 1920, pp.44–45. 156 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967, note 1 on p.85. 157 See Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp.6–7. 158 For the quoted phrase see p.103 above.

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Selected Bibliography This bibliography includes key works that explore relationships between ancient sculpture and modern art, as well as theoretical texts on the modern reception of classical antiquity and closely related areas. A section is devoted to important exhibition catalogues, which demonstrate the rapid recent growth of public as well as scholarly interest in artistic relationships between antiquity and modernity.

Exhibition Catalogues

Ades, Dawn et al., Art and Power: Europe Under the Dictators, London: Hayward Gallery (Thames & Hudson), 1995 Becker, Edwin, Elizabeth Prettejohn et al., Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum; Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers), 1996 Blühm, Andreas et al., The Colour of Sculpture 1840–1910, Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum; Liverpool: Henry Moore Institute (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers), 1996 Cowling, Elizabeth and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910–1930, London: Tate Gallery, 1990 (the extended version of this catalogue (412pp) includes an excellent series of essays by Christopher Green and others) Curtis, Penelope and Keith Wilson (eds), Modern British Sculpture, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2011 (see especially the section ‘Theft by Finding’, with catalogue entries by Penelope Curtis, pp. 52–83, and essay by Adrian Locke, ‘Looking Around at Leisure: Sculptors and the British Museum’, pp.84–91) Cuzin, Jean-Pierre, Jean-René Gaborit, Alain Pasquier et al., D’Après l’antique, Paris: Musée du Louvre (Réunion des musées nationaux), 2000

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Ekserdjian, David (ed.), Bronze, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2012 Green, Christopher, Jens M. Daehner and others, Modern Antiquity: Picasso, De Chirico, Léger, Picabia, Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011 Jeammet, Violaine et al., Tanagra: Mythe et archéologie, Paris: Musée du Louvre (Réunion des musées nationaux); Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, 2003 Liversidge, Michael and Catharine Edwards (eds), Imagining Rome: British Artists and Rome in the Nineteenth Century, Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery London: Merrell Holberton Publishers, 1996 Querci, Eugenia and Stefano De Caro, Alma Tadema e la nostalgia dell’antico, Naples: Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Milan: Electa, 2007 Silver, Kenneth E., Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy and Germany, 1918–1936, New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2010 Taylor, Michael B. et al., Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne, Philadelphia Museum of Art; London: Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, 2002

Books and Articles

Barkan, Leonard, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999 Brilliant, Richard, My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000 Diebold, William J., ‘The Politics of Derestoration: The Aegina Pediments and the German Confrontation with the Past’, Art Journal 54/2 (Summer 1995), pp.60–66 Gazda, Elaine K. (ed.), The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002 Goldhill, Simon, ‘The Touch of Sappho’, in Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (eds), Classics and the Uses of Reception, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 250–73 Green, Christopher, ‘Classicisms of Transcendence and of Transience: Maillol, Picasso and de Chirico’, in Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910– 1930, exhibition catalogue, London: Tate Gallery, 1990, extended edition, pp.267–81

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Haskell, Francis and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1981 (second printing, 1982) Henderson, John, ‘(At) the Visual Point of Reception: Anselm Feuerbach’s Das Gastmahl des Platon; or, Philosophy in Paint’, in Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (eds), Classics and the Uses of Reception, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 274–87 Hughes, Anthony and Eric Ranfft (eds), Sculpture and its Reproductions, London: Reaktion Books, 1997 Jauss, Hans Robert, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, intro. Paul de Man, Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press and Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982 Jenkins, Ian, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum 1800–1939, London: British Museum Press, 1992 — ‘“G.F. Watts’ Teachers”: George Frederic Watts and the Elgin Marbles’, Apollo 120 (September 1984), pp. 176–81 Kiilerich, Bente, ‘From Greek Original to Modern Pastiche: The Reformulation of the Classical Statue in Contemporary Art’, Acta ad Archaeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia (Institutum Romanum Norvegiae) 20 (2007), pp.241–65 Marchand, Suzanne L., Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996 Martindale, Charles, ‘Reception’, in Craig W. Kallendorf (ed.), A Companion to the Classical Tradition, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007, pp. 297–311 — Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 Martindale, Charles and Richard F. Thomas (eds), Classics and the Uses of Reception, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006 Michaelis, Adolf, A Century of Archaeological Discoveries, trans. Bettina Kahnweiler, London: John Murray, 1908 Østermark-Johansen, Lene, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2011 Prettejohn, Elizabeth, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007 (see especially the chapters on Simeon Solomon, Albert Moore and ‘The Classicism of Frederic Leighton’) — Beauty and Art 1750–2000, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005

