The Male Nude

The overwhelming majority of free-standing Archaic statues are of nude youths, generally known as kouroi, which quite simply means 'youths'. More than a hundred survive, either whole or in large fragments, ranging in height from an average 5 feet (1.5m) or so to an exceptional 11 feet (3.35m) (the kouros of Sounion, National Archeological Museum, Athens). Examples have been found in most parts of the Hellenic world, but mainly in Greece itself. All stand in the same stiff attitude, head held high, eyes to the front, arms hanging down with fists clenched. Emphasis is placed on breadth of shoulders, athletic development of pectoral and calf muscles, narrowness of waist, hardness of knee, roundness of thigh and buttock. Facial expressions vary from an impassive, rather loutish, stare to a conventionalized and to our eyes all too knowing, and sometimes slightly pert, alertness (4,8). Two such statues, slightly over life-size and perhaps among the earliest, are known to record the legend of the dutiful brothers Cleobis and Biton, who died in their sleep after their mother - a priestess whose chariot they had drawn to a religious festival - prayed that they might be rewarded with what was best for mortals. The original significance of the other kouroi is, rather surprisingly, obscure. Many were placed in sanctuaries as votive offerings, beside their fully clothed female equivalents, the korai; others served as funerary monuments, and not necessarily for those who died young. They have been described as images either of the youthful god Apollo or of mortal athletes (though obviously not intended as portraits). To give them, however, such precise meaning is perhaps to misunderstand them. Greeks never distinguished between the physical features of men and gods. Nor did they (like the Mesopotamians and Egyptians) invest statues of either with the spirits of those whom they represented; there is nothing animistic about Greek sculpture. Kouroi and korai, caught at the moment when the body once human and divine. And this duality may account for the increasing care devoted to the rendering of anatomy. It may also, paradoxically, underlie the tendency to avoid characterization by deriving from individuals a highest common factor of physique - in other words, it may contribute to that unique combination of naturalism and idealism which became, when fully developed in the is just on the point of reaching maturity, in their first bloom of that youthfulness which mortals possess briefly and only the gods enjoy eternally, are at once human and divine. And this duality may account for the increasing care devoted to the rendering of anatomy. It may also, paradoxically, underlie the tendency to avoid characterization by deriving from individuals a highest common factor of physique - in other words, it may contribute to that unique combination of naturalism and idealism which became, when fully developed in the Classical period, the great and enormously influential contribution of the Greeks to Western art. Kouroi may thus have been intended as images both of the gods and of their human worshippers - those naked athletes who took part in the games at Olympia and elsewhere, which were, of course, primarily religious festivals of a type wholly peculiar to Greece.

To explain their practice of disporting themselves naked in the games - which has always seemed odd to members of other civilizations - the Greeks told the story of a runner at Olympia who dropped his loincloth and won the race. Its true origin probably lies deeper, somewhere between the earlier association of nudity with the act of worship (as in Sumer, see p. 54) and later symbolism of the naked soul as a body divested of its earthly trappings. The athletes were also soldiers, it should be remembered, and belonged to a superior caste on whom the safety of their polis or state depended. They came from the richer or upper ranks of citizens who were bound to serve in the infantry (as hoplites) or, if they were very well-to-do, in the cavalry. The work-force consisted of second-class citizens and slaves who left these favoured young men free to devote themselves to athletic training when they were not fighting. The kouroi thus reflect a distinctly elitist view of youth. Their air of blithe self-confidence, their obvious pride in the bodies they so freely display, form part of it. They symbolize the upper echelon of a male-dominated society which relegated women to the home, smiled on pederasty and seems never to have doubted the superiority of men, in beauty as well as in strength.

