Classical Sculpture Research Articles

The goddess’ new clothes: the carving and polychromy of the Parthenon Sculptures

White marble sculpture is a cornerstone of Western art history. Archaeological inquiry, however, has demonstrated that Classical sculpture and its associated architecture were once coloured. The authors examine the Parthenon Sculptures at the British Museum to identify traces of colour and carving on their surfaces. Using close examination and archaeometric techniques, the study shows that the sculptors finished surfaces with textures that reflected specific elements (e.g. skin, wool, linen) and these were then enhanced through the application of colour, including a purple colourant and Egyptian blue. The latter was used extensively to paint elaborate figurative designs on the carved textiles. Despite the complexity of the carved drapery, elaborate ornament was applied to the finish. The findings encourage a reconsideration of the appearance of the Parthenon in the fifth century BC.

Twentieth-century private collecting

Abstract Dr Philip Nelson, who died in 1953, was an antiquary and collector who lived in Liverpool. One of the highlights of the collections of classical sculpture in the World Museum, part of National Museums Liverpool, is a group of statuettes and busts acquired by Nelson from the 12th Lord Kinnaird and formerly housed in Rossie Priory, near Perth in Scotland. Although Nelson bought only two sculptures from the first auction of sculptures from the Rossie Priory collection, held at Sotheby’s in London in December 1948, it is apparent that he acquired several others, either directly from Lord Kinnaird or through dealers. Details of this process can be found in the archives of the World Museum and the Walker Art Gallery, also part of National Museums Liverpool, including hitherto unpublished letters, notebooks and invoices, reproduced here in an online appendix. The correspondence provides an insight into the formation of a private collection of ancient sculpture in the first half of the twentieth century, a period often overlooked in collecting scholarship.

Transfiguration: Southworth and Hawes, Reproduced Images and Body

The Harrison Horblit Collection at the Harvard University’s Houghton Library contains a remarkable daguerreotype plate by the Boston firm Southworth & Hawes. It reproduces an engraving after Raphael’s Transfiguration. Whereas reproductive printmaking normally seeks to produce multiples of a unique original, daguerreotype reproductions open a space of ambiguity between the categories of original and reproduction since daguerreotypes are unique objects. Much is lost in this translation, but what is gained? If reproduction of paintings normally renders the singular multiple, what happens when a painting is reproduced as a unique image? Why was this daguerreotype created? Southworth & Hawes specialized in portraits of celebrities and considered themselves artists. Why then did they make a daguerreotype of an engraving of a painting? And why this painting?Their image of an image of an image is at once simply duplicative and a meditation on photography itself – an expanded conception of photography that figures it as spiritual and conceptual practice, as is suggested in other conflations of image reproduction and transfiguration within Southworth & Hawes’ oeuvre as well. The logic of the Southworth & Hawes’ Transfiguration becomes less a conundrum when considered in relation to two of their other images, one of the branded hand of abolitionist Jonathan Walker, the other a self-portrait representing Southworth’s torso as a classical sculpture. Translation, transfiguration, body, soul and image are closely imbricated in all three of these daguerreotypes, each produced during the height of New England Transcendentalism. While Raphael’s Transfiguration epitomizes the intersection of the human and a divine being as Scriptural drama, The Branded Hand and Southworth as a Classical Bust allude to the spiritual realm through representation of the soul’s transcendence of the suffering body rather than direct reference to scripture. The Branded Hand detaches subject from the context of the body as a whole; Walker’s wound appears in the image as the silvery trace of the price paid for his abolitionist conviction. The portrait of Southworth separates an individual man’s identity from the more allegorical presence, while presenting suggestions of sorrow as emblems of spiritual elevation. But beyond this, the transmedial daguerreotype of the print of the Raphael announces itself as visual metonymy; the transfiguration of Christ in the painting also conveys the transfigurative power of the photographic medium itself.