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­— ‘Between Homer and Ovid: Metamorphoses of the “Grand Style” in G.F. Watts’, in Colin Trodd and Stephanie Brown (eds), Representations of G.F. Watts: Art Making in Victorian Culture, Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004, pp. 49–64 — ‘Lawrence Alma-Tadema and the Modern City of Ancient Rome’, Art Bulletin 84/1 (March 2002), pp. 115–29 — ‘Reception and Ancient Art: The Case of the Venus de Milo’, in Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (eds), Classics and the Uses of Reception, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 227–49 Squire, Michael, The Art of the Body: Antiquity and Its Legacy, London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2011

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index Abstraction and Empathy 180 Achilles 13, 19, 200 Acropolis 3, 185, 190, 194, 196, 200, 203 Action Française 222 Adam, Sheila 204, 212 Addresses 140 Aegina Marbles 3, 29, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44–45, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 74, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 108, 193, 196, 198, 200, 203 Aestheticism 85 Aesthetics 44, 176, 244 Agasias 15 ‘Age of Athletic Prizemen, The’ 158, 159, 162, 165 Age of Bronze (L’Âge d’airain) 144, 145, 147, 150, 155, 163, 166 Albani Thetis 9, 20, 21, 25 Albani, Cardinal 9, 27 Alcinous 200 Aldington, Richard 175, 182, 211, 215 Alexander the Great 22, 23 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence 32, 33, 153, 240 Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the Tent of Achilles, The 122 American Declaration of Independence 7 Amphitrite 76

Amsterdam 32 Analytic of Principles 167 Ancient Art and its Remains 74 Antenor 159 Antinous 9 Antioch 76 Antoninus Pius 21, 23 Aphrodite 156 Aphrodite of Knidos 77, 99, 118 Aphrodite of Kos 80 Apollo (god) 19, 27 Apollo 87 Apollo Belvedere 9, 12, 15, 17, 19, 20, 23, 25, 26, 27, 48, 62, 66, 78, 85, 109, 123, 152, 156, 169, 182, 184, 202, 220 Apollo of Melos 193, 194, 209 Apollo of Tenea 196 Apollo Sauroctonos 120 Apollonios 16 Apollons Archaïques, Les 194 Apollos 82, 196 Apollos and Maidens 181, 185, 187, 196 Apoxyomenos 114, 115, 131, 132, 134, 135, 149, 162 Arcadia 84, 228, 235, 238 Arena Chapel 66 Ariadne of the Vatican 235 Aristocles 190, 196 Arman 4, 88 Arp, Hans 1, 171

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Art and Objecthood 251 ‘Ancien Grec, L’Art’ 202 ‘Art in Ancient Life’ 172 Art of Ancient Greece, The 56 Art Students’ League 209, 213 Ashmole, Bernard 4, 60, 61, 172, 173, 174, 177, 181, 197, 198, 204 Athena 57, 99 Athena Lemnia 135 Athena of the Parthenon 109 Athenaeus 120 Athens 41, 43, 61, 190, 193 Athlete Wrestling with a Python 144, 153, 154, 162, 163 Attica 195 Augustus 219 Avenue of the Americas 89

