Figurines: Figuration and The Sense of Scale (Visual Conversations in Art and Archaeology Series) 2020944027, 0198861095, 9780198861096

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F IG U R I N E S

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V I S UA L C ON V E R S AT ION S I N A R T A N D A RC H A E OL O G Y General Editor: Jaś Elsner Visual Conversations is a series designed to foster a new model of comparative inquiry in the histories of ancient art. The aim is to create the spirit of a comparative conversation across the different areas of the art history and archaeology of the pre-modern world—across Eurasia, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas—in ways that are academically and theoretically stimulating. The books serve collectively as a public platform to demonstrate by example the possibilities of a comparative exercise of working with objects across cultures and religions within defined, but broad, historical trajectories.

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Figurines Figuration and the Sense of Scale

Edited by

JA Ś E L S N E R

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2020 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020944027 ISBN 978–0–19–886109–6 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International Ltd Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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A CK N O W L E DG M E NT S The papers in this book were conceived together and delivered at a conference in the Center for Global Ancient Art in the University of Chicago’s Art History Department. They were then reworked in dialogue and presented at a workshop on comparativity in art history and archaeology in the British Museum under the auspices of the Empires of Faith Project and with the support of the Leverhulme Trust. The authors are grateful to all in Chicago and London for their support, and most especially to Michael Squire, who was a scintillating respondent in London. In the production and reviewing process, we record our very warm thanks to two excellent anonymous reviewers for the Press as well as to Charlotte Loveridge, Karen Raith, Jenny King and the team at the Press. We also thank Roko Rumora for help with the index. The authors dedicate this book with gratitude to their students and to the attendees at the Global Ancient Art conferences, whose conversation and debate have inspired these essays.

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P RE FA C E Richard Neer The Chicago Center for Global Ancient Art was founded in 2009 by members of the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Its animating idea is that a new research paradigm is emerging within art history. Antiquity was, of course, one of the original topics of this discipline as it emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century. For many years, however, art history derived its basic research questions and its accepted ways of answering such questions from the study of more recent epochs: the Latin Middle Ages, the European Renaissance, nineteenth-century Paris, 1960s New York. That situation is changing: as the discipline grows and expands, new questions and new ways of answering them start to appear. The center, in particular, explores two developments in recent scholarship: an increasing tendency amongst art historians to study archaeological corpora, and a corresponding tendency amongst archaeologists to move beyond functionalism into “art-historical” topics like beholding, iconography, materials, phenomenology, stylistics, and aesthetics. What happens when these two worlds collide? We define ancient in procedural terms: wherever it is from, whenever it was made, art is ancient if our knowledge of it derives to a significant degree from archaeological data: stratigraphic, archaeometric, typological/stylistic, even quantitative. Antiquity is, in short, a function of method. Because these methods apply to a broad range of regions and corpora, this definition makes it possible to speak in global, comparative terms—a comparativism, however, not so much of the objects of knowledge as of the ways of producing and ordering them. Scholars of ancient China, Greece, and Mexico may work with radically different materials and possess radically different research skills, yet they all use similar kinds of data, produce facts in similar ways. In a discipline that still partitions itself according to nation, religion, and date (we have sinologists and classicists, modernists and Islamists), these affinities of method provide a new, “horizontal” way to organize research. On offer, in short, is a comparativism of method. Perhaps the most controversial, even tendentious aspect of this program is the apparently cavalier use of the term art. Art, we are sometimes told, is a quintessentially modern concept that can be applied to older or alien materials only on pain of gross anachronism. We do not pretend to know in advance the compass of this term or the limits of the aesthetic. On the contrary, it is only by testing the

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Preface

methods of art history against the materials and protocols of archaeology that we may be in a position to discover whether our questions are well formed, our answers cogent. Like global and ancient, in short, our use of the term art is procedural, a function of method—a usage that, in its turn, enables comparison across cultures, times, and places. Each volume in this series examines and compares a basic concept or category of art-historical and archaeological inquiry. Unlike the widely available handbooks or companions to standing fields of inquiry, these books do not codify or survey well-defined bodies of knowledge. They are, instead, exploratory: at once primers for students seeking to expand their research horizons and provocations to specialists. They offer, in short, theory from the ground up: an apt description, we hope, of a truly archaeological history of art.

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CO NT E NT S List of Illustrations

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List of Contributors

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Introduction1 Jas´ Elsner 1. Small Wonders: Figurines, Puppets, and the Aesthetics of Scale in Archaic and Classical Greece

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Richard Neer 2. Shifting Scales at La Venta

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Claudia Brittenham 3. Thinking Through Scale: The First Emperor’s Sculptural Enterprise

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Wu Hung 4. The Death of the Figurine: Reflections on an Abrahamic Abstention

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Jas´ Elsner Epilogue182 Claudia Brittenham Index185

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L I S T O F I L L U S T RAT I O NS 1.1 Statuettes from the temple of Apollo at Dreros, Crete. Heraklion inv. 2445, 2446, 2447.  1.2 Figurine (B 150) from the South Temple at Kalapodi, Phokis.  1.3 Statuette of Apollo as hoplite from the temple at Metropolis, Thessaly.  1.4 Corinthian terracotta jointed “doll”. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art (Rogers Fund) 44.11.8.  1.5. “Naked goddess” figurines from the urban sanctuary of Hera at Paestum, Campania. Paestum, Museum inv. 1859.  1.6 “Baubo” figurine from the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Priene, Ionia. Berlin, Staatliche Museen TC 8616.  1.7 Androgyne figurine from the sanctuary of Hera Limeneia at Perachora, Corinthia. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 16503.  1.8 Votive plaque from the sanctuary of Hera Limeneia at Perachora, Corinthia: Aphrodite/Aphroditos emerging from the scrotum of Ouranos.  1.9 Zeus from Cape Artemisium, Greece. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 15161.  1.10 Figurine representing Zeus with a thunderbolt, from Ambracia, Aetolia. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 14984.  1.11 Athenian grave relief (fragment): mistress with doll, serving girl with waterfowl. Avignon, Musée Calvet E31.  1.12 Terracotta “doll” with truncated limbs, from Athens (?). Munich, Antikensammlungen NI 8594.  1.13 Athenian grave relief (fragment): servant girl with a puppet and a box. Athens, National Archaeological Museum inv. 1993.  1.14 Athenian grave relief (fragment): a male actor holding a female mask, from Ambelaki on Salamis. Piraeus, Museum, unnumbered.  1.15 Athenian grave relief of Pausimache, from Charvati, Attica. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 3964.  2.1 Clay figurine from La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. Headless figure is approximately 6 cm tall.  2.2 Greenstone figurines from La Venta Offering 4, Olmec, 900–400 bce. The largest figurine is 20 cm tall.  2.3 Carnelian grasshopper, Aztec, 1400–1521 ce. 19.5 × 16 × 47 cm.  2.4 Modern Nahua cut-paper images from Veracruz, undressed (left); dressed and displayed on an altar (right).  2.5 Objects from Offering 3, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. The figurines are approximately 6.5 cm tall.  2.6 Frida with Idol, 1939.  2.7 Side views of Figurine 8 from Offering 4, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. 16.9 × 6.34 cm. 

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2.8 Offering 4, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce.  2.9 Hollow clay baby, said to be from Las Bocas, Puebla, Central Mexico, 1200–900 bce. 34 × 31.8 × 14.6 cm.  2.10 Hollow clay baby excavated at La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. 18.4 × 10 cm.  2.11 Wooden bust from El Manatí, Olmec, c. 1200–900 bce. 48.9 × 20.2 × 14.5 cm.  2.12 Offering 5, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. This child-sized burial included child-sized ornaments, in some cases cut down from larger objects.  2.13 Altar 5, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. 155 × 203 × 134 cm. Parque Museo La Venta, Villahermosa.  2.14 Las Limas Figure, Olmec, 900–400 bce. 55 × 23 × 43.5 cm.  2.15 Stela 2, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. 348 × 206 × 46 cm.  2.16 Pillars from the Temple of the Inscriptions, Palenque, Maya, c. 684 ce. Prints of glass-plate negative taken by by Alfred Percival Maudslay in 1890–1891.  2.17 Carved panel, Temple of the Sun, Palenque, Maya, c. 692 ce.  2.18 Lintel 3, Temple 1, Tikal, Maya, 734 ce. The god Yajaw Maan, in jaguar form, towers over king Jasaw Chan K’awiil.  2.19 Aerial view of La Venta Pyramid C, Olmec, 900–400 bce. The pyramid is over 30 meters tall, containing at least 3.5 million cubic feet of packed earth.  2.20 Colossal Head 1, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. The sculpture is 2.5 m tall.  2.21 Monuments 89, 88, 87, 25/26, 86, and 27, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. Monument 25/26 (shown in the photo at right) is over 4.5 m tall; the others are between 2 and 3 meters in height.  2.22 Jade celt with supernatural face from Tomb E, Mound A-2, La Venta, Olmec, c. 900–400 bce. 11.1 × 5.1 × 1.2 cm.  2.23 Kunz Axe, Olmec, 1000–400 bce. 30 × 15.2 cm.  2.24 “El Bebé,” Monument 2, La Merced, Olmec, 1000–800 bc. 40 × 23 × 8 cm.  2.25 Monument 21, Chalcatzingo, 900–400 bce. 240 cm tall.  3.1 The Twelve Goden Men in front of the Xianyang Palace. Film still, The First Emperor of China, Canadian Film Board and the Xi’an Film Studio, 1989.  3.2 Set of bronze bells from Leiguduan Tomb 1 (Tomb of Marquis Yi of the State of Zeng) at Suizhou, Hubei. Early Warring States period, fifth century bce.  3.3 Human-shaped caryatids on the set of bronze bells from Leiguduan Tomb 1, Suizhou, Hubei. Early Warring States period, fifth century bce.  3.4 Plans of the Lishan Mausoleum. (a) Entire mausoleum, (b) funerary park. 

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List of Illustrations  

3.5 The Lishan Mausoleum in the early twentieth century.  3.6 Terracotta statue from K0006 in the Lishan Mausoleum, probably representing a civil official.  3.7 Terracotta statue from the “underground zoo” in the Lishan Mausoleum, probably representing a zookeeper.  3.8 Terracotta statue from K9901 in the Lishan Mausoleum, probably representing a foreigner.  3.9 Bronze crane from K0007 in the Lishan Mausoleum.  3.10 Pits 1–4 of the underground army in the Lishan Mausoleum.  3.11 A panoramic view of Pit. 1 of the underground army.  3.12 Different hairstyles of terracotta soldiers in the underground army.  3.13 Terracotta statue of the commander-in-chief from Pit 2 of the underground army.  3.14 A pit in the Lishan Mausoleum containing a terracotta zookeeper.  3.15 Terracotta statue from K9901 in the Lishan Mausoleum, probably representing a foreigner.  3.16 Back of the terracotta statue from K9901.  3.17 Location of the two bronze chariots in the Lishan Mausoleum.  3.18 Two bronze chariots from the Lishan Mausoleum.  3.19 Chariot No. 1.  3.20 Chariot No. 2.  3.21 Driver on Chariot No. 1.  3.22 A wheel on Chariot No. 1.  3.23 Bronze horses with movable harnesses and bridles.  3.24 The driver on Chariot No. 1 and his weapons.  3.25 (a)–(c) Sections of the bronze drivers.  3.26 Northern yong as represented by a group of miniature terracotta figurines from Zhangqiu, Shandong province. Warring States period, fourth century bce.  3.27 Southern yong as represented by a wooden figurine from Baoshan Tomb 2, Hubei province. Warring States period, fourth century bce.  3.28 Miniature figurines installed in the Yangling Mausoleum of Emperor Jing of the Western Han, 141 bce, Xi’an, Shaanxi province.  4.1 Ivory statuette of the Virgin and Child, perhaps late 10th or early 11th century ad from Constantinople. 325 mm in height.  4.2 Marble statuette of the Good Shepherd that served as a trapezephoron or table support, fourth century ad, found in Corinth. 720 mm in height.  4.3 The Cleveland Marbles, perhaps third century ad from Asia Minor: (a) Jonah cast into the Whale, (b) Jonah spewed out by the Whale, (c) the Good Shepherd, (d) Jonah resting beneath the gourd vine, (e) Jonah praying. None more than 503 mm in height.  4.4 Male terracotta figurine from Sagalassos with a cross on his hat, found at the Doric Temple. Fifth or sixth century ad. About 90 mm. 

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4.5 (a) Female terracotta figurines from Abu Mina, fifth to seventh century ad. Archaeological Museum in Alexandria. (b) Heads and bodies from a further series of terracotta figurines from Abu Mina, fifth to seventh century ad. (c) Terracotta rider and animal figurines from Abu Mina, fifth to seventh century ad.  4.6 Terracotta figurine of standing mother and child from Upper Egypt (Qau el-Kebir, ancient Antaeopolis), mould pressed at the front with plain flat back. Remains of paint, bronze earrings on the woman and woollen cloth which once dressed both mother and child. Sixth to seventh century ad. 179 mm high.  4.7 Nude female bone figurine from Egypt (front and back). Christian or Islamic period (seventh to ninth century). 60 mm high.  4.8 Marble statuette of Ganymede and the Eagle, from the House of the Greek Charioteers, Carthage, perhaps early fifth century ad. 490 mm in height.  4.9 Female bone figurine from early Islamic Egypt with some painting, seventh to tenth century. 155 mm in height.  4.10 Bronze figurine of Mercury seated on a rock with a cock to the right. Excavated in Paramythia, Epirus, Western Greece.  4.11 (a) Roman marble version of Hercules Epitrapezius, perhaps first century ad. 432 mm high. (b) Roman bronze version of Hercules Epitrapezius on a limestone base, first century bc or ad. 950 mm including the base. Found in a villa near Pompeii. (c) Roman limestone version of Hercules Epitrapezius, first century ad. Inscribed on the base in Greek ‘Diogenes made (this). Sarapiodorus son of Artemidorus (dedicated this) in fulfilment of a vow’, this sculpture was excavated in 1880 in the Palace of Sennacherib, Nineveh, Iraq. It is likely to have been a purchased import into a Parthian collection or a piece of booty. 529 mm high. 

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Whilst every effort has been made to secure permission to reproduce the illustrations, we may have failed in a few cases to trace the copyright holders. If contacted, the publisher will be pleased to rectify any omissions at the earliest opportunity.

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L I S T O F C ONT RI B UT O RS Claudia Brittenham is Associate Professor of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the art of Mesoamerica, especially Central Mexico and the Maya area, with particular interests in the materiality of art and the politics of style. She is the author of The Murals of Cacaxtla: The Power of Painting in Ancient Central Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2015), The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak (University of Texas Press, 2013; co-authored with Mary Miller), and Veiled Brightness: A History of Ancient Maya Color (University of Texas Press, 2009; co-authored with Stephen Houston, Cassandra Mesick, Alexandre Tokovinine, and Christina Warinner). Jaś Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at the University of Oxford and Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has been a Visiting Professor in Art History at the University of Chicago since 2003, and also at the Divinity School since 2014, and was Senior Research Keeper in the Empires of Faith Project on art and religion in late antiquity at the British Museum from 2013 to 2018. In 2019 he was elected a member of the Max Planck Society with association at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He works on art and its many receptions (including ritual, religion, pilgrimage, viewing, description, collecting) in antiquity and Byzantium, including into modernity, with strong interests in comparativism, global art history, and the critical historiography of the discipline. Richard Neer is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in Art History, Cinema & Media Studies and the College at the University of Chicago, where he is also Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities. From 2010 to 2018 he was the Executive Editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, where he continues to serve as a co-editor. He has published widely on Greek art, early modern French painting, stylistics, and cinema. His most recent volumes are Art and Archaeology of the Greek World: A New History, 2500–100 bce, 2nd edition (Thames & Hudson, 2018); Davidson and His Interlocutors, co-edited with Daniele Lorenzini (special issue of Critical Inquiry, Winter 2019); and Pindar, Song, and Space: Towards a Lyric Archaeology, co-authored with Leslie Kurke (Johns Hopkins, 2019). He is also editor of Conditions of Visibility, another volume from the Center for Global Ancient Art (Oxford University Press, 2019). Wu Hung is Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago, and also Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia and Consulting Curator of the Smart Museum of Art. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and sits on the boards and advisory committees of many research institutes and museums in both the United States and China. He has published widely on both

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traditional and contemporary Chinese art, experimenting with different ways to integrate these conventionally separate phases into new kinds of art historical narratives, as exemplified by two of his most recent books, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Several of his ongoing projects follow this direction to explore the interrelation between art medium, pictorial image, and architectural space, the dialectical relationship between absence and presence in Chinese art and visual culture, and the relationship between art discourse and practice. The contributors to this volume are the founding members of the Center for Global Ancient Art at the University of Chicago.

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Introduction Jas´ Elsner

This book has three purposes. First, it is an attempt to put on the table the ­category of the figurine as a key conceptual and material problematic in the art ­history of antiquity. It does so through comparative juxtaposition of c­ lose-focused papers drawn from deep art-historical engagement with specific ancient cultures, all but the last from the first millennium bce; the cultures addressed being ancient Greek, ancient Chinese, Mesoamerican before the arrival of Europeans, and Roman in late antiquity. Second, in doing so, and alongside other books in this series by the same authors, it makes a claim for comparative conversation across the disciplines that constitute the art history of the ancient world, through finding categories and models of discourse that may offer fertile ground for comparison and antithesis.1 Third, it challenges the implicit assumption made in the very rich and astute literature on prehistoric figurines, that there is no interest or mileage in the study of this category of artifact in historical contexts where literary texts and documents, inscriptions or surviving terminologies can be adduced alongside material culture.2 Notably, the end of the archaeologically attested figurine in a 1   For reflections on the comparative exercise in art history, see Elsner 2017. For examples of such comparison, see the volume on sarcophagi published as RES 61/2 (2012), guest edited by Wu Hung and Jaś Elsner; Brittenham 2017, 2019; Neer 2019; Wolf 2019. Specifically for comparative figurines: Lesure, 2017. 2  The monumental Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines—Insoll 2017b—seems to make this assumption since it does not examine at any stage over its nearly one thousand pages either the existence or the conceptual value of post-prehistoric figurines—including the virtual disappearance of this category of material culture in certain historical contexts. The volume is highly laudable both for its explicit comparativity of 34 chapters treating figurine production and usage across prehistoric Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australasia, and Europe, and for its exceptional scope. But in not touching at all on historical contexts, it reflects a worrying throwback to the unfortunate division between a world of “real” archaeology and one that is vitiated by being “text-assisted,” “text-aided,” even “text-hindered”: See for example Little 1992 or Smith 1997, 6, who refers to the problems of “text-hindered archaeology.”

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very widespread landscape, where it had been ubiquitous for millennia (on which see Jaś Elsner’s chapter in this volume), and its continuing existence in other landscapes, are matters of substance for understanding both the nature of this kind of object and its importance, including in prehistory. This book concerns figurines as archaeologically attested materials from literate cultures with surviving documents, that have no direct links of contiguity, appropriation, or influence in relation to each other. The specific cultures concerned are ancient China, pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Our definition of “ancient” is not one of absolute dates but an empirical and epistemological one of artifacts knowable and study-able in ways shared by all these cultures as academic subjects—that is, through archaeology and also through some forms of documentary material (literary and epigraphic) from within their source civilizations. Thus Mesoamerican objects from the fifteenth century ce are from this point of view no less “ancient” than figurines found in Han tombs in the third century bce or Roman villas in say the first century ce, though in strictly chronological terms they may be more than a millennium and a half later. The collective archaeology of figurines, as surviving objects from all these cultures, differs from that of say figurines in the European Neolithic because there is a textual record within those cultures which makes the study of their artifacts historical rather than prehistoric. It is not easy to find a set of emic definitions of figurines that intersect across a variety of highly distinctive cultures, many unconnected by any historical link. In Chinese the term Yong, from a fourth-century bce definition, discussed at length by Wu Hung in his chapter in this book, means sculpted human and animal images created for mortuary purposes, potentially with intimations of substitution and of ritual use.3 Strikingly, from a Western viewpoint, the notion of Yong includes the potential for but does not certainly imply miniaturization or portability—concepts that a modern archaeologist is likely to associate with the English term “figurine.”4 The Mesoamerican cultures appear to have left us no trace of a defining concept that corresponds to what we might mean by “figurine.” Greek offers a variety of terms—many with the potential implication of sanctity like bretas, agalma, eikon, eidolon, and some with intimations of substitution and relative size like kolossos—which in different ways cover aspects of the phenomenon but extend beyond it also.5 Latin, likewise, is rich in terms—signum, sigillum, simulacrum, imago—which overlap but do not discretely frame the figurine as modernity may   Mencius, Book 1 part A. 4, tr. Lau 2003, 10–11 (bilingual edition) where the view is attributed to Confucius in the sixth century bce. 4   This is one reason that it is dangerous to import Western notions of miniaturization in relation to figurines into analysis of Chinese materials, as for instance Sebitschka 2015. 5   In the 1920s, the great philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff argued that the word kolossos only came to have intimations of size in Greek from the first century bce: Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1927, 169. But his conclusions have been contested and nuanced: see e.g. Dickie 1996 and Kosmetatou 2003. 3

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INTRODUCTION  

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understand it. Insofar as I can see, none of these terminologies definitively or constitutively concern the issues of scale and miniaturization that are key to modern understandings.6 As Richard Neer argues in his chapter in this volume about archaic and Classical Greece, “the idea of a large figurine may seem like sophistry, but it is a natural consequence of taking smallness as an aesthetic category rather than a mathematical one.”7 In the Greek context, whether small or large, the kinds of statuary we see as figurines were effectively thaumasta—objects capable of wonder. In her chapter on Olmec figurines from the southern Gulf lowlands of Mexico, Claudia Brittenham makes the case that this class of objects in both clay and stone (not self-standing and hence made to be handled) existed in a subtle discursive relationship with other kinds of scaled artifacts, including monumental forms like colossal heads, pyramids, and stelae. The defining issue is not miniaturization or portability as such, but these qualities within a large material semiotics of scale and stasis, all operating around the specific size and mobility of the human body. These models, drawn from conceptual systems created by different cultures, cut the cake of how to understand the objects we call “figurines” differently from the modern category as constructed by current scholarship. The contemporary concept of the figurine as understood in Western archaeology and art history is, in other words, etic—a modern heuristic construct that is applied for formal reasons to the archaeological or arthistorical record by modern interpreters. And for good reasons. In the archaeology of antique cultures—Mesoamerican, Andean, Chinese, and Mediterranean, including Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Western Europe from the deepest Palaeolithic—figurines, in the sense of figured, portable miniatures are extraordinary for their ubiquity in the archaeological record. Moreover, within archaeology, they have come to occupy a remarkable role amongst the diverse kinds of data disinterred from the earth. For by contrast with clay shards, axe heads, arrow heads and the like, the figurine—typically miniature, anthropomorphic or animal shaped—is the art-historical and aesthetically inflected special case, archaeology’s inevitable “irruption of sensibility” in relation “to a select element of material culture.”8 The figurine represents the “degree-zero” point of archaeology’s disciplinary relation to its art-historical dimension: The figurine’s evocation of human or animal form raising “some indication of the non-materialistic side of [its] makers’ lives,”9 which has been taken to allude to their religious beliefs or ritual practices,10 even “the possible presence of the transcendent.”11 The art-historical special case of figurines within 6   For some discussion of definitions, see Insoll 2017a, 4–6, starting with the OED’s “a small carved or sculptured figure” (see https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/70095?redirectedFrom=figurine#eid); also Bailey 2005, 26–44 on “miniaturism and dimensionality” and Martin and Langin-Hooper 2018, 3–6. 7 8 9 10   See p. 35.   Broodbank 2000, 58.   Ucko 1968, xv.   Ucko 1968, xv. 11   Renfrew 1985, 364.

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the normatively materialist approaches of archaeology is matched by what has been described as a special rise in the discursive register of their descriptive and interpretative treatment,12 archaeology’s special case of that ekphrastic discourse of loving description, which has been central to art history since antiquity itself.13 At the same time, the figurine—most commonly made from cheap materials like clay—is art history’s most archaeological object: not (usually) at the high end of elite patronage, although there are many exceptions, nor of especially grand aesthetic pretensions, but at the same time a whole work of art in its own right, though figurines are more often treated merely as contextualizing evidence. In general, in the game of the art-historical survey, figurines serve as the opening gesture—art history’s “primitive” beginning, its prehistoric base-line. Indeed, in terms of free-standing sculpture, even in cases where objects have no base and are made to be handled or laid flat, we may propose that the figurine is art history’s “degree-zero” object of independent analysis. It is not only a key conceptual point in both disciplines independently, but it is an essential node in their interface. We will not attempt here to define figurines reductively, but rather to signal a spectrum of key aspects against which a vast range of material and visual culture may be thought about, to provide a relatively defined conceptual space within which figurines may be understood and perhaps cross-culturally compared. First, materials. In principle (and despite those who have insisted, following simply the huge numbers in the material record, that the typical figurine is made of clay),14 figurines may be made of any material from the most cheap and humble such as clay, corn cobs, cloth, paper, bone, wax, glass and via a gradation of ever more expensive materials, such as ivory, increasingly precious metals from lead and bronze to silver and gold, semi-precious and precious stones. Figurines may be hand-made one-off or produced in numbers by replication, using technologies such as molding and casting. They may be formed of malleable clay or metal or of stones on an increasingly difficult curve when it comes to fashioning and carving. The question of materials and media gives rise to cognitive issues which concern the body but may be differently interpreted across cultures—one thinks of the coolness of bronze or rock crystal compared with the relative warmth of bone or textile, the hardness of jade beside wood or clay. Second, figuration. What figurines have in common is some element of figuration of human or animal forms—with no need of any impulse to mimesis, although some, like the mold-cast clay figurines from the Boeotian town of Tanagra in northern Greece or the terracotta army of the first Chinese emperor, 13   Bailey 2005, 20–3.   E.g. Elsner 2010.   Speaking of the wide range of “figurine materiality” Insoll notes “above all, fired and, to a lesser extent, unfired clay.” See Insoll 2017a, 7. 12 14

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may show remarkable mimetic qualities. Figurines are largely types of animal or human figures, although the application of certain kinds of human attributes to pillars such as the weapons and armor attached to trophies in Greek and Roman culture, or Aztec flint knives with eyes and teeth, and other attributes, arguably extends the anthropomorphic into areas of relative aniconism. The figure may allow for distortions of all kinds: one thinks of Greek Baubo figures with legs, bare bellies, and genitals, that themselves have become faces (see Fig. 1.6, p. 31).15 What is at stake here is not realism or anatomical accuracy but the potential to evoke the human or animal form, even if distended or otherwise reshaped, and the place of the part-object and the transitional object in human experience. Third, there is the problem of scale. Most figurines are miniatures; although some, like the first emperor’s generals, discussed here by Wu Hung, or Precolumbian insect sculptures, small though they are, may be more than lifesize (and one may repeat that the Chinese term Yong appears not to offer any determinant of size but rather to carry connotations of funerary function). In cases of seriality—where many similar figurines exist perhaps over a long period of production, as in the Cycladic figures that were made in the Aegean islands from the fourth to the second millennium—scale is one fundamental variable across a given corpus. It is not always clear what the differences in meaning or significance may be between differently sized members of such a corpus, but they are susceptible to different functions, and there is the possibility for like objects of different sizes to entice varieties of narratives about their potential relations. Such issues may be equally the case for kouroi from ancient Greece and for Teotihuacan obsidian figurines from Mexico. Unlike the issue of size, which is a measurable absolute, that of scale is always relative—relative to the viewer, relative to other kinds of objects that formally look like a given figurine or may be part of its context of use or deposition. There is a fundamental arbitrariness in the figurine’s relationship to its potential referent; there is a range of undetermined potentiality in precisely how and what it signifies. A small figurine may nonetheless be the site of the presence of a powerful god, for example, as discussed by Richard Neer in his chapter. The arbitrariness of reduction or enlargement in a figurine’s reference to (or representation of) its prototype is arguably the space for the uncanniness, vitality, and animation, which such objects can always potentially demonstrate. That is, the figurine—as one in a series of similar images but of multiple sizes—has a distinctive unclarity of closure about both its meanings and its potential referents. Scale in the form of miniaturization, whether on the most simple level of mundane children’s play with dolls and other toys (however profoundly reflective of

  See e.g. Olender 1990; Barrow 2018, 41–2, 72–4.

15

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underlying psychopathological drives this may be)16 or on the much grander social level of divine images that may be carried, washed and fed in ritual (as discussed in the third section of Jaś Elsner’s chapter), is one of the triggers for that distinctive thematic of the figurine’s affect in enticing feelings from its handlers and viewers (not only in antiquity). The enticement of subjectivity—from positive feelings of affection to ones of fear or cursing (in the magical uses of such objects)—is key to the issue of animation. Once power is granted to the miniature object, then the problem of how to control it becomes fundamental. Here questions of cultivation and movement through portability, of hiding and absconding the object through burial for example, of tying it down, of regulating it through ritual procedure or assemblage or other social protocols become essential. Small worlds (as in chess pieces, soldiers, toys, or household shrines) imply games with rules, which allow the threat of animation to remain in the realm of a “what if ” fantasy rather than a potential reality intervening in one’s own lived world. One entailment of smallness is handleability and portability— both themes enabling agency through the participation of the viewing or handling subject. In this sense, occupying a minuscule place on the scale of size enables the figurine to occupy a space on the spectrum of movement and stasis, becoming potentially portable in the way colossal or monumental object is not. Alongside the universally applicable, although always contextually specific, theme of scale, goes the crucial question of touch. Figurines are largely made to be handled, as discussed by Claudia Brittenham in this volume. One may argue that the differentiation of forms of free-standing sculpture across cultures is underlined by the issue of touch—from the figurine which may be cupped in a hand, worn as an amulet on the body, held up as a kind of statuette by one or two hands, to those forms of life-size and over-life-size statuary where the beholder’s body is necessarily separated from the object and effectively moves from a haptic to an optic regime of relationship. The handling of a figurine—even in a public context—is the eliciting of a kind of intimacy, a placement of the handler’s subjectivity in relation to the object. That has particular ramifications for viewers in relation to contexts of death or religion, which are extremely frequent for figurines in all cultures. Effectively one aspect of the power of figurines is their role in regulating the self: they construct the handler in relation to and in dialogue with the object being handled; they offer a plastic model of thinking the self as potentially replicated in miniature, as well as of thinking through difference by means of seriality and its range of differentiations. The figurine as the object of handling—often handled by its user as it was handled in its manufacture by its maker—is a base-line for thinking about statuary in general. The fact that the forms of so much large-scale statuary are made   E.g. Klein 1997; Winnicott 1971, 1–2, 14, 38–52.

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present in miniature in figurines, may be a function of miniaturized replication of a prior monumental type, but may equally be domestication of the monumental or the experimentation with form that comes prior to its expression on a large format. In this sense a corpus of figurines, in their seriality and in the differences between them, may be the evidence for the evolving thinking of artists with regard to all forms of experimentation and the making of art. Art-historically speaking, the figurine as touchable object engages the viewer in a different way from flat art—whether relief sculpture or painting. In particular it elicits different models of narrative relationship to what it depicts, since in part the viewer is engaged in and addressed by the objects of the narrative— makes up his or her stories in direct tactile relationship with the object through play, in psychic fantasy, via ritual action. Unlike the voyeuristic relationship of viewing, as if from the outside, the neatly framed pictorial narrative, the viewer as handler is always potentially and without protection within the narrative of figurines. Maya terminology speaks of “caring for images,”17 and we may see the tangibility of affect in relation to figurines to be a fundamental drive for a distinctive visuality of the sculptural and three-dimensional. It is through this visuality, as a relationship of narrative-making from the beholder’s end, that figurines have a particular power in creating “what if” worlds—representations of past and future (including within the mortuary realm of the dead), kinds of social questioning (that may be both supportive and subversive of normative culture), models of conceptually imagining space and temporality both like and unlike the viewer’s own social and political experience. Multiple tiny figures—whether in ancient Egyptian or early Chinese tombs—may have the effect of rendering a small space seem large to its deceased occupant, the narrative of presence among the figurines playing out as a fantasy of what the dead will see and think in the long twilight of their buried afterlife. In formal terms the narrative issue has a relation to the problem of bases. Many made to stand like a human being or an animal, and this may be by being placed in the earth (as in many Olmec examples) or on a flat or a raised base, sometimes supported by struts.18 But many—from Cycladic figures, via jointed dolls to numerous Mesoamerican instances—only “live” when held and otherwise lie down or flop. Museum displays—constructing complex methods to make the objects “stand”—often distort them by imposing modern aesthetic norms of how they might be experienced. But the range from hand-held, via base-set to hung from a roof or, we suspect, around the neck, is great and in all such cases—across cultures—opens differing and nuanced models of narrative interrogation.

  Houston and Stuart 1996, 294.

17

  See Anguissola 2018, 191–8, 203.

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The issue of the series—again one found in all the cultures we examine here— and of sheer numbers raises fundamental questions. Is the figurine to be thought of as an individual and special object, a one-off work of art, or as a representative of its type, an item in an assemblage? The themes of replication and aura that Walter Benjamin thought so important about the work of art in the moment of modernity,19 are in fact among the most potent and ancient problems of visual and material culture, as witnessed above all by the figurine. Questions of collecting and of the creation of history through assemblages, which viewers know as brought together over different times, are potentially in play. At the same time seriality always raises the problem of its end-point—in smallness or hugeness, or in the expense of a medium so great that it claims uniqueness. An unproblematized working assumption of what a figurine is, gives three special qualities—smallness, figuration (whether of human or animal features), and portability. Though the concept is not fully defined there, this is the assumption of the many essays in the outstanding comparative discussion of figurines in Timothy Insoll’s landmark volume The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines (2017).20 Since that book draws on materials from periods where no emic or internal discussions survive, it has been necessary for archaeology to construct— on the basis of a vast swathe of empirical evidence—a working definition of a real category for contemporary analytic usage. The problem in this procedure is, inevitably, that such a definition must start from the assumptions, classifications, and intellectual structures of the Western academy as it turns to the comparative investigation of the rich range of materials at hand: the risks of Eurocentrism and colonial or post-colonial bias (however aware of the issues the practitioner may be) are insuperable because there is no emic control, no voice internal to the cultures examined to give its own spin. The immense value of taking an art­historical, but rigorously comparative, approach that places the investigation in periods where we do have texts which give us some concepts internal to the cultures we study, is that we find ourselves discombobulating the initial starting point. What the findings of this volume imply is that—at any rate in the Chinese, Greek, and Mesoamerican examples we examine—the issues are not smallness, figuration, and portability but rather a spectrum of relative scale (from larger than human to miniature), a spectrum of relative figuration (from the very schematic to the spectacularly realistic), and a spectrum within the poles of mobility and stasis (in which the portable is mobile). Those spectra, classified by a kind of funerary shadowing of the living world in ancient China, or by wonder in relation to the divine world (for example) in ancient Greece, exist in an entirely 19

  See Benjamin 2003.

20

  Insoll 2017b.

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relational dynamic to the basic unit of the human body (or the animal body for  zoomorphic figurines)—in terms of all three axes of scale, figuration, and mobility/stasis. In their ubiquity, seriality, scale, and interactive relationships, figurines make visible issues fundamental to all categories of ancient art, at the same time as they pose, by the very definition of the class, issues of figuration and representation central to all art-historical analysis. Too often studied only for typological or chronological information, figurines have much to contribute to a general reflection about the disciplines of art history—and archaeology—and much to reveal about the meanings of art throughout the ancient world.

R EF ER ENCE S Anguissola, A. (2018) Supports in Roman Marble Sculpture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Bailey, D. (2005) Prehistoric Figurines: Representation and Corporeality in the Neolithic (London: Routledge) Barrow, R. (2018) Gender, Identity and the Body in Greek and Roman Sculpture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Benjamin, W. (2003) “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (third version, 1936–39), in Selected Writings vol. 4 (1938–40) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 251–83 Brittenham, C. (2017) “Epilogue: Quetzalcoatl and Mithra,” in P. Adrych, R. Bracey, D. Dalglish, S. Lenk, and R. Wood, Images of Mithra (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 173–83 Brittenham, C. (ed.) (2019) Vessels: The Object as Container (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Broodbank, C. (2000) An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Dickie, M. (1996) “What is a Kolossos and How were Kolossoi Made in the Hellenistic Period?” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 37: 237–57 Elsner, J. (2010) “Art History as Ekphrasis,” Art History 33: 11–27 Elsner, J. (ed.) (2017) Comparativism in Art History (New York: Routledge) Houston, S. and D. Stuart (1996) “Of Gods, Glyphs and Kings: Divinity and Rulership among the Classic Maya,” Antiquity 70: 289–312 Insoll, T. (2017a) “Miniature Possibilities? An Introduction to the Varied Dimensions of Figurine Research,” in Insoll 2017b, 3–15 Insoll, T. (ed.) (2017b) The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Klein, M. (1997) “The Psychoanalytic Play Technique: Its History and Significance” (1955) in Envy and Gratitude (London: Tavistock Publications), 122–40 Kosmetatou, E. (2003) “Size Matters: Poseidippos and the Colossi,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 143: 53–8

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Lau, D. (2003) Mencius (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press) Lesure, R. (2017) “Comparative Perspectives in the Interpretation of Prehistoric Figurines,” in Insoll 2017b, 37–60 Little, B. (ed.) (1992) Text-Aided Archaeology (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press) Martin, S. R. and S. Langin-Hooper (2018) “In/complete: An Introduction to the Theories of Miniaturization and Fragmentation,” in S. R. Martin and S. Langin-Hooper (eds.), The Tiny and the Fragmented: Miniature, Broken or Otherwise Incomplete Objects in the Ancient World (New York: Oxford University Press), 1–23 Neer, R. (ed.) (2019) Conditions of Visibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Olender, M. (1990) “Aspects of Baubo: Ancient Texts and Contexts,” in D.  Halperon, J. Winkler, and F. Zeitlin (eds.), Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 68–78 Renfrew, C. (1985) The Archaeology of Cult: The Sanctuary at Phylakopi (London: Thames & Hudson) Sebitschka, A. (2015) “Miniature Tomb Figurines and Models in Pre-Imperial and Early Imperial China: Origins, Development and Significance,” World Archaeology 47: 20–44 Smith, J. (1997) Roman Villas: A Study in Social Structure (London: Routledge) Ucko, P. (1968) Anthropomorphic Figurines of Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete with Comparative Material from the Prehistoric Near East and Mainland Greece (London: A Szmidla) Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U.  von (1927) “Heilige Gesetze: Eine Urkunde aus Kyrene,” Sitzungsberichte der preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: 155–76 Winnicott, D. W. (1971) Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications) Wolf, G. (2019) Die Vase und der Schemel: Ding, Bild oder einer Kunstgeschichte der Gefässe (Berlin: Kettler)

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Small Wonders Figurines, Puppets, and the Aesthetics of Scale in Archaic and Classical Greece Richard Neer

For there is not, of what is small, something that would be the smallest, but rather always something that is smaller. . . . But with reference to itself each thing is at the same time both large and small. Anaxagoras (fifth century bce)1

VA R I ET I E S OF SM A L L N E S S

Figurines are a particularly apt topic for comparative investigation because they bring together two ways of conceiving size and scale: the absolute and the relative. On the one hand, the category seems to presuppose an abstract, situationindependent metric by which to class artifacts as “small,” or apply the diminutive suffix that turns “figure” into “figurine,” statue into “statuette.” This way of thinking has its own enabling technologies: the ruler or meter-stick that relates any given artifact to a fixed scale, and the surveyor’s transit (or modern upgrades like a GPS/GNSS device) that integrates such finds into larger assemblages and sites. Such tools lend themselves to thinking in terms of determinate ­relations between ruled objects. An assemblage of figurines in situ is doubly determinate: The author would like to thank his fellow participants in the symposia of the Center for Global Ancient Art, as well as Annetta Alexandridis, Rebecca Ammerman, Alice Casalini, Patrick Crowley, Anna Darden, Milette Gaifman, Joachim Heiden, Leslie Kurke, Verity Platt, Charles Ray, Roko Rumora, and Michael Squire for helpful discussions and for assistance with the preparation of this chapter.   Anaxagoras fr. B3 DK (tr. Most).