Transient Permanence

There are few places where the tenacious dichotomy of copy and original deconstructs itself more forcefully than in the trajectory we refer to as classical sculpture. This process is intrinsic to the assumed origins of the classical and the idea of the antique original, and despite the existence of celebrity pieces such as the Venus de Milo, the Laocoön, or the Farnese Hercules, objects that crowds have lined up for centuries to see in Paris, Rome, and Naples, respectively. Few statues can be authorized as first, original versions: the history of classical sculpture is as much a history of the serialized original as of the serial copy, as Salvatore Settis and his team exquisitely displayed in the concurrent exhibitions Portable Classic and Serial Classic at the Prada Foundation in Venice and Milan in 2015. While the Milan edition revolved around seriality, materiality and surface, the Venice exhibition displayed antique repetitions through scale, miniaturization and portability. Hackneyed conceptions of origins and originality collapsed in the line–up of a Farnese Hercules series in Palazzo Corner della Regina on the Grand Canal, and in the numerous antique variants and derivatives of iconic statues such as the Discobolus and the Crouching Venus in Milan. Entering these two spaces was a profound bodily experience of the repeatability, versatility, and adjustability of the classical tradition.

The Physician as Patient: Medicine after COVID-19

The Physician as PatientMedicine after COVID-19 Laura Kolbe (bio) when i was a child, four nuns worked in my Catholic grade school and lived in the "convent," a small, plain ranch house on the property. Three taught while one ran the business of the parish. Their short gray curly hair, their coordinating brown clothing, and the appellation "Sister" gave me the confused notion that they were related. This prompted the further extrapolation that all teachers must belong to some vast yet exclusive family, set apart from the rowdy tribe of non-teachers that my own family belonged to. Two of my aunts claimed they were teachers. I didn't believe them; both had houses, and one even went on dates. I think that on some level adults have the same notion of physicians. I certainly do when I'm the patient, even though I am a physician, even though my own primary care doctor is a colleague [End Page 5] whom I've glimpsed attending to the many nonclinical parts of her life on her phone during the duller parts of faculty meetings. There is, you'll be sorry to learn, something called #medtwitter (one part gripes, two parts preachy threads, with a dash of haphazardly edited vacation and postpartum photos), which might initially seem to recontextualize doctors back into the yowling Family of Man but in fact often renders us ever more generic and implausible as individuals. The genre conventions of the format fit our self-expression into a few flat archetypes—the pedantic explainer, the griper, the eternally grateful and blessed—as non-native to true human reality as those classical sculptures of Hippocrates that turn him into a hypertrophied megalith of brawn. But then came COVID-19. Many doctors—along with all kinds of other health care and frontline workers—had the chance to render their idiosyncratic experience on the page and screen, and the public was listening. We each had particular things to be angry and sad about. We watched irreplaceable patients die under our care; we each had our own unique recurring nightmares; our marriages and family structures and friendships were disintegrating, or marvelously holding up, in an explosive variety of particulars for everyone to see. Doctors became people. At my annual visit in 2021, emboldened by the novel thought that my primary care doctor was a person, no more and no less, I told her the truth about how much I drink and how often I exercise—some 80 percent of people are not entirely truthful with their physicians about their health habits, myself very much among them—and the exam table did not collapse in flames. The downside of doctors becoming widely recognized as people is that people are also people, and so now we're on undeniably equal footing: the clinicians and the "everyone else" from whom doctors have long stood carefully apart. In this newly vulnerable moment, my medical uncertainty takes on a different character. Whereas my occasional uncertainty as a doctor once had a numinous sheen, at least to my eye, it is now exposed as the ordinary not-knowing that it always was. (That my not-knowing is often [End Page 6] laced with data and probabilities does not completely change the fundamental head-scratch.) There have always been times when I know that I don't know best, though I also know that my honest counsel is important. It is up to me to tell a patient who wants to leave the hospital prematurely, or decline an important procedure or medication, exactly why I think that's dangerous and imprudent—and then to do my utmost to trust, to teach, and to support if that patient continues to reason otherwise. Within the boundaries of safety and good practice, I take patients at their word about the physical pain they report to me, though that pain is sometimes hard for me to understand or imaginatively inhabit. This becomes complicated when many of the medications that treat pain are also dangerous or potentially addictive, but that very complication means that I need to listen harder, not less. The stakes are too high not to. Even when a patient...