Bennington, Walter 214 Berenson, Bernard 129, 130, 165 Bergson, Henri 175 Berlin 5, 44, 104, 217, 219 Bernard, Joseph 206 Bertolucci, Bernardo 88 Bildung 26 Black Square 224, 246 Blümel, Carl 208, 212 Blunt, Anthony 228, 229, 230, 233, 243, 251 Bonnard, Pierre 185, 187 Borghese Gladiator 9, 15, 23, 82 Boston Museum of Fine Arts 197 Bowl of Milk, The 185, 187 Brancusi, Constantin 31, 182, 205, 211 ‘bras de la Vénus de Milo, Les’ 86 Braun, Emil 113, 114, 132 Breker, Arno 219, 220, 221, 222 Bristol 34, 255 Britain 29, 142 British Museum 29, 33, 39, 52, 53, 54, 58, 60, 63, 78, 114, 140, 147, 162 Brunn, Heinrich 113, 124, 125, 126, 190 Brussels 150, 155 Buchloh, Benjamin 222, 223, 224, 225, 246, 249, 250 Burlington Magazine 228, 251 Burne-Jones, Edward 241 Byzantine 185

Baedeker 173 Baigneuse au griffon, La 121, 122 Bal, Mieke 34 Barberini Faun 53 Barcelona 222 Barkan, Leonard 141, 142 Barlach, Ernst 205 Barye, Antoine-Louis 83 Bathers, The 84 Battle of Waterloo 43 Baudelaire, Charles 1, 5, 6, 25, 35, 177 Bavaria 29 Baxandall, Michael 251 Bazille, Frédéric 83 BBC 172, 176 ‘Beginnings of Greek Sculpture, The’ 162, 199, 200, 202, 211 Belt, R.C. 205 Belvedere Antinous 23 Belvedere Torso 9, 10, 16, 17, 20, 23, 25, 47, 48, 85, 225, 227 Benjamin, Walter 6, 103

Cahiers d’Art 202 Calamis 173 Cambridge 172, 213 Cameron, Julia Margaret 66, 67, 71 Canon of Polykleitos 141, 142 Canova, Antonia 57, 102, 205 Carrà, Carlo 223 Casson, Stanley 4, 174, 208, 210, 212

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INDEX

A Century of Archaeological Discoveries 123, 196, 197 Cézanne, Paul 5, 31, 83, 179, 227, 256 Champfleury 86 Chantrey, Francis 48 Charioteer of Delphi 3 Chassériau, Théodore 4, 83, 84 Chaucer 200 Chirico, Giorgio de 235 Cicero 142 Classical Heads 229, 230, 232, 233 Classicism 222 Cleopatra, the 9 Colonna 77 Commons Select Committee 43, 50, 51, 56, 57, 59, 62, 123 Communism 224 Comte de Clarac 79, 80 Constance school 34, 35 Constantinople 137 Contemporary Review 162 Copenhagen 153 Corbusier, Le 203 Corinth 196 Cornford, F.M. 172 Costa, Joachim 206 Courbet, Gustave 84 Crane, Walter 83 Crete 194, 196 Critical Terms for Art History 34, 176 Critique of Judgement, The 30, 142 Critique of Pure Reason 167 Crystal Palace 81 Cubism 5, 31, 222, 223, 227, 231, 256 Curtius, Ernst 2, 126

Dalou, Jules-Aimé 151 Damophon 111 Daumier, Honoré 4, 84 David 139 David 147 Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Le 116 Delacroix, Eugène 38, 74, 95 Delos 19, 190, 196, 197, 202 Delphi 202 Denis, Maurice 198, 203 Déonna, Waldemar 194 Derain, André 198 Derrida, Jacques 165 Description of Greece 21 Diadoumenos 114, 115, 116, 147, 161, 162, 163, 167 Dine, Jim 4, 89 Dionysus 28, 48, 119, 245 Discobolos 112, 113, 125, 158, 161, 162, 217, 225, 248 Discourses on Art 26 Doryphoros of Polykleitos 3, 30, 114, 115, 116, 133, 134, 135, 142, 144, 146, 150, 159, 162, 219, 220, 240 Dositheos 15 Drawing of ‘Theseus’ 64 Dreamers, The 88 Dresden 7, 24 Dreyfus, Alfred 88 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste 10 Duccio, Agostino di 216 Duffy, Mary 88 Duveen, Lord 58 Eakins, Thomas 139 École des Beaux-Arts 82, 122 Edwards, Charles M. 131, 132, 135 Egoist, The 171, 175, 176, 179, 182, 189, 211, 215, 228 Elgin Marbles 3, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65,