Kouroi and korai vary greatly in anatomical accuracy and attempts have been made to date them almost by decade on the assumption that their sculptors were constantly striving towards greater naturalism. Regardless of whether this attempt at a chronological classification is sound, a more naturalistic style does seem to have begun to emerge in the early fifth century BC. This can be seen from the statuary that was pulled down when the Persians, under Xerxes, sacked the Athenian Acropolis in 480 BC. These statues (later buried in new foundations and thus preserved) include a number of Archaic pieces and also the greater part of a statue in an entirely different style, which seems to have been carved not very long before the disaster: the Kritios Boy (so-called because of its similarities with statues by Kritios, the fifth-century Athenian sculptor, whose works are unfortunately known only from later copies). The rigidity of the Archaic kouros is relaxed in this outstandingly beautiful and calmly passionate tribute to the Greek cult of the youthful male nude (4,9). The right leg is slightly bent at the knee, the boy's weight being shifted mainly to the left, while his head - which originally had eyes of glass or colored stone - is turned to the right, very slightly but just enough to send a current of animation through the whole figure. What is perhaps still more notable is that the torso is no longer conceived as a kind of chart or diagram of separate anatomical parts (as in most Archaic kouroi), but as a single, organic form in which muscular rhythms find their natural balance. It is carved with a controlled sensuality which gives the marble something of the quality of firm young flesh. Even in its damaged state, the statue seems so amazingly alive that one hardly notices the liberties the sculptor has taken to avoid the deadness of a simulacrum. The ripple of muscle over the pelvis, for instance, is exaggerated partly to link the thighs with the torso and effect a smooth transition from the front to the back of the figure - a device used by nearly all Greek sculptors and their imitators in subsequent periods. Emphasizing the shift in balance, these muscles lead the eye round the figure so that the four main viewpoints begin to merge fluidly into one another and the figure itself acquires the potential of movement.

Sculpture was normally colored and thus more closely related to painting than is nowadays apparent; indeed, there seems to have been a symbiotic relationship between the two arts. Until later in the sixth century BC painters continued to render figures in the conceptual Egyptian manner. A terracotta panel (see Glossary), probably torn down when the Persians sacked the Acropolis, depicts a warrior exactly according to the Egyptian convention: the spear in his left hand seems to pass behind his back, so that prominence is given to what is most important (4,10). Much more attention was paid to visual appearances by the carver of reliefs of boys shown wrestling and playing various games. A passionate delight in the human body, in watching the play of muscle beneath the skin, in catching the fleeting rhythms as it passes from one position to another, inspired this notable example of early Greek art. So enthralled was the sculptor by the beauty of what he saw that he tried to present the human body from every angle -back, front and sides - and in order to show it as it actually appeared he confronted the problem of foreshortening. The left foot of the boy on the right (4,11) is seen frontally and not aligned with the base, as it would have been in Egypt or the ancient Near East. It is a small detail. But the difference between the way in which the Greek artist rendered it and the visual convention previously accepted by artists is a crucial one.

A similar process can be observed in vase painting. The same delight in bodily movement is evident from many sixth-century vases, on which figures run and leap, dance and fight, ride horses and drive chariots. On a vase probably painted about 540 BC, Ajax and Achilles are shown at rest, concentrating on a table-game, but with a great animation and sense of drama (4,11). Here the practice of arranging scenes in strips has been abandoned and a single moment in the story, very economically delineated, fills the whole area available for figurative painting. The composition is delicately balanced on a central axis with just enough deviation from bilateral symmetry to give it life - the helmet worn by Achilles, for instance, is counterpoised by that hung up over the shield behind Ajax. No attention was, however, paid to the relationship between the painting and the curvature of the vessel. The composition seems to have been worked out on a flat surface, although whether it was derived from a larger painting, on a panel or wall, cannot be known.

Behind Ajax an inscription reads Onetorideskalos 'Onetorides is beautiful' - referring to the youth who was presumably given the vase by an admirer. Such 'love-names', nearly always male, appear on numerous cups and vases of this period, some of which are decorated with paintings of handsome young athletes (4,15), and others are still more explicitly homo-erotic. They are of interest for the light they shed on a prominent aspect of life in ancient Greece. But there are other inscriptions on the Achilles and Ajax vase. One around the mouth records: 'Exekias painted me and made me', and Exekias also wrote his name in the background of the figurative panel. Such signatures appear quite frequently, though by no means consistently, on vases made in Athens - rarely elsewhere - during a limited period from the mid-sixth to the mid-fifth century. Why only these should have been signed is a mystery.