Classical Sculpture from the Athenian Agora, Part 4: Concluding Remarks on the Sculptures of the Temple of Ares (Athena Pallenis)

Classical Sculpture from the Athenian Agora, Part 4: Concluding Remarks on the Sculptures of the Temple of Ares (Athena Pallenis)

Общность и её пластические воплощения

How does the practice of contemporary art make us rethink the principles of classical aesthetics? This question is examined through a specific case study, namely, the sculptures of Vadim Sidur, an original Soviet artist. The paper formulates the concept of hieroglyphic sign that originates in the artistic practices themselves, indicating ways in which the contemporary theory of art might be further developed. Sidur’s sculptures are juxtaposed with G. E. Lessing’s Laocoon that interprets classical sculpture as striving for eternity, i.e., as subject to idealization and subordinated to the principle of beauty. What Sidur’s sculptures express, however, is not individual heroism, where pain is overcome for the sake of harmony, but collective pain and suffering that cannot be sublated –– harmonized –– in a work of art. In order to better understand Sidur’s sculptures, it is useful to turn to S. M. Eisenstein’s remarks. For Eisenstein, the hieroglyph is not only a combination of picture and concept, but also a “conflict” of the two, which is how he understands cinematic montage. The hieroglyph expresses something meaningful and universal by means of pictorial units. Elaborating this idea, one might suggest that symbolic mediation is discarded and that sculpture becomes a social sign of pain. Inseparable from the dynamic of social matter, such signs participate in it directly. Thus they challenge the linguistic model and reveal an irreducible community, in Sidur’s case –– a non-heroic community of those who share the experience of 20th century mass suffering. Hieroglyphic signs contradict autonomy and individuality typical of the classical philosophies of art.

Gandhara Art’s Influence on Buddhist Art in Xinjiang, China

The Gandhara region of India was the origin of Buddhist art, and, due to its unique geographical location, it was a place where European and Asian civilizations mingled. The original Gandhara Buddhist art style was largely influenced by the style of Classical Greek sculpture. With the gradual development, its sculpture art and Buddhist stories entered a prosperous period and began to spread eastward, exerting a profound impact on the development of Buddhist art in the early stage of western Regions and later in Xinjiang.

‘Contemporary Classicism’ Copy of a Copy: Appropriating Classical Statues as Conceptual Readymades

Conceptual readymades – a contemporary artist’s use of a classical work selected as a key point of reference taken out of time – have developed in recent years as part of contemporary art’s appropriation of Greco-Roman statuary. This investigation argues that a contemporary artist’s use of the classical does not represent ‘copies’ but cultural readymades. Contemporary digital and sculptural work foregrounding the classical sheds light on the parallel phenomenon whereby Roman re-interpretations of Greek sculpture may have been equivalent to contemporary classicism. Contemporary case studies featuring digital media, generative art, and sculpture are approached both from the perspective of what they can reveal about contemporary art’s use of the classical and what contemporary art’s use of classical sculpture can suggest about Roman reinterpretations as cultural readymades. Remade as part of contemporary art, classical sculpture is uniquely positioned as an accessible point of reference with which to comment on our own time by concurrently reframing the past.