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figurines are absolutely small and their relationship to their larger context is securely measurable. This approach is incredibly useful for organizing data, even if it does give rise to the problems of borderline cases, parameters of accuracy, and so on. There is, however, another way to look at it. One might want to say that the word “small” is not absolute but relative: something can be “small” only by comparison to something else, something “big.” In a classic study, for instance, Wu Hung has shown that even small artworks can possess “monumentality,” which means that the absolute or situation-independent rule or metric can only yield a partial, or even downright misleading, account of them.2 Even relative size, however, is susceptible of quantification by means of scales or algorithms. The real contrast to absolute metrics, therefore, is not relative size alone, but relative size in the absence of consistent regulation, an aesthetics of scale as opposed to its metrical quantification. Several recent studies and edited volumes have begun to address this topic in the archaeological context.3 Yet size is not the only criterion of the figurine. The other criterion is figural representation in three dimensions (as opposed to two: tiny pictures, for instance, are not figurines). But this second criterion opens a veritable Pandora’s Box of problems. It does so because there are for all intents and purposes no criteria that determine in advance whether something can or cannot be seen as a figural representation. The human capacity to see depictions is notoriously promiscuous and neither depends upon nor is beholden to authorial intention. We can see whales and camels in clouds, faces in mountainsides, landscapes in “scholar’s rocks”; conversely, we can be baffled by fully intended representations in styles that are unfamiliar, as when we cannot make out a child’s scrawl as a picture of anything whatsoever.4 Archaeological materials are all, potentially, alien in just this sense, even as the relatively sparse nature of the evidence makes the role of perception in building inferences even more prominent. If figural representation is a criterion of identity for a figurine, then the topic is irreducibly humanistic.5 We need both ways of thinking about size, the absolute and the relative, quantity and quality, determinative and aesthetic. Yet they are often incompatible. In terms of practice, this incompatibility produces a persistent anxiety about the category of the figurine, and a persistent relegation of the latter to subfields and the margins of scholarship. Where do figurines end and statuettes begin, for example? Why do surveys of Greek sculpture typically ignore small bronzes and terracottas? In terms of institutions, the incompatibility produces an apparent   Wu 1996. See also Wu 2005.   See Smith and Bergeron 2011; Squire 2011; Martin and Langin-Hooper 2018. Insoll 2017, though outside the chronological range of the present chapter, is very relevant as well. Key points of reference include Stewart 1984; Mack 2007. 4 5   See Wollheim 1987.   On this topic see Neer 2010a, 2017. 2 3

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division between archaeology and art history—the one aspiring to the status of social science, the other preoccupied with meaning and value—and encourages the proliferation of subfields (terracottas, small bronzes, ivories, jewelry, and so on). The category of the figurine, in short, brings to light latent tensions in taxonomy and, by extension, in disciplinary formations. This is good news for research: a standing invitation to see what happens if we do not isolate meanings and values from categorical properties like size and shape. It is not clear that archaeological taxonomies permit such a move, insofar as they seem to presuppose measurement in terms of inches and centimeters. We might ask, however, what smallness does, what it is good for, variously in the historical past and in the historiographic present. What are its solicitations and affordances, resistances and obstacles? Given the importance of the situational to the very formulation of these questions, any attempt at an answer will have to start from specific cases. In practice, what matters will be neither absolute size, nor relative size, but relative size within a given context—which may itself be open-ended. Once scale becomes both relative and situational, then the figurine ceases to be a determinate class and becomes something much more complex and dynamic. An aesthetics of the figurine, accordingly, is circumstantial, historical, contextual. In essence, historical or archaeological “context,” broadly construed, occupies the role vacated by absolute metrics in the shift from a mathematical determination of size to a historical aesthetics of smallness. It provides a baseline reference. The remainder of this chapter will describe the aesthetics of smallness with regard to material from Archaic and Classical Greece (roughly, from the late eighth to the late fourth centuries bce). The goal is by no means to be exhaustive, nor to mount sweeping historical claims. It is, rather, to sketch a range of historical possibilities and, in so doing, to relate ancient Greek concepts of scale and likeness to the research protocols of art history and archaeology. The first half of the chapter will emphasize the ancient concepts; the second half, the corpora. There are, however, two substantive theses: a local, historical one and a general, methodological one. The local, historical thesis is that smallness in Archaic and Classical Greece could be wonderful, in that it could make a work of craft what the Greeks called a thauma idesthai, “a wonder to behold for itself and oneself.” More strongly, the claim is that one of the tasks of sculpture in early Greece was to stage or render conspicuous relations of scale that organize everyday life, and smallness was exploited to that end. The figurine is apt to defamiliarize ancient Greek categories no less than modern ones. Ultimately, however, this local, historical argument is intended to address a contemporary, comparativist question: whether these ancient categories might be accommodated in a modern disciplinary infrastructure. The general, methodological thesis is that such accommodation requires an eclectic and egalitarian

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approach to evidence, a combination of archaeological taxonomy with the reading habits of philology and art history, corpus scholarship with close looking.6 The difference between art history and archaeology is also one of scale, as between the tiny detail and the big picture, close reading and typology—and the figurine, by staging scale as it does, both condenses and clarifies these distinctions. This invitation to mix different research protocols doubtless risks mere incoherence but it may also produce new disciplinary formations.

WON DER A N D T H E A E ST H ET IC S OF SC A L E

Most discussions of Greek art cast it in broadly Platonic terms: ideal beauty, mimetic accuracy, or some combination of the two.7 But neither “beauty” nor “imitation” are especially prominent in Archaic and Classical accounts of crafted things; and, when they do appear, it is by no means obvious that they carry the quasi-technical sense that Plato gave them toward the end of the Classical period in the fourth century bce.8 Instead, the characteristic reaction to a well-wrought artifact in early Greek literature is wonder, or thauma. Homer uses the phrase thauma idesthai, “a wonder to behold for itself and oneself,” exclusively of such works. The laborious translation reflects a basic incompatibility between Greek and English grammar. The verb idesthai, “to behold,” is neither active nor passive but in the “middle” voice, for which there is no English equivalent. Verbs in the middle voice suggest reflexivity, a subject acting on itself or for itself. But idesthai is an infinitive (“to behold”), which means that it has no clear grammatical subject at all. So what, exactly, is acting on itself, or for itself, in this situation? The grammar admits more than one possibility: either the one doing the beholding, or the artwork beheld. A thauma idesthai is both a wonder to behold for oneself (the beholder) and a wonder to behold for itself (the artifact). Wonder is indeterminate between beholder and beheld, between something like an experience and a work of craft.9 To repeat, Homer uses this phrase exclusively of crafted things. Other Archaic and Classical authors are more liberal but it is possible to generalize and identify certain features that are characteristically associated with wonder throughout

6   For an extended treatment of this topic see Neer and Kurke 2019, 1–10 and throughout. For the phrase “corpus scholarship” see Orton 1998. 7   Philipp 1968, 60 and Pollitt 1985 are particularly forceful statements but the point has more general validity. 8   These histories of the words “beauty” (kallos) and “imitation” (mimēsis) lie beyond the scope of this chapter. For basic orientation see Halliwell 2002 (imitation); Konstan 2014 (beauty). 9   The crucial study here is Prier 1989, 25–117. See also Taylor 1989, 113, on the middle voice in Greek.

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this period. The quintessential wonder is a spectacle of brilliant radiance, flashing speed, and radical “otherness.” Uniting these qualities is a basic effect of twofoldness or doubleness in viewing: the statue should seem simultaneously alien and familiar, far and close, inert and alive, absent and present. The doubleness of the wonder shows up as a doubleness in beholding. In the Odyssey (19.227–31), for instance, a little figure of a dog, part of a brooch, elicits wonder because it can be seen to be doing things while yet being of gold. The front part of it was artful: a hound held a dappled fawn in his forepaws, gazing on it as it struggled; and all were wonderstruck at it, how, although they were golden, the hound gazed at the fawn and strangled it, and the fawn struggled with his feet as he tried to escape.

What induces wonder is neither illusion nor fidelity to appearances but a combination of vivid, lifelike effect with a particular awareness of the material support of the image (in this case, gold). Odysseus’s brooch is, in this regard, exemplary: its exploitation of what has been called the “twofoldness” of depiction is essential to the Greek experience of wonder before works of craft.10 Hesiod, an epic poet of the seventh century BCE, provides an acoustic counterpart in his Theogony, where he tells us that the multiple heads of the monster Typhoeus “woofed like puppies, wonders to hear”: the onomatopoetic “woof” (the Greek version is “au”) makes the poet’s own verse an acoustic “likeness” or eiko ̄n of sorts, hence a wonder in its own right.11 Elsewhere Hesiod provides a more sustained example.12 The poet describes how Athena and Hephaistos constructed the first woman, Pandora. Made of earth as a semblance (ikelos) of a maiden, a “fabricated woman” (plaste ̄ gune ̄), she is, in effect, a clay statue; representations of the story in Athenian vase painting assimilate her to a work of sculpture, stiff and frontal, diminutive relative to the gods who mold her.13 Athena and Hephaistos outfit the clay semblance with a wondrous crown: “On it were contrived many works of skill, a wonder to see for itself and oneself [thauma idesthai]: all the strange things the land and the sea nourish, he put many of these into it, wonderful things [thaumasia] like living beings with voices, and gracefulness wafted over them all.”14 The crown is a

  Twofoldness: Wollheim 1987.  Hesiod, Theogony 834. On this passage see Passmore 2018. 12  Hesiod, Theogony 560–612, Works and Days 60–105. Amongst the many discussions of these passages Vernant 2011 is especially relevant. 13  Hesiod, Theogony 513, 572. On the iconography of Pandora see Lissarrague 2001; Platt 2011, 111–13. For the relevance of coroplasty to the story see Barr-Sharrar 1993; Hurwit 1995, 182; Wickkiser 2010. 14  Hesiod, Theogony 578–84, tr. Neer. 10 11

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wonder because it has wonderful things crafted upon it—and what makes those things wonderful is the fact that they are “like living beings.” In Greek, the words eoikota (“like”) and ikelos (“semblance”) are cognate with eiko ̄n (“image”): Hesiod is telling us that something iconic, a “like-ness,” is a wonder by virtue its strange assimilation of one thing to another. The clay girl is similarly duplex: the poet calls her a “good bad,” kalon kakon, a tricky conjunction of opposites. At her presentation to gods and men, “wonder took hold of the deathless gods and mortal men when they saw that which was sheer guile, incomprehensible to men.”15 Thus the nameless image-maid assimilates to the well-wrought objects that adorn her body: just as their iconic twofoldness made them wonderful, so now the semblance is a wonder for its incorrigible duplicity. Yet Pandora is the first, the prototypical woman, so there is nothing for this likeness to resemble; she is a semblance of nothing on land or sea except herself. Relative to herself she is nothing but “sheer guile, incomprehensible to men,” a wonder for ­herself and oneself. Thauma, here and elsewhere, is an essentially unreflective response, often characterized by paralysis and muteness. Pandora the clay maiden is not a puzzle to solve: she is incomprehensible, full stop. Mortals simply do not know what to make of her; the literal meaning of the Greek is that they have no “device” or “mechanism” to bring to bear. For just this reason, wonder represents a hiatus, a break in everyday comportment. Scholars in particular often oppose immersion in the everyday with a distanced or theoretical cognition, if-then deliberation, problem-solving and the like, but thauma is something else entirely. It is being “gobsmacked” or “blown away.” Hesiod expresses this by saying that one is seized by wonder as a powerful, external force. Wonders do not have solutions, they are open-ended and combinatory, a bringing-together of disparities in a relationship of what Hesiod calls “likeness.” To wonder for oneself is to be overcome by a sameness in difference to which intellectualizing and cognitivist terms such as “paradox” are inapt. For present purposes it is noteworthy that wonder has a strong connection to scale—or, more precisely, to the variable perception of magnitude. At one extreme, the enormous, gilt-wood statue of Apollo at Delos, dating to the early sixth century and the bronze cauldron, some 6 m high and bedecked with figures, that the Samians dedicated at Delphi were undoubtedly thaumata.16 So, too, were the supreme works of Classical sculpture: the gigantic chryselephantine statues such as the Athena Parthenos at Athens, the Zeus at Olympia, both

 Hesiod, Theogony 585–9, tr. Evelyn-White.   Delos: Prost 1999. Kolaios: Herodotus 4.152; Papalexandrou 2017.

15 16

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works of Pheidias, or the Hera at Argos by Polykleitos.17 Yet small things can have outsized power as well. If anything, small scale can put spatial relations, as of near and far, particularly at issue: if the very large can overwhelm, the very small can fascinate.18 Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in the eighteenth book of the Iliad shows how a wondrous work of craft can affect perceptions of magnitude.19 Within the vast concentric scenes that the smith-god Hephaistos works onto the shield are diminutive figures of Ares and Pallas Athena leading a sally of warriors from a walled city—and the poet’s description suggests multiple scales in simultaneous operation. 18.516  And Ares led them, and Pallas Athena. 18.517 Both were golden, golden the garments in which they had clothed themselves, 18.518  and they were beautiful and big with their weapons, like gods indeed, 18.519  super-clear on both sides, but the troops around them were smaller.20 This passage merits close attention. The poet’s eye falls on two depicted deities, Ares and Athena, and comes in for a closer look. The next three lines describe the figures, but they also narrate the evolving and changing perception of the work of craft. 18.517 emphasizes the material support of the image: Ares and Athena are “golden” with “golden raiment,” the pleonasm hammering the point. 18.518 describes the same figures in terms of depictive content: Ares and Athena are “beautiful” and “big” because they are “gods indeed.” 18.519, finally, emphasizes context: Ares and Athena are “super-clear on both sides” and their great size turns out to be relative to the “smaller” figures around them. By deferring this comparative adjective to the end of the passage, the poet suggests an arc or micro-narrative of beholding. Initially, the diminutive figures make a big impression (that is, an impression of “bigness”) by virtue of being golden and beautiful, but over time they acquire cogency within the context of a miniature tableau. It is the story of gradual absorption into a diegetic world, and it leads straight into a vivid account of an ambuscade outside one of the depicted cities, a reverie of the sort that only magical craftsmanship can provoke. Everything here is literally double. We have seen that ancient Greek has a grammatical voice that English does not: the middle voice alongside the active   Classical chryselephantine: Lapatin 2001. Parthenos: Prost 2009; Platt 2011, 77–91, 105–14; 224–28, 321–5, with earlier bibliography. 18   Michael Squire puts it nicely: “Miniaturization magnifies the mechanics of making meaning” (Squire 2011, 6). Cf. Porter 2010, 484–5. 19   The bibliography on the shield is immense. See Becker 1995; Frontisi-Ducroux 2002; Scully 2003; Francis 2009; Giuliani 2013, 19–26; Squire 2013. 20  Homer, Iliad 18.516–19, tr. Neer. 17

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and the passive. It also has a grammatical number that English does not: not just singular and plural but the “dual,” which names precisely two entities. The description of Ares and Athena is full of dual constructions: “golden” (chruseio ̄), “clothed themselves” (esthe ̄n), “beautiful” (kalo ̄), “big” (megalo ̄), “gods” (theo ̄), “super-clear” (arize ̄lo ̄) are all dual in this sense. The doubling of the word “golden” (“both were golden, golden the garments,” 18.517) literalizes the theme, a doubling of words to go with the grammatical doubling. The sense of the words is correspondingly duplex. When the gods are said to be “golden,” the term seems to refer to the material support of the image, and not to the depictive content, the gods “themselves.” But when their garments are said to be “golden,” the term could refer either to the support or to the content or to both; it could mean that here, too, Hephaistos has employed gold to make the image, but it could equally mean that he has depicted cloth-of-gold.21 The phrase “super-clear on both sides” works much the same way. To whom are the gods “super-clear”? The answer is again duplex: they are super-clear either to the mortals within the scene, or to the imagined beholder of the shield, or to both, that is, “both sides.” Clarity, conspicuousness, is relative, too. Thus the poet’s very words are double, comprehensible in two ways—and we, the auditors, are beholders just like the depicted troops. This is heady stuff, a verbal, ecphrastic miniaturism in which small details fascinate. At least three dualisms are at play in these lines: a doubleness of depictive content and material support (being gold and depicting gold), a doubleness of size (being at once large and small), and a doubleness of sense (specific words meaning two contrary things). Each juxtaposes a view from “within” the diegetic world with one from “without.” Seen one way, it is cogent to speak of “Ares” and “Athena,” cogent to say that the figures are “big” and “gods indeed”; seen another way, it is cogent to speak of gold and to say that everything on the shield is “small.” The effect is ingenious: the three lines perform the small shifts in Gestalt that depiction solicits. The result is a granular account of the variegated ways of seeing that compound during an encounter with a work of art and thereby bring out the relational structures that organize perception in these situations. We can compare this doubleness to that of Odysseus’s brooch, to Pandora, or, more proximally, to a field elsewhere on the shield, “similar to a tilled plot, | though indeed being of gold, such was the wonder that had been forged” (18.548–9). In each case what elicits wonder is, as usual, the simultaneous awareness of depictive content and material support—but also a concomitant doubleness of scale, of seeing large things made wonderfully small, small things as wonderfully large. There is a doubleness of big and little in perception that is   See Squire 2013, 184 n. 22 (“It is often left unclear whether these metals refer to the medium of the representation, or else more figuratively to the represented scenes themselves”). 21

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congruent with the more basic doubleness of figural representation and facture, and it is part of the work of poetry to bring out these duplicities and to relate them to one another. Skipping down to the end of the Classical period, the terms remain very similar in the fourth century bce. In Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus, for example, the relativity of large and small occasions one of the most famous discussions of wonder in the ancient tradition. Socrates is an adult but Theaetetus is still growing, that is, becoming larger. As usual Socrates makes this banal observation problematic. He does so by relativizing it: Theaetetus, he says, is growing while Socrates remains the same; so, although Socrates has not changed, he is no ­longer big. How can this be? “By the gods, Socrates,” exclaims the youth, “I wonder strangely [thaumazo ̄] when it comes to these things, and sometimes when truly looking at them, I get dizzy.” This “wonder,” Socrates replies, “is the only beginning of philosophy.”22 And they proceed to investigate the problem. Philosophy is a response to, a theorization of, wonder—here, at the duplicity of scale. It starts from wonder, starts where the beholding of the shield of Achilles or the brooch of Odysseus ends, but tends toward something very different: wisdom, sophia. The historical Theaetetus was an important mathematician, and the dialogue goes on to discuss the problem of geometrical incommensurability and irrational numbers (the theme of scale in sculpture will re-emerge as major concern of Sophist).23 The initial wonder, however, is a response to the relativism of scale or indeed of predication in general. Socrates can seem both large and small depending on context, just as six dice is at once fewer than twelve and more than four. This doubleness or duplicity provokes a thauma that can, if cultivated, become properly philosophical when one tries to discover a rational etiology for it.24 It is telling that Theaetetus should describe his wonder in visual terms: he gets dizzy when he “looks at” or “beholds” theoretical problems. Here as elsewhere, Plato appropriates traditional ways of talking about images on behalf of his own discourse: cognitive theo ̄ria or theory, literally “beholding,” of the Forms is an abstraction from the sublunar beholding of statues and other imitations.25 Theaetetus himself is a “close likeness” of Socrates himself (143e), and the vertigo of scale between the two is akin to the phenomenological doubleness that Hephaistos crafts onto the wonderful shield. How can a god be both golden and not golden, how can a man be both big and not big? The difference, however, is  Plato, Theaetetus 155b–d, tr. Loeb, modified. See Pappas 2016, 84–90.   On the relation between these concerns and the visual arts see Neer and Kurke 2019, 29–30. On Sophist see Nightingale 2002; Leigh 2009. Wonder is associated with sophism at 233a. 24  For Presocratic antecedents (concepts of scale in the fifth-century bce thinker Anaxagoras of Clazomenae) see Porter 2016, 21–31. 25   Cf. Neer 2010b, 63–6. 22 23

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no less important. Archaic wonder, as in Homer, is not a theoretical problem. Odysseus’s brooch and the shield of Achilles are not puzzles to solve, paradoxes to unpick, or brainteasers for students. The relation is not distanced in the requisite way; the beholder of “a wonder to behold for itself and oneself” is implicated no less than the artifact. Plato literally theorizes this state of being to make it a conceptual, philosophical problem in a spiritual ascent to a stipulatively suprasensible reality. Wonder at difference between absolute and relative size— between beholding “for itself” and “for oneself,” a small likeness and a full-sized model, Theaetetus and Socrates—becomes a route to the contemplation of immaterial Forms as opposed to sublunar ones. The discourse of wonder—the very meaning of the word—evolves in the Hellenistic period in ways that are beyond the scope of this essay but that do require a brief mention. The third-century poet Poseidippos of Pella, for instance, can call the engraving on a tiny gem a “big wonder” (mega thauma): little figure, big impact.26 Now, however, the wonder has a very different origin. Posidippos, unlike Plato (or Homer), is a functionalist: he asks questions like, “How did the pupils of the engraver’s eyes not suffer as he gazed so intently?”27 His wonder is not so much a revelation of the relational constitution of phenomena as a response to the efficacy of technology and the laboring body: “How’d they do that?” Posidippos’s “big wonder” derives from the logical relation of cause and effect within a particular relation of production, a form of if-then deliberation that is quite different from helpless astonishment at the twofoldness of depiction or the imbrication of sense and grammar in a hexameter line. More generally, Plato’s theorization of wonder as a logical incompatibility susceptible of analysis really is unlike the mute stupefaction of the Archaic beholder before “a wonder to behold for itself and oneself.” That Platonic conception—with its attendant placement of art under the concept of mimesis, its metaphysical distinction between ideality and materiality—doubtless influenced everything that followed. But it is dangerous to read Archaic and early Classical material in the light of later authors. Archaic wonder may, for instance, stand in a genetic relation to the notion of the sublime as it emerged in the Roman era with the raffiné rhetorical criticism known as Second Sophistic. Both terms share what James Porter has called “the logic of the gap,” yet the differences are no less significant—which is hardly surprising given that the chronological gap between high Classical art and On the Sublime is about half a millennium.28 The sublime is notoriously difficult to define but one could do worse than to call it a 26   Poseidippos fr. 15 Austin-Bastianini, l. 7. For recent treatments of the Hellenistic aesthetics of leptote ̄s, or miniaturization, see Porter 2010, 484–5; Porter 2011; Squire 2011; Zanker 2015, 51–2; Hunzinger 2015, 428. 27   Poseidippos fr. 15 Austin-Bastianini, ll. 7–8. 28   See, for instance, Longinus, On the Sublime 1.4. Quotation: Porter 2016, 171.

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post-Platonic recuperation of pre-Platonic thauma, a retrospective savoring— and, perhaps, mourning—of wonder after the fact. For present purposes, however, these developments are secondary. Part of the interest of Archaic and Classical art is that it is, precisely, pre-Platonic, hence almost impossibly alien—a challenge even today.

F IGU R I N E S: TA XONOM Y A N D WON DER

How does the ancient category of the small wonder compare to the modern category of the figurine? Put differently, how can these philological considerations affect the arrangement and understanding of archaeological corpora? Surviving Greek figurines are chiefly of bronze or terracotta, though wood, precious metals, and ivory were used as well. Scholars tend to specialize by medium, with terracotta in particular being a subfield unto itself.29 Early terracottas were hand-made, and early bronzes were made by the direct lost wax casting technique: such works are each unique. From ca. 700 bce the use of piece molds allowed the large-scale replication of terracotta figurines, though indirect lost wax casting from piece molds was less common in bronze until the mid-sixth century. Terracottas require decent clay, and some of the best clay beds in mainland Greece are in Boeotia, near the town of Tanagra. Later craftsmen would move to Athens and eventually they migrated to Asia and areas near Pergamon. Southern Italy has also produced large quantities of terracotta, not so much because the clay is especially fine but because local stone is especially poor. Greek figurines, regardless of medium, are found chiefly in two contexts: mortuary and cultic (domestic figurines are not unknown but are less common).30 Mortuary figurines are typically of terracotta, which means that terracotta figurines survive disproportionately. They could be burnt on pyres, perhaps as standins for human sacrifice, or placed in graves alongside the corpse.31 Iconographically,

29   There has been an explosion of interest in terracotta figurines in the last twenty years, with publication centering around a series of conference volumes, special issues of journals, and excavation reports. For useful discussions of historiography and the current state of the field see Uhlenbrock 1993, 2009; Albertocchi and Huysecom-Haxhi 2014. For results see Huysecom-Haxhi 2009; Albertocchi 2012; Huysecom-Haxhi and Muller 2015a, 2015b; Huysecom-Haxhi 2016; Muller, Laflı, and HuysecomHaxhi 2015, 2016. For a comparable development in the study of Tanagra figurines specifically see Jeammet 2007. For a brief review see Burn 2012. For the most up-to-date research see the open-access journal of the Association for Coroplastic Studies, Les Carnets de l’ACoSt (https://journals.openedition. org/acost/). There is no comparable, one-stop resource for small bronzes, but see Mattusch, Brauer, and Knudsen 2000–2. Wooden figurines are rare, see Hermary 1997; fine examples found at Brauron in 2011 await publication. 30   Finds from domestic contexts may, of course, have a ritual function: Kosma 2015. 31   For evidence of graveside human sacrifice see Eleutherna human sacrifice: Stampolidis 1996.

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mortuary figurines can represent deities (especially but not exclusively chthonic ones like Demeter and Persephone), mortals, animals (dogs, cocks), and fantastic beasts of all kinds. A third category, which falls outside this discussion, consists of miniature vessels and other non-anthropomorphic objects.32 Figurines from sanctuary contexts are varied. Terracotta votives survive in vast numbers: the Corycian cave on Parnassus, for example, has yielded more than 50,000 examples.33 Bronzes are more prominent in this context than in graves, but preservation is uneven: Archaic bronzes were preserved in votive deposits, while Classical and Hellenistic ones were often looted in the last few centuries bce and are relatively scarce. Iconographically, votive figurines sort into the same categories as grave goods do: images of deities, images of worshippers, images of animals and fantastic beasts; and realia. It is notoriously difficult to distinguish deity from worshipper in the absence of clear attributes, and a single type could probably be seen in different ways depending on context.34 Variants of the kouros and (especially) the kore types are not uncommon, and it has proved tempting to call them smaller, cheaper versions of the big, expensive statue types. Iconography can be reflexive, as in images of a votary carrying an offering: in such cases the gift (the figurine) is a representation of a gift being given by a giver. Animal figurines could be placed near altars, suggesting that they were substitutes for victims of flesh and blood.35 In a related vein, the use of figurines in magic as stand-ins for enemies effectively “weaponizes” this collapse of categories, such that harming the image will harm the person for whom it is a substitute.36 Figurines could play a variety of roles within a sanctuary. One and the same type could be regarded differently depending in its location: set at the entryway, in a colonnade or in the cella; on the ground, a shelf, a table or a base; by itself or in a crowd of similar objects; fixed in place or portable.37 Certainly there was no hard and fast distinction between offering and “cult image.”38 Size is no indicator of importance; for instance, the Archaic temple of Aphaia on Aegina enshrined an ivory goddess that would nowadays be classed as a figurine or statuette.39 Small bronzes could commemorate big victories, especially when mounted on stone pillars or columns, and even important artists could produce   Miniature dedications: Schattner, Zuchtriegel, Alexanian et al. (2013).   Corycean cave: Amandry 1972, 1981; Pasquier 1977. For an excellent treatment of votive figurines at a small shrine near Corinth, with special emphasis on cults of the Nymphs, see Kopestonsky 2016. 34   For good statements of the issues see Huysecom-Haxhi 2007; Muller 2009, with Brommer 1986. 35   Alroth 1988. 36  Faraone 1991; Stampolidis and Oikonomou 2014, cat. 64. The term “voodoo doll,” routinely applied to these figurines, should be retired because it is racist. 37   On the placement of figurines: Alroth 1988; Gladigow 1990. The variability and context-dependency of the meaning of votives is a consistent theme of the essays in Prêtre and Huysecom-Haxhi 2009. 38   See Alroth 1989. 39   Aegina cult image: Inscriptiones Graecae 4.1580; Williams 1982, 65; Lapatin 2001, 61–2. 32 33

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diminutive works, such as an equestrian statuette that the great Onatas of Aegina made for one Timarchos on the Athenian Acropolis.40 In sanctuary settings figurines and statuettes can stand in a range of relations to larger images; sometimes they are clearly ancillary to larger objects of veneration, sometimes their status is less certain; they can be centrally located in a temple (like a “cult statue”) or off to the side, fixed in place or movable. A few examples will give a sense of the range of possibilities. In some cases there is a clear distinction between the primary focus of ritual and the secondary offering. At Kommos on the south coast of Crete, for instance, a shrine in use ca. 800–ca. 600 bce exhibited three aniconic representations on a low platform; the deities were, in all likelihood, Apollo, his sister Artemis, and their mother Leto. Placed on the platform alongside the signs of the deities were two Egyptian figurines of faïence and other, terracotta figurines were associated with the cult.41 This very early example is fully consistent with later practice.42 Centuries later, for instance, an outdoor shrine of the Nymphs at Corinth shows basically the same arrangement, terracotta figurines clustering around the base of an aniconic stone pillar, this time in the open air.43 In such cases the contrast in scale, technique, and above all position makes the distinction between the primary focus of ritual and the secondary offering perfectly clear. Other cases are less straightforward. Here again Crete provides an early example. From Dreros in the northeast of the island come three diminutive figures of hammered bronze that date to the late eighth or early seventh century bce (Fig. 1.1)44 Roughly contemporary with the Kommos shrine, they almost certainly represent the same triad of Apollo, Artemis, and Leto. They are usually called “cult images” but, as noted earlier, the term is problematic: although the figures were found near an offering table they do not seem to have been fixed in place and could have stood in more than one location over the years, and there is no direct evidence that they were singled out for veneration. Like the Kommos aniconics,

40   On the display of bronze statuettes, see Sharpe 2016. Timarchos/Onatas: Inscriptiones Graecae I³ 773; Hansen 1983 no. 243; Kansteiner et al. 2014, no. 512; Kaczko 2016, no. 63. For athlete statuettes as votives on the Athenian Acropolis (totaling 11), see Niemeyer 1964, with Keesling 2003: 171–2, 234 n. 93. In addition, up to 23 stone bases and columns from the Acropolis supported statuettes either singly or in groups (Kissas 2000, 7–9; Keesling 2003: 84 and nn. 106–7). Up to 10 of the bases will likely have supported figures of Athena Promachos, but some of the others could have supported athletes. 41   Kommos: Shaw and Shaw 2000; Gaifman 2012, 186–8. 42   On the endurance of Greek aniconism see Gaifman 2012. 43   Kopestonsky 2015, 2016, 2018. 44   Heraklion inv. 2445, 2446, 2447. See, amidst the copious bibliography, Brommer 1986, 49 (not cult images but votives); Alroth 1988; Romano 2000–2; Bumke 2004, 45–54; Klein and Glowacki 2009, 164–6. For unambiguously votive figures from the site see Alroth 1989, 18–19.

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F ig . 1.1 Statuettes from the sanctuary of Apollo at Dreros, Crete: Apollo, Artemis, Leto. Bronze. H. (central figure) 80 cm. Late eighth century BCE. Heraklion, Archaeological Museum 2445, 2446, 2447. Image: Richard Neer.

the Dreros statuettes make a triad; unlike the Kommos offerings, they are not fixed in place. Which is the more important variable? In the Classical sanctuary of Apollo at Kalapodi in Phokis, a tiny bronze kouros stood in a small cavity atop an offering table directly adjacent to an altar (Fig. 1.2).45 The figurine was fixed in place with lead so that its ankles and feet were permanently invisible; alongside it were feminine votives, including clothes-pins and a large terracotta mask representing a goddess. The bronze is probably an offering but, being fixed to the table facing the altar, the possibility cannot be excluded that it was (also) the recipient. If it were larger it would probably be called a cult statue. Lastly, at the temple of Apollo at Metropolis in Thessaly a statuette of Apollo in the attitude of a hoplite stood on a base in the middle of the cella (Fig. 1.3).46 On the base were cuttings for three large statues (now lost), but the bronze  Kalapodi: Felsch 1980, 88–98; Felsch 2007, 259–60 no. 118. On bronze figurines of youths, including but not limited to kouroi, see Papalexandrou 2005. 46   Metropolis: Intzesiloglou 2000–2, 2002. 45

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F ig . 1.2 Figurine (B 150) from the South Temple at Kalapodi, Phokis, in situ. Bronze. H. 10.6 cm. Ca. 445–435 BCE. Image: Gösta Hellner, D-DAIATH-1978/725.

stood on a plinth of its own and did not have a cutting to receive it. Elsewhere in the temple were column dedications, both with and without figures atop them. Although the bronze has been published as a cult statue, it is unclear what the term means in this context. Was it an arkhaion agalma, an “old image” supplemented by later ones, as attested at some other sites?47 Or was just a specially prominent votive standing atop another statue’s base, as at Kommos and Corinth? Could the fact that the hoplite-Apollo was not fixed in place indicate a processional function, such that it could be “switched on” for special occasions but was otherwise of secondary importance? Such questions may not have settled answers (the last is pure speculation), but the interesting point is that they should arise at all: figurines are so mutable and context-dependent that they can fall into many categories at once, or shift from one to another. The Kalapodi figurine is especially revealing in this regard. Although cast with separate legs and feet on a square plinth, when fixed into the offering table it was submerged in lead up to mid-calf; traces of lead on other figurines, and similar sockets on other stone bases, suggest that this arrangement

 Suggested by Intzesiloglou 2000–2, 115. On multiple “cult images” in a single shrine see Platt 2011, 83–5. 47

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F ig . 1.3  Statuette of Apollo as hoplite from the temple at Metropolis, Thessaly. Bronze. H. 80.2 cm. Middle of the sixth century BCE. Karditsa, Archaeological Museum. Image: laberis, Wikimedia Commons, modified by the author.

was not uncommon in Archaic Greece.48 At Kalapodi the kouros was visible in its entirety only up until the moment of its dedication, like an unblemished victim before its sacrifice. The strong implication is that the kouros was intended to be used, handled, gifted at least as much, if not more, than to be displayed for posterity. The act of giving was paramount; installation on the offering table fixed that fleeting moment, even at the cost of partially occluding the figurine. Literally embedding the figurine in its architectural setting does nothing to diminish its potential. On the contrary, numerous ancient authors suggest that Archaic statues had to be fixed in place to keep them from walking off with uncanny animacy; at Kalapodi, molten lead effectively rendered the figurine apous, “footless” or immobile, an attribute of the most ancient statues in the Greek imagination.49 Of course, this expedient only underscores the essential mutability of the figurine as a class. This mutability may have functional causes (figurines are portable, multiple, cheap, etc.) but is not reducible to them. A third, particularly vexed category

  See Gehrig 1975, 49 n. 15; Felsch 1980, 90 n. 170.  For apous (“footless”) applied to early statues see Tzetzes, Chiliades I.535–41, with Pausanias 9.40.3. See also Frontisi-Ducroux 1975, 97–115; Bremmer 2013. 48 49

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Fig. 1.4  Corinthian jointed “doll”. Terracotta. H. 12 cm. First half of the fifth century BCE. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art (Rogers Fund) 44.11.8. Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art open content program.

makes this point clear: the toy.50 Here the figurine is unfixed or portable between seriousness and triviality, cult and play. It is sometimes argued, for instance, that certain toy-like objects found in tombs are actually symbolic representations of toys and, by extension, of childhood.51 Exemplary here is a tradition of naked female terracottas with jointed limbs that goes back to the Geometric period (Fig. 1.4).52 Most represent dancers and were meant to be suspended on strings, but others sit on little thrones. Found mostly in graves, they also turn up in sanctuaries. Their function has been much debated: they seem too fragile to be functional toys, but might be representations of toys; then again, when hung up like wind chimes their movement and noise could have had an apotropaic function without the least suggestion of play. Figurines, in short, have a special potential that other classes lack. This is no mere scholarly conceit: tellingly, Aristotle used the example of puppets on strings, “wonderful automata” (ta automata to ̄n thaumato ̄n), to illustrate the conceptual   On the difficulty of identifying toys see Dasen 2018. On “dolls” and puppets: Elderkin 1930; Dörig 1958; Purschke 1984; Jeammet 2003, 20; Pilz 2009; Larson 2001, 101–7; Huysecom-Haxhi, Papaikonomou, and Papadopoulos 2012; Knauß 2014, 146–7 cat. C394–6 (Cypriot), 161–3 cat. D29–D35; Lang-Auinger 2015. 51   Vierneisel-Schlörb 1997, 166; Dasen 2010, 26, 29. 52   Elderkin 1930; Dörig 1958; Jeammet 2003. 50

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difference between potentiality and actuality. “The parts of these automatons,” he writes, “even while at rest, have in them somehow or other a potentiality, and when some external agency sets the first part in movement, then immediately the adjacent part comes to be so in actuality.”53 Applied to jointed dolls, the potentiality for “re-animation” might have made the figurines appropriate items to put in a grave. There is a certain incipience to this class. Figurines may have been “good to think with” for Aristotle, a useful way for him to theorize certain conceptual differences. Stepping back, however, all of these distinctions are apt to seem very fine: what is the difference between a doll and a full-scale replica of a doll, between an apotropaic wind chime and a lighthearted plaything, potential significance and actual triviality? In such cases we come close to the problem of Pandora and a likeness to which the very concept of a model in inapt. The difference in each case is not the morphology of the object but the occasion and the rules and protocols thereof. It is precisely this archaeologically invisible, qualitative difference that the figurine, the aesthetically small, brings to the fore. The moral of the story of toys is that archaeological context may not be the most informative or even the most interesting way to frame the issue: sometimes the figurine itself defines its own context, not the other way around. Excavation context is essential; it can usefully control or limit the significance of a figurine: the types are generic but, ex hypothesi, we can assign a meaning by appealing to local circumstance. But it need not, and sometimes cannot, have methodological priority over other considerations. The special virtue of the figurine may be its resistance to such definition: the aesthetics of scale lends a certain urgency to contexts and circumstances, rules and protocols, that do not show up archaeologically. To sum up, ancient Greek figurines are basically gifts, variously to the dead and the gods—except when they are playthings. Iconographically they are varied but often reflexive of function. This functional specificity has a fluid relation to the absolute smallness that defines them as an archaeological class. Just as there is a distinction between quantitative and qualitative, hence a question of which gets methodological priority, so there is a distinction between generic size and specific function, hence a question of their relative weighting. A figurine is small to behold “for itself and oneself.”

PL A ST ICI T Y

We began with the question: what is smallness? Then, finding that phrasing to be ill-formed, we modified it to ask, what does smallness afford, what does it solicit?  Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals 734b11–14, tr. Loeb.

53

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This latter question is, perhaps, possible to answer. For there are clearly things one could do with figurines in Greece that one could not do on a larger scale. In particular, figurines were iconographically plastic: they crossed up categories and boundaries in ways that are distinctive within the larger corpus of figural imagery. Small scale permits somatic and gendered forms disallowed in other media. Types that enter large-scale sculpture only in Late Classical and Hellenistic are not uncommon in early figurines: animals, grotesques, and above all female nudes.54 The last is anomalous in Greek art, while male nudes are normal; this is the opposite of Near Eastern custom, where male nudity is largely unknown and female is common—particularly for the representation of Astarte, the Levantine version of Aphrodite. But if insufficiently decorous for large-scale statuary, Protoarchaic female nudity is not especially rare in figurines.55 In the Western Mediterranean, where Greeks and Phoenicians mingled constantly, the figurine afforded the possibility of syncretic and hybrid body types. At Paestum, just south of Naples, a sanctuary of Aphrodite stood just outside the city walls, in a contact zone between the settlement and the outside world. Rebecca Ammerman has published more than three thousand terracottas from the site along with associated types.56 Notable for present purposes was a series of figurines that adapt a Punic Astarte type of naked goddess (Fig. 1.5).57 They do so, however, in unexpected fashion: Ammerman showed that the Paestan Aphrodites adapted nude male figurines produced at the Greek colony of Metaponto in the “instep” of the Italian peninsula. Coroplasts at Paestum used a single mold for both genders: figurines emerged from the mold as androgynes, and became masculine through the addition of a penis and scrotum, feminine through the addition of a headdress. Gender, here, was literally plastic. This serial production of difference is only possible with figurines. On the one hand, smallness affords, and even solicits, a plasticity of iconography that plays out in distinctive figurations of bodies and genders: the relation of nude male to nude goddess runs along with the hybridity of the cult and what one might call the “smallness effect.” On the other, this same plasticity of iconography is to some extent a function of manufacturing technology. Because figurines are small and cheap, experimentation carries low risk. Thus figurines can be seriated in a way that may have been theoretically possible at a larger scale but was practically quite difficult, especially before the advent of indirect lost-wax casting from piece molds.58 In other words, because they are cheap and plentiful, figurines are in a sense marginal, and because they are marginal they play on boundaries.59   See Huysecom-Haxhi 2013 (animals), Dasen 2015 (grotesques), both with earlier bibliography. 56   Stewart 1997, 34–42, 231–4, with bibliography 241.   Ammerman 1991, 2002. 57   See Böhm 1990. 58 59   See Rumscheid 2008.   Compare Jeammet 2014. 54 55

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F ig . 1.5  “Naked goddess” figurine from the urban sanctuary of Hera at Paestum, Campania. Terracotta. H. 17.9 cm. First half of the sixth century BCE. Paestum, Archaeological Museum 1859. Image © Rebecca Ammerman, used by kind permission.

