The Hellenistic turn in bodily representations: venting anxiety in terracotta figurines

Abstract

In the archaic age (600-480 bce), Greek sculptors began to represent the human body in the round, their limbs finally losing their matchstick appearance. According to the 5th-century bce sophist Protagoras (Plato, Theaetetus 152a-f), man was ‘the measure of all things’. It is as if that Greek artists took this motto to heart and from the archaic age until the dawn of the Roman Empire in the late 1st century bce, focusing their entire powers of observation and creativity on the human body. The representations underwent many changes, struggling between two poles, realism (mimesis) and idealism, either trying to show mimetically the human body as accurately as they could or, alternatively, showing it as well as they could according to certain notions of beauty. Disability did not earn a rightful place in representations until late in the Hellenistic age (322-31 bce), and mainly in a cheap and mass-produced art form, terracotta figurines. After a quick review of the various artistic movements that preceded the Hellenistic age, we will consider a selection of physical deformities represented in terracotta figurines and what the function of some of these objects may have been.