Dadaism 1 Daedalus 6, 21, 108, 131, 184, 200 Daedalus and Icarus 168, 169, 256 Dalí, Salvador 4, 88, 92, 100

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66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 108, 109, 127, 144, 149, 152, 194, 235, 237, 252 Elgin, Lord 28, 39, 43, 101, 118 Eliot, T.S. 255, 256 Éméric-David, Toussaint-Bernard 79, 80, 83, 90 Empson, William 253 Endymion 70 England 121, 139, 161, 193 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) 218, 224 Ephesos 196 Epstein, Jacob 182, 205, 211 Ernst, Max 31, 88 Etruscan 51 Eupompos 150, 151 Europe 39, 54, 81, 109 Evans, Arthur 182 Eve 85 Expressionists 205, 222

Franco–Prussian War 85, 155, 166 Freud, Sigmund 166 Fried, Michael 251 Friedrichs, Karl 30, 113, 142, 159 Fry, Roger 183, 202 Furtwängler, Adolf 31, 50, 55, 87, 88, 95, 96, 110, 111, 118, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 133, 135, 163, 166, 170 Fusiyama 72 Futurism 31, 171, 222 Galen 116, 156 Gardner, Ernest A. 4, 181, 190, 203, 204, 211, 212, 213 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 171, 175, 182, 183, 189, 194, 205, 206, 211, 213, 214, 215, 217, 244 Gautier, Théophile 82, 84, 86, 215 Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (see Reflections) ‘General Works on Greek Sculpture’ 209 German Expressionism 31 Germany 7, 8, 34, 96, 121, 139, 142, 205, 222 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 241 Geschichte der griechischen Künstler 190 Getsy, David 139, 142 Getty Museum 197 Getty Research Institute 11 Getty Villa 54 Gilbert, Alfred 162 Gill, Eric 4, 205, 206, 209, 214, 215 Ginzburg, Carlo 165 Giorgione 66, 67, 70, 101 Glyptothek 39, 53, 54, 58, 59, 196, 217

Farnese Bull 234, 235, 236, 241, 245, 255 Farnese Diadumenos 33 Farnese Hercules 10, 20, 235, 242 Fascist 219, 222, 225 Fates, the 49, 66 Fauns 82 Femme 198 Feuerbach, Anselm 139 First World War, the 31, 177, 189, 205, 222, 224, 227, 247, 249 Flaxman, John 48 Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History 35 Florence 33 Foucault, Michel 165 France 29, 31, 90, 96, 114, 142, 222 Francophiles 85

294

INDEX

Godwin, E.W. 84 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 7, 24, 25, 26, 35, 86, 103 Gold and Silver Ages 155 Gosse, Edmund 162 Graces, the 19, 82 Grand Prix de Rome 122 Greece 39, 56, 67, 90, 126, 173, 194, 213 Greek and Roman Sculpture 50, 55 Greek Sculpture: An Exploration 55, 247 Greenberg, Clement 5, 192, 251 Griechische Bidhauerarbeit 208 Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) 218, 224 Gsell, Paul 140, 146, 168

Hepworth, Barbara 207, 216 Hera of Samos 196 Herculaneum 9, 228, 229, 230 Hercules 9, 15, 17, 20, 25, 48, 240, 244 Hercules and Telephus 228, 230, 233, 233, 234 Herder, Johann Gottfried 103 Hermes 18 Hermes of Praxiteles 3, 28, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 128, 135, 138, 164, 168, 173, 256 Hesiod 155 High Renaissance, the 9 Hildebrand, Adolf von 4, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 149, 150, 151, 156, 157, 158, 164, 203, 208, 209, 213 History of Ancient Art 192 History of the Art of Antiquity (Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums) 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 18, 22, 24, 33, 36, 37, 38, 42, 44, 52 Hitler, Adolf 96, 217, 218, 219, 221 Hokusai 72 Holmes, Sherlock 166 Homer 13, 18, 26, 50, 199, 200 Hosmer, Harriet 205 House of Commons 43 Huber, Erwin 218 Hulme, T.E. 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 194, 201, 216, 222, 224, 237, 249, 250, 255