Artists' signatures have been found on a few earlier Egyptian relief carvings but on no works of art outside the Hellenic world until much later periods (in about the eighth century AD in China). Already in the seventh century BC a

Greek sculptor, of whom nothing else is known, signed the base of a statue in the sanctuary of Apollo on Delos: 'Euthykartides the Naxian made and dedicated me.' Later sculptors often signed the statues that their patrons dedicated to the gods. Greek painters are known to have signed their works, though none survives; also engravers of gems and dies for coins. Yet the significance of these signatures has never been satisfactorily explained. Were they expressions of pride in artistry or simply a means of advertisement? Were they applied with the consent, or at the bidding, of patrons? Is it a mere coincidence that they make their sudden appearance at the moment when artists were beginning to assert their individuality? And has this anything to do with Greek democracy? These questions must remain un-answered; but it is significant that they can be asked. They simply do not arise in connection with the products of any earlier civilization.

The Po\h

The distinctive characteristics of Greek art became evident at about the same time as did those of the no less distinctly Greek political unit: the polls or self-governing state. Before the end of the Dark Age, kings or hereditary chieftains had been eliminated from the various communities of the Greek mainland (apart from Sparta, which remained the exception) and power passed into the hands of leading families. In other words, monarchy gave way to aristocracy - a word that originally meant rule by the 'best' people in terms of riches and birth. The same system of aristocratic government was initially adopted in the Hellenic cities, which, from the mid-eighth century BC, were established in Italy, Sicily and elsewhere overseas, partly for trade but much more to relieve population pressure at home (it is misleading to call them colonies, for they were wholly independent of the states from which their founders had emigrated). Subsequent developments varied from place to place. In Athens, a city of the greatest importance in the history of the arts, the famous constitution drawn up by Solon at the beginning of the sixth century created a status hierarchy based on wealth - reckoned in terms of agricultural produce - and for the first time gave a role in government, albeit a minor one, to a middle class of fairly prosperous farmers, merchants, shippers and craftsmen. Despite a period of tyranny from 545 to 510 BC - which was, in fact, more like constitutional monarchy than the word tyranny suggests nowadays - this system survived to become the basis of a democratic state in which all free citizens could participate directly in government.

The Athenian polls was a very small state by modern standards. It occupied an area of some 1,000 square miles (i,6oosq km) - the size of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg today and rather less than Rhode Island in the USA - with a population which rose at its height in the mid-fifth century BC to no more than a quarter of a million people, about a third of whom lived in the city itself. Other poleis were still smaller: Corinth seems to have had a population of around 90,000, Argos about half that, and many had 5,000 or less, yet contrived to remain independent. Both the proliferation and the small size of these 'city-states' (misleadingly so-called, for most were, in fact, agricultural communities) may well have conditioned artistic developments more than the various political systems they adopted - aristocracies and tyrannies being more usual than democracies. Each one had its temples decorated with sculpture and paintings, and each had a comparatively rich and leisured upper class. Artists (like poets) were free to travel from one to another in search of patronage. Their products, especially metalwork and pottery, were also exported to the Greek cities overseas, whence they might be traded with Etruscans in Italy and Scythians in southern Russia (see p. 161).

The potential market for works of art in the Hellenic world may thus have been larger than in the incomparably vaster empires of ancient Egypt, Assyria and Iran, for in them patronage was concentrated at the top of a single social pyramid. But if the patrons of Greek artists were more numerous, they were much less wealthy. They could afford to give few opportunities for work on the grand scale. Significantly, the largest and showiest of Greek temples were built by tyrants, on the island of Samos and at Syracuse in Sicily. The main demand seems to have been for statues rarely more than life-size, for panel paintings rather than great decorative schemes, for small pieces of finely wrought gold jewelry and for pottery vases, which were, of course, of slight intrinsic value. A premium was thus set on artistry. Artistic experiment was quite evidently not discouraged and the artists themselves, perhaps for the first time in history, seem to have competed with one another in attempts to improve on their predecessors' efforts. Competition was a great feature of Greek life, not only in athletics: the fifth-century BC Greek tragedies were first performed in poetical competitions. Perhaps artists were also fired by that love of independence which enabled the Greeks to defeat the massive Persian invasion of 480 BC.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 848