Bodies Out of Time: Sculpting Queer Poetics and Queering Classical Sculpture in the Poetry of C. P. Cavafy

Two major themes dominate the poetry of the Alexandrian poet, C. P. Cavafy: homosexual desire and Greekness, broadly defined. This paper explores the interconnectivity of these motifs, showing how Cavafy’s poetic queerness is expressed through his relationship with the ancient Greek world, especially Hellenistic Alexandria. I focus on Cavafy’s incorporation of ancient sculpture into his poetry and the ways that sculpture, for Cavafy, is a vehicle for expressing forbidden desires in an acceptable way. In this, I draw on the works of Liana Giannakopoulou on statuary in modern Greek poetry and Dimitris Papanikolaou on Cavafy’s homosexuality and its presentation in the poetry. Sculpture features in around a third of Cavafy’s poems and pervades it in various ways: the inclusion of physical statues as focuses of ecphrastic description, the use of sculptural language and metaphor, and the likening of Cavafy’s beloveds to Greek marbles of the past, to name but three. This article argues that Cavafy utilizes the statuary of the ancient Greek world as raw material, from which he sculpts his modern Greek queerness, variously desiring the statuesque bodies of contemporary Alexandrian youths and constructing eroticized depictions of ancient Greek marbles. The very ontology of queerness is, for Cavafy, ‘created’ using explicitly sculptural metaphors (e.g. the repeated uses of the verb κάνω [‘to make’] in descriptions of ‘those made like me’) and he employs Hellenistic statues as a productive link between his desires and so-called ‘Greek desire’, placing himself within a continuum of queer, Greek men.

Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present

Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present

PLASTER - POLYESTER CASTING TECHNIQUES IN THE ART OF SCULPTURE

Sculpture art forms an integrity within itself in mass and volumetric sense in the period from the first age to the present in the classical sense. Likewise, the art of sculpture made progress by developing itself further with concepts such as mass, volume, emptiness, fullness, light and shadow, which were revealed in the medieval and baroque period. Especially the separation of the sculpture, which was created with classical materials, with different phenomena with the formation process (clay, mud, marble, wood, bronze, etc.) began to express itself as a separate definition with casting processes as well as molding with materials. In this study, mold making processes, which are indispensable of sculpture art, will be examined by using two different casting techniques from sculptures that have been molded. In this context, it is observed that gypsum mold and polyester mold technologies continue to be used today with the developments and changes that they have undergone from the past to the present. To summarize, within the scope of this study, detailed processes related to casting the work whose mold was taken over classical sculpture technology were explained. Keywords: Sculpture, mold, casting, plaster, polyester

A new Graeco-Egyptian magical amulet of Anguipes with an apotropaic inscription

Sotheby's New York Lot, Auction: Ancient Marbles: Classical Sculpture and Works of Art, 13 June 2016, Lot 92. Provenance unknown, 3rd-4th century CE. Contains a protection formula and the depiction of several deities, including Anguipes and Harpocrates. - 1. Presentation of the amulet. - 2. Commentary. - 3. Iconography. - 4. Some conclusions.

Classical Sculpture from the Athenian Agora, Part 3: The Pediments, Metopes, and Akroteria of the Temple of Ares (Temple of Athena Pallenis)

Classical Sculpture from the Athenian Agora, Part 3: The Pediments, Metopes, and Akroteria of the Temple of Ares (Temple of Athena Pallenis)

Eros in Vienna: Dreams/Archaeology/Photography/Film

The female nude in photography has a complex history in Freud's Vienna. This paper examines photographic images of nude women and girls in the published art-historical studies of classical sculpture. Books on the "sciences" of health and well-being by authors like Carl Heinrich Stratz and Paul Schultze-Naumberg reproduced many photographs of nude women and children, especially young girls. Such visual material comes to bear on Freud's case-history of "Dora" as well as other contemporary writings on psychoanalysis.

Mystery and history: when did Catherine the Great purchase the Lyde Browne collection?