Hadrian 23, 162 Harmodius and Aristogeiton 159, 160 Harrison, Charles 176, 178 Harrison, Jane 190 Harvard University 32 Haskell, Francis 29 Hawkins, Edward 65 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 120 Haydon, Benjamin Robert 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66 Hazlitt, William 63 Head 229 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich 5, 6, 7, 35, 40, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 92, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 117, 138, 176, 200, 244 Heine, Henrich 76 Helbig 167 Hellenes 183 Hellenism 165 Hellenistic 76, 88, 93, 118, 191, 234

Iliad, the 13 Ilissos 47, 144 Impressionists 83 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 122, 229, 233, 239

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Kuhn, Thomas 101 Kunstgeschichte 1, 8

Iraq 163 Iser, Wolfgang 34, 35 Isms of Art, The 171 Italian Masters in German Galleries 191 Italy 23, 66, 109

Laïs 20 Laocoon & Sons 1, 171 Laocoon, the 4, 9, 10, 13, 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 78, 104, 105, 106, 112, 135 Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry 12 Lateran collection 113 Laurent, Robert 205, 209, 213, 214, 215 Lauseion 137 Lawrence, Thomas 4, 47, 62 Léger, Fernand 187, 203, 224, 240 Leighton, Frederic 31, 70, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 157, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 168, 169, 170, 252, 256 Leochares 123, 152 Leonardo da Vinci 11, 12, 191 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 12 Lewis, Wyndham 185, 187, 188 Limewood Sculptures of Renaissance Italy, The 251 Lipchitz, Jacques 206 Lisle, Leconte de 84 Listener 172, 176 Lives of the Artists 9 Loewy, Emmanuel 201 Lomas, David 236 London 26, 38, 39, 43, 54, 168, 172, 189, 205, 237 Looking Towards the Avenue 89 Louvre 29, 42, 43, 76, 78, 79, 82, 83, 85, 86, 92, 147, 182, 196 Lucian 112, 120 Lysippos 30, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 117, 131, 132, 135, 137, 147,

Jack, Ian 62 Jacob, Max 223 Jacobsen, Carl 153 Janson, H.W. 142, 150 Jauss, Hans Robert 35, 36, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 226, 255 Jenkins, Ian 65 Judgement of Paris 80 Judgement of Paris, The 223 Kant, Immanuel 30, 89, 142, 167 Kauffmann, Angelica 24 Kavvadías, Panagiótes 190 Keats, John 60, 61 Kemp, Wolfgang 34, 35 Kennedy, Duncan 255 Keppel, Commodore Augustus 26 Kertbeny, Karl Maria 121 Kilburn 60 Kirchner, Ludwig 205 Kiss, The 182 Klein, Melanie 216 Klenze, Leo von 53 Knidian Aphrodite (Knidia) 78, 80, 90, 118, 120, 121, 122, 136 Knight, Richard Payne 43 Knossos 182 Kopienkritik 86, 93 Kore 186 Kouroi: Archaic Greek Youths 194 Kouros 195 Krauss, Rosalind 58 Kristeller, Paul Oskar 98 Kritios 159

296

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149, 150, 151, 152, 165, 202, 208, 242, 244 Lysippos of Sikyon 150

Michaelis, Adolf 42, 54, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 138, 191, 196, 197, 245 Michelangelo 4, 93, 101, 127, 128, 146, 147, 215 Minoan 182 ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’ 179 Modern Movement in Art, The 172 Modigliani, Amedeo 205, 206 Mona Lisa 11, 12 Monument to Whistler 83 Moore, Albert 70, 85, 90, 91, 92, 93, 100 Moreau, Gustave 139 Morelli, Giovanni 30, 124, 125, 128, 130, 164, 166 Mostra Augustea della Romanità 219, 224 Müller, Carl Ottfried 74 Munich 39, 50, 53, 54, 59, 172, 217 Murray, A.S. 140 Muse 76 Musée Napoléon 42, 43, 47, 79 Musée Rodin 140 Museo Archeologico 33 Museum of Modern Art (New York) 54 Museum of Naples 159 Mussolini, Benito 219 Muybridge, Eadweard 159 My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks 34 Mycenae 200 Myron 30, 110, 112, 113, 117, 124, 158, 161, 163, 173