Small bodies can be fantasmatic in ways that one simply does not see in larger formats before the Hellenistic period.60 A well-known example is the so-called Baubo type from the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Priene, in which the frontal face, female genitalia, and a truncated body all coincide (Fig.  1.6).61 These figurines have long been taken to refer to a mythological episode in which the grain goddess Demeter, while mourning her abducted daughter Persephone, was made to laugh by an old woman who lifted her skirts. More recently, however, the fact that they can be shown with baskets of offerings has been taken to argue against this identification.62 In any case, the narrative component of these figures is minimal. Whatever their connection to myth, the figurines are an extreme version of a genre of monstrous, confrontational imagery that includes staring Gorgons and masks of Dionysos. This class of image has been brilliantly studied by Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux and Rainer Mack.63 The mythical narratives always suggest that these staring faces provoke an extravagant reaction, as when the gaze of Medousa turns men to stone. If such magic never occurs in real   For recent discussion, with references, see Voegtle 2016.  Baubo: see Olender 1990; Török 1995, 132–3; Lentini 2005; Bonfante 2007–8, 2009. Priene: Rumscheid 2006. 62   Rumscheid 2006. 63   Frontisi-Ducroux 1995; Mack 2002 (on Medousa). 60 61

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F ig . 1.6 “Baubo” figurine from the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Priene, Ionia (Turkey). Terracotta. H. 9 cm. Ca. 33-327 BCE. Berlin, Staatliche Museen TC 8616. Image: Richard Neer.

life, it does not follow that the images are failures; it may be just the point. Figurines may be “good to think with” precisely because their smallness makes disturbing images manageable: they represent what Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux and François Lissarrague would call an “organized and regulated alterity.”64 Baubo figurines, arguably, contain or circumscribe the disturbing power of the gaze (here neatly feminized) precisely by failing to have an especially traumatic impact. Small scale lends itself to a certain trivialization. Such results can pose problems for archaeological taxonomy. A naked figurine of the later seventh century from the sanctuary of Hera Limeneia at Perachora on the Gulf of Corinth provides a good example (Fig. 1.7).65 It clearly has breasts, but steps forward like a masculine kouros; it has lost its sex due to breakage, with the result that it has been something of a Rorschach test for archaeologists. The excavators and, later, the great art historian Gisela Richter took the figurine’s nudity to indicate masculinity: they classed it as an instance of the kouros type of standing youth, and it is displayed as such in the National Museum in Athens. Ammerman, however, has pointed out that the figurine could perfectly well be a naked goddess of a Near Eastern type widely distributed around the Mediterranean, albeit adapted to Greek style. Although Ammerman’s argument is persuasive, for   Frontisi-Ducroux and Lissarrague 1990, 230.   Athens, National Museum 16503; Payne 1940, 207 no. 42; Richter 1970, 60 no. 44; Ammerman 1991, 225. 64 65

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F ig . 1.7 Androgyne figurine from the sanctuary of Hera Limeneia at Perachora near Corinth. Terracotta. H. (as restored) 23.3 cm. Ca. 590-580 BCE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 16503. Image: Richard Neer.

present purposes the correct answer is less important than the fact that both sides in this debate frame their research questions in terms of iconography. An enabling assumption is that the goal of research should be to place an image in this or that category of representational content. Yet the Perachora figurine seems to defy the categories. Are figurines, then, the class of the unclassifiable? It is noteworthy, in this light, that the same sanctuary at Perachora has also yielded a terracotta plaque, again of the Protoarchaic period, in which a bearded version of the goddess clutches her breasts while emerging from a scrotum (Fig. 1.8).66 She must be an androgyne Aphrodite/Aphroditos emerging from the testicles of Ouranos, castrated by Zeus. As Hesiod tells the story: And when at first he had cut off the genitals . . . and thrown them from the land into the strongly surging sea, they were borne along the water for a long time, and a white foam [aphros] rose up around them from the immortal flesh; and inside this grew a maiden. First she approached holy Kythera, and from there she went on to sea-girt Cyprus. She came forth, a reverend, beautiful goddess, and grass grew up around her beneath her slender feet.67   Payne 1940, 231–2, no. 183a; Ammerman 1991, 225. On the plaque’s relation to Corinthian cults of Aphrodite see Pirenne-Delforge 1994, 123–4. 67  Hesiod, Theogony 188–95 (tr. Most, slightly modified). 66

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F ig . 1.8 Votive plaque from the sanctuary of Hera Limeneia at Perachora near Corinth: Aphrodite/ Aphroditos emerging from the scrotum of Ouranos. Terracotta. H. 7.6 cm. First half of the seventh century BCE. After Payne 1940, pl. 102.

Our plaque adds a beard, but the bearded goddess type is known from Cyprus, with which Aphrodite had long association, so the iconography has a Cypriot cast wholly appropriate to the subject matter.68 The sixth Homeric Hymn adds that Aphrodite—not unlike Pandora—was presented to the assembled gods after being adorned in finery: the Olympians “wondered at the form of violet-crowned Kytherea,” eidos thaumazontes.69 Thus the plaque represents a wonder, a thauma, in the making—and the androgyny is integral to the effect. Such cases argue for alternatives to iconography and typology. Perhaps we do not have to decide between masculine and feminine, kouros and goddess; perhaps a certain plasticity and mutability is a quality that attends smallness, however defined. A figurine may be ambivalent but, for just that reason, “super-clear on both sides,” that is, clearly perceptible in multiple ways. Compare the figurines from Perachora and Paestum to Pandora, the beautiful and confounding person made of earth and water, and one can start to glimpse the way in which these curiosities and aberrations could, in fact, be congruent with mainstream Greek artistic priorities. The terracottas may not be radiant or particularly complex visually, but in their “jamming” of local and foreign, masculine and feminine,   Cypriot imagery: Winbladh 2012.  [Homer] Hymn to Aphrodite 6.18. See also Hesiod, Theogony 188–200; Cypria fr. 5.

68 69

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they are wonderful and incomprehensible in their own way. Smallness is not intrinsically wonderful but, as it shuttles between relational and absolute, indeterminate and determinate, it lends itself to wonder-working.

EN L A RGEM EN TS

The sanctuary setting does, however, raise some fairly basic questions of classification. Did figurines dedicated at a given shrine resemble the nearby “cult statue” (if any)? The question has provoked much discussion, but the short answer is: not necessarily.70 Yet the form of the question is, perhaps, no less interesting than the answer. It exemplifies an iconographic and typological paradigm that, while fruitful, has tended to monopolize discussion. Even when resemblance is not at issue, the cult statue plays a normative role as a basic point of reference; the Metropolis Apollo, for example, has been assimilated to larger cult statues because of its position in the sanctuary. An alternative would be to take the smaller, less prestigious figurines as the point of comparison. The Metropolis Apollo is not androgyne but he is duplex in a different way. Part of the issue is technical. The Apollo was, in its day, a showpiece of the founder’s art: one of the earliest hollow-cast bronzes in the Greek world. Cast in sections, it is literally composite. Below the waist, the figure resembles a kouros, the standard formula for an Apollo, as at Kalapodi: nude, caught in mid stride. Above the waist, it is a hoplite with upraised spear, the so-called smiting pose. In fusing the two halves of the figure, the craftsman has in effect fused two distinct iconographies, creating a new hybrid. Scale works to similar effect. The “smiting” pose had a long pedigree in Greek and Near Eastern figurines and is often associated with the Levantine god Reshef, whom the Greeks identified with Apollo.71 Imported figurines are common in Greek sanctuaries around the Aegean. In this case the technical achievement consisted in scaling up the traditional type: the upraised arm would have been difficult to produce in a stone figure of this size (it would likely have snapped off under its own weight if not supported), but posed no serious difficulty in bronze thanks to the metal’s superior tensile strength. In this sense, the Metropolis god, at 0.82 m, might be seen as a hypertrophic figurine.72 Because it enlarged a wellknown figure type, and used a flashy new technology in order to do so, it may be  On the typological relation of statuettes to so-called cult images: Beschi 1988; Alroth 1989; Rumscheid 2008. See also Ridgway 1971, 336–7; Stemmer 1995. Bartman 1992 remains an essential study of Hellenistic miniaturization. 71   For general discussions see Negbi 1976; Gallet de Santerre 1987; Byrne 1991. 72  Compare Pilz 2011, arguing that miniature objects are signs of full-scale ones. Oversize objects could likewise signify small ones. 70

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said to have made scale a source of visual interest in its own right. But this reference frame is unstable. Relative to a mortal beholder, or to the larger statues with which it shared a base, the god will have been conspicuously small. In this way, the Metropolis Apollo is of a piece with the other small wonders we have discussed, both literary and archaeological. Like the Perachora figure, it combines different iconographies into a single compound figure. Like Ares and Athena on the shield of Achilles, it is an instance of highly skilled metalwork that relativizes scale by contrasting with its surroundings, seeming big while being little. Like Socrates in Theaetetus, it can seem both large and small depending on context. The idea of a large figurine may seem like sophistry, but it is a natural consequence of taking smallness as an aesthetic category rather than a mathematical one; and, after all, sophistry is a good Greek invention.73 So the idea is worth pursuing. It is relatively uncontroversial, for instance, to say that the great Zeus found in the sea off Cape Artemisium—an Attic work of the mid fifth century bce—belongs to a type pioneered in small bronzes: the god stands in a variant of the “smiting” pose with the left arm outstretched and a thunderbolt in the right hand: (Figs. 1.9 and 1.10).74 Diminutive examples are widely distributed from the late sixth century onward; it is for just this reason that the statue should probably be classed as a votive. 75 Yet this typological-iconographic observation has an experiential, or even aesthetic, correlate. If it is not merely coincidental that the statue strikes the same pose as the figurines that preceded it, then the similarity must have been intentional; and if the similarity was intentional then it must have been at least potentially relevant to a beholder’s experience.76 Like the Metropolis Apollo, in short, the Artemisium Zeus is a “supersize” figurine—and conspicuously so. Dramatic enlargement proposes a comparison with more commonplace votives and, arguably, increases the statue’s visual impact: the Artemisium god may be large relative to a human but, compared to a figurine, he is enormous. Jean-Marc Luce has described how Greeks would dedicate oversized versions of everyday tools and household goods in a process of “defunctionalisation,” displacing them from the mortal sphere into a divine one.77 But this analogy will only take us so far: a figurine is not “functional” in the relevant sense, hence cannot be “defunctionalised.” In such cases the play of scale must be important in itself. The Zeus of Artemisium evokes the small while yet being large, thereby

73   The relation between measurement and appearance would later be recurrent concern of Plato in his responses to sophism; see, for instance, Parmenides, Protagoras, and Sophist. 74  Athens, National Museum 15161. See Tzachou-Alexandri and Andreopoulou-Mangou 2000–2, with earlier bibliography. 75  Degrassi 1981.   76 Degrassi 1981.   77  Luce 2011.

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F ig . 1.9  Zeus from Cape Artemisium, Greece. Bronze. H. 2.1 m. Ca. 460-450 BCE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 15161. Image by George E. Koronaios, modified by the author.

making scale and size noticeable, unfamiliar. It is “about” scale, it thematizes scale, no less than it represents a particular deity or action. A revelation of the relational constitution of scale was part of what made the shield of Achilles (and Homer’s account thereof) thaumastos, wonderful. The same terms are in play in this instance. The Zeus of Artemisium is, in fact, a quintessential example of the Classical thauma idesthai, “a wonder to behold for itself and oneself.”78 Made of radiant bronze, hurling a bright thunderbolt across the “fourth wall,” projecting dramatically outward when seen from the front while resolving into a flat and self-contained pattern from the side, the statue stages and elaborates the doubleness in perception that Homer describes. Distinctively Classical, however, is the way it performs that doubleness insofar as its narrative action (hurling brilliant lightning into our space) recapitulates its visual impact (dazzling, brilliant, conspicuous from afar). It does what it shows and shows what it does. The play of scale works to similar effect: a tiny figurine has become enormous, like Alice after eating the “Eat Me” cake, and the result is a Wonderland. Pose, material, narrative, and scale all work in tandem to effect 78   For a more extended argument of this point see Neer 2010b, 86–8, with Neer and Kurke 2019, 52–6.

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F ig . 1.10 Figurine representing Zeus with a thunderbolt, from Ambracia, Aetolia. Bronze. H. (with base) 18.8 cm. Ca. 480 BCE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 14984. Image: Richard Neer.

thauma: a radical estrangement of relations, as between large and small, near and far, beholder and beheld.

R EL I EFS W I T H DOL L S

Visual representations of figurines are few, but the ones that do exist are informative: each is, in a way, a precious gloss upon, or reading of, the class. For example, a series of Classical Athenian gravestones shows girls or young women holding female figurines or “dolls” (Fig. 1.11)79 Nearly all of these “dolls” are naked; a significant number are truncated, their arms cut at the elbow, their legs at the knees. Real examples of this latter type do exist (Fig. 1.12).80 Some scholars reason that limbs are easily breakable and take 79   Dörig 1958; Cavalier 1988; Clairmont 1993–5, vol. 1, 227–8; Reilly 1997; Larson 2001, 101–7; Margariti 2018, 114–16. On the related Polyxena stele in Berlin, which represents a young female— either a bride or a priestess—holding a statuette, see Schwarzmaier 2006 (bride); Schild-Xenidou 2008, 172–4, 274–5 no. 42 (priestess). 80   For real examples of the truncated “dolls” see Dewailly 2007, 150; Knauß 2014, 163 no. D35, with list and earlier bibliography.

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F ig . 1.11  Athenian grave relief (fragment): mistress with doll, serving girl with waterfowl. Marble. H. (as preserved) 49 cm. First quarter of the fourth century BCE. Avignon, Musée Calvet E31. Image © Fondation Calvet, Avignon, France, used by kind permission.

F ig . 1.12 “Doll” with truncated limbs, from Athens (?). The head is missing. Terracotta. First quarter of the fourth century BCE. Munich, Antikensammlungen NI 8594. Image: Richard Neer.

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their absence to indicate that these figurines are toys; others draw the opposite conclusion, that something so bizarre must have a ritual function.81 It has been suggested, for instance, that a girl would dedicate such a figurine just before marriage—offering up her virgin body—and that the stelai commemorate maidens who died young, holding the offerings that they would never have the chance to make.82 It is true that in ancient Greece, as in the modern Mediterranean, it was not uncommon to offer up an image of a body part in thanks for healing.83 However, real examples of these limbless dolls do not turn up with anything like the frequency that one would expect if every girl were dedicating one at marriage. There is a telling contrast with the shrine of the Nymph on the slopes of the Athenian Acropolis, where brides dedicated lustral vessels in vast quantities.84 It is unlikely that limbless dolls were routine offerings of this sort. Their exact identity, therefore, remains obscure. It need not have been fixed: Jennifer Larson points out that there is no need to choose between toys and votives, for an object could start out as one and end up as the other.85 Another gravestone shows a servant girl handing her mistress a puppet, identifiable by a stick or chord emerging from its head (Fig. 1.13).86 It has apparently been stored in the box that the girl holds in her other hand.87 The puppet’s presence on a gravestone recalls the jointed dolls discussed earlier, but in this case the mechanism is different. The author of the Aristotelian treatise On the Cosmos describes how such puppets, called neurospasta, worked: “the men who run puppet-shows, by pulling a single string, make the creature’s neck move, and his hand and shoulder and eye, and sometimes every part of his body, according to a rhythmical pattern.”88 The puppet on the gravestone is not jointed, but the sculptor must be taking some license in order that the uncannily animate figurine might seem as lifelike as possible: the relief registers the impression, the experience of the puppet, not its “real” appearance. This attempt to depict the experience of depiction is as strange, in its own way, as the attempt to distinguish between a toy and an exact replica of a toy, or to imagine the very first woman as a likeness in clay of something other than herself. As a complement to typology and iconography, we might focus in such cases on the place of the figurine within the relief space. Comparison with other grave reliefs suggests that, compositionally, the figurine can occupy the same place as two other kinds of image: the mask and the mirror. On a stele in Piraeus, for instance, an actor holds a mask (notably, it is feminine) in much the same position 82   Toy: Dörig 1958, 46–7.   Reilly 1997. 84   See Draycott and Graham 2016.   Sanctuary of the Nymph: Brouskari 2002. 85   Larson 2001, 101. 86   Athens, National Museum inv.1993; Dörig 1958, 45–6; Clairmont 1993–5 cat. 2.204. 87   Dörig 1958, 45. 88  [Aristotle], On the Cosmos 6.398b, tr. Forster and Furley. 81 83

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F ig . 1.13 Athenian grave relief (fragment): servant girl with a puppet and a box. Marble. H. (as preserved) 66 cm. Early fourth century BCE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 1993. Image: Richard Neer.

as the girls hold their dolls (Fig. 1.14).89 On other gravestones, a woman holds a mirror in the same position (Fig. 1.15).90 In each case, the depicted action consists essentially of looking or pondering. The result is a certain reciprocity between the depiction and its own beholding: we look at the stele as an actor looks at his mask, or a woman at her mirror, her figurine, her puppet. The implicit analogy consists in the fact that each is a visual representation that evokes the unseen and absent. The sculpted (images of) figurines, in particular, make absence conspicuous in their very iconography: the dolls by conjuring up phantom limbs, the puppet by proposing a potential but unrealized vitality. While it would be good to know the real-world ritual function, if any, of these figurines, this visual conceit is no less important: the puppet and the limbless doll are like gravestones, objects of mournful beholding. As such, they bring out the affective transformation of everyday things—such as a child’s toy or a woman’s mirror— into poignant reminders of loss, memorials in the midst of the everyday.91 It is no coincidence that another Greek word for marionette is, precisely, thauma or wonder. Plato, for instance, suggests that we are all “wonderpuppets,” thaumata, and our passions are the strings.

  Actor stele: Piraeus, Museum, unnumbered; Clairmont 1993–5, no. 1.075; see Tsirivakos 1974; Slater 1985: 340–4; Neer 2010b, 207–13. 90   Mirrors: Leader 1997, 693; Younger 2002, 183–5; Neer 2010b, 198–200; Margariti 2018, 116–17, with earlier bibliography. Illustrated here is the stele of Pausimakhe, from Charvati in Attica (Athens, National Museum 3964; Clairmont 1993–5, no. 1.283). 91   Cf. Stewart 1984. 89

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F ig . 1.14 Athenian grave relief (fragment): a male actor holding a female mask, from Ambelaki on Salamis. Marble. H. 70.2 cm. Late fifth century BCE. Piraeus, Archaeological Museum 4229. Image: Richard Neer.

F ig . 1.15  Athenian grave relief of Pausimache, from Charvati, Attica. Marble. H. 1.29 m. Early fourth century BCE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum 3964. Image: Richard Neer.

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Let’s consider each of us, though we are living beings, to be a divine wonder-puppet [thauma], put together either for their play or for some serious purpose—which, we don’t know. What we do know is that these passions inside us work like tendons or cords, drawing us and pulling against one another in opposite directions toward opposing deeds, struggling in the region where virtue and vice lie separated from one another.92

This metaphor internalizes wonder(s): where the Archaic thauma idesthai staked out a grammatical middle between a beholder and an entity in the world, the wonder-puppet figures “the passions inside us” and their relation to a deity that we know only intellectually, through cognitive beholding or theo ̄ria.93 Where the Archaic “wonder to behold for itself and oneself” was a literal encounter with artifacts, Plato’s thauma is a figural approximation, a trope that the philosopher invites us to entertain (“Let’s consider . . .”) in order to grasp a metaphysical truth. The puppet is a material condition of Plato’s idealist philosophy—which, however, promptly relegates it to the status of a mere imitation and transforms phenomenal beholding into noumenal theo ̄ria. The modern disciplines can theorize this ancient theorization of the thauma, but they are not fated to Platonism. On the contrary, figurines defamiliarize modern categories no less than ancient ones. Because they put “formal” issues of size and scale so insistently at issue, they have the potential to pull scholarship away from its obsessive concern with iconography, narrative, and discursive thematics and toward the mutual implication of artwork, beholder, and environment. Perhaps an eclectic and comparative method that combines art history, archaeology, and philology will make it possible to glimpse the wonders behind the idealizations of imitation, form, and number that, now more than ever, or­gan­ize research in the Academy.

R EF ER ENCE S A lbertocchi , M. (2012) Philotechnia. Studi sulla coroplastica della Sicilia greca (Catania: Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche) A lbertocchi , M. and S. Huysecom-Haxhi (2014) “Nouveaux projets collectifs en coroplathie antique,” Thiasos 3: 17–25 A lroth , B. (1988) “The Positioning of Greek Votive Figurines,” in G. C. Nordquist, N.  Marinatos, and R.  Hägg (eds.), Early Greek Cult Practice (Stockholm: Svenska Institutet i Athen), 195–203 92  Plato, Laws 644d–e, tr. Pangle and Kurke, slightly modified. On this passage see Kurke 2013. See also Plato, Laws 803c. 93   On Plato and inwardness see Taylor 1989, 115–26. “The passions inside us” translates the Greek ta pathē en hemin.

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Shifting Scales at La Venta Claudia Brittenham

Figurines were ubiquitous in ancient Mesoamerica. They are found by the hun­ dreds at nearly every archaeological site, in households of all social statuses, in trash deposits, and sometimes in graves. Clay figurines are most common in the archaeological record—so common indeed that they are the unmarked category, as Rosemary Joyce has observed: a figurine is assumed to be made out of clay, unless its medium is otherwise specified, as I will do with the “greenstone fig­ur­ ines” that are the subject of this chapter.1 In addition to clay, Mesoamerica hosts robust traditions of figurines made of precious jade as well as serpentine and other greenstones; figurines are also made of shell, obsidian, bone, or metal. But as is often the case, this ubiquity may obscure what does not survive: figurines of unbaked clay, wood, rubber, aromatic copal resin, amaranth grain, dried maize husks, fig-bark paper.2 Such ephemeral and often consumable materials may have been as important in the prehispanic world as the more durable figurines that survive in the archaeological record. Modern definitions of figurines involve both scale and subject matter. A fig­ur­ ine is reduced in scale, relative both to its referent and to the human body. Figurines most commonly represent human (or humanoid) figures—again, an anthropomorphic figurine is the unmarked category, and an “animal figurine” or   Joyce 2009.   For amaranth figurines, see Sahagún 1950–82, bk. 1, ch. 21, 47–9. For copal figurines, see Klein and Victoria Lona 2009, 355–65. In contemporary Nahuatl-speaking communities of Veracruz, Alan Sandstrom has documented a tradition of cut paper figurines: paper images of maize deities are dressed and fed offerings in the communities’ most important ceremonies; images of malignant wind spirits are quickly covered beneath offerings of foodstuffs and chicken blood, and then disposed of at the end of a curing rite (Sandstrom 1991, 2009). One town over, maize cobs take the place of cut paper images in agricultural ritual (Sandstrom 2009, 268). 1 2

         

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so forth must be specified.3 It might even cause a moment of cognitive dissonance to term a reduced-scale representation of an inanimate object a figurine. Yet objects from the Olmec site of La Venta, Mexico, c. 900–400 bce, show us that figurines are an etic classification; that is, they are our way of associating small, often hand-held, three-dimensional figural objects in the archaeological record. At La Venta, clay and jade figurines enjoy an almost perfectly comple­ mentary distribution: only clay figurines are found in residential contexts, and only greenstone figurines are found in ceremonial contexts, including elite buri­ als (Figs.  2.1 and 2.2).4 These objects are made, ornamented, and treated in different ways as well: while hundreds of fragmentary clay figurines were found in excavations at La Venta, only 30 greenstone figures are known from the site, all found within the ceremonial center of Complex A.5 Clay figurines are almost always found in fragments, often with patterns suggesting deliberate breakage, while greenstone figurines are generally largely complete, or at most, missing a limb.6 The vast preponderance of clay figurines represent female subjects; by

F ig . 2.1  Clay figurine from La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. Headless figure is approximately 6 cm tall. University of Kansas, Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum. Gift of Robert J. Squier. 4   Joyce 2009.   Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959, 133.  Drucker 1952, 153–60; Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959, 158–61, 231–3. On the history of Complex A, see Gillespie 2008; Colman 2010. 6   Follensbee 2000, 77–8; Guernsey 2020. 3 5

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F ig . 2.2  Greenstone figurines from La Venta Offering 4, Olmec, 900–400 bce. The largest figurine is 20 cm tall. National Anthropological Archive, Smithsonian Institution, Heizer_118.

contrast, greenstone figurines more frequently seem to represent male subjects, or perhaps do not mark or specify gender.7 In general, many markers of identity are more separable on greenstone figurines than on clay ones: clay figurines often have earspools modeled out of clay, for example, while holes in the ears of greenstone figurines would let these markers of status be added—but also altered. These two classes of objects may look functionally equivalent to our eyes, yet they clearly had very different meanings for their creators. By classifying all of these objects as ­figurines, we already obscure significant differences in function and meaning. What is also clear from La Venta is that clay and greenstone figurines are not the only objects at the site that participate in scaled relationships with their ref­ erents. Indeed, many of La Venta’s monumental art forms, from pyramids to stelae, also engage with matters of scale. It is only by placing La Venta’s figurines within this larger context of shifting scales, I contend, that we can fully under­ stand their meaning. There are evidentiary and methodological hurdles to studying the Olmec, Mesoamerica’s first great civilization.8 In the absence of contemporary texts, the primary sources of evidence are the archaeological record and analogies with later Mesoamerican civilizations. What makes such inquiry possible, in spite of the evidentiary challenges, is that we are still people with bodies much like those of the ancient Olmec. Especially when it comes to matters of scale, bodies m ­ atter. 7  Follensbee 2000, 26–85, 90–152; Follensbee 2009; Follensbee 2014, 220–6; Follensbee 2017, 93–5. As Billie Follensbee has argued, the markers of female gender include distinctive hairstyles, gar­ ments, and swelling thighs more often than overt representation of breasts or genitalia. 8   For recent introductions to the Olmec, see Pool 2007; Berrin and Fields 2010.

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The material affordances of the object—the embodied encounters that its size and shape permit, and its scale, relative to the human body—have not changed.9 While we now encounter Olmec objects in radically different contexts and with radically different subjectivities than ancient users did, the objects themselves offer cues to reconstruct ancient use and understanding. SI ZE A N D SC A L E

Before proceeding, a few clarifying words about size and scale. Although ­frequently conflated, size and scale are not the same: size is absolute, scale is relative.10 While figurines are reduced in scale and small in size, size and scale need not coincide. An object may be reduced in scale but still large in size: if Mesoamerican pyramids, beginning with Pyramid C at La Venta, are in some way reduced-scale models of mountains, they form a powerful example of this kind of monumental compression (see Fig. 2.19, discussed later in the chapter). An object may also be small in size but enlarged in scale: one example is an Aztec sculpture of a grasshopper made out of carnelian, 47 centimeters long (Fig. 2.3).11

F ig . 2.3  Carnelian grasshopper, Aztec, 1400–1521 ce. 19.5 × 16 × 47 cm. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City, 10-220929. Photo © Javier Hinojosa.   On this point, see also Elsner 2019, 52, 75–7.   The literature on scale is ably reviewed in Hamilton 2018, 5–50. See also the essays in Roberts 2016 and in Kee and Lugli 2016. 11   Matos Moctezuma and Solís Olguín 2002, 160, 418; Hamilton 2018, 244–7. 9

10

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F ig . 2.4  Modern Nahua cut-paper images from Veracruz, undressed (left); dressed and displayed on an altar (right). Photos courtesy of and © Alan R. Sandstrom and Pamela Effrein Sandstrom.

Another possibility is that the referent for an image is some kind of abstraction that does not have a fixed size, as in the case of modern paper figurines from Nahua communities in Veracruz that represent intangibles such as wind or illness— in this case, the object is small in size but its scale is undefined (Fig. 2.4).12 Scaled relationships need not be consistent within a figurine tradition. Referent objects of different sizes may be reduced to the same generally small size, intro­ ducing or distorting differences in relative scale; that is to say, reduced-scale objects may have differently scaled relationships than their full-scale referents. For example, in addition to figurines of humans, artisans at La Venta carved jade into miniature canoes, pots, and squashes, no more than 3 cm long (Fig. 2.5).13 All are thus more or less equally small, but the canoe is far more reduced in scale than the pot—or even the human. What may seem particularly significant are the scaled relationships within a series of figurines. All figurines are by definition small, but they are not equally small, something that can be hard to keep in mind when we usually see figurines in relative isolation or as disembodied images on page or screen, abstracted from all scaled referents. At La Venta, for example, excavated greenstone figurines ranged from just over 6 cm to 20.5 cm in height; other unprovenanced examples are as tall as 30 cm. All of them are small, but the largest is nearly five times the size of the smallest one. Although the La Venta figurines are formally similar in spite of the variation in size, they may have been used and understood in differ­ ent ways: some of the smallest examples have holes drilled in the neck so that   Sandstrom 1991, 2009. On this point, see also Dehouve 2016.   Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959, 148, 152. The resemblance to a canoe is more clear in a larger example excavated from a cache at Cerro de las Mesas (this object is 20 cm long; Drucker 1955, pl. 38b; Benson and de la Fuente 1996, 258). 12 13

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F ig . 2.5  Objects from Offering 3, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. The figurines are approximately 6.5 cm tall. In the upper right corner are four oblong plaques which may represent reduced-scale canoes; in the bottom center are strings of beads shaped liked jars and others that are fluted like squashes. At top center are reduced-scale versions of Olmec “spoons,” likely items of personal adornment. National Anthropological Archive, Smithsonian Institution, Heizer_117.

they might be suspended as pendants or possibly earrings (see Fig. 2.5), but none of the larger figurines received this kind of modification.14 What is equally important is that figurines may participate in several scaled relationships at once: we can define and analyze their scale relative to their referents, relative to other objects of the same class, relative to other reduced-scale objects, and relative to the human body.

  Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959, 147–8; Clark and Colman 2014, 177–80. Figurine 3, from the basalt tomb, which is 11 cm tall, does have small holes drilled between the torso and the arms, most clearly visible in Berrin and Fields 2010, 173. 14

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F ig . 2.6  Frida with Idol, 1939. Photo by Nickolas Muray. © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives.

I N T ER ACT ION

This relationship to the human body shapes the experience of figurines. In Mesoamerica, figurines are almost universally scaled to the human hand. Small figurines might be cradled within the hand, while larger ones might exceed its confines, but almost all can be grasped with a single hand, and many bear pat­ terns of wear corresponding to sites of repeated touch (Fig.  2.6). Touch was fundamental to the making of figurines, and also to their subsequent use.15 Many Mesoamerican figurines cannot stand independently—something it can be easy to forget, not in the least because museum displays often work so in­gen­ iously to counteract this effect. But in fact, most Olmec figurines, both clay and greenstone, cannot stand on their own: they do not have integral bases, and their long legs and vestigial feet are inadequate support for the bodies above. They are 15   Later Mesoamerican figurine traditions offer even more clear examples of interaction. Some fig­ur­ ines from Teotihuacan have movable arms and legs (Barbour 1975, 17–22; Berrin and Pasztory 1993, 232–5), while the only context in which the wheel is known from Mesoamerica is a group of small animal figurines from the Gulf Coast region. Still other figurines have removable costume elements, like a dwarf warrior with a detachable helmet from a Maya royal tomb at El Peru-Waka (Rich and Friedel in Finamore and Houston 2010, 284–7). Many figurines are also musical instruments; a considerable number of Maya and Aztec figurines are also ocarinas or rattles, filled with small clay beads that resonate when they are shaken, and again configured perfectly to the hand that holds them (Overholtzer 2012; Halperin 2014, 115, 153–69, 204–7). On touch and figurines more generally, see Bailey 2014.

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made to be held.16 The gently curving backs and flexed knees of the greenstone figurines, which render them so unstable on a flat surface, also cause them to nestle ­comfortably within a human hand (Fig. 2.7). The modern paper figurine traditions that Alan Sandstrom has documented in Veracruz support the idea that dressing, carrying, feeding, and other kinds of interactions with figurines are important parts of Mesoamerican tradition (see Fig. 2.4).17 Made to be cradled in the hand, Mesoamerican figurines demand a kind of affective caretaking. Olmec greenstone figurines show evidence of touch. Many figurines have ­cinnabar on their surfaces, deeply embedded especially into the crevices of their bodies, documenting moments when they were rubbed with this precious and uncanny substance (see Fig. 2.2).18 Many apparently simple figurines may have originally been dressed in textiles and feathers that do not survive in the archae­ ological record, just as Inca silver and gold figurines were habitually costumed and adorned in ancient Peru.19 Olmec greenstone figurines habitually have pierced ears and noses, from which adornments could be suspended. Their bod­ ies are minimally detailed, perhaps because they would have been covered with clothing. Sometimes a loincloth and belt are lightly incised but even those 16   In this context, figurines that do stand or sit independently merit special consideration. Of the 30 greenstone figurines found at La Venta, only two are seated figures, and both were found in exceptional contexts within La Venta’s most monumental memorial, a tomb enclosure constructed of massive basalt pillars (Stirling and Stirling 1942, 640–3; Drucker 1952, 23–6; Follensbee 2000, 98–106; Follensbee 2006, 266–7; Colman 2010, 206–11). There were either two or three mummy bundles inside; judging from the size of the surviving bones and teeth, each seems to have been a juvenile at the time of death. Each seated figurine was found associated with a different bundle, in addition to other jade figurines and ornaments (Drucker 1952, 154–7). The seated female figurine found in the more elaborate bundle is unusual in other ways as well, starting with her gender and the incised skirt which lets us recognize it. Attached to her neck is a pyrite mirror, a tool used by diviners and other ritual specialists; close examina­ tion suggests that her earrings were originally inlaid, rather than attached and suspended. This seated figurine thus carried with her more permanent markers of identity and status than many of the standing figurines from La Venta. Differences in pose which initially seem quite minor might in fact imply different kinds of interaction with these figurines, and perhaps even different ways that meaning inheres in them. Note, however, that these two figurines are unlikely to be portraits of the people they were buried with, since the bodies are likely those of children. Another significant shift in the ontology of figurine production occurs at Teotihuacan in the first cen­ turies ce, and relates to the ability of figurines to stand independently. In the Formative period, seated figurines were a small minority, and most figurines could not stand independently. At Teotihuacan during the Tlamimilolpa period (c. 170–350 ce), female figurines with wide band headdresses were made out of nearly flat pieces of clay, with a prop behind to support them, suggesting new modes of use, where display, from a single angle, and not intimate interaction, is the primary goal (for wide band headdress figurines, see Barbour 1975; Berrin and Pasztory 1993, 225–7). Later figurine types at Teotihuacan are increasingly likely to have supports which allow them to stand independently, as are figurines in later Mesoamerican traditions. 17   Sandstrom 2009; Sandstrom n.d. 18   Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959, 158, 161; Magaloni Kerpel and Filloy Nadal 2013b. For the significance of cinnabar in Mesoamerica, see Pendergast 1982; Gazzola 2000; Brittenham 2015, 34. 19   Hamilton 2018, 221–33; Dransart 1995, 2000.

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F ig . 2.7  Side views of Figurine 8 from Offering 4, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. 16.9 × 6.34 cm. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City. Archivo Digital de las Colecciones del Museo Nacional de Antropología. INAH-CANON.

features may be omitted.20 The common pose, with the legs apart and the arms separated from the torso, would facilitate dressing. Likewise, it would easy to attach a headdress to a figurine’s elongated head, even as this head shape also refers to Mesoamerican practices of cranial modification, which often had the aim of making skulls beautifully elongated, like that of the Maize God or an ear of maize.21 In the acidic soil of the Olmec heartland, none of these kinds of adornments would survive. 20   Billie Follensbee suggests that Olmec clay figurines were also intended to be dressed, citing the open position of the limbs (2000, 55; 2006, 253). However, Olmec clay figurines typically have mod­ eled pubic aprons and other minimal kinds of clothing, as well as attached earrings and elaborate hair­ styles. It seems that the greenstone figurines, which lack these features, demand a different kind of interaction. Follensbee suggests that loincloths were added to the greenstone figurines long after they were made, specifying or altering their gender (2000, 124–9; 2014, 220–6; 2017, 93–5). Magaloni Kerpel and Filloy Nadal (2013b) include loincloths in their analysis of artists’ hands, and find their form to vary consistently with other details, such as ways of shaping hands or facial features. There may be different approaches to different figurines. Some of the loincloths are only lightly incised and may be later additions, while others seem very consonant with the rest of the carver’s approach and were likely planned from the outset. 21   Taube 2004, 74.

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The reduced scale and lack of independent support of figurines have implica­ tions for both display and audience. The primary mode of interaction with a figurine is necessarily individual and intimate: held no farther than arm’s length away, a figurine could only be seen by its holder and a very few others. Of course, it was possible to circumvent the intimate physicality of the objects: figurines could be displayed lying flat on their backs or propped up against another object (the way Nahua paper figurines are displayed today, see Fig. 2.4), or they might be temporarily fixed in place by driving them into the earth.22 Offering 4, a grouping of figurines and celts buried in Complex A at La Venta, demonstrates that this mode of display was used by the Olmec to associate multiple objects, in a grouping that was buried, re-accessed nearly a century later, and then buried once more (Fig. 2.8).23

F ig . 2.8  Offering 4, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. National Anthropological Archive, Smithsonian Institution, Heizer_1145.

  Follensbee 2000, 71–84, 129–30; Marcus 1996; Marcus 2009, 26–31.   The offering was deposited as the northeast platform was being constructed during Phase III, c. 700 bce, then sealed beneath a series of colored floors which represent a considerable length of occupation at the site. Perhaps a century later, a precisely-placed elliptical pit was dug through those floors. Chunks of the colored floors fell into the fill above the assemblage, but none were found beneath it—this is what indicates that the assemblage was remembered and re-viewed, and not an intrusive deposit made later. 22 23

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The damage to the feet of many figurines in Offering 4 suggests that such insertion might have been a repeated gesture (see Figs. 2.2 and 2.7).24 Yet even in these cases, because of their small size, even a grouping of figurines such as Offering 4 could only have been seen by a few people at a time. These kinds of groupings may have been transitory, aside from the exceptional burial of Offering 4, and it is equally possible that figurines may have been largely inert between moments of interaction. In fact, I’ve come to realize that my very conceptualization of a Mesoamerican figurine has this possibility of intimate interaction embedded in it, unlike, for example, the definition of yong in Wu Hung’s chapter in this volume. Other reduced-scale representations of human beings, like the tomb figures of West Mexico, or more to the point, Olmec ceramic “babies” seem very different than the hand-held figurine tradition which is the focus of this chapter (Figs. 2.9 and 2.10).25 Usually between one and two feet tall, these objects can usually sit or stand on their own, and they invite a much more limited kind of touch—a brief and cautious two-handed grip, always conscious of the possibility of breaking the hollow clay body. Similar considerations apply to the wooden busts excavated at El Manatí, which are approximately the same size, but represent only an elon­ gated head with schematic features and a cone-shaped torso beneath (Fig. 2.11).26 Found in ritual deposits at a spring, these objects also demand a distinct kind of handling. Their rudimentary bodies suggest that the busts might have been dressed or wrapped in cloth; indeed, several of the busts were found associated with fiber mats and string, perhaps to tie the mats around the figures.27 In both cases, the shape and scale of the figures dictate different kinds of interaction. Neither the hollow clay figures nor the wooden busts could be held comfortably The existing figures do not seem to have been removed; they remained embedded in the red sand beneath the grouping. For Offering 4 and its figurines, see Drucker 1952, 366–70; Drucker and Heizer 1956; Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959, 152–61; Follensbee 2000, 115–32; Colman 2010, 165–9; Magaloni Kerpel and Filloy Nadal 2013a; Gillespie 2015.   Four of the figurines in Offering 4 (numbers 8, 13, 14, and 19) are missing at least one foot, while at least seven others have nicks, stress fissures, and other kinds of damage to the feet (numbers 10, 11, 12, 15, 17, 18, 19). Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959, 161, underreport damage; Magaloni Kerpel and Filloy Nadal 2013b provide a more reliable catalog but mislabel several of the figurines (Figurine 12 is mislabeled as 17, Figurine 17 as 20, Figurine 20 as 21, and Figurine 21 as 12). I have used the original numbering here. 25   For West Mexican tomb figures, see Beekman and Pickering 2016. The majority of the Olmec hol­ low baby figurines are looted, and most are said to have been found in Central Mexico, but there is evi­ dence that the tradition also existed on the Gulf Coast, and may in fact have originated there; see Blomster 2002; Blomster, Neff, and Glascock 2005; for the tradition, see also Joyce 2008. Related figures have been found near La Venta (one is illustrated in Fig. 2.10), but their context is unclear; see Follensbee 2000, 54–58; Follensbee 2006, 256–7. 26  Ortíz Ceballos and Rodríguez 1999; Rodríguez and Ortíz Ceballos in Berrin and Fields 2010, 132–9. 27   Ortíz Ceballos and Rodríguez 1999, 238–42. 24

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F ig . 2.9  Hollow clay baby, said to be from Las Bocas, Puebla, Central Mexico, 1200–900 bce. 34 × 31.8 × 14.6 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1979.206.1134. The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979.

in a single hand and they thus seem categorically different from the clay and greenstone figurines. We experience all figurines as small in size and reduced in scale, relative to our own bodies. Writing about Neolithic figurines, Douglass Bailey has argued that there is a universal human response to figurines and other miniaturized objects: the viewer feels empowered, aggrandized, or omniscient, and experiences increased alertness; time even seems to pass faster when interacting with very small things.28 However, these generalizations are largely drawn from very small studies of modern Western people, primarily European and North American college stu­ dents, a population from which it may be difficult to extrapolate to all of pre-modern humanity.29 While there are many reasons to be skeptical about such grand universalizing claims, it is not necessary to accept the specifics to propose

  Bailey 2005, 33–6.  For problems with generalizing from the “WEIRD” (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) subject base of many cognitive studies, see Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010. 28 29

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F ig . 2.10  Hollow clay baby excavated at La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. 18.4 × 10 cm. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City, 13.0-00621. Archivo Digital de las Colecciones del Museo Nacional de Antropología. INAH-CANON.

that there might be something universal about perceiving a scaled relationship to a human body in a figurine. It is in the culturally contingent ways that smallness may be interpreted that the greatest interest may lie.30

IS BIG GER BET T ER ?

