ANCIENT GREEK RELIGION AND ATHLETICS

The life-size bronze figure (4,22) was made for the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, one of the most sacred places in ancient Greece, believed to be the centre of the world. Backed by bare cliffs on the steep, south-western slope of Mount Parnassus with a dizzying view down to the Gulf of Corinth 2,000 feet (610m) below, the site inspires awe even today. The main temple (of which little remains) bore the famous admonitory inscriptions that encapsulate ancient Greek belief in reason and moderation: 'know thyself and nothing in excess' -remember that you are a mortal and don't overreach yourself. But Delphi was also famous for its oracle which reflects another, alternative aspect of the Greek genius: awareness of the irrational and acknowledgement of its power. For a fee, an appropriate sacrifice and ritual purification, an oracle called Pythia - the only woman admitted to the sanctuary -would sit on a tripod above a smoking pit and, in a state of shamanistic delirium, would shriek her incoherent but divine utterances in answer to her petitioners' prayers.

The Pythian Games, similar to the Olympic Games, were called after her. They were athletic contests which from the early sixth century BC accompanied the musical competitions held at Delphi in honour of Apollo at regular festivals. These festivals attracted devotees from all over the Greek world, from the coast of Turkey to Sicily and southern Italy, partly because of their appeal to that competitive spirit which was so marked a feature of ancient Greek life - notably in drama, rhetoric, poetry and music as well as sports and games - but also because of their religious significance, the nature of which has never been fully understood by later civilizations. The only prizes given were crowns of laurel leaves sacred to Apollo. But winners also gained kudos or public esteem in return for which they made gifts to the sanctuary. The Charioteer was one of these. It joined and was later joined by many others, in gold, silver, ivory, bronze and terracotta, nearly all of which were later destroyed or broken up for the value of their materials. The Charioteer survived by chance. It was buried under a rockfall and was only discovered in 1896.

Originally it stood in a small two-wheeled racing chariot drawn by four horses, shown at rest (as surviving fragments reveal). This type of chariot was often depicted on vases (4,25) and the horses were probably similar to the one represented in a bronze statuette from Olympia (4,26). The Charioteer has lost his whip, his left forearm, the copper inlays on his lips and most of his silver eye-lashes (like those of the Riace Warrior, 4,36), and no more than a trace remains of an inlaid silver key-pattern on his head-band. Butotherwiseheisquiteremarkablywellpreserved.

As we have seen (pp. 144-5), Charioteer is a superlative work of art but it is hardly less remarkable as a technical feat in bronze casting by the ancient 'lost-wax' or cireperdue process (see Glossary). The figure was cast from hollow molds in seven sections: head, two arms, the garment above and below the belt, and the two ankles and feet. The original model may have been of clay with a metal armature or of wood - the treatment of the drapery and other features suggests that it was of wood. When all the pieces had been satisfactorily cast they were soldered together. It is not known where the Charioteer was made. Athens was one of the main centres for bronze-working and a painting on an early-fifth-century BC Attic cup shows a sculptor's studio with statues being cast in sections by the method used for the Charioteer (4.27). Bronze casting was, however, practised elsewhere in Greece, Asia Minor, Italy (by Etruscans as well as Greeks) and Sicily. A racing chariot with its driver and team of horses might nowadays seem to be a secular rather than a religious subject. But it would not have occurred to anyone in ancient Delphi to make such a distinction. Certainly, its dedication to a sanctuary was as much a religious act as the sacrifice of a bull. That it was a very expensive object no doubt made it particularly acceptable to Apollo's priests. No private individual could have afforded to pay for it or, for that matter, to have engaged in chariot racing. An inscription reveals that it was dedicated by'Polyzalos, tyrant of Gela' (478-c. 470 BC) whose team must therefore have won the race at the quadriennial festival in either 478 or 474 BC. Gela was a small but agriculturally rich Greek colony on the southern coast of Sicily near Syracuse, and Polyzalos had only recently become its tyrant - a word then meaning simply a ruler who had gained power by his own efforts and not, like a king, by birthright. Tyrants often overthrew aristocracies and supported the common people, thus unwittingly preparing the way for democracy in some places, for example in Athens and for a brief period in Syracuse. In Sicily some were generous patrons of literature and the arts. The great tragedian Aeschylus spent several years at the court of Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse and brother of Polyzalos. The great Pindar wrote an ode congratulating Hiero on his team's victory in another chariot race at Delphi.