Madame Moitessier 229 Maeander 76 Magritte, René 88 Maillol, Aristide 50, 194, 198, 199, 203 Malevich, Kasimir 223, 224, 246 Manet, Edouard 5, 116 ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ 170 Manual of Ancient Sculpture 190, 197 Marble Faun, The 120 ‘Marbles of Aegina, The’ 162 Marées, Hans von 139 Marinetti, Filippo 171 Mars 79, 81 Marsyas 113 Martindale, Charles 255 Marx 97, 100, 167, 187, 246, 249, 252, 253 Masaccio 229 Masson, André 31 Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture 87, 110 Matisse, Henri 198 Mead, G.S.R. 189 Meaning of Modern Sculpture, The 171, 172, 174, 175, 206, 210 Mediterranean 182, 233 Méditerranée, La 198, 199 Meisterforschung 86 Meisterwerke der griechischen Plastik 110, 123, 126, 129 Meleager 9 Melos 29, 76, 80 Mengs, Anton Raphael 24, 27 Menzel, Adolph 4, 93, 94 Metamorphoses 155, 239 Metropolitan Museum 193, 194, 197

Naples 83, 159, 228, 231 Naples Museum 30, 114 Napoleon 11, 29, 61, 78, 96, 140, 217, 245

297

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Napoleon III 116 National Maritime Museuem 26 National Musuem (Athens) 193 National Socialism 223 Natural History 10, 21, 56, 152, 153 Naukratis 212 Nazis 217, 218, 221, 225 Nemesis 76 Neoclassicism 61, 84 Neolithic 202 Nero 23 Nesiotes 159 Nestor the Athenian 16 Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) 222 New Sculptors 139, 162, 163, 165 New York 89, 192, 193, 197, 201, 205, 209, 225 Newman, Barnett 172, 224 Newton, Charles 54, 55, 109, 110, 111, 114, 117, 120, 123, 212 Neyt, Auguste 150 Nike of Paionios 28 Niobe group 9, 22, 109 ‘Notre-Dame de Beauté’ 76 Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek 153

Palagia, Olga 111, 131 Papal States 42 Paris 38, 39, 43, 76, 85, 102, 122, 140, 172, 198, 205 Paris Salon 116, 150 Paris, Pierre 190 Parliamentary Commission of 1857 65 Parliamentary Select Committee 103 Parnassus 27 Parthenon 11, 23, 29, 30, 38, 39, 40, 43, 47, 48, 49, 57, 60, 62, 66, 68, 69, 72, 76, 80, 87, 99, 108, 109, 136, 144, 213, 238 Party, The 219, 220 Pater, Walter 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 20, 21, 25, 26, 35, 50, 74, 92, 93, 103, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 170, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215, 252 Patroclus 122 Pausanias 21, 56, 57, 118, 121, 126, 130, 137, 138, 159, 160, 173 Penny, Nicholas 29 Pentelic 213 Pergamon 55, 196 Periclean age 183 Persians 190 Personal Styles in Greek Sculpture 111, 131 Petrie, Flinders 212 Pheidias 10, 41, 44, 57, 58, 65, 66, 67, 69, 80, 87, 99, 101, 109, 110, 111, 117, 127, 133, 135, 137, 144, 146, 150, 173, 213, 241, 244 Philebus 174, 175, 177, 179, 224 Philo Mechanicus 115, 133, 156 Philoctetes 13, 14 Philostratus 13, 137 Phryne 120, 122 Physical Energy 69

