30 Millennia of Sculpture. Patrick Bade
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colourful world.
In Classicism, beauty has a numerical component. Just as musical intervals and chords could be defined proportionally through the ratio of numbers, and geometry and mathematics informed planetary movements, similar proportional aspects found a place in Greek sculptural and architectural design. Polykleitos’ Canon, or Spear-bearer, was only the most prominent of many works informed by proportional ideals: the ratios of lengths of fingers, hands, arms, legs and heads were adjusted to stand in relationship to other parts and the whole. We know of his system in part from a description by Galen, a medical doctor who lived in the 2nd century CE. Galen discussed Polykleitos’ artistic system, and seemed to accept the idea that the human body truly comprises a set of ideal proportions. This principle would endure throughout the history of art; Classicism in the Renaissance and neoclassical periods would also incorporate some kind of mathematical or numerical system of proportionality.
The Greek city-states were weakened by warfare during the 4th century BCE. Although striking developments in their sculptural traditions continued unabated, the works of that time were enhanced by a new sense of elegance and spatial play. By the end of the century, faced with powerful opposition, the Greek city-states had lost their independence and were united by the Macedonians under Philip II and Alexander the Great. Greek citizens were incorporated into a far-flung empire that occupied lands from Italy to the edge of India, and even after the division of this empire into various kingdoms, the various Greek city-states remained parts of larger political entities. Such dramatic changes could only lead to a changed perception of one’s place in the universe, and it is hardly surprising that novel artistic developments resulted in all of the visual arts. One new strain was a pragmatic, realistic attitude that seemed to respond to the new realpolitik of changing conditions, in which the ideal of local democracy was shattered. In the new state of things, the individual had to get by in a difficult, changing and dynamic world. The Hellenistic period saw the diffusion of genre scenes, some of which held great pathos: an old woman struggling to walk to market, tired boxers, children tussling, dwarves dancing. New expressionistic details can be found in Hellenistic figures, particularly in the distinctive muscular types, with large muscles, thick proportions, deep-set eyes, and thick, curling, moving hair. The older types of sculptural project – frieze reliefs, tympanum sculpture, and free-standing figures – continued, but new settings and types arose. In the great Altar of Zeus at Pergamon (fig. 206), rather than a narrow frieze set above, there is a large-scale relief scene below, bringing the gigantic battle scene down to the viewer’s own level. The size of public sculpture increased over earlier periods of Greek art, and the Colossus of Rhodes, dominating the harbour, became an early tourist site.
The Greek colonies in the Italian peninsula had set the stage for the advance of the figural arts there. The Etruscans, a still relatively mysterious people, adopted some of the figural modes learned from the Greeks. The spectacular rise of the Romans started out as one of military and political triumph. The story is well known of how a small city-state grew to dominate the peninsula, and then came to create a great empire that stretched from Scotland to North Africa and Mesopotamia. The most striking of the Roman sculptural products during the centuries before the Empire were in portraiture; the unflinching realism of Roman republican portraiture reveals the character and moral fibre of those who were developing a political and social system of great strength and promise.
Iconographic change in sculpture followed the political development and expansion of the Empire. The establishment by Augustus (died 14 CE) of an imperial regime called for a new manner of imperial portraiture, and the changing styles and approach of these images of rulers stand at the core of the development of Roman portraiture. The divine status of the emperor and the propagandistic display of his likeness in public spaces provided opportunities for Roman sculptors and designers of coins and medals. There arose a vast new array of new monument types, and sculpture appeared on triumphal arches, on towering columns, and at the baths, fora, and elsewhere. The Romans were willing, when they were not relying on their own inventions, to erect copies of Greek works, or proudly to display the originals themselves, which had been purchased or plundered from Greece. These Greek copies and originals, in turn, served as artistic inspirations and helped maintain a high standard of quality in Roman sculpture. Some Roman emperors, such as Marcus Aurelius, consciously appropriated Greek ideals; he sported a beard in the Greek fashion and adopted Stoic philosophy, and his sculptors responded with idealising and classicising works, the most memorable being the equestrian monument placed on the Capitoline Hill. This work is in bronze, a favoured material of the Greeks, which also became highly desirable to the Romans.
Roman people of all social classes were surrounded by high-quality sculptural originals, as the Roman state wanted to leave its stamp on public sites, including provincial ones. The baths (terme) were a frequent location for sculptures, many of them free-standing figures on athletic themes. The exterior of the Coliseum was adorned with sculptural figures standing in its open arches and a colossal statue of the Emperor Nero adjacent to the amphitheatre (later turned into a sun god by Nero’s unadmiring successors). The rediscovery of the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18th century led to an increase in knowledge of the placement and type of sculptural figures used in Roman cities, and confirmed the literary evidence that much statuary was displayed in the atria of urban homes, as it was in the villas and vast country gardens of the aristocratic classes. Cicero, like other cultured contemporaries, formed what were essentially small museums in his villas, inside and out, and these served as places of retreat and philosophical contemplation. Emperors, too, populated their villas with grottoes, fountains and reflecting pools that were surrounded by sculpture. Knowledge of these villas from ruins and from verbal descriptions was vital in shaping the gardens of Europe in the Renaissance and later. The Romans developed a vigorous sculptural tradition surrounding the rituals of death and mourning, and their funerary portraits and sarcophagus reliefs provide a rich legacy of artistic history.
During the last centuries of its existence, the Roman Empire slowly went into decline militarily, economically, culturally and morally. The amphitheatres and their bloody games gained in popularity, while traditional athletics (running, javelin throwing, discus throwing) fell into decline. Dramatic theatre in the traditional sense all but disappeared, and poetry and prose lost much in the way of refinement. For its part, Roman sculpture of the 2nd to the 5th centuries CE showed a gradual decline, and figural ideals and proportions ultimately handed down from the Greeks gave way to blunt, mundane and stocky types that conveyed stature and power. Constantine the Great (died 337 CE) was the first Roman emperor to accept Christianity, which had hitherto, with varying degrees of intensity, been persecuted in the empire. The early Christians generally shared the artistic materials and style of the secular Romans, while introducing religious imagery.
The destruction of the civilisation of the Roman Empire at the hands of the tribal Visigoths, Ostragoths, Vandals and others in the 5th and 6th centuries CE brought an end to long cultural traditions. Some of the migratory peoples brought with them a kind of art based on small-scale, intertwining and animal motifs, with only a rather stylised human presence. The Vikings, no less than the others, practiced a style alien to ancient Mediterranean traditions. For its part, the Roman tradition remained dormant for over two centuries before being revived by Charlemagne (Charles the Great; died 814 CE), who deliberately restored ancient Roman styles of script, architecture, sculpture and manuscript illumination, all in what seems to us as provincial variation at best, and hardly taking a new direction. The Ottonian style of a century or so later was less linked to Roman models, but perhaps equally vigorous and forcible in attempting new narrative force and figural presence.
Although Europe was weakened by invasions from Vikings, Magyars and others towards the end of the first millennium after Christ, a great stabilisation of European society took place around the year 1000, and civilisation began to flourish. The feudal system was well established, and Christianity had become mature in its institutions and was leading the way in education and in shaping the codification of both civil and canon law. Society was secure enough that trade could take place on land and sea, and the faithful could take long pilgrimages to distant sites. Places where holy relics were located – blood from the body of Christ, pieces of the True Cross, the mantle of the Virgin, bones of a saint – became pilgrimage destinations, and the internationalisation of culture grew as pilgrims travelled the continent. The holy destinations for these religious tourists