Polyzalos was the owner, not the driver, of the chariot and horses. The charioteer was his subject or servant, possibly his slave, and is shown dressed for the race in a tunic tightly belted at the waist and with cords tied over the shoulders and under the armpits to prevent it from catching the wind. This completely covers his body and limbs, setting him apart from the kouroi (4,8; 9) whose nude bodies display an ideal of youthful beauty. Male figures were rarely clad in Greek art of this period even when engaged in activities for which some clothing would have been desirable and must normally have been worn - the central figure in the sculptor's studio, for example (4,27). It might be suggested that clothing ranked the charioteer with the tyrant's other household slaves who were usually female and therefore always depicted fully clad. Yet the almost too regularly featured head (4,28) with its perfect Greek profile and the amazingly refined and delicate feet and surviving hand indicate some idealization. Polyzalos would not have wished to dedicate to Apollo anything but thoroughbred horses and an equally beautiful charioteer.

The frieze depicts the Great Panathenaia, the most important Athenian religious festival, celebrated in July every fourth year with a great procession from the city to the Parthenon. Here it is commemorated as an eternal, rather than a temporal, event in the living presence of the gods, who are represented over the main entrance. Originally 524 feet (160m) long (of which about a fifth has perished), the frieze includes several hundred figures, all idealized, yet quite as individual in their poses as in the variety of their clothing or lack of it. (Comparison with the only very slightly earlier processions in low relief [see Glossary] at Persepolis is revealing; see p. 117.) There are no exact repetitions throughout the whole length of the frieze. The vast composition is rhythmically composed with a quiet beginning at the west end of the building, where men are shown preparing to set off, rather more movement rising to crescendos along the side walls and a slow, solemn finale above the entrance at the east end. The figures seem to determine the pattern, to create rather than follow the rise and fall of this great composition (4,30). Prominent among them are young men in perfect control of the spirited horses they ride, recalling lines from the Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles:

Every bridle flashes

And each man gives his horse its rein, as onward

The whole troop surges, servants of Athena,

Mistress of horses

The technical problems involved in the naturalistic representation of men and animals in movement on a shallow stage, with one overlapping the other, have been completely mastered even when complicated, as they were here, by optical distortions due to the siting. The spectator's angle of vision, looking up from the colonnade, had to be taken into account and compensation made for it in the carving. The heads, for instance, are cut in higher relief than the feet and the backgrounds slant inwards. The imposing figures from the pediments were similarly designed to be seen from below, though in much brighter light. As a means of heightening their plastic expressiveness - their tactile sense of form - the sculptors developed a new technique for the carving of drapery, using what are now called 'modelling lines'.

Whereas the cloak over the shoulder and round the left forearm of the Apollo at Olympia looks as if it had been ironed flat, the garments of the Parthenon statues are carved in ridges and deep furrows, which catch the light and hold the shade. No cloth naturally rumples in this way. The effect is entirely artificial. These gossamer-like draperies must have given the pediments a shimmering vitality and - what was far more important - they revealed, rather than concealed, the forms of the bodies beneath them. In the group of The Fates (4,51) the soft fullness of the breasts is emphasized by gently swirling lines, the firm roundness of the arms by tight gatherings across them, the robustness of the thighs by the broad diagonals of deeper folds. Sometimes the concentric lines describe forms almost with the precision of a volumetric diagram. Greek sculptors now realized also that drapery running counter to the direction of the body could indicate movement as well as form. The torso of Iris from the Parthenon is an early instance of this, but a slightly later statue of Nike at Olympia illustrates better their quickly attained mastery of the technique (4,31). The goddess of victory is seen in flight with her dress swirling out behind her and the drapery pressed close to her front so that those parts which it covers seem fuller and rounder than those left naked.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 871