La Venta was home to a number of genres of monumental stone sculpture, including colossal heads, stelae, and thrones (often referred to as altars). It is easy to assume that these very public monuments were the most important works at La Venta, but the precious materials of Olmec greenstone figurines signal their importance. Because of the time-consuming nature of working jade, the hardest of all stones in Mesoamerica, even these very small figurines represent considerable

30   Andrew Hamilton has suggested that it is helpful to think of scale as analogous to color, in the way that it has both a measurable component and a subjective one, such that a common, quantifiable physio­ logical input may be interpreted in very different ways by people from different cultures—or even by individuals within the same culture (personal communication, 2014; see also Hamilton 2018, 29–30). For these issues as they relate to Mesoamerican color, see Houston et al. 2009.

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F ig . 2.11  Wooden bust from El Manatí, Olmec, c. 1200–900 bce. 48.9 × 20.2 × 14.5 cm. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico, 13.0-01120. Archivo Digital de las Colecciones del Museo Nacional de Antropología. INAH-CANON.

investments of time and labor.31 Our neglect of these kinds of objects may reflect modern biases against the small and the precious. As Andrew Hamilton observes, human biology provides a model for thinking about scale. We are surrounded by reduced-scale human beings whom we call children.32 We think of childhood as a diminished state: for us, children are not yet mature, not yet possessed of the full powers of adults. Mesoamericans some­ times saw the matter quite differently: children, especially very young children who had not yet been weaned, were sacred. The richest evidence for this propo­ sition comes from texts describing Aztec culture, written after the Spanish inva­ sion. In the Florentine Codex, Bernadino de Sahagún and his indigenous collaborators record orations on the occasion of the birth of a child, in which the child is described as a precious substance. According to the Florentine Codex, the midwife addresses the newborn child in this way: “Precious necklace, precious feather, precious green stone, precious bracelet, precious turquoise, thou wert created in the place of duality, the place [above] the nine heavens.”33 As Rosemary  Taube 2004, 19–25; Taube et al. 2004; Taube and Ishihara-Brito 2012; Jaime-Riverón 2013, 56–61. 32   Hamilton 2018, 9, 233–40. For dwarves, another kind of reduced-scale human in Mesoamerica, see Follensbee 2006, 258, 261–2; Miller 1985. 33   Sahagún 1950–82, bk. 6, ch. 32, 176. 31

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Joyce explains, such texts demonstrate that, for the Aztecs, “young children were considered to be materially distinct from adults and composed of precious sub­ stances worked by the gods and entrusted to humans.”34 The lapidary analogy, where children are compared to greenstone worked by the gods, is even more explicit in the Aztec address to the firstborn son of a noble: O my grandson, O master, O our lord, O precious one, O precious person, O precious greenstone, O bracelet, O precious turquoise, O precious feather, O hair, O fingernail, thou has endured fatigue, thou has endured weariness; thou wert formed in the place of duality, the nine heavens in tiers. Thy mother, thy father, Ome tecutli, Ome cihuatl, and verily thy master, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, have cast thee, have perforated thee. Thou wert sent here on earth, a place of weariness, a place of pain . . .35

While these texts were composed 2,000 years after La Venta was abandoned, they invite us to be attentive to contemporary evidence about the status of ­children in Olmec culture. Childhood may have been an especially sacred state for the Olmec. Billie Follensbee points out that some of the most prominent ritual burials in the ­ceremonial center of La Venta—where many of the figurines were found—seem to have been burials of children, judging by the size of the ornaments and the fragments of bones, where they are available.36 The two bundles in the massive tomb of basalt pillars were both of children, as were at least three of the nine other burials encountered within Complex A (Fig.  2.12).37 With maximum lengths between 50 cm and 76 cm, these burials are too small to contain adult bodies, and the placement of small earspools, necklaces, and belts also corre­ sponds to the reduced-scale anatomy of children. In one case, earspools were 34   Joyce 2006, 295. See also Joyce 2000, 475–6; Hamann 2006, 223; Román Berrelleza and Chávez Balderas 2006, 236; Díaz Barriga 2012; Román Berrelleza 2010; Dehouve 2016, 515–19; and, for a Puebloan parallel, Fowles 2013, 167–9. 35   Sahagún 1950–82, bk. 6, ch. 34, 183. 36   Follensbee 2006, 266–9. The interpretation of these deposits is complicated by the poor preserva­ tion of bone in the acidic soil of La Venta. Based on the absence of bones, the excavators argued that these deposits were “pseudo-burials,” assembling jewelry and offerings without a body (Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959, 162). In a recent re-analysis of Complex A at La Venta, Arlene Colman has offered compel­ ling arguments to support the hypothesis that these were indeed burials (Colman 2010, 117–27; see also Joyce 1999). Whether or not these “pseudo-burials” originally contained juvenile human remains, the salient point is that several of the burials are reduced in scale; they are more child-sized than adult-sized, whether bodies were originally there or not. Infant bones also accompanied the ritual deposit of busts like the one shown in Fig. 2.11 at the spring of El Manatí; Ortíz Ceballos and Rodríguez 1999, 238–41; Rodríguez and Ortiz Ceballos in Berrin and Fields 2010, 132. 37   For the basalt tomb, see Drucker 1952, 23–6; Stirling and Stirling 1942, 640–3; Colman 2010, 206–11; Follensbee 2006, 266–7. The figurines in the tomb are discussed in Follensbee 2000, 98–106. For the other potential child burials—Offering 5, Offering 6, and Tomb D (Offering 1943-L)—see Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959, 162–74; Follensbee 2006, 266–9; Colman 2010, Table 8. Note that Follensbee also identifies Offering 7 as a child burial, but Colman argues, based on the placement of ornaments, that it was an adult burial, with cinnabar placed on or underneath only part of the body.

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F ig . 2.12  Offering 5, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. This child-sized burial included childsized ornaments, in some cases cut down from larger objects. National Anthropological Archive, Smithsonian Institution, Heizer_0284.

even literally reduced in size—cut down from larger earspools to make the small ornaments found in the deposit.38 There are other suggestions that the Olmecs conceived of the gods as small in size relative to humans—and sometimes analogized them to children as well. On Altar 5 from La Venta, seated human figures wearing elaborate hats hold in their arms supernatural creatures, likely, by their elongated and curving heads, incar­ nations of the Maize God (Fig. 2.13). These supernaturals are toddler-sized and proportioned, about as tall as a seated human figure, and on the sides of the monument, they flail and squirm much as an unwillingly-corralled 2- or 3-year-old might do. On the front of the monument, in the focal high-relief carving, the ruler holds another, younger, child-sized figure in his lap, rigid and unmoving, perhaps dead. This monument may analogize the life-cycle of maize to the human life-cycle and provide a charter for child sacrifice, a practice known for the Olmecs, as well as for the Aztecs, two millennia later.39 Other Olmec monuments recapitulate the same scenario, including the battered La Venta Altar 2, San Lorenzo Monument 12, San Lorenzo Monument 20, and   Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959, 164, as noted in Follensbee 2006, 267.   Follensbee 2006, 259–64; for Aztec child sacrifice, see Arnold 1999; Román Berrelleza and Chávez Balderas 2006; López Luján et al. 2010. 38 39

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F ig . 2.13  Altar 5, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. 155 × 203 × 134 cm. Parque Museo La Venta, Villahermosa. Photo by Claudia Brittenham.

the Las Limas figure (Fig. 2.14).40 This greenstone sculpture, 55 cm tall, shows a seated figure holding a motionless baby-sized Olmec supernatural in its arms. Incised lines on the seated figure’s shoulders, knees, and around the mouth show other supernatural heads. A similar kind of shifting, almost fractal, scale charac­ terizes the supernatural faces incised on a profile face on a greenstone plaque now in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City.41 In other cases, Olmec supernaturals appear smaller than the humans they accompany, but not especially childlike. On Stelae 2 and 3 from La Venta, standing human figures are surrounded by many smaller figures, some of them floating in the air above the scene (Fig.  2.15). These figures often have the downturned mouths of Olmec supernaturals, and they are represented as about half to two-thirds of the scale of the focal figures. But in contrast to the toddler-like supernaturals on Altar 5 and other monuments, these figures have the body   Follensbee 2006, 263–4. For the San Lorenzo sculptures, see Cyphers Guillén 2004, 67–69, 81–4; for the Las Limas figure, see Benson and de la Fuente 1996, 170–1. 41   Benson and de la Fuente 1996, 247. Although this object is unprovenanced, and therefore should be treated with caution, it entered the museum’s collection in 1943, slightly earlier than the era of the most problematic potential fakes. On the question of fakes, see Kelker and Bruhns 2010. 40

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F ig . 2.14  Las Limas Figure, Olmec, 900–400 bce. 55 × 23 × 43.5 cm. Museo de Antropología de Xalapa, 04017. Photo © Javier Hinojosa.

F ig . 2.15  Stela 2, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. 348 × 206 × 46 cm. Parque Museo La Venta, Villahermosa. Photo by Claudia Brittenham.

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F ig . 2.16  Pillars from the Temple of the Inscriptions, Palenque, Maya, c. 684 ce. Prints of glass-plate negative taken by by Alfred Percival Maudslay in 1890–1891. British Museum Am, Maud, B7.52 and Am, Maud, B7.53. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

proportions of muscular adults. Their reduced scale indicates their supernatural status. Other Mesoamerican peoples continued this tradition. Centuries after the abandonment of La Venta, the Maya also imagined small gods. When a Maya ruler “grasps K’awiil”—the god of lightning and rulership—as part of his acces­ sion ceremony, what he holds is a scepter in the form of the serpent-footed deity, about the size of his forearm.42 This might just be pragmatics, but in other cases, as on the pillars of the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque, when K’awiil is shown as an animate entity, he is once again small in size relative to humans, cradled in the ruler’s arms as if he were an infant (Fig. 2.16). It is not just young gods that are shown as small. On the tablet from the Temple of the Sun at Palenque, King K’inich Kan Balam stands facing his younger self across crossed spears and a decorated shield (Fig. 2.17). Both images of the king hold small gods or god-images in their hands; they also stand on slightly larger kneeling gods, while two other aged deities, recognizable as a god of the underworld and the Sun God, crouch to support the throne carrying the shield and crossed spears. Oval markings on the gods’ bodies indicate that they are hard and shiny,

  For example, on Yaxchilan Lintels 1, 3, or 7; Tate 1992, 151, 220–1.

42

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F ig . 2.17  Carved panel, Temple of the Sun, Palenque, Maya, c. 692 ce. Drawing by Linda Schele © David Schele. Photo courtesy Ancient Americas at LACMA (ancientamericas.org).

polished like a piece of jade. In this scene, there are relationships of scale among the gods, but all of them are smaller than the humans. Classic Maya hieroglyphic texts also give us some sense of the intensely per­ sonal interactions between patron deities and the rulers of particular communi­ ties. The gods (or god-images) were fed, bathed, given articles of clothing and jewelry, dressed, held, and carried—all things that “satisfied the hearts of the gods.”43 One word used to describe ruler–god interactions, huntan, also describes the relationship of affective caretaking between mother and child, another metaphorical association between gods and children.44 In other cases, it was superhuman scale that defined the presence of deities, as in the case of the towering god palanquins which that Maya kings rode into battle. On Lintel 3 from Temple 1 at Tikal, the king is shown in a palanquin that he had captured from the king of the rival city of Calakmul, which represents the god Yajaw Maan as a giant jaguar towering over the seated king (Fig. 2.18). The text describes the ceremonies by which the god was induced to transfer its allegiance   Baron 2016, 62–3, 85–7; Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006, 189.   Houston and Stuart 1996, 294; Stuart 1997, 8–9; Stewart 2009, 32–5; Baron 2016, 87. The gen­ dered implications are of interest, since the ruler performing these actions is usually male; see Looper 2002 for gender and rulership in the Maya world. 43 44

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F ig . 2.18  Lintel 3, Temple 1, Tikal, Maya, 734 ce. The god Yajaw Maan, in jaguar form, towers over king Jasaw Chan K’awiil. Drawing © 2000 John Montgomery. Photo courtesy Ancient Americas at LACMA (ancientamericas.org).

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to its new home.45 The towering scale of the jaguar, as well as its bipedal pose, marks it as a powerful supernatural force. If reduced or enlarged scale frequently characterized Maya deities, however, the gods could also manifest at precisely human scale when the god was made present in a human body. The process is denoted by the phrase u baahil aan, which we are accustomed to translate as “god impersonator,” although some­ thing like “god embodier” might be a better expression for it.46 Inscriptions reveal that many Maya kings represented on monumental stone stelae are shown in the process of embodying a god. Perhaps, then, it was not a particular scaled relationship to the human body but instead the possibility of manifesting at ­multiple different scales that defined Mesoamerican divinity, a way of conceptu­ alizing forces and beings not bound by human constraints. The point of these comparisons is not to argue that all Mesoamerican figurines are images of deities or children. On the contrary, almost all of the greenstone figurines from La Venta have adult-like proportions and human-like faces, in contrast to clear representations of children or supernaturals elsewhere in the sculptural corpus.47 Instead, the goal is to suggest ways that smallness might signify something different for Mesoamericans than it does for us.48 It’s all too easy to underestimate figurines, to dismiss them as dolls or child’s play, some­ thing particularly pernicious when talking about non-Western and pre-modern cultures. But it’s also clear that how we conceive of small things like figurines is correlated with how we think about children. For us, smallness is childish, and therefore trivial. But for Mesoamericans, perhaps small was instead child-like, and therefore precious; concentrated, carrying with it a hint of the divine.

SH I F T I NG SC A L E S AT L A V EN TA

What is crucial is that at La Venta figurines were not the only class of objects that destabilized senses of scale, often in quite revolutionary ways. Quite possibly the 45   Baron 2016, 80–4. In response, the next ruler of Calakmul made a new image of Yajaw Maan, the god of the conquered palanquin, and consecrated the replacement image, thereby reclaiming the power of this deity for Calakmul. 46   Stuart 1996; Houston and Stuart 1998; Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006, 72–101; Knub, Thun, and Helmke 2009. 47   Figurine 11 from Offering 1934-M might be a notable exception; Follensbee 2006, 258. Tate 2012, 172 identifies this figurine as a fetus. Both Follensbee and Tate also identify Figurines 8, 9, and 10 from Offering 1943-M as children, but I consider the grounds for these identifications less clear. Of course, the possibility that the figurines could be dressed in different ways allowed them to take on multiple identities over the course of their long lifetimes, and one cannot rule out the possibility that they were occasionally asked to represent gods or children. 48   On miniaturization in Mesoamerican ritual, see Dehouve 2016.

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F ig . 2.19  Aerial view of La Venta Pyramid C, Olmec, 900–400 bce. The pyramid is over 30 meters tall, containing at least 3.5 million cubic feet of packed earth. Photo © Kenneth Garrett.

largest center in Mesoamerican history at its apogee, the site was—and still is— huge, even awesome in its size. La Venta was home to Mesoamerica’s first great pyramid, a form of monumental architecture which endured until the Spanish invasion. Colossal heads, carved thrones and stone stelae perpetuated an engage­ ment with the large and monumental. Yet in all of these monumental forms, transformations of scale are also in play. The giant pyramid that dominated the landscape was itself a reduced-scale iteration of a distant mountain; colossal heads enlarged the human head to exceed the size of a human body. Greenstone figurines, another relatively novel form at La Venta, fit neatly into this economy of scale.49 One of the most striking features of the landscape at La Venta was the massive Pyramid C, one of the first such constructions known in Mesoamerica (Fig. 2.19).50 By its final phase, the pyramid stood over 30 meters tall, with a footprint of 128 by 114 meters, and contained over 3.5 million cubic feet of earth.51 Seeing in its eroded slopes the shape of a truncated and fluted cone,   There are a few isolated greenstone figurines, like the one excavated from El Manatí (Berrin and Fields 2010, 135) that might be earlier, but nothing near the profusion found at La Venta. Celts offered at El Manatí also may predate La Venta (Berrin and Fields 2010, 136–8). Clark and Colman (2013) suggest that greenstone figurines, especially, might be heirlooms rarely deposited in the earth before La Venta. 50   On the development on monumentality in Mesoamerica, see Joyce 2004. 51   Heizer 1968, 17; González Lauck 1997, 81–2. 49

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Robert Heizer suggested that the pyramid was intended to echo the shape of distant mountains, particularly the cone-like forms of extinguished volcanoes.52 More recently, Rebecca González Lauck has conducted excavations at the pyra­ mid and argued that it had a more conventionally Mesoamerican form, with stepped setbacks and inset corners.53 Yet even if the form were a more obviously human-made shape, that would not negate the possibility of a scaled relationship to a mountain. It is the scale of construction and acts of symbolic equivalence, rather than close mimetic resemblance, which made Mesoamerican pyramids recognizable as mountains. There is good evidence that later pyramids were indeed understood as reducedscale mountains. Teotihuacan’s Moon Pyramid is explicitly placed with reference to the mountain Cerro Gordo (called Tenan, or “Stone Mother” in Nahuatl), so that as one approaches the pyramid along the processional avenue, the pyramid gradually eclipses the view of the mountain behind.54 Hieroglyphic evidence from the Maya indicates that they explicitly named some of their most notable pyramids as witz, or mountains. For example, Structure O-13 at Piedras Negras is named in inscriptions as “Five Flower Mountain,” associating an eighth-century funerary pyramid with a mythical place.55 Aztec pyramids, too, could have ­resonance with mythical mountains, as when the Aztec Templo Mayor simulta­ neously evoked Tonacatepetl, or the Mountain of Sustenance, and Coatepec, or Snake Mountain, two crucial locations in Aztec origin myth.56 But all of this history lay in the future when Pyramid C was being built at La Venta. The first pyramid in the Olmec heartland, it changed the way that humans perceived themselves relative to the built environment and natural landscape. As La Venta was located in the middle of a flat alluvial plain, the effect would have been particularly powerful. But if the pyramid is indeed a reduced-scale moun­ tain, it compresses distance as well, bringing the Tuxtla mountain range, some 60 km to the north, much closer to the city. Other monuments at La Venta enlarged human scale, literally aggrandizing particular individuals. Most notable in this regard are the colossal heads, each larger than a standing person (Fig. 2.20). Four such heads are known from La Venta, ranging from 1.6 m to 2.4 m in height, continuing a sculptural tradition established centuries earlier at the Olmec center of San Lorenzo.57 Individuals are also depicted on massive stone stelae, a format which took on new impor­ tance during the La Venta period (see Fig. 2.15). Larger than a standing person,   Heizer 1968, 20; see also Heizer and Drucker 1968; Reilly 1999, 18.   González Lauck 1988, 142; González Lauck 1997, 80–5. For the history of representations of the pyramid, see also Gillespie 2011, 14–29. 54   Tobriner 1972. 55   Stuart and Houston 1994, 69, 77–9; Martin and Grube 2008, 150. 56   López Austín and López Luján 2009. 57   Stirling 1945, 56–8; Fuente 1992; see also Porter 1989. 52 53

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F ig . 2.20  Colossal Head 1, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. The sculpture is 2.5 m tall. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Hezier_467.

stelae featured human bodies of life-size or slightly reduced scale, either singly or in more complex scenes of interaction. Here, again, the intention seems to be to glorify individuals, both male and female, through monumental depiction. But other stelae have a more complex scaled referentiality. As James Porter first recognized, the oblong and upright form of the Olmec stela resembles that of a much smaller sculptural form: the carved greenstone celt or axe, a kind of object which was deposited in a number of offerings at La Venta.58 The relationship is made especially explicit in a group of the largest stelae from the site, which are carved with the same kind of supernatural face with almondshaped eyes and downturned mouth that is also represented on several small celts (Figs. 2.21 and 2.22). Several of these stelae are made out of green schist or gneiss which further emphasizes the relationship to these smaller objects.59 The stelae include repre­ sentations of cloth wrappings (or perhaps wooden scaffolds), as if to create a

  Porter 1996.   Monuments 25/26 (the two fragments of the stela were found separately, and not recognized as parts of a single object at the time of their discovery) and Monument 27 are made of greenish stones; Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959, 120, 126, 204–8; González Lauck 1988, 145; González Lauck 2010, 135–8. 58 59

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F ig . 2.21  Monuments 89, 88, 87, 25/26, 86, and 27, La Venta, Olmec, 900–400 bce. Monument 25/26 (shown in the photo at right) is over 4.5 m tall; the others are between 2 and 3 meters in height. Monuments 89, 88, 25/26, and 27 exist in a scaled relationship to celts; Monument 86 is an enlarged-scale version of a torch or bundle, and Monument 87 has no figural carving. Line drawing courtesy of the New World Archaeological Foundation; photo by Jillian Mollenhauer.

F ig . 2.22  Jade celt with supernatural face from Tomb E, Mound A-2, La Venta, Olmec, c. 900–400 bce. 11.1 × 5.1 × 1.2 cm. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico, 10-9668. Photo © Javier Hinojosa.

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permanent record of an ephemeral binding, and perhaps referencing a way in which the smaller objects were also bound. While the resemblance is clear, the scaled relationship is harder to determine. Is the stela an enlarged replica of a celt or is the celt a reduced-scale image of a stela? It is also possible that both might point to an outside referent, perhaps an ear of maize, wrapped to form a sacred bundle; at this point in history, an ear of maize would have been smaller than even the smallest greenstone celt at La Venta.60 Another possibility is that all are realizations of an abstraction which itself has no fixed scale, like the modern Nahua wind spirits represented by paper figurines. Whatever the case, the repe­ tition of the form at different scales contributed to its powerful and destabilizing presence at La Venta. What’s more, several anthropomorphized celts with supernatural faces are shown clutching celts in front of their bodies, a recursive scenario which seems as if it might extend to infinity. None of these objects have been found at La Venta, but the Kunz Axe, a 30 cm tall block of jade found in Oaxaca in 1889, is a good example of the theme (Fig. 2.23).61 The figure grasps a tapering celt in its hands, positioned directly at the center of the body. This body is itself subject to a number of other scale distortions, with its supernatural-featured head taking up nearly half of the jade block, the arms radically reduced in proportion to the head and the vestigial legs indicated simply by a few incised lines. A similar theme is shown on the figure known as El Bebé, excavated at La Merced (Fig. 2.24), and on a number of unprovenanced examples.62 The reflexive nature of these figures implicates not only form but also function, emphasizing the tactile interaction with reduced-scale objects like celts and figurines. On certain occasions, celts might even have been bound onto the surfaces of stelae, initiating yet another tactile and recursive encounter. This seems to be what is depicted on Chalcatzingo Monument 21, which shows a woman with her arms outstretched touching a tall and narrow pillar, similar in proportion to the very stela on which it is carved (Fig. 2.25).63 At intervals, horizontal bands are tied around the pillar, each punctuated by the distinctive cleft-headed shape of a celt. While much about this image remains puzzling, especially the diagonal   Karl Taube makes the connection to Hopi maize fetishes; Taube 1996, 2000, 2004, 25–9. For the scale of maize, see LaPier 2014, 11–17; Benz et al. 2006, 78. While David Grove (2000) understands the figure as the face of the earth or a mountain, I find Taube’s proposal that the subject is a maize deity more convincing. 61   Kunz 1889, 1890; Pillsbury, Potts, and Richter 2017, 207. 62  LaPier 2014, 22; Berrin and Fields 2010, 143. Another celt grasping a celt, now in the Museo Nacional de Antropología, was first published in Chavero 1888, 64, and is reproduced in Benson and de la Fuente 1996, 17. There are also more questionable unprovenanced variations on the theme, e.g., Benson and de la Fuente 1996, 210–15. Note also the dwarf, yet another kind of reduced-scale human being, holding a celt on San Lorenzo Monument 18, illustrated in Cyphers Guillén 2004, 78–80. 63   Guernsey 2006, 25–6; Reilly 2006, 7–9; Grove 2012, 38, fig. 2.4; Follensbee 2017, 112–13. 60

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F ig . 2.23  Kunz Axe, Olmec, 1000–400 bce. 30 × 15.2 cm. American Museum of Natural History, New York, 30/7552. Courtesy of the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History.

F ig . 2.24  “El Bebé,” Monument 2, La Merced, Olmec, 1000–800 bc. 40 × 23 × 8 cm. Centro INAH Veracruz, 10-581031. Photo © Javier Hinojosa.

F ig . 2.25  Monument 21, Chalcatzingo, 900–400 bce. 240 cm tall. Drawing by Linda Schele © David Schele. Photo courtesy Ancient Americas at LACMA (ancientamericas.org).

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patterning on the surface of the pillar (echoed in the basal field below), it also seems to fit into a broader Mesoamerican tradition of wrapping and unwrapping stelae, as do the La Venta stelae discussed above.64 What is crucial here is the way that celts and a stela are brought into physical contact with one another, touch perhaps furthering the sense of resemblance between these differently scaled objects. Yet another instance of stelae being implicated in the play of scale occurs with Offering 4, perhaps the most famous offering from a site full of buried riches. The configuration consists of 16 figurines arranged in a gripping tableau that suggests the witnessing of an important event (see Fig. 2.8). The six long pieces of jade arrayed in a semicircle to the east behind the figurines recall the line of seven monumental stelae placed in front of Pyramid C; the way that the offering is backed up against the Northeast Platform further echoes that configuration, with the mass of the low platform standing in for the massive pyramid.65 If this is correct, Offering 4 mobilizes a set of nested scaled relationships: the pyramid, itself a reduced-scale version of a mountain, is represented by a platform, a reduced-scale version of a pyramid. Celts and figurines play the roles of stelae and humans, with approximately the same scaled relationships between them, only at smaller size.66 The jade celts, perhaps the most precious part of the configuration (they are made of jade, rather than ordinary greenstone, the substance of the majority of the figurines), seem to specify place, representing, reorienting, and rescaling another part of the site.67 Or perhaps it is the other way around, and the placement of the monumental stelae responds to the small-scale configuration of Offering 4. After all, the pres­ ent alignment of stelae in front of Pyramid C is a late phenomenon in La Venta’s history, corresponding to Phase IV, while Offering 4 was placed early in Phase III, and reentered just before the start of Phase IV.68 While it is possible that there was a line of stelae in front of Pyramid C earlier in its history, rather than assuming that the miniature emulates the monumental, we should be open to the possibility that influence flows in the other direction as well, something that

  For later Maya examples, see Stuart 1996, 154–6; Houston 2016.   Porter 1996, 65; Taube 2004, 16; Colman and Clark 2016, 128–31, 143–7. 66   However, it is noteworthy that the celts in this scene are narrower than the typical run of celts at La Venta, perhaps because several of them are recut from jade pectorals, Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959, 156–8; Jaime-Riverón 2013; Colman and Clark 2016, 132–5. 67   All six of the celts are jade, while only one of the 16 figures is made of this most precious substance, Filloy Nadal et al. 2013. 68   For the chronology of the stelae, see Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959, 206; Brittenham 2018; for the chronology of Offering 4, see Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959, 152–4. Note that Colman and Clark (2016, 125–6, 138–41, 143–7) advocate for the reverse: that the celts of Offering 4 replicate an arrangement of stelae present in front of Pyramid C during Phase III. 64 65

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Richard Neer has suggested might have been the case in ancient Greece as well (see Chapter 1 in this volume). Many of the newly prominent forms of art at La Venta involved the play of scale. From the pyramid, a reduced-scale mountain, to the shifting scale of stelae and celts, La Venta was a place where one’s sense of size and place was constantly destabilized. La Venta’s greenstone figurines were yet another entry into this universe of shifting scale. Although there were isolated examples of stelae, celts, and greenstone figurines before La Venta, never before had such forms been found together, in such quantities, in combination with monumental architec­ ture. Perhaps it was the power of these transformations that made La Venta such a charismatic place.

ACK NOW L EDGM EN TS This volume grew out of conferences organized by the Center for Global Ancient Art at the University of Chicago and the Empires of Faith project at the British Museum. I am grateful to audiences at both events for incisive questions, and especially to my Global Ancient Art colleagues for the richness of our ongoing comparative conversation. I am also extremely grateful to Andrew Hamilton, whose book Scale and the Incas inspired many of the approaches I have attempted in this chapter.

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3

Thinking Through Scale: The First Emperor’s Sculptural Enterprise Wu Hung

The word figurine is relatively young in English: etymologists trace its origin to 1824, coined as a diminutive of “figure” to signify a small sculpture made of any material. In comparison, the Chinese character yong 俑, which has been con­sist­ ently translated as “figurine” in English, is very old, reportedly used by Confucius (551–479 bce) in the sixth century bce for a type of figurative sculpture made specifically for tombs. According to Mencius (372–289 bce), Confucius con­ demned such grave furnishing because it implied human sacrifice, even going so far as to curse the inventor of yong as someone who deserved to have perished without descendants.1 Neither he nor Mencius said anything about the size or look of such tomb sculptures. The terms yong and figurine are therefore asymmetrical because they origi­ nated in different contexts and imply different criteria. In all definitions of fig­ur­ ine (as well as figurina in French and Italian), “size” is without question the first and last determinant. A sculpture is always recognized as a figurine in a compar­ ative sense, juxtaposed consciously or unconsciously with a life-size or monu­ mental statue. The word is thus often used interchangeably with statuette—a miniature statue. Yong, on the other hand, is first of all understood contextually as a word for “grave sculpture.” Other small three-dimensional images, such as Buddhist and Taoist statuettes, never assume this term. It is true that most Chinese tomb figures are diminutive, the majority ranging from less than 10 centimeters 1   The passage reads: “When Confucius said, ‘The inventor of burial figures in human form deserves not to have any progeny,’ he was condemning him for the use of something modeled after the human form.” Lau 1970, 52.

       

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to half a meter. But this is not universally true; neither must the small size of a yong imply comparison with large statues. Instead, as I have discussed in a previous essay, the fundamental reason for producing diminutive tomb fig­ur­ines, as well as small architectural models and other “spirit articles” (mingqi, meaning objects made specifically for tombs) lies in the prevailing imagination of the posthumous soul as an animated “invisible miniature,” which would inhabit the underground tomb chamber after burial.2 This reflection on terminology reminds us of the divergent conceptual prop­ erties of yong and figurine, which should in turn determine the different meth­ odological orientations in studying them. In short, the foremost question concerning a yong must be about its identity, function, and intention as a type of tomb furnishing. Other issues about material, form, and size follow this initial inquiry. The definition of figurine, on the other hand, implies a classification of individual sculptures devoid of explicit ritual or architectural contexts. The term associates these objects with the notion of miniaturization and encourages the researcher to think about the meaning of their smallness, their correlations with sculptures of different sizes, and the systems of scale that govern their produc­ tion. So far, studies of “Chinese figurines” have by and large ignored the concep­ tual distinction between yong and figurine, which has consequently generated confusion. Readers of these studies, for example, are puzzled by the identifica­ tion of life-size terracotta warriors from the First Emperor’s mausoleum as “fig­ ur­ines,” and may ask why an historical survey of Chinese figurines excludes all religious statuettes. This confusion can be dispelled by making a clear distinction between the concepts of yong and figurine. Based on this distinction, we can study yong as a type of tomb sculpture in ancient China, whose dimensions vary from miniature to larger than life and whose history can be traced back to the sixth century bce and even earlier.3 Alternatively, we can focus on the interrelationship between yong and other types of sculpture, including their relative size and scale. I have written on the first aspect of yong.4 This chapter adopts the second focus to explore the interrelationships between three groups of sculptures associated with a single historical personage—the First Emperor of China (Ying Zheng, 259–210 bce). Two of the three groups originally furnished his tomb and thus fall into the category of yong, although they differ in size, material, and manufacturing method. The third group consists of monumental statues erected above ground, and is thus distinct from the two yong-groups in placement and ritual function. All three groups were made in or shortly after 221 bce when the First Emperor   Wu Hung 2015, reprinted with minor revisions in Wu Hung 2016a, 9–33.   See Wu Hung 2018a. 4   Wu Hung 2010, 99–126. This chapter is a revised version of my 2016b. 2

3

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founded the Qin dynasty (221–206 bce), and all were located at his capital Xianyang. They were therefore historically related works and should be observed and interpreted together.

T H E T W ELV E G OL DEN M EN

Historians consider the establishment of the Qin dynasty the single most im­por­ tant event in traditional Chinese history: not only did the Qin bring about China’s territorial unification, but it redefined the country and punctuated its history by creating a sharp divide between the past and future. China before this time was a society of clans and lineages; afterwards it was an empire governed by a central government. Under various dynasties, this Chinese empire was to endure for more than two thousand years until 1911; it is arguably still in ex­ist­ ence today. The Qin marked a turning point in the country’s cultural history as well. Sima Qian (c. 145–86 bce), the Grand Historian of the following Han dynasty, recorded many reforms that the First Emperor carried out as soon as he unified China, including the standardization of laws and regulations, weights and mea­ sures, written characters, and the length of carriage axles.5 In the intellectual sphere, Confucians, Taoists, and members of the other “One Hundred Schools” had each developed their own political and philosophical visions during the Eastern Zhou (770–255 bce). The First Emperor dismissed them all but one— Legalism—a political school whose fundamental agenda was to promote an autocratic state. All these reforms implied simultaneous construction and destruction, while the new order established by the Qin took the form of one man. This understanding of Qin politics and the First Emperor’s ambitions is indispensable to any investigation of Qin sculpture, since all state-sponsored sculptural projects were by nature linked to the destruction of the old society, the establishment of the new system, and to the First Emperor himself. Although no longer extant, the most frequently documented sculptural works commissioned by the First Emperor were not the terracotta soldiers that have been hailed as the Eighth Wonder of the World, but a group of bronze statues known as the Twelve Golden Men (shier jinren). Sima Qian first recorded their creation in his Historical Records (Shi ji): in 221 bce, after the First Emperor had just successfully united China, “all the weapons in the country were collected and brought to the capital Xianyang. They were melted down to make the

  Sima Qian 1959, 239; Yang Hsien-yi and Yang 1979, 168.

5

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Twelve Golden Men. These bronze figures, each of which weighed a thousand catties, were placed in front of his palace.”6 The timing of these monumental bronze sculptures was crucial. Fashioned immediately after the destruction of rival kingdoms, they commemorated an epic historical moment: Qin’s unification of China. Sima Qian listed the making of the Twelve Golden Men among other unification measures that the First Emperor announced the day he assumed the imperial title. The implication of these statues was thus unmistakable: the country had been pacified and no fur­ ther wars were necessary. The former Six Kingdoms had been destroyed and assimilated into the new political unity; their weapons were “melted down” to make new monuments. Standing along the Imperial Way leading to the throne hall, these giant sculptures symbolized the transformation of a divided country into a single political unity (Fig. 3.1). This group of monumental statues must have reminded people then of the legendary Nine Tripods, said to have been created in antiquity when Chinese history first began. According to ancient records, these sacred vessels were also made of bronze collected from different regions, and also symbolized the assimilation of these regions into a political unity, the Xia.7 But in the Qin case, the chief visual signifier of such a political process was no longer a group of ritual vessels, but statues of human figures.   Sima Qian 1959, 239. The translation of this passage demands an explanation. The Chinese text includes two characters zhongju 钟虡 before “Twelve Golden Men” (jinren shier). According to ancient dictionaries such as Shuowen jiezi [Explaining graphs and analyzing characters], zhongju means the phys­ ical support of bells or drums in animal forms. The relevant sentence in the Shi ji passage can thus be read as: “. . . all the weapons in the country . . . were melted down to make Twelve Golden Men as supports of bells.” The archaeologist Tang Chi has indeed argued that this reading is supported by the bell set from Leigudun Tomb 1, whose upper and lower beams are raised by six sculptured bronze warriors. See Tang Chi 1991, esp. 62–3. Tang’s argument deserves consideration. But it is also important to realize that the Leiguduan bell set was created in the fifth century bce, two hundred years before the First Emperor. It is possible that by the late third century bce, the term zhongju tongren or zhongju jinren, both originally meaning “bell-support­ ing bronze figures”—had become a standard term for human-shaped sculptures made of bronze. Three kinds of textual evidence support this possibility. First, Jia Yi (c. 200–169 bce), a famous writer born about half a century prior to Sima Qian, also recorded the event of the First Emperor’s making of the Twelve Golden Men in his “Disquisition Finding Fault with Qin” (Guo Qin lun). His record is very similar to that in the Historical Records, except that he omitted the word zhongju and called the sculptures straightforwardly “twelve bronze figures” (shier tongren). Second, several other Han dynasty texts, such as the “Biography of Jia Yi” in The History of the Western Han (Han shu) and the Plan of the Three Capital Regions (Sanfu huangtu), use zhongju as a synonym for “bronze figures.” Third, the first-century histo­ rian Ban Gu recorded in The History of the Western Han that a set of 12 bronze statues representing 12 giant barbarians was commissioned by the First Emperor. This set, also called the Twelve Golden Men, was likewise made after Qin’s unification of China from melting down the bronze weapons collected throughout the country. No bells are mentioned in this record, which seems just a different legend about the Twelve Golden Men recorded by Sima Qian. Based on this evidence, I interpret the phrase zhongju jinren in Shi ji simply as “bronze figures.” 7   For a discussion of the Nine Tripods, see Wu Hung 1995, 4–11. 6

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F ig . 3.1  The Twelve Goden Men in front of the Xianyang Palace. Film still, The First Emperor of China, Canadian Film Board and the Xi’an Film Studio, 1989.

It is possible that the Twelve Golden Men still existed during the Han (206 bce – 220 CE) and were displayed in front of the Changle Palace, the throne hall in Chang’an. When the country fell into chaos at the end of the second century CE, the warlord Dong Zhuo (d. 192) melted down ten of the twelve figures to make coins. The last two were moved in and out of Chang’an by different regimes, finally destroyed in 384 by Fu Jian (337–385), the founder of the Qian Qin. During the six hundred years from the Qin to Qian Qin, stories of the Twelve Golden Men circulated and yielded contradictory information about their size, weight, and meaning. Some Han and post-Han writers named them after the Qin general Weng Zhong, or identified them as portraits of some giant “bar­ barians” who came to China when the First Emperor became the supreme mas­ ter of the country. The recorded weight of each statue ranges from 240,000 to 340,000 jin (about 54.4 to 90.6 tons).8 Since none of these records can be ver­ ified while little direct evidence exists to allow speculation on their precise forms, scholars have focused instead on possible origins or inspirations of such giant statues, which were absent in pre-Qin China. So far, large-scale figurative sculptures prior to the first millennium bce have been found only in periphery regions, including fragments of clay statues in the “Goddess Temple” in Liaoning and a free-standing bronze figure from Sanxingdui, Sichuan. The former belonged to the northeastern Hongshan Culture of the fourth millennium bce; the latter came from a southwestern kingdom 8   For these records, see Shi Yan 1940; He Ziquan 1955, 11; Tang Chi 1991, 61–2; commentaries in Sima Qian 1959, 240 n. 2.

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contemporary to the late Shang around 1300 bce.9 These examples were not connected with the Twelve Golden Men chronologically or geographically. In central China, in addition to tomb figurines, sculptured figures and animals appeared predominantly as components of artifacts, including vessels, lamps, and musical instruments.10 The majority of such figures are miniature in size; the largest ones, albeit still considerably smaller than life-size, were discovered in the tomb of Marquis Yi of the State of Zeng, who lived in the fifth century bce. These figures, six in total, are designed as human-shaped caryatids of an enor­ mous bell set with a three-tiered wooden frame, on which as many as 65 bronze bells are suspended (Fig. 3.2). Each of the three figures on the lower level weighs 359 kilograms and stands approximately 1 meter tall above a hemispherical base 0.35 of a meter high (Fig. 3.3). The three figures on the second level are slightly shorter, about 80 centimeters each. Tenons extending from the top and bottom secure these figures in position. The statues must represent people of rank: their identical clothes consist of a tight jacket and a long skirt, both originally painted with black lacquer and embellished with bands of red floral patterns. All six fig­ ures wear swords, a feature which has led some scholars to call them “warriors” or “palace guards.” The modeling of the figures shows intense artistic concern. Although their straight bodies function as column-like caryatids, the artist created the illusion

F ig . 3.2  Set of bronze bells from Leiguduan Tomb 1 (Tomb of Marquis Yi of the State of Zeng) at Suizhou, Hubei. Early Warring States period, fifth century bce. Hubei Provincial Museum. Photograph: Courtesy of Hubei Provincial Museum.   For brief introductions to these examples, see Wu Hung 2006, 22–3, 30–3.  Some traditional texts do mention stories about certain statues. For example, we read in “The Stratagems of Yan” (Yan ce) in The Stratagems of the Warring States (Zhangguo ce) that a king of Song during the Eastern Zhou made statues to represent the rulers of rival kingdoms. He arranged these fig­ ures in his palace as if they were all his servants, and humiliated them at will. Such records, however, were all written considerably late and cannot be taken as reliable historical evidence. 9

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F ig . 3.3  Human-shaped caryatids on the set of bronze bells from Leiguduan Tomb 1, Suizhou, Hubei. Early Warring States period, fifth century bce. Hubei Provincial Museum. Photograph: Courtesy of Hubei Provincial Museum.

that they are effortlessly supporting the heavy frame with two bent arms. Each figure has a rather large head, but not as disproportional as in some earlier or contemporary examples. What make these bronze figures outstanding works of sculpture are their faces, created with an understanding of human anatomy. The straight eyes and closed lips are defined by sharp contours, contrasting with the smooth and subtle transition between the broad forehead, the high cheekbones, and the pointed chin. This naturalistic style must have been intentional, because an entirely different style is employed to decorate the hemispherical bases on which the figures stand. Densely covered with undulating curls and volutes derived from traditional zoomorphic motifs, these bases are stylistically homoge­ neous with many ritual objects from the tomb. But here their prickly surfaces also serve to set off the “naturalness” of the figures they support. Two principal features of these figures, namely their impressive size and asso­ ciation with bronze bells, have led some scholars to identify them as a possible prototype of the First Emperor’s Twelve Golden Men. There may be some truth in this hypothesis, but it is also important to realize that the two groups of sculp­ tures are fundamentally different works—one human-shaped components, the other free-standing statues—separated by a temporal gap of over two hundred years. Noticing the absence of large free-standing sculptures in pre-Qin Chinese art, scholars such as Lukas Nickel have turned to another direction, arguing that

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the Twelve Golden Men must have been inspired by Greek bronze sculptures. Nickel suggests that following the eastward campaign of Alexander the Great (356–323 bce), Greek art was brought into present-day Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan in the fourth century bce and influenced artistic practices further East. In his words: “They [i.e. the Twelve Golden Men] were cast in bronze as was customary in Greece during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. They were public sculptures with a political function which again mirrors Alexandrian prac­ tice. Their appearance was outlandish and their inscriptions stated that they were made following a model from the ‘Far West’.”11 While this bold hypothesis demands the support of more archaeological evidence, its emphasis on the public function of the Twelve Golden Men is related to the present chapter, which jux­ taposes these monumental statues with the “private,” hidden sculptures created for the First Emperor’s tomb.