Odes of Pindar 160, 162 Oeser, Adam Friedrich 24 Olympia 3, 28, 55, 117, 118, 121, 126, 128, 196, 198 Olympic games 27, 160, 167, 217, 218 Olympic Stadium 118 Osborne, Robin 133, 135 Ottoman 43 Ovid 13, 155, 239 Oxford 4, 161, 172 Oxford Book of Modern Verse 12 Oxford University Press 208 Padua 66 ‘Painter of Modern Life, The’ 1, 176

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Picabia, Francis 223 Picasso, Pablo 73, 182, 221, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 251, 252, 254, 255 ‘Picasso’s Classical Period’ 228, 233 Piero della Francesca 216 Pindar 19, 165 Pipes of Pan, The 221, 233 Pittura Metafisica 222 Plato 174, 175, 178, 183 Pliny 9, 10, 18, 21, 56, 57, 108, 109, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 126, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138, 141, 142, 147, 150, 151, 152, 153, 158, 160, 167 Plutarch 57, 115 Pollitt, J.J. 56, 111, 131 Polykleitos 30, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 141, 142, 146, 147, 149, 156, 157, 161, 165, 167, 168, 169, 173, 202, 208, 220 Pompeii 84 Porter, James 96, 98, 99 Portrait of an Englishwoman 188 Post-Impressionist 194 Potts, Alex 11, 35, 102 Pound, Ezra 1, 171, 175, 179, 206, 211, 213, 214, 215, 217 Poussin, Nicolas 229, 233 Praxitelean style 76 Praxiteles 28, 30, 77, 80, 99, 109, 110, 111, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 128, 131, 135, 137, 156, 164, 167, 168, 169, 173, 175, 204, 256 Pre-Raphaelites 180 Prince Ludwig of Bavaria 29, 44, 53, 54

Problem of Form, The 140, 142, 147, 156, 208, 213 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre 84, 139, 233, 234 Pygmalion 6, 19, 21, 108, 241 Quatremère de Quincy, AntoineChrysostome 79, 80, 81, 89, 92 Quest Society 189 Quintilian 142 Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History 34 Ranke, Leopold von 95, 96 Raphael 67, 68, 127, 128, 180, 229 Raphael and the Fornarina 239 Ravaisson, Félix 85, 90, 92 Read, Ben 161 Read, Herbert 150 Reagan, Ronald 223 Realism 61 Réflections critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture 10 Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture 7, 12, 15, 26, 51, 66, 67 Reinach, Joseph 88 Reinach, Salomon 76, 87, 88 Rembrandt 127, 128 Renaissance, the 4, 8, 9, 29, 30, 32, 39, 49, 67, 68, 78, 103, 124, 125, 128, 129, 142, 159, 163, 180, 189, 200, 222, 224, 225, 230, 234, 241, 249 Renaissance, The 11 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 83, 110, 121, 122 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 26, 173 Riace 133, 134 Riace bronzes 3, 135, 204 Richardson, John 231

299

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Richter, Gisela 4, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197, 201, 203, 204, 208, 209, 210, 215, 217, 231, 234, 237, 243, 244, 245, 247 Richter, Irma 191, 208 Richter, Jean Paul 191 Richter, Louise M. 191 Ridgway, Brunilde Sismondo 135, 137 Riefenstahl, Leni 217, 248 Riegl, Alois 180 Rodchenko, Alexander 223 Rodin, Auguste 4, 31, 72, 83, 110, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 162, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 205, 207, 208, 252 Romanticism 61 Rome 7, 8, 10, 15, 39, 102, 113, 217, 219 Royal Academy 65, 140, 168, 213 ‘Rudiments of Connoisseurship’ 129, 165

Sellers, Eugénie 110 Severini, Gino 223 Sicily 196 Silver, Kenneth 222, 223, 224, 233, 246, 247, 249, 250 ‘Six Projects’ 72, 84–85 Sluggard, The 144, 147, 148, 149, 150, 153, 162 Socrates 174 Solomon, Simeon 70, 139 Some Modern Sculptors 208 Sophocles 13, 14, 18 Sparta 196 Spinario 235, 238 Stadio dei Marmi 219 Standing Man 144, 147, 151, 156, 157 Stewart, Andrew 55, 247, 248 Stokes, Adrian 216, 253 Stones of Rimini 216 Stuck, Franz von 51 Studio Wall 94 Study of Belvedere Torso 226 ‘Sublime is Now, The’ 172 Surrealists 88, 92, 100, 177, 227 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 100 Sydenham 81

