30 Millennia of Sculpture. Patrick Bade
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which among them go back to Lysippos.
As head of the great athletic school of Peloponnese, Lysippos naturally sculptured many athletes; a figure by him of a man scraping himself with a strigil was a great favourite of the Romans in the time of Tiberius; it has usually been regarded as the original copied in the Apoxyomenos of the Vatican (fig. 178).
178. Anonymous, Apoxyomenos, copy after a bronze original created around 330 BCE by Lysippos. Ancient Greek. Marble, height: 205 cm. Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican.
In the 4th century, standing male statues of idealised athletes remained a popular subject for sculpture. The poses became more varied, however, as sculptors experimented with forms that could be viewed from multiple angles. The Apoxyomenos, or Man scraping Himself, is an example of innovation of pose. His right arm extends forward, reaching out of the plane in which the rest of his body lies. Before exercising, a Greek athlete would apply oil to his body. He would then return to the bath house, after engaging in sport, and scrape the oil off himself. The subject of the Apoxyomenos is in the process of scraping himself clean.
179. Anonymous, Aphrodite of Knidos, copy after a Greek original created around 350 BCE by Praxiteles. Ancient Greek. Marble. Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican.
Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty, and sex, was renowned for her own beauty. The Aphrodite of Knidos was one of the first nude female sculptures in the Greek world, and caused quite a stir. It portrays Aphrodite as the epitome of female beauty: a goddess, but rendered accessible to mere mortals through her vulnerability. That vulnerability, expressed through the combination of her nudity and her shy stance, was emphasised through the placement of the statue in an outdoor shrine in a place where it could be directly approached and seen up close. The nude Aphrodite became a common subject for sculpture in the 4th century BCE and following, in part due the popularity of this piece. It is also likely that Aphrodite provided sculptors with the opportunity to showcase the female form in a sensual and erotic manner under the guise of a reverential image of a god.
180. Anonymous, Apollo Sauroktonos, Hellenistic copy after a Greek original created during the 4th century BCE by Praxiteles. Ancient Greek. Marble. Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican.
Greek sculptor, Praxiteles of Athens, the son of Cephissodotus, is considered the greatest of the 4th century BCE Attic sculptors. He left an imperishable mark on the history of art.
Our knowledge of Praxiteles received a significant contribution, and was placed on a satisfactory basis with the discovery at Olympia in 1877 of his statue of Hermes with the Infant Dionysos (fig. 188), a statue that has become world famous, but which is now regarded as a copy. Full and solid without being fleshy, at once strong and active, the Hermes is a masterpiece and the surface play astonishing. In the head we have a remarkably rounded and intelligent shape, and the face expresses the perfection of health and enjoyment.
Among the numerous copies that came to us, perhaps the most notable is the Apollo Sauroktonos, or the lizard-slayer (fig. 180), a youth leaning against a tree and idly striking with an arrow at a lizard, and the Aphrodite of Knidos of the Vatican (fig. 179), which is a copy of the statue made by Praxiteles for the people of Knidos; they valued it so highly they refused to sell it to King Nicomedes, who was willing in return to discharge the city’s entire debt, which, according to Pliny, was enormous.
The subjects chosen by Praxiteles were either human or the less elderly and dignified deities. Apollo, Hermes and Aphrodite rather than Zeus, Poseidon or Athena attracted him. Under his hands the deities descend to human level; indeed, sometimes almost below it. They possess grace and charm to a supreme degree, though the element of awe and reverence is wanting.
Praxiteles and his school worked almost entirely in marble. At the time the marble quarries of Paros were at their best; for the sculptor’s purpose no marble could be finer than that of which the Hermes is made.
181. Anonymous, Sculpture of a Bull with Folded Legs, 4th-3rd century BCE. Ancient Celtic, Porcuna (Spain). Limestone. Museo Provinciale, Jaen.
182. Anonymous, Athenian Tombstone, c. 340 BCE. Ancient Greek. Marble, height: 168 cm. National Archaeological Museum, Athens.
183. Anonymous, Sarcophagus of Velthur Partunus, so-called “Magnate”, third quarter of the 4th century BCE Ancient Etruscan. Painted marble and limestone, Museo Archeologico di Tarquinia, Tarquinia (Italy).
184. Anonymous, Plate Containing the Torso of a Woman, second half of the 4th century BCE. Ancient Celtic, Setting of the yoke of the woman’s grave of Waldalgesheim (Germany). Bronze, height: 9.5 cm. Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn.
185. Anonymous, Tanagra, 364–305 BCE. Ancient Near East, Babylon (Iraq). Terracotta. The British Museum, London.
186. Anonymous, Statuette of a Nude Standing Woman, Perhaps Representing a Great Babylonian Goddess, 3rd century BCE-3rd century CE. Ancient Near East, Babylon (Iraq). Alabaster, gold, rubies and clay, height: 24.8 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
187. Anonymous, Venus and Cupid, Roman copy after a Greek original created at the end of the 4th century BCE, restored at the end of the 17th century by Alessandro Algardi. Ancient Greek. Marble, height: 174 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Aphrodite became a common subject for Greek sculptors in the 4th century BCE and later, because her renowned beauty provided an acceptable excuse for an erotic representation of the female body. She is sometimes shown, as here, with her son Eros, known to the Romans as Cupid, and in later art as “putti,” the winged babies symbolising earthly and divine love. In Roman art and mythology, Aphrodite became Venus, goddess of love. To the Romans she had a more elevated status, seen as the progenitor of the line of Caesar, Augustus, and the Julio-Claudian emperors, and by extension as an embodiment of the Roman people. This playful depiction of Aphrodite and Eros, or Venus and Cupid, is more suggestive of the Greek view of Aphrodite, who saw her not only as the symbol of sensual beauty, but also as occasionally silly and humorous.
188. Anonymous, Hermes with the Infant Dionysos, copy after an original created at the end of the 4th century BCE by Praxiteles. Ancient Greek. Marble, height: 215 cm. Archaeological Museum, Olympia.
189. Anonymous, Belvedere Apollo, copy after a Greek original by Leochares created around c. 330 BCE. Ancient Greek. Marble, height: 224 cm. Museo Pio Clementino, Rome.
The Belvedere Apollo has long enjoyed fame, known as the prototypical work of Greek art. This fame springs from its rediscovery during the Renaissance of the 15th century. At that time, wealthy Italian nobles began to collect ancient sculpture that was being discovered in the ruins of Roman Italy. The Belvedere Apollo went to the collection of the Pope, and was displayed in the courtyard of the Belvedere villa in the Vatican. There, it was seen by countless visitors and visiting artists, who sketched the piece. Copies were made for various courts of Europe. The proud, princely bearing of the figure, along with the delicate beauty of Apollo’s face, had great appeal among the aristocratic classes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to the Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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