T ER R ACOT TA SCU L P T U R E S I N T H E L ISH A N M AUSOL EUM: A N OV ERV I E W

In the past 44 years, more than ten thousand life-size12 and nearly life-size clay statues have been discovered in the Lishan Mausoleum of the First Emperor and have attracted worldwide attention, being discussed extensively by scholars and featured in numerous books, exhibitions, and films. It is important to remember, however, that the immense sculptural project that produced these statues was entirely unknown before 1974: no Qin dynasty or later text mentioned it even in passing. Two possible reasons may explain this profound silence. More generally, according to a traditional Chinese definition for “tomb” formulated around the time of the First Emperor, “burying means hiding away” (zang zhe, cang ye).13 Based on this idea, not only must the deceased be buried deep under the earth and the grave chambers be tightly sealed after entombment, but living people generally avoided writing about anything inside such hidden spaces. More spe­ cifically, the First Emperor made a determined effort to keep his posthumous residence a well-guarded secret: it is said that he ordered crossbows and arrows set up in his grave, rigged so that they would shoot anyone attempting to break in. Even memories of the underground site had to be erased: all the builders and craftsmen who had worked in the tomb were locked inside when “the inner gate was closed off and the outer gate lowered,” so the secret they knew would be

11   Nickel 2013, 442. To my knowledge, no ancient text states explicitly that the Twelve Golden Men bore inscriptions which “stated that they were made following a model from the ‘Far West’.” 12   The concept of “life-size” will be discussed later in this chapter. 13   Lüshi chunqiu in Zhuzi jicheng 1986, vol. 4, 96.

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forever kept within the tomb.14 Whereas the making of the Twelve Golden Men was announced in official documents and their grand images became the focus of public attention, the emperor’s terracotta army and other funerary sculptures belonged to a private, self-contained domain that no human gaze was allowed to penetrate. According to Sima Qian, the First Emperor began building his necropolis the very day he mounted the throne, at the exact moment when he ordered the casting of the Twelve Golden Men to celebrate his coronation. These two groups of sculptures were therefore parallel art projects under the same patronage. Yet they belonged to separate public and private spheres, one in front of his throne hall, the other for his future grave. What their temporal correspondence indi­ cates is a profound belief in preparing for the inevitability of death, which even the most powerful man on earth could not escape. In the same vein, The Book of Rites (Li ji), a set of ritual prescriptions compiled during the late Eastern Zhou and the Western Han, instructs a ruler to prepare his inner coffin as soon as he has ascended the throne, and to paint and repaint it every year until his demise.15 The construction of the Lishan Mausoleum employed more than 700,000 con­ victs, many of whom died while laboring at the site. Archaeological surveys and excavations of the mausoleum since the mid-1970s have begun to show the tomb’s general plan (Fig. 3.4):16 the focus of the tomb district was a pyramidshaped earthen tumulus constructed above the emperor’s grave (Fig. 3.5). It was surrounded by double walls. The outer walls measured 2,165 meters north to south and about 940 meters east to west; the inner walls measured 1,355 meters north to south and about 580 meters east to west. This basic layout divided the whole mausoleum into four zones: (1) the tumulus and the burial structures under it, (2) the enclosure within the inner wall, (3) the space between the inner and outer walls, and (4) the area outside the walled funerary park (ling yuan). The huge pyramid-shaped tumulus occupied the south half of the central enclosure. The grave chamber underneath this artificial hill has not been exca­ vated, but close to 20 underground timber structures have been found on all sides of the remaining earthen mound of the tumulus. The tumulus was consid­ erably bigger 2,000 years ago, so it is possible that some of the underground structures next to the existing mound were originally buried beneath it. One such structure, located immediately west of the tumulus, yielded a set of two astonishingly intricate miniature bronze chariots, which will be discussed in the last section of this chapter.   Sima Qian 1959, 265; Watson 1993, 63–4.   Li ji (The Book of Rites) in Ruan Yuan (ed.) 1980, vol. 1, 1292. 16   English summaries of earlier excavations include Cotterell 1981, 16–53; Thorp 1983. The most up-to-date introduction to archaeological excavations in the Lishan Mausoleum is Zhang Weixing 2016. Additional information can be found in Wang Xueli 1994. 14 15

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(a)

Xiyang

Shangjiao

Inner Wall Outer Wall

(b)

Administrative Building Site

Remains of Side Hall

Administrative Site of Food Officer

Retiring Hall

Accompanying Cemetery

Sacrificial Pits

Accompanying Cemetery Bronze Chariot Pit

K9902

Sacrificial Animal Pits Stable Pits

K9801 Stone Armor and Helmet Pit K006 Terra-cotta Figure Pit

K9901 Bronze ding and Terra-cotta Acrobat Pit

0

100

200 meters

F ig . 3.4  Plans of the Lishan Mausoleum. (a) Entire mausoleum, (b) funerary park. Xiaoneng Yang, New Perspectives on China’s Past: Chinese Archaeology in the Twentieth Century, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, fig. 76b, p. 226.

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F ig . 3.5  The Lishan Mausoleum in the early twentieth century. Wu Hung, Zhongguo gudai yishu yu jianzhu Zhong de jinianbeixing, Shanghai renmion chubanshe, 2009, fig. 2.30.

Within the second zone surrounded by the inner wall, archaeologists have found traces of a large architectural complex north of the tomb mound, possibly the main sacrificial hall where ritual offerings to the deceased emperor were placed. This hall was adjacent to a large architectural compound to the northwest. Consisting of ten rows of courtyard houses and occupying almost a quarter of the inner enclosure, it was probably used to maintain monthly and yearly “grave sacrifices” (mu ji). Opposite this compound, a walled area in the northeast quar­ ter of the inner enclosure contained rows of small and mid-sized tombs, possibly belonging to the emperor’s consorts.17 Other underground structures and stor­ age pits have also been found within the inner wall. One of them (K0006) located southwest of the tumulus consisted of a sloping ramp and two interconnected chambers. Twelve life-size terracotta figures originally stood in the front cham­ ber, representing four charioteers and eight civil officials in attendance (Fig. 3.6).18 In the third zone between the two walls of the funerary park, the areas to the east and west of the tumulus are especially rich in archaeological deposits. In the west section, two adjacent underground structures yielded two groups of differ­ ent terracotta figures. To the south was an L-shaped structure (MA), an under­ 17   Sima Qian (1959, 265) recorded that after the First Emperor passed away, numerous palace ladies who failed to bear royal descendants were ordered to follow their lord to the other world. Watson 1993, 63–4. 18  Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology and Archaeological Team for Qin Funerary Figures 2006, 65–95.

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F ig . 3.6  Terracotta statue from K0006 in the Lishan Mausoleum, probably representing a civil official. Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum.

ground royal stable which contained several hundred horses slain before their burial. Eleven pottery figures installed inside this stable are all life-size, ranging from 1.82 to 1.9 meters tall. Either holding weapons to guard the place or simply standing and watching, they represent the stable’s administrators of different ranks. Immediately north of this stable was an underground zoo com­ prised of 51 individual pits in three rows. The pits in the middle row contained animals and birds, along with pottery basins to symbolize the continuing sup­ ply of food and drink. Fourteen terracotta figures, each buried in a square pit two meters deep, were arranged on either side of the middle row. Representing zookeepers or animal trainers, they all wear simple clothes without caps and carry no weapons (Fig. 3.7; also see Fig. 3.14). A pottery jar buried with each figure perhaps reminded him of his duty to feed the animals in the afterlife. To the east side of the tumulus between the two walls, more terracotta ­figures have been found in an 80-meter-long underground structure (K9901).19 The 33 or 34 figures installed there all wear short skirts; some have bare torsos and are making dramatic gestures—features that initially led the excavators to identify them as acrobats (Fig. 3.8; also see Figs. 3.15 and 3.16). About 35 meters north is a huge rectangular structure (K9801) 130 meters ­east–west and 100 meters north–south, which contained 87 sets of stone armor and 19   This structure was partially excavated in 1999. For information about that excavation, see Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology and Archaeological Team for Qin Funerary Figures 2000. It was fully excavated in 2002. The formal archaeological report is not yet published, but several reports and articles provide valuable information about its structure and content. See Fu Jian, et al. 2013; Zhang Weixing 2015.

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F ig . 3.7  Terracotta statue from the “underground zoo” in the Lishan Mausoleum, probably representing a zookeeper. Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum.

F ig . 3.8  Terracotta statue from K9901 in the Lishan Mausoleum, probably representing a foreigner. Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum.

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43  stone helmets arranged in rows, as well as stone harnesses and bronze ­arrowheads. In the fourth zone that encompasses a broad area surrounding the walled funerary park, archaeologists have found five groups of sculptures (for locations see Fig. 3.4), as well as a large number of human and animal burials. About 350 meters east of the funerary park lay a straight row of 17 tombs of consider­ able size, possibly belonging to nobles who were killed after the death of the First Emperor. Slightly east of these tombs were 98 “stable” pits in three rows, some containing both figures and horses, others holding only horses or figures. The horses were buried in a standing position with legs secured in four holes; the accompanying pottery vessels again indicated that they were being fed in the netherworld. A second underground structure (K0007), located 1.5 kilometers to the north near a marshland, yielded 15 clay figures and 46 bronze birds of various kinds (Fig. 3.9). This unique content suggests that this area simulated a royal garden. About 1.5 kilometers due east from the emperor’s grave was the famous underground terracotta army, consisting of some 8,000 terracotta soldiers and horses in three underground timber structures (6,000+ figures and 200 horses in

F ig . 3.9  Bronze crane from K0007 in the Lishan Mausoleum. Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum.

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Pit 4

Pit 2

Pit 3

Pit 1

N

Scale

0

50

100 m

F ig . 3.10  Pits 1-4 of the underground army in the Lishan Mausoleum. Drawing: Courtesy of Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China.

Pit 1; nearly 1,500 figures and horses in Pit 2; 64 figures and 4 horses in Pit 3) (Fig. 3.10). A dominant opinion among Chinese archaeologists is that the three pits and the unfinished Pit 4 together replicated the Qin Imperial Guard, which consisted of a headquarters and three branches.20 According to this interpretation, the largest military formation in Pit 1 imitated the Right Army (Fig. 3.11). The enormous rectangular pit, extending 210 meters east to west and 62 meters north to south, was surrounded by a continuous gallery on all four sides.21 Within this rectangle were a series of nine corridors running east to west, each 3.5 meters wide. Separated by thick walls of rammed earth, these tunnel-like subterranean chambers had paved brick floors; their wooden roofs were sup­ ported by timber pillars and cross-beams. The terracotta legions were interred in standing position in a very orderly fashion. Two rows of infantry soldiers dressed in armor or plain clothes protected the regiment on each side. The soldiers in the east gallery, including nearly 200 sharpshooters equipped with crossbows, formed the vanguard of the whole regiment and were followed by a total of   Wang Renbo 1987, esp. 41–4. According to this interpretation, the unfinished Pit 4 would repre­ sent one of the branches, probably the Middle Army. 21   For information about the excavation of this pit, see Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology and Archaeological Team for Qin Funerary Figures 1988. 20

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F ig . 3.11  A panoramic view of Pit. 1 of the underground army. Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum.

38 single-file columns of warriors in the nine corridors. The infantry squads, the main components of this pit, were regularly punctuated by battle chariots, each pulled by four terracotta horses and manned by a charioteer and one or two soldiers. Some of the chariots equipped with drums and bells seem to have been

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command vehicles. Striking either instrument, the officer riding on such a char­ iot could order his section of the regiment to advance or retreat. Facing east in unison, the army seems to be waiting on alert, before marching out along the earthen ramps leading to the surface. Unlike Pit 1 which predominantly contained an infantry regiment, the regi­ ment in Pit 2 was a unit of war chariots and cavalry, possibly a replica of the Left Army of the Qin Imperial Guard.22 Situated about 20 meters north of Pit 1, this roughly L-shaped pit held some 939 pottery warriors and 472 horses divided into four groups: a square group of kneeling archers on the eastern side, a square group of war chariots in the southern half, a rectangular group of chariots and foot soldiers at the center, and a rectangle composed of mounted cavalry in the northern half. Pit 3, the smallest of the four, clearly imitated a military command post, where the commander-in-chief of the entire underground army was ­stationed.23 Indeed, his war chariot, yoked to four terracotta horses, dominated the center of this irregularly shaped subterranean chamber. Richly painted with lacquer patterns, this canopied vehicle was originally attended by four strong guards, and was further flanked by 68 officers dressed in two kinds of armor. These officers were stationed in two side rooms, originally separated by curtains from the central room which enclosed the commander’s chariot. Most of them held a long spear-like weapon with a blunt blade, whose function was more cer­ emonial than practical. Archaeologists have also found animal bones and deer antlers in this pit, possibly the remains of certain divinatory practices related to military operations. The figure of the commander-in-chief, however, was not found in the pit. Some scholars have hypothesized that he should be the occu­ pant of a large Qin-period tomb just 15 meters to the west of this pit. Another possibility, however, is that this absent commander-in-chief should be the First Emperor himself. As with the empty bronze wagon found next to the First Emperor’s tomb chamber (discussed later in this chapter), the emperor’s likeness was beyond representation. Distinguished by their different uniforms and military functions, the several thousand terracotta figures in this underground army included foot soldiers in battle array, archers bending their bows, cavalrymen leading their horses, char­ ioteers driving their chariots, and generals standing at attention, sword in hand. All men have strong and resolute faces, powerfully structured and with a determined expression imparting a dignified martial air. Much research has been devoted to the manufacturing procedures for these sculptures. Generally speak­ ing, each statue was produced by making and combining three separate parts of the body: the head, hands, and torso. The torso was modeled by hand, while the   For information about the excavation of this pit, see Archaeological Team for Qin Funerary Figures 1978. 23   For information about the excavation of this pit, see Archaeological Team for Qin Funerary Figures 1979. 22

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other two parts were fashioned with molds. Whether modeled or molded, the rudimentary form of each part was first made of a sandy, rather coarse clay. When this rough form had dried slightly, layers of finer clay were applied, in which were then carved the details of hair, beards, eyes, mouths and chins, muscles and tendons, collars, pleats, belts and belt hooks, leg bindings, and armor plates (Fig. 3.12). It was at this stage of production that sculptors articulated each fig­ ure’s individual features and personalities, and added the numerous details such as the varied hairstyles, the tassels and ribbons on the armor, the thousand grooves on a shoe sole. After such modeling and carving, each figure was mounted on a base and fired. It was finally brilliantly painted in contrasting hues of red, black, blue, white, and yellow, and outfitted with real weapons or bronze trappings. To sum up, archaeological excavations in the Lishan Mausoleum have so far found more than 8,000 sculptures, buried in eleven underground structures inside and outside the funerary park (see Fig. 3.4). In terms of scale, however, there are only two essential kinds of sculpture, one life-size and the other halfsize. What are the main features and burial contexts of these two types of sculp­ tural works, both created for the First Emperor’s tomb? Why were they conceived and made in different sizes? What did their different dimensions signify? Answers to these questions are pursued in the following two sections.

L I F E-SI ZE T ER R ACOT TA F U N ER A R Y SCU L P T U R E S

Although scholars have routinely described terracotta figures in the Lishan Mausoleum as “life-size,” they have mostly used this term impressionistically, based on a general perception rather than the works’ precise dimensions. A closer look at the figures’ sizes reveals that they actually do not faithfully imitate real people’s height, and that the disparities are not random, but follow certain patterns. The majority of the unearthed terracotta figures, including the civil officials and charioteers from K0006 within the inner district (see Fig. 3.6), the stable administrators from MA between the two walls, and the numerous statues in the underground army outside the funerary park (see Fig. 3.11), are all taller than normal people. According to the excavators, the height of the officers and sol­ diers in the underground army ranges from 1.75 to 2 meters, averaging 1.85 meters.24 These measurements include headgear, shoe soles, and the baseboards. Subtracting these, the average height of the figures should still be over 1.75 meters. This is even taller than the height of modern Chinese men between ages 18 and 25, who measure 1.70 meters on average.25 Archaeological evidence   Liu Yunhui 1996, 670. These measurements are supported by a detailed inventory of 1087 status from Pit 1 of the underground army. See Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology and the Excavation Team of Terracotta Figurines in the Tomb of the First Emperor 1988, 349–72. 25   Wang Jingdong 1986. 24

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F ig . 3.12  Different hairstyles of terracotta soldiers in the underground army. Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum.

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has led scholars to believe that Chinese people in the third century bce were about 6 centimeters shorter than their modern descendants.26 If this information is reliable, then the terracotta figures in the underground army were about 10 centimeters taller than the contemporaneous male population. To explain this phenomenon, the scholar Liu Yunhui has hypothesized that only strong, tall men were selected for the Qin imperial guards, whom the under­ ground army replicated.27 It is true that such practice is common to royal guards of all times and places, but Liu’s interpretation is problematic because the statues of civil officials, charioteers, and stable administrators found in the Lishan Mausoleum are the same height as the clay soldiers, averaging 1.80 meters with­ out caps and bases (see Fig. 3.6). Their uniformity seems to imply a more perva­ sive approach, that is, in producing these terracotta statues the sculptors followed a general principle to slightly magnify the figures’ physique to enhance their visual appearance. But because the dimensional differences between the sculptures and their models are subtle, even unnoticeable from a distance, such manipulation does not mitigate the perception that the figures duplicate and substitute for imperial officials and soldiers. This strategy is also employed to emphasize the prowess of specific subjects. An impressive example is the sculpted commander-in-chief of the army division represented in Pit 2 (Fig. 3.13). Nearly 2 meters tall, his magnificent height was further elevated by the chariot on which he originally stood. With proportionally broad shoulders, he has a powerful physique that surpasses all other figures in the army division. Wearing a long, double-layer military uniform and an armored vest decorated with tassels, he is furthermore distinguished by a unique head­ dress in the form of a double-tailed bird, said to be a symbol of bravery and skill on the battlefield. He rests his hand on a bronze sword in front of his abdomen (not shown in Fig. 3.13). Instead of representing him in a more predictable domineering manner, the sculptor depicted his face in a state of contemplation. Looking slightly downward, he appears resolute and steadfast. Opposite to such subtly magnified “life-size” images of generals, soldiers, and administrators, the clay stable boys and zookeepers are shrunken versions of their human models, yet the nature of their size adjustment remains the same, simul­ taneously representational and symbolic. Portrayed in a frozen kneeling posture devoid of any movement and expression, these figures wear plain clothes without headgear. Their upper bodies are erect, with hands rigidly placed on thighs or in sleeves (see Fig. 3.7). At about 60–65 centimeters tall in this position, the figures would be about 1.2–1.3 meters if standing up, apparently below the estimated average height of 1.64 meters for Qin dynasty men. Thus while their physical appearance remains unfailingly naturalistic, their reduced size accentuates their 26

  Liu Yunhui 1996, 671.

27

  Liu Yunhui 1996, 671.

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F ig . 3.13  Terracotta statue of the commander-in-chief from Pit 2 of the underground army. Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum.

lower social status, indicated further by their poorly furnished environment: these figures are always buried individually at the bottom of narrow pits to accompany horses and other animals (Fig. 3.14). The so-called “acrobats” figures from K9901, an underground structure east of the First Emperor’s grave, deserve a separate analysis because their forms and sizes may have resulted from special concerns. For one thing, the 33 or 34 figures found here are all dressed in exotic costumes radically different from other terra­ cotta figures found in the Lishan Mausoleum. More than half of them wear only short skirts vaguely resembling the pteruges of Roman soldiers;28 their naked tor­ sos and limbs exhibit carefully articulated anatomical details (Figs. 3.15 and 3.16). These figures can be extraordinarily large: it is reported that one of them, now lacking a head, stands at the magnificent height of 2.2 meters, so the undamaged statue must have originally stood over 2.5 meters tall. The group also includes some slender, less powerful figures wearing not only skirts but also tunics fitted with studs and plates (see Fig. 3.8).29 Two other features contribute to the uniqueness of these sculptures in early Chinese art: their individualized body   Pteruges is a skirt of leather or fabric strips worn by Roman soldiers around the waist to protect the upper legs. It could be fitted with small metal studs and plates to provide additional protection. 29   See note 16. 28

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F ig . 3.14  A pit in the Lishan Mausoleum containing a terracotta zookeeper. Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum.

shapes and gestures, and the highly naturalistic style used to render human anat­ omy. Indeed, in terms of both style and iconography, such figural images had never appeared before in Chinese art; they also differ markedly from other fig­ ures discovered in the Lishan Mausoleum. Although scholars have generally characterized the style of these other terracotta figures, especially those in the underground army, as “naturalistic” or “lifelike,” such qualification is mainly based on the minute rendering of facial features and clothes, not on the repre­ sentation of the body, which had never attracted much attention in ancient Chinese art. It is therefore highly surprising to find the half-naked strong men in this group, which unmistakably display the sculptor’s knowledge of human anat­ omy and his superb artistry in three-dimensional fashioning of unclothed bodies. We see a clear demonstration of such skill and knowledge in No. 5 statue: omitting all excessive details, the sculptor gave the figure not only a masculine torso but also inner strength (see Figs. 3.15 and 3.16). Although this group of figures is widely known as the First Emperor’s under­ ground “acrobats,” recent excavations and research on K9901 have led the excavators to reject this identification. According to their reconstruction of this narrow chamber, these figures originally stood in two facing rows with their

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F ig . 3.15  Terracotta statue from K9901 in the Lishan Mausoleum, probably representing a foreigner. Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum.

F ig . 3.16  Back of the terracotta statue from K9901. Photograph: Courtesy of Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum.

backs against the long side walls. Most of the half-naked large statues belonged to the northern row. A powerful figure, also wearing only a skirt but sitting with knees bent at 90 degrees, dominated the west end.30 All these factors have led Zhang Weixing, the head of the excavation team, to suggest that the entire scene in this structure represented a solemn ceremony, not an acrobatic performance.31 Based on their exotic costume, special physique, unusual height, and the seated position of the chief figure, we may also need to entertain the possibility that these figures represented a non-Chinese people.32 Parallel cases can be found in later Chinese funerary art, in which statues of foreign chieftains were lined up in front of imperial mausoleums.33   Zhang Weixing 2015, 24.    31  Zhang Weixing 2015, 25.   As historians commonly believe, the chair was not widely used in China until the tenth century CE. See Handler 2001, 9. 33   A group of 61 such sculptures still exists in the Qianling Mausoleum of the Tang dynasty, flanking the Spirit Path leading to the imperial tomb. 30 32

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In general, all terracotta figures discussed in this section fall within the range of life-size; their dimensional adjustments never challenge the fundamental perception that they faithfully copy their subjects. The figures’ basic role types— warriors, administrators, charioteers, entertainers, and servants—were not entirely new, but had characterized Eastern Zhou yong-figurines as well.34 All pre-Qin funerary figures are small, however: those from the North are made of clay, most measuring less than 10 cm tall. The southern figures from the Chu regions, made of wood and sometimes dressed in clothing, are larger; but even the tallest ones are still just about half of life-size, as exemplified by two yong-fig­ur­ines from Baoshan Tomb 2 in Hubei. So the question becomes, while continuing this pre-Qin tradition to have manufactured figures mimic different roles in a tomb,35 why did the First Emperor drastically increase their sizes, transforming these sculptures from miniature figurines into life-size statues? More than one reason is possible, but a principal one must be the ambition to create what Ladislav Kesner calls “a self-sustaining version of the world” in the Lishan Mausoleum.36 This artificial world consisted of not just manufactured sculptures but real human bodies, animal and birds, and actual weapons and chariots. Indeed, the line between images and real beings and things seems curi­ ously blurred in this mausoleum. Kesner points out that the First Emperor’s burial was the result of “an all-encompassing strategy that deployed varying modes of representation to stage a reality appropriate for the emperor’s eternal sleep.”37 A closer observation yields three different modes. First, the mausoleum includes many graves of human subjects other than that of the First Emperor. Judging from their locations, these burials were conceived as integral components of the emperor’s underground empire. Three groups of such burials are especially noteworthy. As introduced earlier, the northeast quar­ ter of the inner enclosure within the funerary park was a walled section containing rows of small and mid-sized tombs (see Fig. 3.4b). Based on Sima Qian’s report, the excavators have deduced that these tombs possibly belonged to consorts of the emperor who had not borne him any sons and who were forced to follow their lord into death. This theory would explain the close proximity of these burials to the emperor’s grave in the center of the funerary park. The second group consists of 17 tombs east of the funerary park. The considerable sizes of these burials indi­ cate the high ranks of the deceased within them, but the tomb occupants appeared to have suffered unnatural death, as some of them were cut into pieces before burial. Based on historical records, scholars have suggested that the deceased were likely to be the princes and ministers who were executed in 208 bce after the   See Wu Hung 2016b, 252–6.   For a general discussion of this pre-Qin art tradition, see Wu Hung 2016b. 36 37   Kesner 1995, 126.   Kesner 1995, 126. 34 35

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death of the First Emperor.38 Buried in front of the emperor’s tomb in a straight row, these men seem to have been intended to continue to serve their master in the afterlife. As such, they, as well as the emperor’s sonless consorts buried inside the walled area, can be considered a special kind of human sacrifice. A third group of tombs is located to the northwest of the First Emperor’s funerary park. It con­ sists of at least forty burials, among which nine are impressively large and con­ tained rich grave furnishings. Lined up east to west in a row only a 100-meters from the funerary park, these tombs are conceivably part of the Lishan Mausoleum, as the excavators have suggested. Because the excavation is still ongoing at this time and because no detailed archaeological report has been published, however, it is not yet possible to confirm this assumption and to ascertain the nature of these tombs’ relationship with the mausoleum. Second, in several underground structures, terracotta figures were buried to accompany real animals, either sacrificed horses in subterranean stables or beasts and birds in an underground zoo. As introduced earlier, this zoo constructed between the two walls inside the funerary park, was attended by terracotta zoo­ keepers or animal trainers buried in individual pits. Two enormous stables were constructed both inside and outside the funerary park, containing sacrificed real horses as well as terracotta administrators and stable boys. The third situation is represented by the giant underground army, which mixes representations and real objects in yet a different manner. Here, figures and horses were both ren­ dered as sculptures, but the weapons, including swords, spears, and crossbows and arrows, were all real, as were the chariots pulled by clay horses. To summarize this part of the discussion, the First Emperor’s tomb as a whole was furnished with a complex mixture of human burials, sacrificed animals, real objects and vehicles, as well as manufactured images. All of these, with the excep­ tion of the two bronze chariots next to the tumulus (discussed in the next section), were unified by the general notion of “life-size” to imitate observed reality. But as noted above, the correspondence between these representations and their refer­ ents is never precise, but is constantly manipulated either to enhance the figures’ visual appearance or to highlight their social status. It is also significant that in this constructed posthumous “reality,” those who were most closely associated with the emperor, including his consorts, courtiers, and relatives, were furnished through human sacrifice, whereas those of lower status performing general governmental and military roles were represented by terracotta statues. The emperor’s ambition to create such a parallel reality for himself explains the sudden increase in the size of tomb figures to match and even amplify real human figures. The same ambition must have also underlain the sculptures’ stylistic lifelikeness.

38

  Wang Xueli 1994, 114–18.

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T H E F I R ST EM PEROR’S M I N I AT U R E BRONZE CH A R IOTS

In December 1980, archeologists working in the Lishan Mausoleum discovered a group of two bronze horse-drawn chariots within the inner wall of the funerary park, about 20 meters west of the existing earthen tumulus that still covers the First Emperor’s grave. Several characteristics separate the chariots from all other sculptures found in the mausoleum, making them unique among the emperor’s sculptures to this day. In terms of placement and manner of burial, the two chariots, each pulled by four bronze horses, were found some 8 meters below ground in a spot not far from the emperor’s grave. A drawing in the excavation report shows that the underground chamber that stored them was attached to a ramp-like space, which extends eastward to the unexcavated area beneath the tomb mound (Fig. 3.17). Inside the small, narrow chamber—one of five in a row—was a rectangular timber structure, 7 meters long, 2.3 meters wide, and 2.2 meters high. Its compact size has led the excavators to call it a guo (casket) rather than a shi (room). The two chariots were arranged in a linear procession, in which a sedan follows a canopied vanguard cart (Fig. 3.18).

F ig . 3.17  Location of the two bronze chariots in the Lishan Mausoleum. Drawing: Courtesy of Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum.

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F ig . 3.18  Two bronze chariots from the Lishan Mausoleum. Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum.

A more recent excavation has uncovered another wooden casket inside the adja­ cent chamber, containing remains of decayed wooden chariots.39 It seems that the two bronze chariots and these wooden chariots originally belonged to a larger pro­ cession, stationed immediately outside the First Emperor’s grave. Equally signifi­ cant, the two bronze chariots were oriented westward, away from the grave pit.40 In terms of material, construction method, and size, the two chariots are not only made of bronze, gold, and silver, but each consists of numerous individual parts. These include the two drivers, eight horses, various horse accessories, and a huge number of chariot components, all cast separately and then fitted together. These two works thus reflect a very different concept of sculpture from that of the terracotta figures, which were made as entire statues with details represented on the surface. Finally, after the two chariots were painstakingly restored, people were surprised to discover their precise “half-size” dimensions. For example, the wheels of Chariot No. 1 measure 66.7 centimeters in diameter; those of a real Qin chariot were 134–136 centimeters in diameter, exactly double the bronze wheels.41 The bronze horses on Chariot No. 1 measure 107.8–110 centimeters   Zhang Weixing 2016, 256.   I have connected this case with similar phenomena observed in Han dynasty tombs, suggesting that this particular orientation implies a movement departing from the tomb. See Wu Hung 2018c. 41   This measurement is derived from traces of wooden chariots buried with the underground army. See Museum of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses of the First Emperor and the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archeology 1998, 378. 39 40

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F ig . 3.19  Chariot No. 1. Drawing: Courtesy of the Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum.

in length; the 32 terracotta horses from Pit 1 of the underground army are 190–220 centimeters long, again double the bronze ones.42 These comparisons prove that the bronze chariots, along with their drivers and horses, were inten­ tionally made as half-size representations. But what were the motivations behind this decision? And what do their special materials, construction method, and location tell us about their symbolism and ritual function? To speculate on the answers to these questions, we need first to take a closer look at the chariots themselves. As mentioned earlier, although both are equipped with four horses and a driver, they represent two different types of vehicle. The first chariot, 225 centimeters long and 152 centimeters high, has a shallow car­ riage with a round canopy; the driver stands in the front section of the carriage while holding the reins with both hands (Fig. 3.19). The second chariot, 317 centimeters long and 106.2 centimeters high, has an elongated wagon covered with a broad roof with rounded corners. The driver sits under the roof before the wagon. The small windows on either side of the wagon are decorated with dense openwork patterns, which would allow the passenger to look out while prevent­ ing onlookers to peek in (Fig. 3.20). The drivers of both chariots wear long robes and tall caps. The sculptors clearly intended to create highly realistic images of contemporary figures. Not only are   Museum of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses of the First Emperor and the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archeology 1998, 48–51; Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology and the Excavation Team of the Pits of Terracotta Figures in the First Emperor’s Mausoleum 1988, 46. 42

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F ig . 3.20  Chariot No. 2. Drawing: Courtesy of the Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum. F ig . 3.21  Driver on Chariot No. 1. Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum.

the figures accurately proportioned, but the modeling of their faces, clothes, caps, shoes, belts, and swords is extremely minute, imitating every detail down to their different surface textures. Both figures were painted in their entirety. Although most of the paint has peeled off, remaining traces have allowed conser­ vators to reconstruct their original appearance: each driver wore a green robe over a pink shirt, while their caps, scarves, and trousers were all white. Like the chariots themselves, these two bronze figures are half-size. The standing one on Chariot No. 1 measures 84.5 cm tall without cap (Fig.  3.21). As a half-size

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image, it imitates a living imperial driver more accurately than the terracotta officers and soldiers. We discussed in the last section that most terracotta figures in the Lishan Mausoleum have a slightly exaggerated height, averaging about 1.75 meters. In comparison, the half-size bronze driver on Chariot No. 1 would have represented a figure 1.69 meters tall, only 4 centimeters taller than the aver­ age height of Chinese men in the third century bce. An important feature of the two chariots is their “procedural construction” method. As briefly mentioned earlier, unlike thousands of terracotta statues found in the Lishan Mausoleum which are all modeled as single-piece sculp­ tures, each bronze chariot is comprised of numerous individual parts, made independently and then assembled together. Thus not only do they imitate the physical appearances of their models, but their manufacturing process also repli­ cates the production of real chariots. The sculptors employed extremely complex casting techniques to copy two wooden-structured vehicles in half-size. Chariot No. 1 is made of over 3,500 individual parts and weighs 1,061 kilograms, includ­ ing over 3 kilograms of gold and 4 kilograms of silver. Chariot No. 2 is equally a marvel of bronze technology: weighing 1,241 kilograms, it renders with amaz­ ing accuracy a fully equipped wagon comprised of 3,462 segments, all shrunken to half size.121 It is mindboggling to imagine how all these segments, some as tiny as 1 centimeter long, could have been reduced uniformly with such precision, cast and inlaid through separate procedures, and fitted together perfectly. I have presented this puzzle to a number of historians of ancient Chinese science but still await a satisfactory answer. To make a wheel, for example, the sculptors first fashioned a half-size hub and 30 half-size spokes. Next, they assembled them, and finally cast the loose ends of the spokes into a half-sized cog (Fig. 3.22). The nearly 2 meters long horse reins on both chariots are each formed by 141 sections made of bronze, gold, and silver, joined together with tiny tenons and joints. Constructed like this, the reins, as well as other complex horse gears such as harnesses and bridles, all con­ sist of movable parts that can be manipulated with ease (Fig. 3.23). The carriage of Chariot No. 2 is shaped like a small lodge, with sliding windows on both sides and a swinging door at the rear. Like the drivers, the horses and chariots were originally painted in brilliant colors. The horses were entirely white; only the tongue and nostrils were pink. The wagon of Chariot No. 2 was decorated with especially ornate geometric designs and cloud patterns, which are still largely preserved inside the carriage. The driver of Chariot No. 1 is a warrior, as indi­ cated by the weapons placed next to him, which include a shield, a crossbow, and sharp arrows in box-like quivers (Fig. 3.24).43 Made of bronze and inlaid with intricate patterns, each of these items is a half-sized version of a real weapon 43   Sun Ji has suggested that these weapons could be used by additional warriors on the chariot. See Sun Ji 1993, 18–19.

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F ig . 3.22  A wheel on Chariot No. 1. Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum.

F ig . 3.23  Bronze horses with movable harnesses and bridles. Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum.

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F ig . 3.24  The driver on Chariot No. 1 and his weapons. Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum.

in  the emperor’s possession. The two drivers’ torsos, heads, hands, feet, and ­headgear were made separately, and then cast or welded together in multiple steps (Fig. 3.25). From a purely technical point of view, this complex procedure seems unneces­ sary, since a hand or foot could have been easily cast together with an arm or leg as a single piece, and this would have saved time and cost. Instead, this “wasteful” construction seems to have served a specific representational purpose to distinguish exposed body parts—the head, hands, and feet—from the clothed body. Similarly, the headgear was made first and then welded onto the bronze head. Once again, the goal seems not only to imitate the outward appearance of a figure and his clothing, but to duplicate the mechanism of life itself, in which headgear is a separate item to be put on and taken off. Scholars believe that with its unusually extravagant construction and decora­ tion, Chariot No. 2 represents the First Emperor’s private sleeping wagon (called a wenliang che), but they are puzzled by the absence of a sitter inside the vehicle.122 I would suggest that the absence of the passenger, in fact, provides a valuable clue to speculate on the ritual role and religious symbolism of the two chariots, and in turn to think about the reason for their miniature form. Like

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F ig . 3.25  (a)–(c) Sections of the bronze drivers. Drawings: Courtesy of Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum.

many peoples around the world, the ancient Chinese believed in the existence of an autonomous soul as the source of human life and intelligence, which would become a disembodied, formless spirit after a person died. All forms of imagination about “posthumous immortality,” i.e., one could reach Heaven or the magic mountain Kunlun after death, were based on this belief. Consequently,

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numerous methods were invented to ascertain the existence of the posthumous soul and to guide it to an eternal paradise. These methods include constructing passages in graves to guide the soul’s movement. The miniature forms of these passages, including holes, doors, and gateways, reveal the shared conception of the soul as an “invisible miniature.”44 Ancient ritual prescriptions instruct that a funerary procession to a grave should include an empty chariot for the departing soul of the dead; this chariot thus acquired the name “soul carriage” (hun che).45 Abundant pictures painted or carved in Han dynasty tombs illustrate such processions, validating this tex­ tual instruction. Other images and actual chariots found in Han tombs, on the other hand, disclose an alternative belief that a “soul carriage” would also serve a second role of transporting the soul of a deceased person to an immortal world after entombment.46 Significantly, carriages entrusted with this function were always oriented toward the outside of a tomb, as if they were about to leave the burial with the deceased’s soul. This position was shared by the two bronze char­ iots in the Lishan Mausoleum. As we have learned, they were positioned west­ ward, away from the First Emperor’s tomb chamber. It is possible, therefore, that the roofed wagon was the emperor’s “soul carriage,” stationed next to his grave to transport his soul beyond the mortal world.

CONCLUSION: T H E QI N SCU L P T U R A L S YST EM I N I TS H ISTOR IC A L CON T E X T

The Qin fell in 206 bce, merely four years after the First Emperor’s death. It is amazing how many changes in Chinese sculpture took place during this short dynasty. Indeed one can say that there briefly emerged a system of sculpture never seen in China before. It is a system because its three components—the monumental Twelve Golden Men, the life-size terracotta funerary statues, and the half-size bronze chariots—were all commissioned by the dynasty’s founder for diverse purposes, and because they were complementary in form, material, and placement. The bronze chariots and terracotta statues were made for the First Emperor’s future tomb and fall into the general category of yong. Their different materials, sizes, and locations, however, denote their distinctive significance for their royal patron. The terracotta statues were intended to be “lifelike” in terms of both physical dimensions and representational details. Arranged to surround the grave pit and funerary park in the Lishan Mausoleum, their groupings replicated   For a discussion on this topic, see Wu Hung 2018b. 46   Ruan Yuan 1980, 1253.   See Wu Hung 2018c.