Sadoleto, Jacopo 13, 14 Saint Phalle, Niki de 4, 88, 89 Salon d’Automne 198 Salon des Refusés 116 Sappho 76 Schad, Christian 223 Schiller, Friedrich 256 Schliemann, Heinrich 200 ‘School of Giorgione, The’ 159, 211 Scopas 109, 123, 173 ‘Sculptor’s Studio, The’ 239, 240, 242–43, 254 Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks, The 191, 196, 204, 208, 217, 247 Second World War, the 58, 216, 224, 245 Select Committee Report 57 Selinus 196

Taliban 246 Taste and the Antique 29 Tate Modern 54 Technique of Early Greek Sculpture, The 208 Technique of Greek Sculpture in the Archaic and Classical Periods, The 204 Teachings from the Elgin Marbles 66, 67 Tepidarium, The 84 Tegea 123 Temple of Aphaia 59

300

INDEX

Temple of Hera 118 Temple of Zeus 28, 55 ‘Ten O’Clock’ lecture 71, 73, 85 Thatcher, Margaret 223 ‘Theseus’ 47, 48, 63, 70 Thorvaldsen, Bertel 30, 57, 58 Three Musicians 223 Three Women at the Spring 238 Titian 66, 67, 71, 101 Titus 18 Townley Venus 83 Trastevere 113 Treaty of Tolentino 42 Trehot, Lise 122 Troy 200 Tuke, Henry Scott 139

Vénus victorieuse 79 Venus Victorious 83 Venus Victrix 79 Vico, Giambattista 21 Victorian Classical Revival 70 Victory of Samothrace 3, 171 Villa dei Papiri 9 Vir Heroicus Sublimis 224 Virgil 13, 18 Visconti, Ennio Quirino 4, 47 Vitet, Ludovic 38, 74, 82, 95, 101 Vlaminck, Maurice 198 Vollard Suite 239, 240, 243 Vuillard, Edouard 83 Waldstein, Charles 213 Walker Art Gallery 32 Watts, George Frederic 65, 69, 71, 100, 101, 110, 146, 242, 252 Watts, Mary Seton 65, 67, 70 ‘Weary Hercules’ 242 Weltanschauung 184, 185, 189 West, Benjamin 62 Westminster Review 8 Whistler, James McNeill 4, 70, 71, 73, 84, 85, 101, 116 White Girl, The 116 Wilde, Oscar 84 Wilenski, R.H. 4, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 183, 197, 198, 202, 204, 206, 207, 208, 210, 213, 215, 223, 234, 236, 248, 251, 252, 254 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45, 51, 52, 56, 66, 67, 74, 87, 92, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 109, 118, 126, 138, 160, 192, 203, 224, 227, 234, 245, 246, 247, 248

Uffizi 84, 109 United Kingdom 34 University of Birmingham 32 University of London 174 Urlichs, H.L. 50, 55 Vaincu, Le (The Vanquished) 155 Vaison 114, 116, 167 Valona, Giuseppe 150 Van Gogh Museum 32 Vasari, Giorgio 9, 10 Vatican 109, 113, 114, 131, 132, 135 Veii 182 Velasquez, Diego 71 Venice 66 Venus, A 85 Venus Anadyomene 72 Venus de’ Medici 9, 20, 21, 82, 83 Venus de Milo 1, 4, 9, 11, 29, 30, 31, 38, 39, 71–103, 118, 122, 156, 171, 210, 211 Venus of Arles 83 Venus of Capua 83

301

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Winter, Franz 123 Works and Days 155 Worringer, Wilhelm 175, 180, 216 Wounded Amazon 50, 51 Wrestlers, The 84

Yeats, W.B. 12 Zadkine, Ossip 211 Zeitgeist 4, 178 Zervos, Christian 202, 203, 224 Zeus 241 Zeus of Artemision 3

XXth Century Sculptors 208

302