44 45

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divisions of the emperor’s palatial entourage, governmental departments, and military forces. The idea behind commissioning this vast assembly of sculptures was to construct a mirror image of the Qin empire underground, which the First Emperor could continuously possess in the afterlife. Although installed in the same funerary park, the two bronze chariots did not belong to this constructed universe, but were prepared for a posthumous journey taken by the deceased ruler. Their half-size dimensions accord with a conven­ tional idea that the posthumous soul had to shrink to reside in a fictional space. The chariots’ precious material and extremely complex construction manifest the notion of singularity, and in turn indicate their association with the emperor as the “one man under Heaven.” The burial positions of the two vehicles further imply movement: they formed a procession with a vanguard leading a wagon, waiting next to the emperor’s grave to take his soul to Heaven or an immortal land. The Lishan Mausoleum was located in the vicinity of Xianyang, the imperial capital and the site of the Twelve Golden Men. The First Emperor unveiled this group of public sculptures at the exact moment when he ordered his mausoleum built, possibly by the same court department in charge of ritual paraphernalia and construction work. To contemporaneous people who had knowledge of three sculptural projects, all of them were associated with the country’s unifica­ tion and the inauguration of the emperor; their shared timing must have made their differences more pronounced and noticeable. Among the three projects, the life-size terracotta statues emulate reality, and hence provide a ground-zero point to measure what was gigantic and what was miniature. Two principal features of the Twelve Golden Men—their public function and above-ground location—distinguish them from the two groups of funerary sculptures. Transforming weapons collected from the defeated Six Kingdoms into colossal figures arrayed in front of the throne hall, they celebrated the First Emperor’s victory over his enemies and commemorated the establishment of the Qin dynasty. What these figures constituted was a distinct “dynastic monument,” with their enormous, seemingly indestructible form demonstrating the dynasty’s imagined longevity. Although no detailed descriptions of the Twelve Golden Men exist, all ancient writers perceived them as giant figures. This particular form relates them to the terracotta figures which furnished the Lishan Mausoleum; but the latter’s clay material was traditionally used to model tomb figurines and signified death. In a different way, the Twelve Golden Men and the two bronze chariots also converged and contrasted with each other. They were both made of bronze and placed in close proximity to the emperor’s person: one group beside his throne and the other next to his grave. Yet their vastly different sizes, separate locations above and below ground, and opposite placements in the palace and mausoleum, all underscored the distinction between life and the afterlife. This system of sculpture created by the First Emperor synthesized various sculptural traditions in pre-Qin China and beyond. Pre-Qin tomb figurines from

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F ig . 3.26 Northern yong as represented by a group of miniature terracotta figurines from Zhangqiu, Shandong province. Warring States period, fourth century bce. Wu Hung, Huangquan xia de meishu. Beijing: Sanlian chubanshe, 2010, fig. 2–20.

northern and southern China constituted two sub-traditions of yong. Northern examples, always made of clay, often consisted of multiple figures and animals in miniature forms. Representing performances and other activities, such tableaux mimicked various aspects of human life (Fig. 3.26). There is little doubt that this northern tradition of funerary sculpture antici­ pated the diverse groups of terracotta statues in the Lishan Mausoleum. In con­ trast, most pre-Qin yong from south China were made of wood and rarely formed larger tableaux on their own. Conceptualized as individual figures, they often embodied household roles as servants, cooks, and drivers, and were installed together with horses and chariots, kitchenware, or writing equipment in partic­ ular tomb chambers. They thus resemble “puppets” on a series of stages that imitated various sections of a household. The most elaborate examples of such southern yong reflect a diligent effort to imitate living persons. Two large wooden figurines from a fourth-century bce tomb at Baoshan, Hubei province, for instance, have arms made of separate pieces of wood; while the ears, hands, and feet were all carved individually and then attached to achieve more complex ges­ tures (Fig. 3.27). This sculptural style is conceptually similar to the procedural construction method used to assemble the two bronze chariots and horses, and may be identified as the latter’s precursor. The Twelve Golden Men embodied an entirely new idea of sculpture, how­ ever. Although they have been connected to Eastern Zhou bronze figures such as those supporting the bell set in Marquis Yi’s tomb, pre-Qin China never saw monumental figural statues erected in public spaces. It is therefore possible, as

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F ig . 3.27 Southern yong as represented by a wooden figurine from Baoshan Tomb 2, Hubei province. Warring States period, fourth century bce. Wu Hung, Huangquan xia de meishu. Beijing: Sanlian chubanshe, 2010, fig. 2–31.

scholars have suggested, that they were inspired by non-Chinese precedents such as Greek or Hellenistic monumental sculptures.47 Some ancient tales connecting the Twelve Golden Men with foreigners and their images supply additional supports to this assumption. The most famous such tale is offered by Ban Gu (32–92 ce), the author of the History of the Western Han (Han shu). The related passage goes: Historians recorded that in the twenty-sixth year of the First Emperor (221 bce), some giants, twelve in all, came to Lintao [in present-day Gansu]. Dressed in for­ eign garb, they each stood five zhang tall, with feet six chi long. A celestial taboo once dictated that anyone who recklessly promoted foreign ways would encounter disaster. But the First Emperor had just subjugated the Six Kingdoms that year, and he celebrated [the arrival of the foreign giants] as an auspicious sign. He melted down weapons from the whole country and cast the Twelve Golden Men to repre­ sent the foreigners.48

Probably based on the same source, the author of the Old Stories of the Capital Region (Sanfu jiushi) named the Twelve Golden Men the “Golden Barbarians”   Nickel 2013, 436–42.

47

  Ban Gu 1962, 1472.

48

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F ig . 3.28  Miniature figurines installed in the Yangling Mausoleum of Emperor Jing of the Western Han, 141 bce, Xi’an, Shaanxi province. Wu Hung, Huangquan xia de meishu. Beijing: Sanlian chubanshe, 2010, fig. 2–26.

(Jin di ren).49 These tantalizing records, however, cannot be taken as reliable historical information. To ascertain any connection between these vanished sculptural works and foreign models, we would need substantial new archaeo­ logical evidence.

  Cited in Sima Qian 1959, 240.

49

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The First Emperor’s sculptural system represented an important breakthrough in the history of Chinese art because for the first time it linked monumental, lifesize, and miniature images into a mutually referential system, and demonstrated an unprecedented role for scale in conceptualizing and designing various kinds of sculptural works. But after the fall of the Qin, this system was soon abolished. Early Han rulers abandoned the First Emperor’s desire for monumentality in favor of more moderate sculptural representations and discontinued the practice of monumental public statues. In the field of funerary figurines, examples from Yang ling, the mausoleum of Emperor Jing (188–141 bce), conflated the two kinds of mortuary sculptures in the Lishan Mausoleum—the life-size terracotta figures and the half-size bronze chariots and horses—to adhere to a uniform scale. At least 24 underground trenches, ranging 25 to 291 meters long, sur­ rounded Yang ling. Furnished with numerous figurines and abundant goods, they replicated legions of soldiers and horsemen, groups of attendants and servants, well-equipped kitchens, livestock, a granary, and so on (Fig. 3.28).50 But if this design reveals a similar attempt to replicate the entire world in the tomb, all figurines in Yang ling are miniatures, reaching only about one-third the height of Qin terracotta warriors. It must have been a conscious decision to diverge from Qin precedent, because the Yang ling figurines were made not long after the Qin’s fall in the Xianyang-Chang’an area, when the memory of creating thousands of life-size statues must have still been alive in the region. Instead of mapping art upon life through creating life-size images, Han emperors reduced the size of tomb figurines to constitute a miniature world for the afterlife. Rulers of later dynasties followed their example until the demise of the dynastic system ended the practice altogether.

R EF ER ENCE S A rchaeological Team for Qin Funerary Figures (1978) “Qin Shihuang ling dongce dierhao bingma yongkeng zuantan shijue jianbao” [Brief report on core samples and exploratory excavations of warrior and horse pit 3 on the east side of the tomb of the First Qin Emperor], Wenwu 5: 1–19 Archaeological Team for Qin Funerary Figures (1979) “Qin Shihuang ling dongce disanhao bingma yongkeng qingli jianbao” [Brief report on the inspection of warrior and horse pit 3 on the east side of the tomb of the First Qin Emperor], Wenwu 12: 1–12 B an Gu (1962) Han shu [History of the Former Han] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju) C otterell , A. (1981) The First Emperor of China (London: Penguin Books)

50

  See Wang Xueli 1992.

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F u Jian, et al. (2013) “Qinshihuangdi ling youyou xinfaxian” [New finds in the mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor], Zhongguo wenwu bao, October 30 H andler , S. (2001) Austere Luminosity of Chinese Classical Furniture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) H e Ziquan (1955) Qin Han shilue [A concise history of the Qin and Han] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe) K esner , L. (1995) “Likeness of No One: (Re)presenting the First Emperor’s Army,” The Art Bulletin 77(1): 15–32. L au , D. C. (1970) Mencius (London: Penguin Books) L i ji [The Book of Rites] (1980) In Ruan Yuan (ed.), Shisanjing zhushu [The Annotated Thirteen Classics], 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company) L iu Yunhui (1996) “Qin yong yu Qindai junren de xingti tezheng” [Qin figurines and the physical features of Qin dynasty soldiers], in The Museum of the First Emperor’s Terracotta Army, Qin yong xue yanjiu [Studies of Qin figurines] (Xi’an: Shaanxi renmin jiaoyu chubanshe) L üshi chunqiu [Mr. Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals] (1986) In Zhuzi jicheng [Collected works by ancient philosophers], 10 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju), vol. 4 M useum of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses of the First Emperor and the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archeology (1998) Qinshihuang ling tong chema fajue baogao [The bronze chariots and horses unearthed from the First Emperor’s mausoleum—an excavation report] (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe) N ickel , L. (2013) “The First Emperor and Sculpture in China,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 76(3): 413–47 R uan Yuan (comp.) (1980) Shisanjing zhushu [An annotated edition of the Thirteen Classics] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju) S haanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology and Archaeological Team for Qin Funerary Figures (1988) Qin Shihuang ling bingma yongkeng: Yihaokeng fajue baogao, 1974–1984 [A report on the excavation of warrior and horse pit 1 of the tomb of the First Qin Emperor, 1974–1984], 2 vols. (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe) S haanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology and Archaeological Team for Qin Funerary Figures (2000) Qin Shi Huang lingyuan kaogu baogao, 1999 [A report of the archaeological excavations in the mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor, 1999] (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe) S haanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology and Archaeological Team for Qin Funerary Figures (2006) Qin Shi Huangdi lingyuan kaogu baogao, 2000 [A report on the excavation of the funerary park of the First Qin Emperor, 2000] (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe) S haanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology and the Excavation Team of the Pits of Terracotta Figures in the First Emperor’s Mausoleum (1988) Qinshihuang ling bingmayong keng—yihaokeng fajue baogao 1974–1984 [The pits of warriors and horses in the First Emperor’s mausoleum—a report on the excavation of pit 1, 1974–1984] (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe) S haanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology and the Excavation Team of Terracotta Figurines in the Tomb of the First Emperor (1988) Qinshihuang ling bingmayong keng yihaokeng fajue baogao [A report on the excavation of the underground army Pit 1 in the First Emperor mausoleum] (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe)

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S hi Yan (1940) “Qin zhi zhongju jinren kao” [A study of the Qin bells and golden figures], Jinling xuebao 10(1/2) S ima Qian (1959) Shi ji [Historical records] (Beijing: Zhonghua shujue) S un Ji (1993) Zhongguo gu yufu longcong [Papers on ancient Chinese vehicles and costumes] (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe) T ang Chi (1991) “Qin ji Xi Han shiqi di diaosuo yishu” [The art of sculpture during the Qin and Western Han period], in Editorial Committee of a Comprehensive Collection of Chinese Art, Zhongguo meishu wuqiannian [5000 years of Chinese art], 8 vols. (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe and others), vol. 3, Diaosuo. shang [Sculpture. 1], 60–86 T horp , R. (1983) “An Archaeological Reconstruction of the Lishan Necropolis,” in G. Kuwayama (ed.), The Great Bronze Age of China—A Symposium (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum), 72–83 W ang Jingdong (1986) “Jinren yu guren shibigao” [A comparison between the heights of ancient people and people today], Guangming ribao, March 23 W ang Renbo (1987) “General Comments on Chinese Funerary Sculpture,” in G. Kuwayama (ed.), The Quest for Eternity: Chinese Ceramic Sculptures from the People’s Republic of China (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art), 39–61 W ang Xueli (1992) “The Pottery Figurines in Yang Ling Mausoleum of the Han Dynasty: Melodic Beauty of Pottery Sculpture,” in Archaeological Team of Han Mausoleums and Archaeological Institute of Shaanxi Province, The Coloured Figurines in Yang Ling Mausoleum of Han in China [in Chinese, English, and Japanese] (Xi’an: China Shaanxi Travel and Tourism Press), 8–13 W ang Xueli (1994) Qin Shihuang ling yanjiu [A study of the mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe) W atson , B. (trans.) (1993) Records of the Grand Historian: Qin Dynasty (New York: Columbia University Press) W u H ung (1995) Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) W u H ung (2006) “From the Neolithic to the Han,” in Angela F. Howard, Li Song, Wu Hung, and Yang Hong (eds.), Chinese Sculpture (New Haven and Beijing: Yale University Press and China Foreign Languages Press), 17–103 W u H ung (2010) The Art of the Yellow Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs (London: Reaktion Books) W u H ung (2015) “The Invisible Miniature: Framing the Soul in Chinese Art and Architecture,” Art History 38(2) (April), special issue: “To Scale,” edited by Joan Kee and Emanuele Lugli, 286–303 W u H ung (2016a) On Chinese Art: Cases and Concepts, vol. 1, Methodological Reflections (Chicago: Art Media Resources) W u H ung (2016b) “On Tomb Figurines: The Beginning of a Visual Tradition,” in Wu Hung, On Chinese Art: Cases and Concepts, vol. 1, Methodological Reflections (Chicago: Art Media Resources), 247–85 W u H ung (2018a) “The Art and Architecture of the Warring States Period,” in Wu Hung, On Chinese Art: Cases and Concepts, vol. 2, Prehistoric to Han (Chicago: Art Media Resources), 195–210

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W u H ung (2018b) “The Archaeology of Passage: Reading Invisibility in Chinese Tombs,” in Wu Hung, On Chinese Art: Cases and Concepts, vol. 2, Prehistoric to Han (Chicago: Art Media Resources), 252–82 W u H ung (2018c) “Where Are They Going? Where Did They Come From?—Chariots in Ancient Chinese Tomb Art,” in Wu Hung, On Chinese Art: Cases and Concepts, vol. 2, Prehistoric to Han (Chicago: Art Media Resources), 360–73 Y ang , H sien - yi and Gladys Yang (1979) Selections from Records of the Historians (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press) Z hang W eixing (2015) “Faxian ‘gongzang’ zuopin: dui Qinshihuang ling yipi taoyong de xinrenshi” [Finding “gongzang” works: a new understanding of a group of terracotta figures from the First Emperor’s mausoleum], in Wu Hong (Wu Hung), Zhu Qingsheng, and Zheng Yan (eds.), Gudai muzang meishu yanjiu disanji [Studies of ancient tomb art no. 3] (Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe), 18–26 Z hang W eixing (2016) Liyi yu zhixu: Qin Shihuangdi ling yanjiu [Ritual and order: A study of the mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor] (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe)

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4

The Death of the Figurine: Reflections on an Abrahamic Abstention Jaś Elsner

There is a problem about the figurine in the arts of what—for want of a ­better term—we may call the Abrahamic religions in late antiquity. It is that archaeological and art-historical scholarship are wary of discussing absences. What we focus on is the material we have. For, despite the many flights to theory, academia remains an empirical enterprise. In this chapter, I am specifically going to examine an absence: one that is hardly mentioned in the vast literature on late ancient Jewish, early Christian, Byzantine, or Islamic art, because these literatures deal quite rightly with what there is in the visual record; and one that for the same reason is hardly discussed in the huge literature on the figurine, which again quite rightly deals with what exists in the material record. But when we focus on what there is and what we have, especially when we do this in the normative cultural and historical context of its making and use, we always risk the myopia of looking too closely at the trees and not seeing their place in the whole wood. If we take a longue-durée perspective,1 we have to contextualize the broad phenomena we are exploring within the scope of what came before, what gave rise to it and against what it may be reacting. In this chapter, this issue comes down to a striking archaeological fact. In all the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean, including Egypt and north Africa, of the near East, of the far East beyond India to China, both prehistoric and historic, from the earliest Palaeolithic to the end of pre-Abrahamic pagan polytheism in the western half of this vast geography spanning the Mediterranean and Asia, the figurine is a prime and ubiquitous product of material culture, with huge   For the essential significance of longue-durée approaches in questions of representation, with a focus on Byzantine iconoclasm and its precursors, see Elsner 2012a, 368–76. 1

         

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a­ ttestation in the archaeological record.2 With the rise to hegemony of Christianity and then Islam, this phenomenon ends and we witness the death of the figurine in the archaeological archive across the vast geography that came to be dominated by the Abrahamic religions. The one area of the post prehistoric but pre-Abrahamic world which showed a reluctance to anthropomorphic representation, at any rate of deities, and has little record of figurine deposition (so far as  I can ascertain), is pre-Islamic Iran,3 especially on its western side.4 This ­abstinence may conceivably have roots in Zoroastrian ideology, which was significant among the ruling classes even though not exclusively dominant in ancient Persia, and in this sense may have been a fundamental precursor to subsequent Christianity and Islam.5 For archaeology, figurines have proved an extremely significant problem because—unlike so many other artifacts—such as axe-heads, or clay shards for instance—figurines (in whatever material they are made and of whatever level of artistic sophistication or simplicity) have an anthropomorphic or zoomorphic quality (dare one call this “mimetic”?) and elicit in the modern student an aesthetic or potentially aesthetic response.6 Whether they did so in their context of making and use is a different matter, and—at least in the archaeological world where texts are not available to modulate our interpretations of objects—this is perhaps an impossible question to answer. But my point is that in all the parts of this vast geographical expanse where Christian hegemony and subsequently where Islamic dominance replaced the polytheisms of antiquity, the figurine rapidly and almost entirely disappears from the archaeological record.7 2   The world-wide span of prehistoric figurines in all cultures (including Africa, Asia, Australasia, the Pacific, and Europe) is well addressed in Insoll 2017c. This volume (of over 900 pages) offers no discussion of what happens to figurine production in historical as opposed to prehistoric periods, an unfortunate result of disciplinary boundaries (between prehistory and history, between anti-textual archaeology and art history) circumscribing substantive questions (in this case about the historical framing and the end of the phenomenon being explored), and of the weaknesses of failing to consider the longue durée. 3   Prehistoric Iran by contrast was very figurine-rich: see Daens 2017; as was Mesopotamia into GrecoRoman times: see Langin-Hooper 2020. 4   Shenkar 2008, expanded in Shenkar 2014, 175–90; see more recently Shenkar 2017. 5   I am hesitant about Shenkar’s conclusions (esp. 2017, 384–6 and 394–5) that it is the influence of Greek artistic practice which explains anthropomorphism in the divine iconographies of eastern Iran. One might speculate that Indian (e.g. Buddhist) and Sogdian elements were also in play. For the argument that the line in Zoroastrian Sasania between “bad religions” (Christianity, Judaism) and worse ones (such as polytheistic cults and Buddhism) was idolatry—whose concomitant, one might add, is the use of ­figurines—see Payne 2015, 32–5. 6   For discussion see e.g. Bailey 2005, 26–44, 66–87, 122–46; Nakamura and Meskell 2009; Lesure 2011, 48–67. For figurines’ “potential for differentiated enstoriment . . . at the level of the individual encounter” leading to the potential for “subversive commentary,” see Hofmann 2017, 135. 7   For the continuity of figurines from prehistory to modernity in non-Abrahamic inflected contexts, see on Australasia Orliac and Orliac 2017; on Amazonia until recently, see Barreto 2017, 420; on Africa, see Insoll 2017b, 151, 153 and Maret 2017.

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This disappearance is not unrelated to the end of free-standing statuary and three-dimensional sculpture in the same historical period and cultural contexts.8 Nor is it wholly separate from the many changes in display and arrangement of older statuary in the public contexts of late antiquity.9 But the death of the ­figurine concerns a much more intimate and personal space than the public and civic contexts from which three-dimensional sculpture vanished in the course of the fourth to the seventh centuries. Rather, it alludes to how the strength of new religious beliefs and their reluctance about three-dimensional imagery came fundamentally to determine the archaeological record as it relates to the most personal spaces of material production and visual consumption. Frankly, this is a datum of great significance, almost entirely suppressed by the workings of disciplinary boundaries (between antiquity and the middle ages, between archaeology and art history). But it has implications which can hardly be overestimated on two counts. First, if the fact of the end of the figurine is accepted, then it demonstrates the incontrovertible impact of ideological change in human beliefs as a determining factor for the archaeological record. Second, in the more specific historical question of the transformation of visual and material culture as a result of the rise to dominance of the monotheistic religions in the Mediterranean and western Asia, the death of the figurine offers direct ­evidence for how the reluctance to idolatry subverted very personal and age-old models of production, cultivation, and handling of material artifacts. I shall attempt here to look at what the figurine constituted in the polytheism of the historical Mediterranean, before it vanished from the world of artistic production, and what its absence might mean about attitudes to representation as such. This chapter has four sections. First, a brief survey of what there is by way of early Christian and Byzantine figurines: this is ultimately a test of the claim that the figurine died in relation to the rise of Abrahamic monotheism and I will conclude that with some nuance the assumption is largely true, especially by contrast with the ubiquity of the figurine in the preceding periods, both prehistoric and historical. Second, a summary account of what we might define figurines to be. Third, a discussion of the ancient—especially the Greco-Roman—figurine as a negative model for what Jewish, Christian, and Muslim image-production would reject: this is effectively an attempt to define what the figurine had come to mean at least in the pan-Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire (including western Asia as far as the Euphrates) before its demise. Fourth, some reflections on what all this might imply—both for our understanding of figurines (including in   This has become a major theme in recent archaeological work. See Smith and Ward-Perkins 2016, esp. Ward-Perkins 2016 and Liverani 2016. 9   See for instance the essays in Kristensen and Stirling 2016 or Jacobs and Stirling 2017. 8

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periods well before that with which I am principally concerned) and for our grasp of historical and cultural shifts in representation itself.10

F IGU R I N E S I N E A R LY CH R IST I A N A N D ISL A M IC J U R ISDICT IONS

There is no clearly agreed or absolutely unambiguous archaeological or ­art-historical definition for the term “figurine.” In offering a frame, at best a loose working definition, for my discussion, I am going to focus here on three-dimensional and in-the-round small-scale statuettes in any medium (clay, wood, bone, metal, stone) from the Mediterranean area and the near East of either prehistoric or historic origin. By prehistoric, I mean in periods, like the Stone Age, for which we have no accompanying textual sources to give us access to the thought world of our objects; by historic, I mean periods, like the Greek and Roman world, for which such texts do exist.11 I need to repeat that my subject is not the figurines I am going to discuss here, but it is teleologically related to them. For, if we ask why there are no three-dimensional statuettes at all (or at least with a very few exceptions) in late ancient Jewish art, in early Christian art, East and West, or in Islamic art, and what this means for attitudes to representation, then there is some benefit in having a sufficient understanding of what is distinctively absent in terms of the kinds of artifacts that Jews, early Christians, and Muslims knew in the cultural environments out of which their religious and artistic practices emerged, and, in a very large majority of contexts, determined not to make. I will focus for the main part on the human figure, but in fact what I have to say is equally relevant to the numerous three-dimensional miniature animal figures found alongside human shaped figurines across the Mediterranean, which again are not found in late ancient Jewish, Christian, or Muslim contexts.12 In other words, from the teleological perspective of what Christianity and Islam did not do in terms of continuing ancient patterns of image-making which they inherited, zoomorphic figuration is no different from anthropomorphism. I will not

  On figurines and the politics of representation, see Bailey 2013, 245–6 and Meskell 2017, 18–21.   The difference, art-historically, is that it is only in historical periods, with a body of texts alongside objects, that the iconological methods evolved by the discipline of art history can be applied. Ucko1968, xvi rightly doubted that one should divide “prehistoric” from historic—but defended the “arbitrary use of the term ‘prehistoric’ ” in his own work for largely pragmatic reasons. 12   E.g. Boutantin 2014. For an ensemble see e.g. the contents of Tomb N321 at Thebes in Jeammet 2007, 20, pl. IX, including a bird and a dog. For a similar argument that all the issues surrounding human figurines are in principle applicable to animal figurines, see Ucko 1968, xvi. 10 11

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explore the complex—arguably fraught—distinction between anthropomorphic or zoomorphic figurines and the anthropomorphic or zoomorphic vessel; but these are classes of item which have clear parallels and also fundamental functional differences.13 Let us begin with the evidence from late antiquity—by which I mean figurines or statuettes from the period after Constantine’s legalization of Christianity, but including also potentially Christian material from the third century. The short summary is that—by comparison with the pre-Christian era—there is very little indeed. On the Jewish side, it is striking that in his attempt to amass all the Jewish visual material from the Greco-Roman period, E. R. Goodenough failed to find a single figurine.14 On the Christian side, there is some nuance. If we take small-scale statuary (other than terracotta or bone) used in places of worship, of burial or in cult sites, then there is a scattering of potential material from what may be called the transitional fourth and fifth centuries, and very little at all in a Christian context thereafter (by contrast with copious two-dimensional images, whether painted or reliefs) until the ninth century in Western Europe,15 and almost nothing (with the exception of a single surviving free-standing ivory statuette of the tenth or eleventh century now in the V&A, Fig. 4.1)16 from the Christian East, throughout the Byzantine period nor in Islam. Moving beyond sites of cult or burial (with the proviso that so much of what we have is unprovenanced), the majority of what might be called early Christian figurines before the fifth century are images of the Good Shepherd (Fig. 4.2).17 But this is an ambivalent and not certainly a Christian theme with a very ancient pre-Christian heritage, and may not always have been intended as or taken to be a Christian symbol.18 Many of these statuettes, alongside a group of mythological images including Orpheus and Bellerophon, are not in fact free-standing figurines but are attached to columns for use in some kind of architectural ensemble, perhaps as “table legs”

  For some discussion of the category issues (as well as the problem of modern forgeries) see Aitken, Moorey, and Ucko 1971. On vessels, see e.g. Wolf 2016 and 2019, and Brittenham 2019. 14   Goodenough 1953–68. 15   Early examples of free-standing sacred statuettes include the late ninth- or early tenth-century reliquary statuette of St. Foy at Conques, with Fricke 2007, and the Golden Madonna of Essen (of about 980 ce), with Pothmann 2000, 138. 16   See Buckton 1994, no. 156, p. 145; and http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O93178/­virgin-andchild-theotokos-hodegetria-statuette-unknown/. 17   For a catalogue of 36 examples from imperial Roman times, see Klauser 1958, 45–6, with the addition of four further examples in Klauser 1965–6, 127 n.5. But note that Klauser fails to distinguish between free-standing statuettes and ones attached to columns which may have an architectural function and can be thought of as a form of very sculptural relief. 18   For the long ancient history of the theme, see Himmelmann 1980, 157–8 on Christian examples; for sketches of the theme in Christian art, see Legner 1959 and Awes Freeman 2015. 13

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F ig . 4.1  Ivory statuette of the Virgin and Child, perhaps late 10th or early 11th century ad from Constantinople. 325 mm in height. V&A no. 702-1884. Photograph: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

(trapezophora), perhaps in fountain or nymphaeum contexts,19 but potentially also as domestic offering tables or altars.20 In addition, there are the Cleveland marbles, purchased on the market in New York in 1965, whose five figurines include one free-standing Good Shepherd,

  See Lehmann-Hartleben 1923–4, with a catalogue of 48 examples at 271–6, Kollwitz 1957, 7–12 with a catalogue of Good Shepherds, and Feuser 2013, 155–61 with catalogue nos. 133–62. 20   See the interesting second-century ce pedestal tables from the House of Leda in Dion, near Mt. Olympus, with a lion’s head and paw and with Leda and the Swan in Pandermalis 2016, nos. 47–8, pp. 130–1. For a series of late antique examples also from Greece (including Orpheus, Bellerophon, and the Good Shepherd), see Drandaki, Papanikola-Bakirtzi and Tourta 2013, nos. 8–11, pp. 61–5. 19

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F ig . 4.2  Marble statuette of the Good Shepherd that served as a trapezephoron or table support, fourth century ad, found in Corinth. 720 mm in height. Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens, no. BXM 2. Photograph: Giovanni dall’ Orto.

one male orant and three figures representing the Jonah narrative—falling into the mouth of the Whale, being spewed out of it and lying beneath the gourdvine (Fig. 4.3).21 These are unique and their authenticity has been questioned; their provenance and function are unknown.22 Among the very unusual aspects of their iconography, Jonah beneath the gourd-vine is bearded and clothed. Dating is not easy, but if we assume these statuettes belong with the six small-scale busts that were purchased with them from the same dealer,23 then they perhaps come from the second half of the third century rather than later.24 Apart from these very few examples, and a number of bronze figurines from the Berlin museums published in the early twentieth century but apparently mainly lost after World War II,25 we have nothing whatsoever that will pass for free-standing figurines in any expensive material (let alone large-scale sacred statuary)26 from early Christian art or from Byzantium, and certainly nothing after the end of the fourth century.   The Cleveland marbles: Wixom 1967; Kitzinger 2002; Vorster 2018.   Wixom 1967, 67; Kitzinger 2002, 310–12. 23   Not by any means the only possible assumption. 24   Wixom 1967, 73–4; Kitzinger 2002, 310–12. 25   See Wulff 1909, 162–3, no. 717 (St. Peter, fourth–fifth century, apparently from Rome), no. 718 (soldier, fifth–sixth century, from Smyrna). 26   The one possible exception, attested in the sixth-century Liber Pontificalis 34.9–10 and 13, and possibly mythical are the life-size statues of the Savior, apostles and angels in hammered silver said to have been donated to the Lateran basilica by Constantine and those of Jesus and John the Baptist given by him to the Lateran baptistery: see Teasdale-Smith 1970 and de Blaauw 2001. 21 22

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F ig . 4.3  The Cleveland Marbles, perhaps third century ad from Asia Minor: (a) Jonah cast into the Whale, (b) Jonah spewed out by the Whale, (c) the Good Shepherd, (d) Jonah resting beneath the gourd vine, (e) Jonah praying. None more than 503 mm in height. Cleveland Museum of Art, John L Severance Fund, nos. 1965.237–241. Photographs: courtesy of the Museum on an open access license.

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If we take small finds from post 300 ce Christian contexts in the archaeological record, there is some continuity of figurine material sporadically attested in c­ ertain specific sites. For instance, at Sagalassos in Asia Minor, we have some quantities of terracotta figurines from the late antique layers,27 a few of which appear to be marked as Christian by the application of crosses and to have had a votive function in the post polytheistic dispensation (Fig. 4.4).28 Figurines, which appear to be from the Sagalassos workshop, have been found also at Seleucia Sidera in Psidia.29 The production of these materials appears to have ended in the early sixth century ce.30 At least one late antique bronze ­figurine

F ig . 4.4  Male terracotta figurine from Sagalassos with a cross on his hat, found at the Doric Temple. Fifth or sixth century ad. About 90 mm. Burdur Archaeology Museum No. SA1991DT/347. Photograph: copyright of the Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project.

27   E.g. a figure (SA 97 VA/N 171) from a room identified as a Byzantine workshop in the upper Agora, in Waelkens et al. 2000, 270 and fig. 85. 28   See Talloen 2011, 593–7, figs. 9–10 and 12 (nos. SA 1991 DT/347, SA 1998 B1/28, SA 2000 B1/164) and Jacobs and Waelkens 2017, 184–6. 29 30   See Laflı 1998.   Jacobs and Waelkens 2017, 184–5.

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from Asia Minor appears to have been a votive from its inscription.31 Similarly at Scythopolis (Beth Shean) in Palestine, Byzantine-period layers from before the Arab conquest of 636 ce have yielded some pottery statuettes including mother and child figurines and a rider figure.32 At Carthage and Oudhna (ancient Uthina, near Tunis), excavation of Vandal and Byzantine contexts have offered small quantities of figurines—including mother and child, orans and animal figures.33 Again, in Philippopolis (Plovdiv in Bulgaria), some rider figurines have been found, probably from the fourth century.34 We may say that the quantities are small—although they clearly speak to larger original numbers—and they represent a transitional phase between pagan practices and full Christianization across the Mediterranean. Most significant—and in some contradiction to the relative absence of evidence from elsewhere—is the material from Egypt, where figurines continue into the Christian period and indeed into Islamic hegemony.35 At the great Christian pilgrimage site of Abu Mina near Alexandria in Egypt, alongside the famous Menas ampullae, deposits of ceramic votive figurines—both female statuettes and horse-rider figures (as well as flasks in the shape of human heads)—appear to mark a continuity with pre-Christian devotional practices into the early Christian period (Fig. 4.5a–c).36 As so often, Egypt proves the exception in general within ancient and late antique studies—in part since its range of surviving materials and the unique conditions of their survival are so different from other parts of the Roman world.37   This is an interesting bronze bull with a cross at the forehead now in the British Museum. It has inscriptions to saints Rhiphsis and Ktimon. See Roes 1950. 32   See Rowe 1930, 52 and Hagan 2013. 33   Carthage: see Henig and Fulford 1984; Oudhna: Bonifay 2007, 146. 34   See Bospatchieva 2004. 35   See especially Frankfurter 2014 and 2015 which try to account for the material as a constitutive aspect of what Christianity was in late antique Egypt rather than as a pagan hang-over; now Frankfurter 2018, 34–8, 58–60, 127–30, 162–7. 36   See Kaufmann 1906–8, vol. 1, 83–102, esp. figs. 39, 41–2, and 44; vol. 2, p. 70, fig. 31 (for figurines from the Baptistery) and fig. 39 for an animal figurine; vol. 3, fig. 54 for further examples; Kaufmann 1910, 123–37; most recently Engemann 2016, nos. H.4–H.8, pp. 119–24 (female statuettes, riders, animals, and head flasks). For further discussion see e.g. Grossmann 1998, 300; Török 2005a, 272–3; Bangert 2010, 307–9. 37   The evidential exceptionalism of Egypt in terms of the distinct kinds of survivals there by contrast with other parts of the Greco-Roman antique world (e.g. papyri, textiles, etc.) raises the issue of whether Egypt is a special case within the patterns of ancient history or only a special case by virtue of the happenstance of data unavailable elsewhere. With materials like papyri or textiles, which clearly survive in dry sand much better than in other contexts, the happenstance argument has some force. But terracotta ­figurines in particular do survive well in all contexts, so the richness of Christian and Islamic era finds in Egypt for these periods does imply exceptionalism to my mind. I would read the latest account of Egyptian religion in late antiquity, Frankfurter 2018, as tending towards exception31

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F ig . 4.5  (a) Female terracotta figurines from Abu Mina, fifth to seventh century ad. Archaeological Museum in Alexandria. From C.M. Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt und das Nationalheiligtum der altchristlichen Aegypter in der westalexandrinischen Wüste, Ausgrabungen der Frankfurter Expedition am Karm Abu Mina, Cairo, 1910, vol. 1, taf. 73. (b) Heads and bodies from a further series of terracotta figurines from Abu Mina, fifth to seventh century ad. Archaeological Museum in Alexandria. From C.M. Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, vol. 1, taf. 74. (c) Terracotta rider and animal figurines from Abu Mina, fifth to seventh century ad. Archaeological Museum in Alexandria. From C.M. Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, vol. 1, taf. 77.

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F ig . 4.6  Terracotta figurine of standing mother and child from Upper Egypt (Qau el-Kebir, ancient Antaeopolis), mould pressed at the front with plain flat back. Remains of paint, bronze earrings on the woman and woollen cloth which once dressed both mother and child. Sixth to seventh century ad. 179 mm high. British Museum no.1924,1006.42. Photograph: © Trustees of The British Museum.

Here Christian-period figurine finds, all of types with distinct continuities to the pagan era,38 are copious and often without archaeological provenance—notably male and female orans figures (some of the latter naked),39 mother and child figurines (Isis Lactans? The Virgin?, Fig.  4.6),40 riders,41 and animals,42 all in ­terracotta as well as small anthropomorphic images in bone, bronze, wood, wax,

alist assumptions (note “local worlds” in the title) but tempered by some genuflection to comparison (e.g. pp. 31–3). 38   We owe a real debt to L. Török for publishing the holdings of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts— but the material is replicated in other unpublished collections. See Török 1993, 30–1 for Coptic figurines and the survival of pagan polytheist figurine types. For orants from the pre-Christian period, for instance, see Török 1995, 127–30 (nos. 169–81). 39   Female figurines: Strzygowski 1904, 244–5 (nos. 7131–3 from a tomb in Kom Eschkaw), Wulff 1909, 282–5 (nos. 1474–1506), Török 1993, 30–47; male: Török 1993, 48–50. 40   Mother and child figurines: Török 1993, 33–6 (nos. G6–10), 41 (G33), 45 (G50–1), and 46 (G54). These have often been connected to Isis Lactans—e.g. Tran Tam Tinh 1973, 40–9 and 1978, 1234–9; more recently, at length but vitiated by making no distinction between two- and three-dimensional representations as well as by a too-certain classification of items as “sacred” and “secular,” see Langener 1996. 41   Riders: Török 1993, 51–2. 42   Animals: Strzygowski 1904, 246 (no. 7134); Török 1993, 52–4.

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F ig . 4.7  Nude female bone figurine from Egypt (front and back). Christian or Islamic period (seventh to ninth century). 60 mm high. Metropolitan Museum New York: Gift of Lily S. Place, 1921. Photograph: Metropolitan Museum.

cloth and stone (Fig. 4.7).43 Are these things toys,44 dolls, idols, votives?45 The distinctions between these categories are ideologically vast, but may be negligible in terms of the empirical data of findspot, material presentation, or formal ­construction. 43   Bone images: Strzygowski 1904, 201–4 (nos. 8868–81); Wulff 1909, 131–4 (nos. 525–47); Török 1993, 59–64, where he calls them “idols” although they are “figurines” in Török 2005b, 244–8, nos. 171–87; Rodziewicz 2007, 81–6 (nos. 27–35); Rodziewicz 2016, 104–14 for excavated “dolls” in Islamic layers. The bone images, so-called “Coptic dolls,” reported by Wulff 1909, 131 as “amulets,” often nude and with striking articulation of breasts and genitals in some cases, survive long—beyond Christian hegemony and into Islam, see also Elderkin 1930, 477–9; for similar figurines outside Egypt: see Ayalon 2005, 80–7 and from Rome, Elderkin 1930, 472–5. The examples dressed in cloth from the Benaki Museum (inv. 10,389, 10,390, and 10,737) may indicate how these “Coptic dolls” were actually presented in antiquity: see Fluck 2004, 395–9 and Tsourinaki 2004, 401–2. Wooden images: Wulff 1909, 81–2 (nos. 244–9); Török 2005b, 239 (nos. 162–3). Bronze images: Strzygowski 1904, 325–9 (nos. 7002–16); Wulff 1909, 164–5 (nos. 724–83). Wax images: Raven 1983, 13 for surviving figures dating to the fifth century ce and 15, 18, 26 for fourth-century ce papyrus instructions for the making and use of wax figurines in magic. Cloth images: Fluck 2004. Stone images: Strzygowski 1904, 19–20 (nos. 7275 and 7277); Wulff 1909, 47–8 (nos. 122–8). 44   For late antique wooden toys from Egypt see Török 2005b, 239–40, nos. 164–6. 45   See Richard Neer’s chapter in this volume for some of the ways figurines take their meanings from context and not vice versa. For figurines (even in pre-Christian contexts) interpreted as dolls or toys see Baird 2014, 232–41.

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Of particular interest and with archaeological provenance, in addition to Abu Mina, is the material from Karanis where several hundred clay figurines were found dating from the first century ce to the fifth,46 where figurine-types like the orans span the whole period,47 with findspots that include early material from late antique contexts.48 In addition, in the post-dynastic archaeological layers of Medinet Habu in Upper Egypt, which became the Christian town of Jeme in the seventh and eighth centuries, until its abandonment in the context of a largescale Islamic conversion of the area in the ninth century,49 some quantities of clay figurines have been found, of which a small number are likely to be from the Christian era.50 Other examples from after the fourth century include some nude figurines from Shurafa in Upper Egypt.51 Key questions relating to the Egyptian evidence include whether patterns of pagan worship continued longer than elsewhere and whether syncretism of pagan devotional forms with Christian cult (as at Abu Mina) were more prolific or more tolerated than in other parts of the Roman world.52 The survival in the archaeological record of larger quantities of female and orant figures than of any other form, has led to the proposal that these are devotional votives related to fertility and childbirth,53 this practice itself being a continuity of ancient fertility cult in a Christian context. However, by contrast with the copious and arguably ubiquitous nature of pre-Christian figurine finds across the Mediterranean and near East, outside Egypt this material is sparse in late antiquity and often its date and the dating of any deposit are very uncertain. Nor is it clear what sort of function belonged to the odd occurrence of such objects in the record (some may have been toys, for instance).54 The archaeology of a great many major late antique sites appears to offer no figurine material at all.55

46   See Allen 1986, 560: about 1,000 were found but only 154 saved, the main categories being animals (pp. 565–70), male deities such as Harpocrates (pp. 571–3), female deities (pp. 574–5), and female orants (pp. 575–6). 47   E.g. Allen 1986, no. 82 (Kelsey Museum 6478, first century ce) to nos. 90–2, 96, and 101 (respectively Kelsey 6485, 3309, 3768, 3432, and 3766, all fourth to fifth century ce) 48   For instance Allen 1986, no. 85 (Kelsey 6475) is a seated female orant of the third century, found in a fourth-century context. 49   See Wilfong 2002. 50   See Teeter 2010, nos. 76 (female), 92–104 (orant), 113–14 (male), 151, 160–7 (horses), 168–70 (camels). 51   See Bailey 2008, 49–50, nos. 3122–3. 52   On the vitality of polytheistic practices with images into the Christian period in Egypt (drawing on both literary and archaeological evidence) see Frankfurter 2008. 53   See Teeter 2010, 83 and Frankfurter 2015. 54   Some fragments of possible anthropomorphic figurines at Nicopolis ad Istrum (Bulgarian): Falkner 2007, 88–91 and Roberts 2007, 76–7. 55  For instance, Aphrodisias, the Athenian agora, Butrint, Cyrene, the early Byzantine ceramics of Delphi, Miletus, Ptolemais, Sabratha, Sardis, Tell Hesban.

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F ig . 4.8  Marble statuette of Ganymede and the Eagle, from the House of the Greek Charioteers, Carthage, perhaps early fifth century ad. 490 mm in height. Excavated 1977, stolen from the Musée Paléochrétien, Carthage in 2013. Photograph: Pascale Radigue on a Creative Commons licence.

If we move to Hellenizing statuettes with pagan mythological subject matter, there is a reasonably large group of free-standing images that date to the fourth and into the fifth century ce, often of rather fine workmanship (e.g. Fig. 4.8). These have been excavated, mainly in villa contexts, from all over the Roman Empire, and many from Gaul.56 Classicizing miniature works, these objects appear to have been largely preserved as assemblages or collections in wealthy villas, with an antiquarian motive and for decorative display, their production and appreciation connected to late Roman traditions of paideia.57 Such uses do not preclude religious functions and some of the mythological figurines do appear to have been used in worship or as votive dedications, almost entirely from caches datable to the fourth century with almost nothing at all thereafter.58 These 56   I know of no comprehensive catalogue, but the best historical contextualization is Stirling 2005, which covers aspects of the whole empire despite its title. For issues of manufacture and production, see also Bergmann 1999. 57   Stirling 2005, 29–90 on collections, 12–13, 138–64, 228–32 on paideia. 58   Stirling 2005, 22–4, 193–4.

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include objects from domestic shrines and lararia,59 and also from some temple contexts before Christian suppression.60 However we interpret this material—as broadly antiquarian and nostalgic or as having some pagan cultic edge—it appears to have largely died out by the early fifth century. In this sense, it emulates the dearth of large-scale pagan statuary, whose making came to an end around the fourth or fifth century, followed by honorific civic portraiture in the sixth,61 and likewise in a different medium, the end of carved sarcophagi which falter by the early fifth century.62 Turning to the Islamic world, there are to my knowledge no figurines of the Ummayad period surviving from Islamic contexts, with the exception of the nude female figures in bone from Egypt which continue types found in Christian contexts as well as in pagan antiquity beforehand (Fig. 4.9).63 It is intriguing that we have some record—potentially legendary—of the vast treasuries attached to the greatest early mosques, which collected all kinds of precious votives not unlike pagan temples and Christian churches before them. Among the wonders listed for Mecca is a gold anthropomorphic figurine.64 In the small finds from the Metropolitan Museum’s excavations of Nishapur in northeastern Iran (dating from the Abbasid period), there are a small number of figurine fragments including animals and naked females—perhaps the remains of toys.65 Certainly there is a significant record of later Islamic animal and

59  Groups of third- to fourth-century ce statuettes of pagan deities, perhaps from pagan domestic shrines, have been found in Corinth, Clermont Ferrand, Athens, and Rome: see Stirling 2008; Provost and Mennessier-Jouannet 1994, 193–7; Daux 1968, 741–8; Ensoli and La Rocca 2000, 265–87 and 518–24; Anghel 2016; Burckhardt 2016, 136–8. For Sagalassos, see Jacobs 2016. 60  For example the London Mithraeum with its collection of divine statuettes and heads including figurines of Bacchus, see Shepherd 1998. 61   For recent synopses on statuary, see Leone 2013, 110–18 and 121–87; Smith and Ward-Perkins 2016 and http://www//laststatues.classics.ox.ac.uk. 62   See Brandenburg 2002. 63   See Rodziewicz 2012, 9–20 and 172–200 (nos. 278–319); Shatil 2016. That said, there is a rich tradition of three-dimensional stucco and limestone statuary from the Ummayad palaces such as Khirbat al-Mafjar and Qasr al-Mshatta, including near-nude females, alongside figural painting and mosaics (for instance at Qasr Amra) in what seem to be secular rather than sacred contexts: e.g. Evans and Ratliff 2012, 205, fig. 85 and 210, no. 142D. It may be that there would have been figurine production in contexts where there were also larger scale sculptures. 64   For instance in the Ka’ba at Mecca a golden idol in the shape of a human figure on a silver throne supposedly given by the king of Tibet on his conversion to Islam, see Aga-Oglu 1954, 182; in the early narratives of the Prophet’s clearing of idols from the Ka’ba, specific mention is made of his protection of icons (not three-dimensional images I take it) of the Virgin and Child and of Abraham: see e.g. Rogerson 2003, 190–2. Secular contexts include the fountain with figures of golden animals and birds in the Ummayad palace at Madinat al-Zahra in Spain, Aga-Oglu 1954, 189, and further on animal figures in three-dimensions Aga-Oglu 1954, 195–6. 65   E.g. in clay: Metropolitan Museum accession nos. 38.40.102, 39.40.116, 40.170.162, 40.170.206, all dated eighth to eleventh century by the Museum; in plaster 40.170.141.

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F ig . 4.9  Female bone figurine from early Islamic Egypt with some painting, seventh to tenth century. 155 mm in height. British Museum no. 1979,1017.203. Photograph: © Trustees of The British Museum.

a­ nthropomorphic figurines, including ephemeral examples made to eat,66 which may imply the existence of earlier material that does not survive.67 But again—as with Christian figurines and indeed pagan ones in contexts of Christian ­hegemony—the archaeological evidence is strikingly sparse by contrast with ­periods of pagan polytheist autonomy. While we must worry about bias in the publications record (for instance, the historical assumption that figurines in finds must be early, the lack of publication of later strata in digs traditionally concerned with the Greek and Roman periods but not late antiquity, the dearth of scholarly interest in such classes of figurines as the orant figures)68 the lack of small-finds evidence (with some

66   See the 1180s travel book of Ibn Jubayr recounting a pilgrimage from Spain to Mecca and back: Broadhurst 1952, 118 for sugar figurines in Mecca. In general ephemeral objects have been very poorly discussed in archaeological art history (because they do not survive), but see for instance Stewart 2014. 67   See for instance Grube 1966; Rogers 1969; Dodd 1972; Watson 1981; Salm 1995; Gibson 2008–9. Notably the excavators of Wâsit, down river from Baghdad on the Tigris in Iraq, found hundreds of terracotta figurines (human, animal, riders) dated to the thirteenth century and later in what they assumed was a toy shop: see Safar 1945, 36–7, plates XVII–XXII. I owe thanks to Finnbarr Barry Flood for discussion of this issue with me, and for this bibliography. 68   On this last point, see Teeter 2010, 80–1.

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exceptions, especially in Egypt) does appear to support the impression of a lack of figurines in religious contexts in the Abrahamic world. My search for material has been anything but comprehensive, yet even if we were to quadruple the amount and provenances of post-Christian figurines I have found, the fact remains that—outside Egypt—the evidence points to an extraordinary diminution in the production and use of what had been from the earliest antiquity one of the most common and popular categories of artistic manufacture. Even in Egypt, while there is a real continuity with pre-Christian polytheistic practices, and despite the problems of minimal publication, it is arguable that the numbers of Christian-period figurines are substantially lower than those of earlier times. From a broad brush perspective one may say that the advent of h ­ egemony by the Abrahamic religions goes with the severe curtailment if not the ­complete eradication of the manufacture and use of figurines not only in religious ­contexts but much more generally. It is worth stressing the significance of this finding. Effectively, ideological change at the level of religious belief appears to be responsible for a fundamental transformation of the kinds of objects people made and used, and therefore of the kinds of evidence available in the archaeological archive as well as for the eradication of a key and ubiquitous type of archaeological find.

W H AT WA S A F IGU R I N E?

Two initial points are worth making.69 First, from the most “primitive,” “archaic,” or “abstract” early prehistoric examples to the most impressively naturalistic ­statuettes from Hellenistic times (such as terracotta figurines from Tanagra or Alexandria),70 free-standing figurines in human form are miniature imitations of the body, male and female, naked or clothed.71 The pull to a homology with the viewer or user or the world she or he inhabits (a quality we may or may not wish to define as a form of mimesis) is powerful and arguably fundamental. The second point is that—from the earliest prehistory (e.g. Minoan and Mycenaean c­ ulture)72 to the end of pagan polytheism in the Roman world (in its full extent including

69   For an incisive interrogation of this question in the present tense (“what is a figurine?”) in relation to a Neolithic corpus dated to 7400–6000 bce, see Meskell et al. 2008, 140–3. For a range of current views from a prehistoric perspective, see Insoll 2017a. 70   Tanagra: Kleiner 1984; Higgins 1986; Jeammet 2007 and 2010; Barrow 2018, 49–61. Alexandria: Tezgör 2007. 71   For discussion of scale, see Faust and Halperin 2009, 3–5; Marcus 2009, 25–50; Joyce 2009, 411– 14. Oddly there is almost no discussion of scale per se in the many pages of Insoll 2017c. 72   E.g. Rethemiotakis 2001; Schallin and Pakanen 2009; Renfrew 2017; Morris 2017.

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the north)73—figurines are plentiful, indeed ubiquitous in the archaeological record, including that of the polytheistic world which was to become Christian.74 These points have led to figurines occupying an extraordinarily important place in the history of the earliest art. I quote from their greatest student of the ­second half of the twentieth century, Peter Ucko, writing nearly 50 years ago, who spoke of: . . . the unique position which they occupy within the prehistoric small-find material, for they have nearly always been accepted as giving some indication of the non-materialistic side of their makers’ lives. In almost all regions of the world they have been taken either as representations of the Mother Goddess or as somehow connected with Mother Goddess worship. In general, the archaeologist’s eternal interest in the ritual and religious beliefs of the prehistoric peoples he deals with has been mainly based on the anthropomorphic figurines.75

In function, for which our excavation evidence is at best a steer but never fully conclusive since all excavated objects may have had prior uses and earlier lives beyond their depositional context, figurines have been attributed significant religious and votive uses (in both sanctuaries and graves without necessary recourse to outdated Mother Goddess theories) but appear also in domestic contexts—from table adornments to dolls in play.76 It remains a significant problem that in the absence of literary evidence about the uses of such objects, archaeology needs to apply a series of theoretically derived best-guesses, inevitably tied to modern assumptions about ancient culture, in order to determine function—a notoriously unreliable guide.77 The empirical data extrapolated from the material has allowed speculations about inter-cultural relations,78 social life and state dynamics,79 trade,80 and of course many conclusions about religion and ritual.81 The current consensus (at any rate as suggested by Mesoamerican anthropology) may be thought a rather bland general proposal: “the multivalent emic meanings [are] dependent on the specific

  E.g. Bémont, Jeanlin, and Lahanier 1993, or Sharpe 2014 on the third century ce.   For a rich range of discussions, see Muller and Laflı 2015–17. 75   Ucko 1968, xv; see e.g. Barrett 2011, 421–42, or Sharpe 2014, for recent instantiations, taking figurines as evidence for domestic religious practices. For incisive questioning of some of these assumptions, see Meskell et al. 2008. 76   Ritual uses: e.g. Schallin and Pakanen 2009, 11–12. Dolls: Ucko 1968, 421–3; Harlow 2013, 322–40. For the problems in deciding, see e.g. Perlès 2001, 254–72. General discussion of functional interpretations: Ucko 1968, 427–44. 77   For some reflections on this problem in relation to the archaeology of ritual, see Elsner 2012b. 78   The classic statement is Ucko 1968, 390–408. 79   For example, the general approach in e.g. Halperin 2014, or Clark 2016. 80  For instance in relation to Egypt-related materials from Hellenistic Delos, Barrett 2011; for Mesoamerica, see e.g. Faust and Halperin 2009, 9–11. 81   E.g. Stern 2010, 156–8. 73 74

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audience, temporal and spatial context”;82 to which we may say “of course,” but for which empirical evidence is rarely adequate.83 We must be particularly cautious about terminology—for instance, the tendentious use of such words as “idol” (perhaps unthinkingly) is not helpful in attempting to come to any kind of cultural understanding of the roles played by figurines, at any point in the pre-Christian or pre-Islamic era.84 We have in fact relatively limited means for conceptualizing religious culture in the pre-Christian era (although we know it was ubiquitous and fundamental), but the use of polemical terms whose aggressive intent was honed by a long tradition of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim vituperation against polytheism (and against each other) is certainly not conducive to clarity. Archaeological figurine studies may be divided between two traditions—an “art-historical” approach from scholars working in historical periods (especially Classical archaeologists) and the much more theorized, comparative interests of scholars focused on (non-text-assisted) prehistory.85 In the former case, which insists on the difference between “primitive images” and “true miniature sculpture” (tied to the at least questionable historiographic model of a shift in art “from religious to artistic preoccupations”),86 there is a tendency to see figurines as influenced by—even as copies of—monumental sculpture.87 This is an ­art-historical instinct that places miniatures on a lower point in a putative hierarchy of sculpture than life-size or monumental statuary, an assumption which may not hold good universally (either in antiquity or in modernity) and for which there is little evidence.88 In prehistoric archaeology, fundamental since the 1960s has been   Faust and Halperin 2009, 2. For more attempts at general meanings, see Bailey 2017 as well as Insoll 2017a, Lesure 2017, and Meskell 2017. 83   Meskell et al. 2008, 158 rightly conclude of Çatalhöyük that “we can say little about [figurines’] original use-lives from the excavation and contextual data retrieved” but that from the material evidence of use-wear at final deposition, figurines were not “separated from human affairs, spatially and temporally” nor were they “inert objects of worship or contemplation.” While these conclusions are surely correct, one may observe that they simply negate a deeply reductive and largely polemical “Protestant” assumption about images in religious life which archaeology has absorbed and ventriloquized. 84   Egregious examples include Negbi 1976, passim but e.g. 2, Thimme 1977, passim and esp. 426– 577, Török 1993, 59–64, and Banffy 2001, passim and esp. 65–83; see also Joyce 2009, 420; Scarre 2017, 894–9, sometimes but not always with “idol” in scare-quotes; Skeates 2017, 613–14. 85   For contemporary theorization, see especially Lesure 2002; Bailey 2005; Mina 2008, 3–24; Budin 2011, 25–9; Lesure 2011; Insoll 2017c. The fundamental theoretical advance in the literature was made in the 1960s: Ucko 1968. 86   See Thompson 1959, 1. 87   E.g. Pottier 1890, ii; Negbi 1976, 2–3; this is an analytic model that underlies Bartman 1992. 88   It will be apparent from the argument below that I think the idea that a hierarchy of monumental to miniature, as indicating anything but scale, is completely misguided. For a few words on figurines as “monumental,” see Osborne 2014, 1–3. Arguably sacred force (whether we see this as animation or agency or in any other terms) is as powerfully invested in mimetic miniatures as in any other kind of object, perhaps even more so. See the discussion of Roman images and texts about them in the third section of this chapter. 82

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the drive to resist universalist interpretations, such as the early twentieth-century idea of a universal mother goddess represented in figurines of all traditions.89 This field has been characterized by the rise of contextual studies and the move to comparison of figurines from different contexts.90 Of particular interest is archaeology’s recognition of the significance of anthropomorphic figurines as objects of “intentionally expressive material culture” in their “production, use and strategic deposition,”91 which have been subject within the interpretative literature and in their treatment by excavators to a “special rhetoric”: Figurines possess strange, attractive powers that seduce and overwhelm archaeologists and editors. It is as if figurines, on their own, out of context, in publications and in museum displays, function with an intangible, inherent and perhaps unquantifiable rhetoric.92

In the context of the difference between the range of archaeological materials (shards of pottery, bones etc.) and those that might be said to constitute “art,” this rhetoric might be described as the echo of a particular reverential approach—a form of that special, disinterested, contemplative space which Kant long ago reserved for aesthetic judgment—which in turn generates a special model of ekphrastic performance in the descriptive rhetoric of interpreters.93 But it has a tendency to essentialism—especially in essentializing the nature of the objects so treated (both as items of their own time and as items in our time).94 Now as an art historian, I have no doubt that what makes figurines special within the archaeological record and in modern appreciation—what has generated so much interest, so particular a range of rhetorical treatments and not least the assumption of essentialism—is their clear representative function as objects that work iconically and mimetically in certain respects to indicate something else.95 That representative quality combines two others—anthropomorphism (or, in the case of animal figures, zoomorphism) and miniaturization.96 Together   A theme demolished in Ucko 1962 and Ucko 1968, 409–19.   For summaries of the universalist tradition and bibliography, see Bailey 2005, 16–19 and Lesure 2011, 10–25; on comparison and context, see Lesure 2011, 26–47 and 2017. 91   See Bailey 2005, 6–7. 92   Bailey 2005, 12–13, cf. Faust and Halperin 2009, 5–6 or Nakamura and Meskell 2013, 231. For a heavily aestheticized account, dependent largely (though not only) on figurine material, see e.g. Renfrew 1991 and again Renfrew 2017, 637–9 and 654–6. For a critique of the “irruption of sensibility into early Cycladic archaeology” through the “modern aesthetic appreciation of a select element of material culture,” see Broodbank 2000, 58–65 (quote p. 58). 93   On Kant, see e.g. Guyer 1979, 167–206; Bernstein 1992, 17–65; Pippin 2014, 10–17. 94 95   Bailey 2005, 13.   See Bailey 2005, 15 and Lesure 2011, 49. 96   There are good discussions of anthropomorphism at Bailey 2005, 66–87 and miniaturization, ibid. 26–44. Further on miniaturization theory, see Foxhall 2015 and Martin and Langin-Hooper, 2018, 3–6 with bibliography. 89 90

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these two features of a figurine give it a set of affects in relation to the viewer or handler—observable not only in the ways contemporary children play with dolls,97 but also in some of our rare accounts in the ancient textual record.98 In particular, miniaturization has been argued to empower the spectator, both through relative size and through the resulting ability to control the homologue of a thing, but it also may act to destabilize its viewer, through a miniature object’s ability to unsettle its handler (especially if powers of agency and animation are imputed to it).99 The figurine, by virtue of its formal nature, creates a sense of make-believe intimacy with its handler—with all the complex range of affective emotions, projections, and fantasies such a thing is capable of generating.100 These issues are no less relevant to modern figurines than to prehistoric ones (for instance Japanese Ningyo dolls of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).101 One may add that in terms of the narrative elicited by such objects through their intrusion (by means of handling) into the embodied and physical materiality of their beholders’ lives, figurines of all periods have a different—let us call it “intrusive”—character from flat art like two-dimensional painting or relief work, which is distanced by means of an optic rather than a haptic model of viewing-engagement, and subject to different forms of storytelling, vicarious voyeurism, and make-believe. But, methodologically, we need to be wary before applying the insights of prehistoric archaeology to any account of figurines in historical periods. When the prehistoric literature borrows observations and conclusions from the likes of George Kubler, Erwin Panofsky, and T.  J.  Clark,102 or James Elkins, David Summers, and David Freedberg,103 or from visuality theory in the hands of such

  The fundamental psychoanalytic discussions are by Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott, although more as suggestive insights than as an argument specifically focused on dolls. See e.g. Klein 1988b, 317: “It is an everyday observation that little girls play with dolls as if they were their babies. But a child will often display a passionate devotion to a doll, for it has become to her a live and real baby, a companion, a friend, which forms part of her life. She not only carries it about with her but constantly has it in her mind, starts the day with it and gives it up unwillingly if she is made to do something else”; also Klein 1988a, 134 n.1. For dolls as transitional objects, see Winnicott, 1971, 1–2, 14, and 40–1 (on transitional phenomena in general). Notable is the love letter written by Winnicott to his wife Clare on the theme of his own transitional object, a doll called Lily: see Winnicott 1989, 16–17. 98   For dolls in Greco-Roman texts, see Bettini 1999, 213–27; for archaeological discussion and interpretation see Elderkin 1930; D’Ambra 2014; Newby 2019. 99   See Bailey 2005, 32–5; Langin-Hooper 2015, 62–8. For a critique of some of these claims, see Claudia Brittenham’s chapter in this volume with its insistence not on miniaturization per se but on relative scaling of objects in relation to the human body. 100   See Bailey 2005, 38–9; cf. Budin 2011 on kourotrophoi, or mother and child, figurines in Bronze Age Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levant, and the Aegean. More on tactility: Bailey 2014. 101 102   See Avitabile and Kawakami 1995.   See Lesure 2011, 49–54; Lesure 2017, 44–6. 103   See Lesure 2011, 6–8, 54. 97

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as Kaja Silverman, W. J. T. Mitchell, and Laura Mulvey,104 we must worry about the extent to which it is applying critical reflections derived from an empirical consideration of relatively modern historical objects and their relevant texts to its own corpus of materials, namely prehistoric objects with no contextualizing literatures.105 Those modern scholarly insights—historically valid though they may be in their relevant contexts—only have the value of a “what if the ancient world was like this” thought-experiment for the prehistoric contexts to which they are applied. It would be a leap to imagine that a “what if” thought-experiment offered any kind of reality assumption—and therefore it is not methodologically secure for us to affirm that insights, derived from theoretical conclusions dependent on the art history of textually-interpreted materials, can offer the way to ­uncontestable truths or facts about antique figurines. It is circular to apply such interpretative assumptions (as if they were facts about antiquity) as an interpretative tool to help us understand the figurines of historical periods. Before I turn to some texts from the Greco-Roman period, it is worth worrying about one final—and I think key—methodological problem in the study of ­figurines, which in fact relates directly to my own theme. The significance of figurines to the writing of the history of religions—as signifiers of “the non-materialistic side of their makers’ lives” (in Ucko’s words), as evidence for ritual and religion, as spurs for modern fantasies about the mother goddess and so forth—lies in part in their ubiquity in the archaeological record and in part in their striking absence from the rich systems of representation and iconography evolved by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, at any rate outside Egypt. There has to be a legitimate concern—so very strongly prompted by the easy uses of the word “idol” which keeps recurring in the prehistoric literature—that figurines fulfill a modern need to imagine a religious world before the one defined by Abrahamic monotheism that gave rise to modernity. In particular the urge towards comparative interpretations of the material,106 is—one might fear— predicated on a category-construction that not only depends on emphasizing something that the Abrahamic aftermath to antiquity did not do, but is ultimately the product of an explicit Abrahamic polemic against idolatry. That is, the figurine when seen as a religious category may be a Judaeo-Christian-Islamic fix, of whose ideological dimensions we may be in denial and to whose polemical intent we may be blind.   See Bailey 2005, 82–3, 143–5; Meskell 2015, 6–11 and Meskell 2017, 17–20, both using Mitchell 2005 to ask “what do figurines want?” 105  It is true that some of these accounts (Summers, Freedberg, Mulvey, Mitchell) are formulated in universalist terms, but arguably that means they are insufficiently nuanced historically, and are committed to models of phenomenology, sexuality, or desire that may be wished to be universal but are not necessarily so. 106   Notably by Ucko 1968 although he stays in Europe and the near East, and Lesure 2011 who adds Mesoamerica; implicitly now the range in Insoll 2017c. 104

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T H E ROM A N F IGU R I N E: A N I M AT ION, CU LT I VAT ION, A N D AGENC Y

Now let me turn to some texts about figurines, situated not in prehistory but in the historical world of the Roman Empire.107 I will comment briefly on three cases from the imperial period that describe figurines in three different media—a pricey kind of wood (ebony), the prestige medium of bronze, and an expensive form of bone (ivory). The first is a personal account in prose of a statuette owned by the writer; the second a pair of poetic celebrations of a famous work of art attributed to the famous fourth-century sculptor Lysippus; the third a mythological fantasy in verse which happens to be one of the most potent accounts of a naturalistic work of art in the entire Classical tradition. I begin with the remarkable Roman orator, sophist, and novelist, Apuleius of Madaura (c. 130–200 ce) writing in Roman north Africa. In the course of a dazzling speech known as the Apology (or Pro se de magia)—a defense against the accusation of being a magician, which was either a real speech given before a court (as most readers assume)108 or a clever fiction not wholly unrelated to the magical themes of Apuleius’s famous novel, the Metamorphoses or Golden Ass109—the orator turns to discuss fi ­ gurines.110 Apuleius tells us he is accused of having had a statuette (sigillum) manufactured “from a special kind of wood in a secret workshop for magical purposes” (quod me aiunt ad magica maleficia occulta fabrica ligno exquisitissimo comparasse, Apology 61); “although it is ugly and horrible, looking like a skeleton” (sceleti forma turpe et horribile, 61), he allegedly held it in great reverence and called it his “king” (βασίλεα, in Greek, 61). Here all the worst elements of ritual and magic (a recurring theme in relation to charismatic gurus and superstars in the p ­ eriod)111 are focalized on a figurine.

  On Greek and Roman images with varieties of magical and animated qualities, see esp. Faraone 1991 and 1992; Wilburn 2012, 28–30, 56–7, 74–83; Kousser 2017, 19–42; Faraone 2017; for figurines and agency in Egypt: see Frankfurter 2018, 24–5, 28, 34–8, 58–60, 65–6, 127–30. 108   Hijmans 1994, 1712; Hunink 1997 largely accepts the factuality of the trial (although see vol. 1, pp. 26–7); similarly Harrison 2000, 39–88, May, 2005, 73–108 and Hunter 2012, 142–3 harbor no doubts. 109   Too 1996 is in my judgment rightly skeptical: “a literary portrait . . . on the pretext of supplying defense against a murder allegedly committed” (134). Cf. McCreight 1991, 29–41 and Hunink 2001, 23–4: “the speech may be entirely fictitious.” I see no reason to believe in the reality of the case. 110   On the figurine of Mercury, see Too 1996, 146–51; Hunink 1997, vol. 2, 162–74; Harrison 2000, 74–5; Gaisser 2008, 15–17; Tilg 2008, 125–7. 111   For instance, Philostratus’s eight-book-long Life of Apollonius of the early third century is constructed as a careful defense against the charges of sorcery made against its hero. See e.g. Flinterman 1995, 60–6; Francis 1995, 90–7; Ogden 2007. 107

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After some play with the fact that Apuleius’s accusers claim that he operated in secret and yet they know the identity of the figurine’s maker, one Cornelius Saturninus, “a man who is praised by those who know him for his skills, and whose conduct is beyond reproach” (uir inter suos et arte laudatus et moribus comprobatus, 61), the sophist admits to sponsoring the making of a statuette. The initial request from Apuleius is presented as being for Saturninus “to carve a figurine of any god he wanted, to whom I could address my regular prayers, from any kind of material, provided it was a type of wood” (aliquod simulacrum cuiuscumque uellet dei, cui ex more meo supplicassem, quacumque materia, dummodo lignea, exculperet, 61). After starting on boxwood, the craftsman eventually made the figurine—a “dense and compact little Mercury” (compacta crassitudine Mercuriolum, 61)—from ebony, “a less common and more durable kind of material” (materia rariore et durabiliore, 61). I know of no surviving Mercury statuettes in wood, but there are many in metal (e.g. Fig. 4.10). That Mercury was the patron god of magic is not a topic Apuleius chooses to discuss in his defense. But of particular interest to us is his description of the image and of his uses of such figurines.

F ig . 4.10  Bronze figurine of Mercury seated on a rock with a cock to the right. Excavated in Paramythia, Epirus, Western Greece. British Museum, no. 1904,1010.1. Photograph: © Trustees of The British Museum.

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Addressing the judge, Claudius Maximus (who was in fact Proconsul of Africa in 158–9 ce), Apuleius produces the Mercury statuette and says: Please take it, Maximus, and have a look at it. A sacred object can safely be handed to such pure and pious hands! Look how handsome its face is, full of the freshness of exercise, and how cheerful the features of the god are. Look how charmingly the down creeps over both cheeks, and how his curls show from under the edge of his felt cap. Look how elegantly those little wings stand out just above his temples, how gracefully his cloak is tied up around his shoulders. Whoever dares to call this a skeleton, surely never looks at statues of gods or completely disregards them. In short, whoever thinks this is a ghost is haunted himself. May this god, the messenger between the upper world and the underworld, call the wrath of the divine powers of both upon you, Aemilianus, as a punishment for your lie! May he continually bring appearances of the dead before your eyes, and whatever shades, malevolent ghosts, spirits or spooks there are; and all nocturnal phantoms, all fears of the grave – from which you, through age and merit, are not that far away. (63–4) accipe quaeso, Maxime, et contemplare; bene tam puris et tam piis manibus tuis traditur res consecrata. em uide, quam facies eius decora et suci palaestrici plena sit, quam hilaris dei uultus, ut decenter utrimque lanugo malis deserpat, ut in capite crispatus capillus sub imo pillei umbraculo appareat, quam lepide super tempora pares pinnulae emineant, quam autem festiue circa humeros uestis substricta sit. hunc qui sceletum audet dicere, profecto ille simulacra deorum nulla uidet aut omnia neglegit; hunc denique qui laruam putat, ipse est laruans. At tibi, Aemiliane, pro isto mendacio duit deus iste superum et inferum commeator utrorumque deorum malam gratiam semperque obuias species mortuorum, quidquid umbrarum est usquam, quidquid lemurum, quidquid manium, quidquid larbarum, oculis tuis oggerat, omnia noctium occursacula, omnia bustorum formidamina, omnia sepulchrorum terriculamenta, a quibus tamen aeuo et merito haud longe abes.

This passage is powerful. It captures the affect and affection of both miniaturization and mimesis in the speaker’s enthusiastic encomium of the figurine’s freshness and grace. The kind of caress implied by “pure and pious hands” holding the image and looking at it, is turned verbal in a brilliant descriptive turn in which words hug the statuette’s face, body, curls, and cloak, identifying with them and evoking not material precision but the qualities of handsomeness, cheerfulness, and elegance. But, without missing a beat, the speech switches from this mood, with all the whimsy of a god in a huff, into a powerful and dark evocation of animate agency as the charming figurine is invoked to curse Apuleius’s enemies. Effectively the mimetic anthropomorphism which allows the speaker to identify with the image as if it were a living being animates the statuette into retributive action quite as scary as anything prehistoric archaeological theory has imputed into figurines from worlds without texts.

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The uses of this kind of miniature cult image are further expressed in what Apuleius described as “a habit of mine” (morem, 63): I usually carry with me, wherever I go, a statuette (simulacrum) of some god, keeping it among my books. On feasts I offer up incense and wine to it, and sometimes an animal victim. (63) Nam morem mihi habeo, quoquo eam, simulacrum alicuius dei inter libellos conditum gestare eique diebus festis ture et mero et aliquando uictima supplicare.

That is, such figurines—despite their manufactured nature as objects made by common and identifiable artisans at the behest of patrons—are the object of active worship, ritual, even animal sacrifice. They are treated to, perhaps in the cultural context we may say they respond to, regular cultivation and effusive affection. They are capable of invocation for retributive action such as curses, which is only possible if one presumes that to at least some people in the culture they are seen as capable of performing the acts threatened by such curses. As he closes his account of this figurine, Apuleius insists that it is not made from gold or silver but wood, because of the injunctions of Plato in his Laws (12.955E–956A), who prefers wood or stone as the substance of votive offerings since gold and silver have the danger of arousing envy, ivory “comes from a body bereft of soul,” while iron and bronze are “instruments of war.” In other words, he even provides an authoritative philosophical frame to justify and defend his image. In general the kinds of figurine described by Apuleius have been largely treated by modern scholarship within the discourse of aesthetic appreciation and connoisseurship in the history of Classical art.112 But the discourses of art-historical antiquarianism in antiquity are rarely fully separable from those of animation and agency in a sacred context.113 In particular miniature copies of famed originals have had a (small) role to play in the grand theme of Kopienkritik, the study of lost famed originals by great named sculptors through their supposed later replicas.114 There is certainly ancient textual support for this connoisseurial approach—which is one that did of course survive into the Christian era in the antiquarianism that preserved and collected precious relics of the past in the treasuries of aristocrats, churchmen, and emperors.115 For instance, take the ­surviving poems on Hercules Epitrapezius—a bronze statuette believed to have

112   For example, Gombrich 2002 firmly avoids any discussion of religion, despite a rich account of ancient forms of “primitivist” aesthetics. The recent aesthetics of antiquity is likewise reticent about questions of cultivation, see e.g. the essays in Sluiter and Rosen 2012, but note Platt 2010. 113 114   The classic paper remains Gordon 1979.   See esp. Bartman 1992. 115   The sixth-century poems by Christodorus of Coptus in the Greek Anthology (Book II) describe the statues collected in the Baths of Zeuxippus in Constantinople; Book XVI of the Greek Anthology (containing the poems from the Planudean Anthology not found in the Palatine manuscript) has many ekphrastic epigrams on ancient statues in Constantinople.

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F ig . 4.11  (a) Roman marble version of Hercules Epitrapezius, perhaps first century ad. 432 mm high. Cleveland Museum of Art: J.H. Wade Fund. Photograph: Cleveland Museum of Art. (b) Roman bronze version of Hercules Epitrapezius on a limestone base, first century bc or ad. 950 mm including the base. Found in a villa near Pompeii. National Museum, Naples. Photograph: Carlo Raso via Flickr.com. (c) Roman limestone version of Hercules Epitrapezius, first century ad. Inscribed on the base in Greek ‘Diogenes made (this). Sarapiodorus son of Artemidorus (dedicated this) in fulfilment of a vow’, this sculpture was excavated in 1880 in the Palace of Sennacherib, Nineveh, Iraq. It is likely to have been a purchased import into a Parthian collection or a piece of booty. 529 mm high. British Museum no. 1881,0701.1. Photograph: © Trustees of The British Museum.

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been made by Lysippus himself for Alexander the Great—which was said to have been owned later by no less than Hannibal and Sulla, and which had by the late first century ce entered the possession of the wealthy Roman poet and collector Novius Vindex, and was much copied in various media (Fig. 4.11a–c).116 Both Martial (Epigrams IX.43 and 44) and Statius (Silvae IV.6) wrote poems in ­celebration of this object, or at any rate in praise of its owner through his prize piece.117 In different ways, the work of both poets—Martial’s brief epigrams and Statius’s poem, the longest in Book IV of the Silvae, ironically devoted to a little figurine—take up some of the themes we have already seen in Apuleius. Both poets are concerned—in part as an element of the rhetoric of praise for the current owner—to recite the piece’s history of famed earlier possessors. Both accounts animate the statuette through a vibrant ekphrasis and a discussion of its relations with earlier owners. In Statius, the poet dines with Vindex. Among the many treasures on display in his host’s collection (the names of major Classical artists like Myron, Praxiteles, Polyclitus, and Apelles are mentioned, and Phidias is referred to, vv. 25–30), the poet falls in love with the statuette of Hercules, Amphitryon’s son (Amphitryoniades multo mea cepit amore/pectora, vv. 33–4). The image cannot sate his gaze however long he looks (nec longo satiavit lumina visu, v. 34). This language of desire and the gaze gives way to the conceit, itself a trope of ekphrastic epigram,118 that the god had revealed himself to Lysippus in an epiphany (vv. 36–7). Much is made of the wonder of the figurine’s miniature form: small to view but huge in its impact (parvusque videri/sentirique ingens, vv. 37–8), only a foot high (mirabilis intra/stet mensura pedem, vv. 38–9) in contrast with its colossal effects—a paradox that works on the viewing poet, in relation to the object as a figure for its mythical hero, and as an impressive artistic invention in Lysippus’s mind (vv. 38–46). So great the illusion that renders a small form large: ac spatio tam magna brevi mendacia formae! (v. 43).119 From this description, obsessed with the power of the miniature, Statius turns to the object’s pedigree. We are told that Alexander loved his divine figurine (numine caro, v. 73) with its gentle countenance (mitis vultus, v. 55) and carried it with him as his companion in the west and in the east (comitem occasus secum portabat et ortus, v. 61). All this is very like Apuleius and his Mercury—the discourse of   See Bonadeo 2010, 70–86.   On the object in the poems: Moreno 1987, 73–9; Bartman 1992, 147–86; Moreno 1995, 347–51; Bonadeo 2010, 24–56; Daehner and Lapatin 2015, 220, cat. 17. On the patron: Nauta 2002, 228–9. For issues of poetics in both poems, see McNelis 2008. Martial: Henriksen 1998, 204–15; Schneider 2001; Dufallo 2013, 237–43. Statius: Coleman 1988, 173–94; Newlands 2002, 79–87; Chinn 2005; Zeiner 2005, 190–200; Rühl 2006, 241–8, 260–4; Bonadeo 2010; Squire 2011, 267–71, 278; Dufallo 2013, 229–37. 118   See esp. Platt 2011, 170–211. 119   Moreover, in the reference to the “Telchines” at v. 47, evoking Callimachus’s Aetia, the question of great art in miniature form is turned explicitly on classic issues in Hellenistic and Roman poetics. See Bonadeo 2010, 67–70, 215–17. 116 117

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personal affection, of bodily closeness between owner and figurine, of the statuette’s portability among the personal effects of its possessor. As with Apuleius, so with Statius’s Alexander, that affect crosses the line from affection to religious cultivation—from love to worship. Alexander seeks courage from his statuette for the next day’s battles (semper ab hoc animos in crastina bella petebat, v. 64), and he feels the need to apologize to it when he sacks Hercules’s hometown of Thebes (fertur Thebanos tantum excusasse triumphos, v. 70). From this movement of relationship, conversation, emotive encouragement, and apology, Statius’s account proceeds swiftly to full animation. As Alexander lay dying of poison, he was struck by fear (timuit, v. 74) when his beloved deity (numine caro, v. 73) changed its expression (vultus alios, v. 73) and the bronze began to sweat (aeraque . . . sudantia, v. 74). Effectively the figurine foretells and arguably mourns its owner’s imminent death, and through its actions—which are transformative of its material form and expression—it strikes terror into the viewer. All this coheres well with Apuleius’s affection for, closeness to, and cultivation of his Mercury, as well as the ability of Apuleius’s figurine to function as the talismanic transmitter of curses. Alexander’s request for courage from the statue may imply the same kind of cultivation as is made explicit in Apuleius’s pattern of offerings, libations, and sacrifices. By contrast with its warm relations to Alexander, the figurine is (with full animation) said to have hated Hannibal (oderat, v.80) despite the Carthaginian’s libations (deo libavit, v. 76) and to have been a grieving companion (maerens comes, v. 81) of Hannibal’s wickedness. This time with a wholly bad owner (from the Roman point of view!), the figurine’s constant presence and cultivation is accompanied by powerful emotion but now expressed as hatred from its side. In Martial’s poem 9.43, which shifts from a lingering description of the object to its maker and owners, the connoisseurial account finds itself hijacked as it moves to Hannibal who as a boy swore by the figurine at the Libyan altars (hunc puer ad Libycas iuraverat Hannibal aras, 9.43.9) and Sulla whom the statue ordered to put aside kingship (iusserat hic Sullam ponere regna trucem, 9.43.10). Martial’s poem rises to the figurine as subject of active verbs of injunction and volition, as well as being capable of emotions in its own right: Hercules commanded Sulla (iusserat, 9.43.10), he is irked (offensus, 9.43.11) by the fickleness of the courts in which he dwelt and so rejoiced (gaudet, 9.43.12) in a domestic dwelling and chooses (voluit, 9.43.14) to be Vindex’s god. The statuette’s animate agency transcends the norms of art-historical description, to end the poem not only as the work of a great artist or the possession of famous owners but as a being with its own will, power, and volition. Its agency is presented as significant in Roman history—fueling Hannibal’s assault on Rome and Sulla’s decision not to become king. My third literary example of a figurine will be briefer but perhaps more controversial. No story of the artist and of love for the object is more famous across

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the entire history of writing about art than that immortalized by Ovid in his account of Pygmalion (Metamorphoses 10.243–92). The brilliant evocation of the molding of desire—in both the made object and the aroused subject—has been much studied; the complex of psychological, frankly psycho-pathological, elements in the narrative of a man who hated women and lived unmarried but sculpted his own perfect beloved in pure delusional privacy only to have her miraculously made real, has been much analyzed.120 I want only to remark here that Ovid repeatedly refers to the figure carved by Pygmalion as being made from ivory (Met. 10. 248, 255, 275–6, 283). If this means from the tusk of an elephant, as seems most likely, then Pygmalion can only have made a figurine, not a life-size sculpture.121 There is no reference to his beloved being of mixed media (like a chryselephantine statue). The text’s power in evoking a beloved, who is desired as a human and eventually becomes one, belies the great likelihood (if one thinks materially about the object sculpted) that it concerns a small figurine. As Pygmalion plays with his love-doll—kissing it, grasping it, speaking to it, clothing it with robes, rings, and a necklace—the image (always presented to the reader from within the frame of Pygmalion’s own desire) appears as if it might be his size; and when Venus grants his prayer and turns her into real flesh, of course the narrative’s conceit has her as a full-size person and not a figurine. But arguably the text’s play on “horns”—the horns of the cows sacrificed to Venus at Met. 10.271 (cornibus) and the horns of the crescent moon at Met. 10.296 (cornibus), as it completes the ninth month when the ivory wife gives birth to Pygmalion’s son Paphus—evokes the ivory tusk out of which the ­statue-woman was carved, as well as the horn with which the sculptor made her pregnant. My point is that the extraordinary revelry of affect, desire, and fetishism, as well as the miraculous act by which ivory becomes flesh and the desired object becomes animate and penetrable, which is so exceptionally characteristic of this text, is particularly apt when focused on a doll-like figurine. I hope that these readings of texts about three statuettes firmly establish the immense power of the sacred figurine in the Roman imagination. Its anthropomorphism and miniaturization, combined with elements of religious cultivation (including portability)122 and the imputation of animate agency, are a potent   The literature is very rich. For commentary, see Bömer 1980, 93–110. For a sketch of a metatextual reading of Pygmalion against Ovid’s other—especially amatory—works, see Rimell 2006, 1–2, 9, 16, 40, 61–2, 72, 89, 105. For literary accounts see e.g. Leach 1974; Rosati 1983, 129–52; Janan 1988; Solodow 1988, 215–19; Sharrock 1991a and 1991b; Bettini 1999, 66–73, 147–8; Hardie 2002, 173–92; Salzmann-Mitchell 2008; Bussels 2012, 32–6. For art historians’ accounts, see Freedberg 1989, 340–4; Elsner 2007, 113–31; Stoichita 2008, 7–20; Hersey 2009. 121   On this issue, see Manson 1982; Didi-Huberman 1985, 77–84; Stoichita 2008, 10–13. 122   On the portability of the figurine in contrast to the stasis of the large-scale statue and hence its openness to a series of ceremonial uses and enlivenings with the potential to animate the image, see Madigan 2013, xxvii–xxviii, and esp. 1–37 on processional statuettes. 120

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mix. However, two significant points arise. First, in relation to the ways ­art-historical literature—itself fundamentally influenced by the Pygmalion narrative especially—has informed the prehistorical accounts of figurines, we do need to worry how much of the immensely rich Greco-Roman material on the responses to and cultivation of figurines (suitably generalized and expressed in abstract) can in fact be imputed to non-Greco-Roman contexts. Second, and fundamental to my principal argument, it is precisely in the terms established by the Roman texts that the newly ascendant Christians chose to ban pagan sacred images as idols. If we look at the legislation against paganism and sacrifice repeatedly passed by the emperors of the fourth and early fifth centuries, when it turns to images, it refers to them in strikingly similar terms to those we have found in texts like Statius and Apuleius.123 So, for instance, in a law promulgated by Theodosius, Arcadius, and Honorius in Constantinople on November 8, 392, we find the following (C. Th. 16.10.12. proem): No person at all, of any class or order whatsoever of men or of dignities, whether he occupies a position of power or has completed such honors, whether he is powerful by the lot of his birth or humble in lineage, legal status and fortune, shall sacrifice an innocent victim to senseless images (sensu carentibus simulacris) in any place at all or in any city. He shall not, by more secret wickedness (secretiore piaculo), venerate his lar with fire, his genius with wine, his penates with fragrant odors; he shall not burn lights to them, place incense before them, or suspend wreaths for them. Nullus omnino ex quolibet genere ordine hominum dignitatum vel in potestate positus vel honore perfunctus, sive potens sorte nascendi seu humilis genere condicione ortuna in nullo penitus loco, in nulla urbe sensu carentibus simulacris vel insontem victimam caedat vel secretiore piaculo larem igne, mero genium, penates odore veneratus accendat lumina, imponat tura, serta suspendat.

Further (C. Th. 16.10.12.2): If any person should venerate (venerabitur), by placing incense before them, images made by the work of mortals and destined to suffer the ravages of time (mortali opere facta et aevum passura simulacra), and if, in a ridiculous manner (ridiculo exemplo), he should sud­denly fear the effigies which he himself has formed (metuens subito quae ipse simulaverit), or should bind a tree with fillets, or should erect an altar of turf that he has dug up, or should attempt to honor vain images (vanas imagines) with the offering of a gift, which even though it is humble, still is complete outrage against religion, such a person, as one guilty of the violation of

  For accounts of the legislative assault on paganism in the fourth century, see Curran 2000, 161–217 and Leone 2013, 40–6. 123

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religion, shall be punished by the forfeiture of that house or landholding in which it is proved that he served a pagan superstition.124 Si quis vero mortali opere facta et aevum passura simulacra imposito ture venerabitur ac ridiculo exemplo, metuens subito quae ipse simulaverit, vel redimita vittis arbore vel erecta effossis ara cespitibus, vanas imagines, humiliore licet muneris praemio, tamen plena religionis iniuria honorare temptaverit, is utpote violatae religionis reus ea domo seu possessione multabitur, in qua eum gentilicia constiterit superstitione ­famulatum.

On August 20, 299, Arcadius and Honorius promulgated the following decree at Padua (C. Th. 16.10.18): Idols (idolis) shall be taken down under the direction of the office staff after an investigation has been held, since it is evident that even now the worship of a vain superstition (cultum vanae superstitionis) is being paid to them.125 . . . depositis sub officio idolis disceptatione habita, quibus etiam nunc patuerit cultum vanae superstitionis impendi.

Whether this legislation was effective in its time is much less significant than the fact that it formed the legal and theoretical model for idolatry in the ensuing Christian tradition. What is significant here are the following specific themes associated with the pagan discourse on figurines: the fact that they have a known human maker, like the artisan Saturninus, or the famous artist Lysippus, or the mythical sculptor-lover Pygmalion; that they have a history in time and are subject to change and decay, as Vindex’s statuette has a long historical pedigree; that they are cultivated with libations, or incense, or sacrifice (as, in various ways, Alexander and Hannibal served Hercules and as Apuleius treats his Mercury); that they operate on their worshippers with emotive force and agency, provoking fear in the explicit testimony of the Christian legislation (as Hercules struck fear into Alexander and as Apuleius expects his Mercury to cause fear to his accusers when he pronounces his curse), but we may surmise other emotions also such as affection and even love (as in Apuleius’s account of his Mercury, Alexander’s feelings for Hercules, and especially Pygmalion’s passion for his ivory maiden). My point here is that the rejection of the figurine in ascendant Christianity— which was to determine its continuing rejection in later Islam, a religion that was in its own right to be still more stringent in its reluctance to anthropomorphic imagery—is directly predicated on the emotive discourse of cultivation which we have been examining in pre-Christian pagan polytheism, now defined as idolatry.

 At C. Th. 16.10.6 the worship of images (colere simulacra) is liable to capital punishment.  Cf. C. Th. 16.10.19.1 for the destruction of images in temples.

124 125

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CONCLUSIONS: T H E F IGU R I N E I N T H E H ISTOR Y OF R EPR E SEN TAT ION I N W E ST ER N A RT

Before I sketch some conclusions, let me give a brief résumé of my argument. First, by contrast with pre-Christian and pre-Islamic culture across the prehistoric and the ancient Mediterranean as well as the near East (except for post prehistoric Iran), there is a marked reluctance to produce or use figurines in contexts of Abrahamic hegemony, a reluctance which seems to be near-universal, with the apparent exception of Egypt. Second, by the Roman imperial period and before Constantine’s conversion, when we have some remarkable texts to inflect the material-cultural evidence, it is clear that figurines were capable of possessing not only significant prestige as items of aesthetic esteem (and expense), but also extraordinary efficacy as objects of cult, of votive and divine power,126 with intimations of agency, animation, and magic.127 It is a mark of the figurine in the Roman Empire that it becomes susceptible to theorization in the kinds of texts I have dwelt on. I suspect—though this is an issue that can never be proved—that these texts effectively articulate age-old qualities in this class of objects that depend to some extent at least on mimetic anthropomorphism and zoomorphism and on miniaturization, which together generate the possibility of hands-on and in-the-viewers’-world narratives where the figurine may be seen as intervening within daily or religious life. At any rate, it is precisely these qualities—the qualities imputed to an idol by Jewish or Christian polemicists—that came to animate the Christian legislation against pagan images in the fourth and fifth centuries, as well as the intimations of reticence about images that we find in some Jewish and Patristic sources.128 Indeed, it is the rise of a culture of textual resistance to, or restriction on, images (common to Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) that marks a fundamental counterpart to the vanishing of the figurine. For example, in a passage that gains particular interest from the longevity and continuity of a tradition of nude female figurines in Egypt from polytheistic times through to Islamic rule, the second-century Christian apologist Clement of Alexandria comments (Protrepticus 4): κἂν γυμνὴν ἴδῃ τις ἀνάγραπτον γυναῖκα, τὴν “χρυσῆν” Ἀφροδίτην νοεῖ. οὕτως ὁ Κύπριος ὁ Πυγμαλίων ἐκεῖνος ἐλεφαντίνου ἠράσθη ἀγάλματος: τὸ ἄγαλμα Ἀφροδίτης ἦν καὶ γυμνὴ ἦν.   Of course it is quite possible but not provable that this was the case back into the deepest prehistory.   In other words, it seems absurd to distinguish between devotional, religious, and fine art in the terms proposed by Garcia-Rivera 2014. 128   For Jews and idolatry see e.g. Urbach 1959; Fine 2005, 60–81, 110–23; and Neis 2013, 170–201. Philo, in de decalogo 66–7 and de vita comtemplativa 7, does appear explicitly to focus on three-dimensional figures within his condemnation of idolatry. For Christian responses to idols, see e.g. Baynes 1955; Murray 1977; Barasch 1992, 95–157; Finney 1994, 15–68; Nasrallah 2010. 126 127

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If someone sees a woman represented naked, he knows her to be “golden” Aphrodite. Thus that fellow Pygmalion of Cyprus loved an ivory statue. The statue was of Aphrodite and it was naked . . .

The point here—and it is a valid problem from Clement’s point of view—is that while we may say such naked female figurines are dolls or votive offerings (potentially supplicating a shrine for success in pregnancy, in childbirth, or in marriage),129 the fact is that one can never be certain that the nude female figurine is not golden Aphrodite. If she is—whether by the maker’s intent, by some magical ritual, or by the viewer’s imputation—then an intolerable act of idolatry is capable of taking place. The same problem is true of any figurine: there is no means for legislating that a given statuette may not have been intended for, or may not have the potential to be used in, acts of cult that tend to idolatry. The issues of mortal manufacture, use by means of handling and secret cultivation (as represented in the imperial legislation and also in the Roman polytheistic literature I have discussed) combined with the dangers of animation, are potent and insoluble. The result of the clash of these fundamental problems from a Judaeo-Christian perspective with the cultural norms of religious art production in polytheism was a pair of extraordinary changes in material culture. There is a remarkable shift in the evidential archive delivered by archaeology, and this mirrors a profound shift in representation in cult space within the Abrahamic religions. The evidential shift at the level of material culture is the end of the figurine—at any rate as a ubiquitous and normative expectation of archaeological excavation, which is to say as a key empirical datum for devotion, aesthetics, or play in human life. The shift in representation is a near total move to flat art in two dimensions—not only in sacred contexts (the decorations of synagogues, churches, monasteries, and mosques) but also in domestic ones. The depth of relief-carving may in part have increased, making flat surfaces more sculptural,130 but by and large the Abrahamic world saw the demise of free-standing statuary, as well as figurines, while the ending of statue-manufacture in the sphere of honorific public portraiture swiftly followed their curtailment in sacred contexts. Now what this means for the history of representation in the European and near Eastern traditions is hardly possible to overestimate.131

  See the discussion of Frankfurter 2015.   See e.g. Elsner 2004. 131   The demise of all free-standing statuary in the round—with the figurine as the most frequent category—takes the definition of what was rejected by the Abrahamic ascendancy close to the idea of yong as defining human or animal images of all kinds and sizes in the Chinese traditions (as discussed in this volume by Wu Hung). Of course, the Abrahamic rejection went beyond only the mortuary associations of yong. 129

130

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In the course of a brilliant argument for the egalitarian nature of images and texts in ancient Greek and Roman culture, Michael Squire has launched an acute attack on the logocentrism of a long interpretative tradition that effectively starts with Luther. He has traced the explicitly Lutheran nature of the theoretical and historical writing about art in the German tradition of Kunstgeschichte, which has been the dominant and normative disciplinary model in art history.132 The Reformation’s attack on Roman Catholic image-use, as inaugurated by Luther and carried out by his more enthusiastic followers, was ultimately founded on a literalist interpretation of the Second Commandment’s prohibition of graven images. It is precisely this scriptural injunction—inflected by the Christian legal tradition of the fourth century ce—which defined idolatry according to the categories of cultivation and animation that the pagan Roman tradition had ascribed to figurines and cult images. The radical Protestant rejection of images, in favor of Scripture,133 with its art-historical legacy as a downplaying of the visual in relation to text, is itself a replay of earlier Christian assaults on the image—notably in the period of Byzantine Iconoclasm.134 That is to say, the traditions of image-making in the Christian world (East and West) as well as the post-Reformation discourses of writing about images within the academy have been fundamentally inflected by concerns about the animation of images—especially when open to a potentially idolatrous intervention through three-dimensionality into the viewer’s real world—and have been fundamentally concerned to find ways of restricting the free-play of the image, whether within a narrative frame set by two-dimensionality (where the beholder stands apart from the image being observed) or by subordinating the image to text. Similar constraints may be said to have been in play in Islam.135 In the Muslim world, we have the rich and fascinating evidence of the Hadith, large collections of legal traditions said to go back to the oral pronouncements of the Prophet, whose dates of collection and cataloguing may be as early as the later seventh century or may be much closer to 800.136 These texts are not easy to read: Do their restrictions on images refer to two- or three-dimensional works, and how can we tell? Do they reflect the actuality of image use (and at what moments?) or   Squire 2009, 8–9 on logocentrism, 9–111 on the Lutheran tradition of art historical writing; also Squire 2018, 136–51. 133   This is a vast topic. See e.g. Phillips 1973; Christensen 1979; Eire 1986; Freedberg 1989, 378–428; Feld 1990, 118–92; Wandel 1994; Koerner 2004; Aston 2016. 134  See Squire 2009, 21–3 and specifically on the parallels between Reformation and Byzantine Iconoclasm: Freedberg 1975. The Byzantine literature is equally vast: a full bibliography may be found in Elsner 2012a, with notable recent contributions that include Barber 2002 and Brubaker and Haldon 2011. 135   This theme is the subject of Barry Flood’s hugely significant forthcoming work on both Islamic material culture and texts: Flood forthcoming. 136   See esp. Reenen 1990, 60–70 on dates. 132

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the failure of religious hierarchies to regulate actuality? Certainly they concern the removal of images and idols from the Ka’ba,137 with the possible exception of an icon of Mary and Jesus.138 But they also worry about images in domestic settings and on furnishings,139 and about the potential attempt by a being other than the Creator to animate inanimate matter.140 In summary, we may say that—as in Christianity—all this regulation—alongside the diminution in the production of three-dimensional sculpture, which we have been exploring in the case of figurines—implies a range of anxieties centered on the independence, free-play, and potential animation of the three-dimensional image. The death of the figurine, an issue entirely untheorized in antiquity and hardly discussed in modernity, and the rise of an almost entirely two-dimensional idiom for visual expression (in manuscript illumination, panel and wall-paintings, mosaics on walls and floors, relief sculptures of all kinds in both large-scale objects such as doors or church screens and in all sorts of miniature ampullae, tokens, and reliquaries) is an immense de facto restriction on the previously equal play of two- and three-dimensional representation in polytheistic antiquity. Whatever the Second Commandment’s prohibition of “graven images” may have meant in Rabbinic Judaism, it did not include the rejection of two-dimensional representations of human figures or narrative scenes, as is evidenced by the numerous figural synagogue decorations of late antique Palestine and Syria.141 Clearly, whatever risks the flat image may be thought to have carried (from the point of view of a vituperative theologian—and we do have a number of early Christian critiques),142 its potential for idolatrous animation within Christianity was significantly less than that of the free-standing statue or figurine. In part this is a matter of placing texts alongside pictures to define their meaning and restrict their potential, and in part about using the narrative structures and textual reference points of Scripture or hagiography as a means to limit the free-play of the visual. The predilection for flat art is not less marked in late ancient Judaism or in early Islam than in Christianity, with Islam at particular times and places offering strong resistance to figuration (though we must beware exaggeration of this feature since it is by no means systematic or universal).143 One may describe the issue this way. Before Christian hegemony, there was a free-play of texts and images of all kinds (two- and three-dimensional) in the   Reenen 1990, 35–42. 139   Reenen 1990, 37, with Grabar 1985 and Ali 2017, 435.   Reenen 1990, 42–4. 140   Reenen 1990, 44–8. 141   For recent discussion of the primary materials, see Fine 2005; Levine 2012; Hachlili 2013; Talgam 2014. 142   For instance in comments by the fourth-century theologians Epiphanius of Salamis and Eusebius of Caesarea: see Mango 1986, 16–18 and 41–3. 143   On Islam, see recently Elias 2012 (to be used with some caution as it is riddled with errors) and Flood forthcoming. 137 138

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lived and religious cultures of the Mediterranean and the near East, with the partial exception of the Zoroastrian-influenced world of pre-Islamic Persia. What the advent of Christian dominance brought to visual culture was something like the restrictions that a bank might put on a credit card—not all kinds of images were viable any longer (as not all kinds of purchase may be allowed), because of the risks of animation and idolatry. This is not a ban anywhere articulated in the textual record (just as one may not be aware of the restrictions on one’s credit rating until one’s card is refused); nor is it wholly universal (just as one’s credit card need not always be refused for all transactions). It may be said to have driven some animated images into the closet (as it were) both in secretive paganism and in some forms of continuity of figurine usage within some forms of practice in Christian and even Islamic contexts, and it clearly created the idol as a fantasy space of the forbidden, the demonic, and the illicit within Christian culture.144 Clearly, in the early part of late antiquity the “ban” was not effective in certain exceptional cases—notably Sagalassos, Scythopolis, Carthage, and Egypt. But it was amazingly comprehensive across a burgeoning Christian art that served a geographically and conceptually diverse Christianity, for a pretty robust de facto restriction that appears to have occurred spontaneously and without deliberate orchestration or central control. In support of the suggestion of a restriction on the freedom of image-making, one might return to the single largest corpus of Christian period figurines so far discovered, those from the pilgrimage shrine Abu Mina near Alexandria. These were discovered alongside a rich group of mass-produced mold-made terracotta flasks depicting St Menas,145 examples of which have been found in a wide range of archaeological contexts, indicating movement in the period of their manufacture (from the mid fifth to the mid seventh centuries)146 across the Mediterranean, including to Britain, the Balkans, Italy, and Gaul.147 The difference is that the figurines were not exported.148 The difference in the public distribution of different classes of artifacts, made by the same workshop in the same raw materials on the same site, is palpable. By the eighth century, the issues had become entirely explicit—not only in textual and theological debate but also in social practice (including the prohibition, removal, and destruction of images)—across the entire late antique tradition. Whether we

  See e.g. Camille 1989; James 1996; Chatterjee 2017.   See Kaufmann 1910 and Galli 2002, 29–62 on issues of manufacture and production. 146   For dates see e.g. Kiss 1989, 9–18. 147   For a corpus see Lambert and Pedemonte Demeglio 1994, esp. 218–19 on diffusion. For worries about provenance for many of the items accessioned by museums in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Linscheid 1995. For archaeologically attested examples from Britain, see Bangert 2007, 29–33 and Bangert 2010, 306–7; from the Balkans, Italy, and Gaul: Anderson 2007. 148   E.g. Bangert 2010, 307 and Frankfurter 2015, 198–9 who states that movement of the figurines is attested only as far as Alexandria. 144 145

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observe the unease over figural representation in some parts of early Islam, the rise of arguments around Iconoclasm in Byzantium, or the parallel discussions in the West and the genesis there—under specific reliquary and cult conditions—of the revived three-dimensional sacred statuette in the later ninth century, we are exploring a self-conscious and theologically sophisticated development of what I have been discussing here as the “end” of the figurine in late antiquity. In terms of the archaeological category of the figurine, one of the more ­interesting theoretical developments of recent times is the suggestion that we see “figurines as process.”149 This refers to the life or biography of any given figurine from making to deposition, to its potential as an experimental medium for other kinds of artistic production, to its place as an anchor for a network of encounters with varieties of individual subjects. My argument has suggested that the entire material genre of the figurine defines a process of embodied imagination which ultimately came to be in impossible ideological conflict with fundamental religious attitudes developed in certain parts of the world within the historical, as opposed to prehistoric, era. The very genre of the figurine—from the profoundly distant past of its birth to the historically determinable period of its curtailment in the archaeological record—serves as a remarkably eloquent testament to the processes of change in cultural representation. And of course what I have called here “the death of the figurine” is itself a very long story that continues in a variety of forms into the contemporary era.

ACK NOW L EDGM EN TS This chapter is the product of three simultaneous conversations conducted across two continents. In Oxford and the British Museum, I was engaged from 2013–18 in a continuing discussion about art and religion in late antiquity with Philippa Adrych, Nadia Ali, Robert Bracey, Belinda Crerar, Katy Cross, Dominic Dalglish, Stefanie Lenk, Maria Lidova, Georgi Parpulov, and Rachel Wood, as part of the “Empires of Faith Project,” funded by the Leverhulme Trust. In Chicago, I have been immersed with my friends Claudia Brittenham, Patch Crowley, Seth Estrin, Wei-Cheng Lin, Richard Neer, and Wu Hung in a long project on comparativism in art history within the Centre for Global Ancient Art. On the East Coast of the United States, I have had the huge benefit of discussion with Finnbar Barry Flood, Milette Gaifman, John Ma, Peter Miller, and Ittai Weinryb, to whose various (sometimes imagined) objections and observations much of this argument is indebted. I am especially grateful to Elisabeth O’Connell, David Frankfurter, Barry Flood, and Ine Jacobs for sharing unpublished work with me and directing me to much bibliography, and also to the acute critiques of two anonymous reviewers for the Press. Notably, the final rewriting followed Barry Flood’s brilliant and

  See Meskell 2017, 23–5.

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inspiring series of Slade lectures at Oxford on Islam and Image: Beyond Aniconism and Iconoclasm in the Hilary term of 2019. Versions of this chapter were offered at conferences on figurines at the Art History Department in Chicago and in the British Museum as part of the Empires of Faith Project, as well as in an ancient religion conference in Brazil: I am grateful to all who participated. In matters photographic, my thanks are due to Marc Waelkens and Jeroen Poblome.

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P ottier , E. (1890) Les statuettes de terre cuite dans l’antiquité (Paris: Hachette) P oulter , A. (2007) Nicopolis ad Istrum: A Late Roman and Early Byzantine City (Oxford: Oxbow) P rovost , M. and C.  Mennessier-Jouannet (1994) Clermont-Ferrand (Carte archéologique de la Gaule 63.1) (Paris: Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres) R aven , M. (1983) “Wax in Egyptian Magic and Symbolism,” Oudheidkundige Mededelingen het Rijksmuseum van Oudheden te Leiden 64: 7–47 R eenen , D. Van (1990) “ ‘The Bilderverbot’, a New Survey,” Islam 67: 27–77 R enfrew , C. (1991) The Cycladic Spirit (London: Thames & Hudson) R enfrew , C. (2017) “Cycladic Figurines,” in Insoll 2017c, 637–58 R ethemiotakis , G. (2001) Minoan Clay Figures and Figurines: From the Neopalatial to the Subminoan Period (Athens: The Archaeological Society at Athens) R imell , V. (2006) Ovid’s Lovers: Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) R oberts , A. (2007) “Worked Bone,” in Poulter 2007, 65–79 R odziewicz , E. (2007) Bone and Ivory Carvings from Alexandria: French Excavations 1992–2004 (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale) R odziewicz , E. (2012) Bone Carvings from Fustat-Istabl’ Antar (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale) R odziewicz , E. (2016) Ivory and Bone Sculpture in Ancient Alexandria (Alexandria: Centre d’Études Alexandrines) R oes , A. (1950) “Un bronze d’Asie Mineur au Musée Britannique,” Syria 27: 221–8 R ogers , M. (1969) “On a Figurine in the Cairo Museum of Islamic Art,” Persica 4: 141–79 R ogerson , B. (2003) The Prophet Muhammad: A Biography (London: Little, Brown) R osati , G. (1983) Narciso e Pigmalione (Florence: Sansoni) R owe , A. (1930) The Topography and History of Beth-Shan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press) R u ̈ h l , M. (2006) Literatur gewordener Augenblick: die Silven des Statius im Kontext literarischer und sozialer Bedingungen von Dichtung (Berlin: de Gruyter) S afar , F. (1945) Wâsit: The Sixth Seasons’s Excavations (Cairo: l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale) S alm , A. (1995) “La collection des statuettes islamiques en terre cuite du Musée de Berlin,” Archéologie islamique 5: 81–96 S alzmann -M itchell , P. (2008) “A Whole out of Pieces: Pygmalion’s Ivory Statue in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Arethusa 41: 291–311 S carre , C. (2017) “Neolithic Figurines of Western Europe,” in Insoll 2017c, 877–99 S challin , A. and P.  Pakanen (eds.) (2009) Encounters with Mycenaean Figures and Figurines (Stockholm: Svenska Institutet i Athen) S chneider , W. (2001) “Phidiae putavi: Martial und der Hercules Epitrapezios des Novius Vindex,” Mnemosyne 54: 697–720 S harpe , H.  F. (2014) “Bronze Statuettes from the Athenian Agora: Evidence for Domestic Cults in Roman Greece,” Hesperia 83: 143–82

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Epilogue Claudia Brittenham

The glory of comparative conversation is the way that it exposes our most ­deeply-held assumptions. All of us, prior to the conversations that resulted in this volume, had surely used the term “figurine,” unquestioned and unproblematized, in our teaching and writing. And equally surely, other specialists in our respective geographic and chronological subfields knew exactly what we meant. But in speaking to each other across the boundaries of time and place, it became clear that we did not mean the same thing at all, and that for each of us, the boundaries around the category of the figurine were much more porous than we had imagined. For Wu Hung, a figurine is to be identified with the Chinese term yong, a typically but not necessarily reduced-scale figural object made for a tomb. Yet similarly-sized Mesoamerican tomb figures, I suggest in my essay, are quite distinct from a smaller hand-held figurine tradition. How different might this volume look if we had tasked ourselves with writing a global art history of yong and not one of figurines? Richard Neer, in his essay, proposes that Greek figurines were simply thaumata, “wonders,” a term that encompasses many kinds of objects, small and large. For the figurine is, as these essays have argued, an etic category, one which reveals as much about the anxieties of the culture and moment in which it was created than it does about the ancient objects to which it has been applied. As Jaś Elsner has argued in his essay, the figurine is from the outset a category of alterity, structured out of the anxiety about the idol, constructed by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to contain the pagan or polytheistic Other. First attested in English in 1854, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in a translation of a French text by Alphonse de Lamartine, it is also often a term of anthropological,

                

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and especially archaeological, alterity: we have dolls, action figures, scale ­models . . . they had figurines. Any classificatory system has its frailties, of course, but what is striking about the term figurine is the way that it encompasses both subject—a figural representation, typically of a human form—and scale—small, reduced, diminutive. As such, it stands in contrast to terms based on subject and function, such as the Chinese term yong, or to classificatory terms based on function alone, such as vessel (the subject of a previous Global Ancient Art volume). With scale, the world invariably enters. Scale is always relative; scale invites comparison. It is hard to stay confined to the topic of figurines because they are objects that engage with bodies: with the bodies that they represent, with the bodies of the people who make, handle, and view them. Figurines also frequently entangle with other genres, from the miniature to the monumental; figurines carry meaning not only singly, but also in assemblage. So what can art history learn from the figurine, flawed though that category may be? Figurines might teach us precisely to beware our seemingly naturalized terms of analysis; but more importantly, to question the bounded ways in which we approach the objects of our inquiry. Figurines, instead, invite us to imagine an art history that bridges and connects.

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I NDE X Achilles, shield of, see Homer, Iliad aesthetics  3, 4, 7, 12–13, 28, 35, 131, 150, 156, 163, 164 affect  6, 40, 58, 70, 151, 155–162 Alexander the Great  95, 157–9, 162 Alexandria, Archaeological Museum in Alexandria, terracotta figurines from Abu Mina  140 amulets 6 aniconism, see representation, aniconic animation  6, 15–16, 28, 39, 52, 89, 153–162, 165, 167, see also  figurines, agency of anthropology, see disciplinary boundaries antropomorphism  3, 5, 51, 77, 131–4, 141, 146, 148, 150, 155, 160, 162, 163 Apuleius: Apology (Pro se de magia)  153–6, 157, 158–9, 161, 162 Metamorphoses or Golden Ass 153 archaeology, see disciplinary boundaries [Aristotle], On the Cosmos 39 Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals  27–8 art history, see disciplinary boundaries Athens: Byzantine and Christian Museum, BXM 2 (“Marble statuette of the Good Shepherd”)  136 National Archaeological Museum: 14984 (“Zeus with a thunderbolt from Ambracia”)  37 15161 (“Zeus from Cape Artemisium, Greece”)  36 16503 (“Androgyne figurins from the sanctuary of Hera Limeneia at Perachora”)  32 1993 (“Athenian grave relief ”)  40 3964 (“Athenian grave relief of Pausimache, from Charvati”)  41 Avignon, Musée Calvet, E31 (“Athenian grave relief ”)  38 axes, see celts Aztec  54, 57, 64–5, 66, 74

Ban Gu  124 bases, see display, on a base Bellerophon 134 Berlin, Staatliche Museen, TC 8616 (“Baubo figurine”)  31 Beth Shean, see Scythopolis Book of Rights (Li ji) 96 Burdur, Burdur Archaeology Museum, SA1991DT/347 (“terracotta figurine from Sagalassos”)  138 Carthage  139, 167 Paleo-Christian Museum, statue of Ganymede  144 caryatids 93–4 celts 75–80 Cerro Gordo  74 Chalcatzingo, Monument 21  77, 78 Chang’an, Changle Palace  92 children  5, 40, 64–7, 70–2, 151 Christianity, see figurines, as seen by Abrahamic religions Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus 163–4 Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art: 1955.50 (“Hercules Epitrapezius”)  157 1965.237–241 (“The Cleveland Marbles”)  137 Coatepec 74 comparativism  vii–viii, 1, 8, 11–14, 17, 42, 88, 149, 152 Confucius 88 cult images  22–5 disciplinary boundaries  vii–viii, 1–4, 9, 12–14, 42, 132, 151–2, 164–5, see also interpretation display: fixed in place or inserted  22–7, 60–1, 101, 134–5, 144 on a base  4, 7, 22, 23, 24, 25, 35, 105 placed on surfaces  4, 7, 21, 22–3, 60 suspended 55–6 dolls  27–8, 37–40, 72, 123, 142, 143, 145, 148, 151, 160, 163

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Index

Dong Zhuo  92 doubleness  15–16, 17–19, 34, 36 Dreros, Temple of Apollo  23–4

gender  29–30, 52–3, 75, 139–146, 163–4 Good Shepherd  134–7, 136 grave reliefs, Greek  37–42

Eastern Zhou  90, 96, 111, 123 Egypt  139–143, 145–7, 162–3, 167 Abu Mina, shrine of  139–143, 140, 167 Karanis 143 Medinet Habu (Jeme)  143 Shurafa 143 El Manatí  61, 64–5 Wooden bust  64 Emperor Jing  125–6

Han  90, 92, 121, 126 Han shu, see History of the Western Han hand-held, see interaction, handling Hannibal  157, 159, 162 Heraklion, Archaeological Museum, 2445, 2446, 2447 (“Statuettes from the temple of Apollo at Deros”)  24 Hesiod, Theogony  15–16, 32–3 Historical Records (Shi ji) 90–1 History of the Western Han (Han shu) 124 Homer  14, 17, 20, 36 Hymn to Aphrodite 33 Iliad 17 Odyssey  15, 18–20 Hongshan Culture  92–3 Hubei Baoshan Tomb 2  111, 123–4, 124 Wuhan, Hubei Provincial Museum, bronze bells from Leiguduan Tomb 1  93, 94

figuration  4–5, 8–9, 12, 29, 42, 133, 166 figurines: across ancient cultures  130–168 agency of  151, 153–162 as copies of monumental sculpture  149 as seen by Abrahamic religions  130–147, 160–8 definition of  2–3, 8–9, 11–12, 51–3, 56, 61, 88–9, 132–2, 147–152, 162–168 emic and etic  2, 8, 52, 148, 182 disappearance of  131–147, 165–8 legislation against  161–8 prehistoric  1, 2, 4, 8, 130–1, 132, 133, 147–9, 151–3, 155, 160, 162, 168 representations in relief  37–42 First Emperor (Ying Zheng)  89–126, see also Shaanxi, Lishan Mausoleum Florentine Codex, see Sahagún Fu Jian  92 function antiquarian or connoisseurial  144–5, 156–9 apotropaic 27–8 funerary  2, 5, 7, 8, 21–2, 27–8, 37–42, 51, 61, 65, 74, 88–126, 148 magic  27–8, 153–5, 159, 163, 164 play, see toys political  7, 95–6, 122–3, 126 ritual  2–3, 6–7, 23, 39–40, 89, 96, 115, 119, 121, 148–152, 156 social  7, 147 votive  22–6, 36, 39, 60–1, 75, 79, 98, 131, 135, 138–9, 142–5, 148, 150, 156–7, 159, 161–3, 168

iconoclasm  165, 167 Inca  58, 80 interaction: affectionate  151, 156, 162 assembling or grouping  6, 23, 60–1 breaking or destroying  21, 38–9, 52, 61 burial  6, 60–1, 65–6, 79, 95 carrying  6, 58, 70, 156 dressing  55, 58–9, 61, 70, 72 feeding  6, 51, 58, 70, 99, 101 handling or holding in hand  3–4, 6–7, 26, 37–41, 52, 57–8, 60–2, 69, 70, 77, 151 sacrifice to  155–6, 159, 161, 162 washing or bathing  6, 70 wrapping  61, 79 interpretation: modern concepts and biases in  3, 7–8, 13, 21, 42, 51, 62, 64, 72, 131–3, 148–152, 156, 166–8 see also disciplinary boundaries Islam, see figurines, as seen by Abrahamic religions

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Index  

jade, see materials, greenstone Jonah 136–7 Judaism, see figurines, as seen by Abrahamic religions Kalapodi, South Temple  24–6, 34 Figurine (B 150)  25 K’awiil 69 La Venta  52–6, 58, 59, 60, 63, 65–9, 72 Altar 2  66 Altar 5  67 Complex A  52, 60, 65 Monument 25/26  75, 76 Monument 27  75, 76 Monument 86  76 Monument 87  76 Monument 88  76 Monument 89  76 Offering 3  56 Offering 4  53, 59, 60, 61, 79 Offering 5  66 Pyramid C  54, 73, 73–4, 79, 80 Stela 2  67, 68 Stela 3  67 Las Limas  67–8 Lawrence, University of Kansas, Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum, Clay figurine from La Venta  52 Li ji, see Book of Rights Liaoning, Goddess Temple  92 London: British Museum: 1881,0701.1 (“Roman limestone version of Hercules Epitrapezius”)  157 1904,1010.1 (“Bronze figurine of Mercury seated on a rock”)  154 1924,1006.42 (“Terracotta figurine of standing mother and child from Upper Egypt”)  141 1979,1017.203 (“Female bone figurine from early Islamic Egypt”)  146 Am, Maud, B7.52-53 (“Pillars from the Temple of the Inscriptions, Palenque”)  69 Victoria and Albert Museum, 702–1884 (“Ivory statuette of the Virgin and Child”)  135

187

Lysippus, Herakles Epitrapezius, statue of 156–9 manipulation, see interaction, handling manufacture, see production Martial, Epigrams 157–9 materials bronze  12–13, 21–5, 34–6, 90–5, 101, 112–121, 122–3, 126, 136, 138, 141, 153, 154, 156–8 clay  15–16, 21, 39, 51–3, 57, 61–3, 105, 122–3, see also materials, terracotta ephemeral  51, 55, 60, 77 greenstone  51–3, 55, 57–8, 62–3, 65, 67, 72 ivory and bone  4, 21, 22, 51, 133–5, 141, 141, 145, 146, 153, 156, 160, 162, 163 terracotta  12–13, 21–4, 27, 29, 32–3, 95–112 wood  4, 16, 21, 51, 61, 64, 111, 113, 123–4, 133, 141–2, 153–4, 156 Maya  57, 69–72, 74, 79 Mencius 88 Mercury 153–5 Metropolis, Temple  24, 26, 34–5 Statuette of Apollo as hoplite  26 Mexico City, Museo Nacional de Antropología: 10–220929 (“Carnelian grasshopper, Aztec”)  54 10–9668 (“Jade celt with supernatural face from Tomb E, Mound A-2”)  76 13.0–00621 (“Hollow clay baby excavated at La Venta, Olmec”)  63 mimesis  4–5, 14, 20, 131, 147, 150, 155, 163 mingqi (spirit articles)  89 miniaturization, see size, reduction in Munich, Antikensammlungen, NI 8594 (“Terracotta “doll” with truncated limbs”)  38 Nahua  55, 60, 77 Naples, National Archeological Museum, bronze Hercules Epitrapezius on a limestone base  157

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188 

Index

narrative  7, 17, 30, 36, 42, 151, 163, 165–6 Neolithic, see figurines, prehistoric New York: American Museum of Natural History, 30/7552 (“Kunz Axe”)  78 Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1979.206.1134 (“Hollow clay baby, said to be from Las Bocas”)  62 21.6.107 (“Nude female bone figurine from Egypt”)  142 44.11.8 (“Corinthian terracotta jointed doll”)  27 Nine Tripods  91 Novius Vindex  157–9, 162 nudity  29, 31, 34, 142, 143, 145, 163–4 Odysseus, brooch of  15, 18–20 Old Stories of the Capital Region (Sanfu jiushi) 124 orans figures  136, 139, 141, 143, 146 Orpheus 134 Ovid, Metamorphoses  159–60, 162 Paestum: Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Paestum, 1859 (“Naked goddess figurines”)  30 Urban sanctuary of Hera  29–30, 33 Palenque: Temple of the Inscriptions  69–70 Temple of the Sun  69–70, 70 Pandora  12, 15–16, 18, 28, 33 Perachora, Sanctuary of Hera Limeneia  31–3, 35 Votive plaque with Aphrodite/ Aphroditos  33 Philippopolis (Plovdiv)  139 Piedras Negras  74 Piraeus, Archaeological Museum of Piraeus, Athenian grave relief from Ambelaki on Salamis  41 plasticity 28–33 Plato  14, 35 Laws 40–2 Theaetus 19–21 portability  2, 3, 6, 8, 22–7 Poseidippos 20

Priene, Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore  30–1 production casting  4, 21, 25, 29, 34, 95, 96, 114, 117–121, 124 modeling 104–5 molding  4, 15, 21, 29, 104–5 procedural construction  117–121 puppets, see dolls Pygmalion  159–60, 162, 163 pyramids  53, 54, 73–4, 79, 80 Qin  90–2, 95, 102, 104, 107, 114, 121–3, 126 Imperial Guard  102, 104, 107 Qinshihuang, see First Emperor representation aniconic  5, 23 figural  5, 7, 9, 12, 19, 109, 123, 166, 168 symbolic  27, 107, 115, 119 see also figuration Sagalassos  138, 167 Sahagún, Bernardino de, Florentine Codex 64–5 San Lorenzo: Monument 12  66 Monument 18  77 Monument 20  66 Sanfu jiushi, see Old Stories of the Capital Region scale  3, 5–6, 8–9, 12–14, 16–19, 29, 31, 34–6, 42, 51–7, 60–3, 64, 67, 69, 72–80, 89, 105, 126, 147 as indicator of divinity  66–72, 77 multiple  56, 72, 121–6 undefined 55 see also size Scythopolis (Beth Shean)  139, 167 Seleucia Sidera  138 Shaanxi: Lishan Mausoleum  95–126, 97, 98, 102, 113 K0006 98 K0007 101 K9801 99–100 K9901 99–100 MA 98

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/08/20, SPi

Index  

Pit 1  102–4, 114 Pit 2  102, 104, 107 Pit 3  102, 104 Pit 4  102 underground zoo  99–100, 112 Xi’an, Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum: Terracotta statue of civil official  99 Terracotta statue of zookeeper  100, 109 Terracotta statue of foreigner  100, 110 Bronze crane  101 Underground army  103, 106, 108 Two bronze chariots  114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120 Shi ji, see Historical Records shier jinren, see Twelve Golden Men Sichuan, Sanxingdui  92 Sima Qian  90–1, 96, 111 size: absolute  5, 12–13, 20, 28, 34, 54 as indicator of status  107–112 colossal  3, 6, 63, 73–5, 90–5, 122, 158 enlargement  5, 34–7, 107–110 life-size  5, 6, 89, 93, 95, 105–112, 121, 126, 149 miniature  2, 3, 5–8, 17–18, 20, 22, 34, 55, 62, 79, 88, 89, 93, 96, 112–121, 122–6 monumental  3, 6, 7, 12, 53, 54, 63, 72–5, 79–80, 88, 89, 90–5, 121, 123–4, 126, 149 reduction in  89, 107, 114–17, 121, 126, 150–1, 155, 160, 163 relative  2, 8, 12–13, 15–17, 19–20, 35, 37, 51, 54–6, 62, 66, 69, 74 smallness  13, 28–9, 31, 33–5, 89, see also size Socrates  19–20, 35 soul  89, 119–121, 122 as invisible miniature  89 Statius, Silvae  157–8, 161 statuettes  6, 11–12, 22–6, 34, 88–9, 133–6, 139, 144–5, 147, 153–162, 164, 167

189

stelae  39, 40, 53, 63, 67, 68, 72, 73, 74–9 sublime 20 Sulla  157, 159 Templo Mayor  74 Teotihuacan, Moon Pyramid  74 terracotta army, see Shaanxi, Lishan Mausoleum thauma, see wonder Theodosian Code  161–2 Tikal, Temple 1, Lintel 3  70–1, 71 Tonacatepetl 74 toys, see dolls Twelve Golden Men  90–5, 96, 121–5 twofoldness  15–16, 20, see also doubleness Veracruz, Centro INAH Veracruz, 10–581031 (“”El Bebé,” Monument 2, La Merced”)  78 Villahermosa, Parque Museo La Venta: Altar 5  67 Stela 2  68 votive offerings, see function, votive Weng Zhong  92 Western Han  96, 124–5 wonder  3, 8, 14–21, 33–4, 36, 40–2 Xalapa, Museo de Antropología de Xalapa, 04017 (“Las Limas Figure”)  68 Xia 91 Xianyang  90, 92, 122, 126 Yang ling Mausoleum  125–6, 125 Yi, Marquis of Zeng, tomb of  93, 123 Ying Zheng, see First Emperor yong  2, 5, 61, 88–9, 111, 121–4 as distinct from figurines  89 Northern and Southern traditions  111, 122–4, 123, 124 zoomorphism  9, 131, 133–4, 150, 163 Zoroastrianism  131, 166

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/08/20, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/08/20, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/08/20, SPi