Abstract Documents preserved in the Russian State Historical Archives shed light on the acquisition by Empress Catherine II of the renowned collection of classical sculpture assembled by the antiquary Lyde Browne (d. 1787) – its purchase, arrival and first display in the pavilions of the imperial summer residence in Tsarskoe Selo near St Petersburg. The date for the sale, once assumed to have been 1787, is most widely accepted as 1785, or, as recently suggested, 1784. In fact, there are two dates – 1783 and 1784 – as established by Catherine’s payments (a total sum equivalent to £22,630) for the sculptures as delivered. The archival lists show considerably more items than does the catalogue of Browne’s collection from 1779, while the dispersal of Catherine’s collection of antiquities by her son, Paul I, a partial export to Poland, the formation of the Imperial Hermitage Museum, and later events all contribute to the complex history of the Lyde Browne sculptures in Russia.

Between the Ideal and Artistic Practice. On Research into Ancient Sculptural Polychromy

Antiquity is often synonymous with white marble. Such are the general expectations when visitors enter 21st century museum galleries hosting ancient sculpture. Yet, ancient marble sculptures have never been actually white. They were originally fully painted or otherwise coloured, and today they pose as controlled ruins build by decades of restorations, de-restorations and preservation manifested as encrusted layers and patina. As such they express the modern ideal, meaning ideas of aesthetics developed by 19th and 20th century museums. They do not reflect the ancient artistic practice or the ideas of aesthetics that once guided the ancient craftspeople. The experimental reconstructions -meaning painted copies of authentic sculptures- are therefore often met with suspicion and sometimes frustration, because they explore the artistic practice above the ideal. Unlike the ancient originals, the painted copies are not in any way visually authentic, but fully polychrome, and layers of paint are often applied in thick, opaque layers, thus failing to meet the ideas of aesthetics on behalf of the modern viewer. While the reconstructions serve as seminal research tools in the academic exploration and experimentation with colours on white marble sculptures, they have no precedents in the history of art. This article will therefore explore how reviews of these experimental reconstructions echoes ideas of aesthetics originating from the 19th century, and how a lack of confronting these ideas ultimately empowers the reconstructions with the potential to impose a much-needed material diversity to 21st century classical sculpture galleries.

ВЫСТАВОЧНОЕ ПРОСТРАНСТВО КАК СРЕДА ДЛЯ ДИАЛОГА КЛАССИЧЕСКОЙ СКУЛЬПТУРЫ И СОВРЕМЕННОГО ИСКУССТВА

The article is devoted to the dialogue between classical sculpture and an exhibition of modern art. The author highlights the art practice of environment, which became particularly popular in the second half of the XX - early XXI century as the main tool for creating the artistic synthesis of classical sculpture and exposition, which leads to the appearance of special immersive spaces. As a part of the study, several exhibition projects are considered, which have included samples of sculptures from past eras in their conceptions. The study identifies the features of the synthesis of the old and the new in art within the framework of exhibition and museum activity, analyses approaches to the creation of a temporary exhibition, examines the peculiarities of the relationship of classical art of sculpture and modern works in the single artistic field.

Does this fig leaf make me look gay? Strongmen, statue posing and physique photography

ABSTRACTStudies of the male nude in photography assume a necessity to ‘desexualize’ early physique photographs, which they treat as evidence of proto-gay sensibilities, by reference to classical sculpture. The satirical prints of Thomas Rowlandson inspired in the antiquarian craze of the late eighteenth century, including that of Emma Hart who helped to establish the conventions of the modern living statue genre, indicate that audiences of that time understood the underlying sexual nature of her fully clothed performances and the potential homosexual implications associated with representations of male classical statuary. The adoption of statue posing by itinerant strongmen of the same period provided a context within which male living statue performances could be seen as reinforcing ‘classical’ masculine attributes. Their subsequent popularization by English-born equestrian acrobat Andrew Ducrow furthered their normalization on the popular stage. The nineteenth and early twentieth century reception of living statue performances by strongman Eugen Sandow and dancer Ted Shawn, along with other living statue acts on the vaudeville stage, suggests an enduring social acceptance of male statue posers that did not extend to their female counterparts, at least within the United States. Their repertory and the performance conventions, including their lighting, descended directly from living statue performers who flourished before the invention of photography. Rather than interpret physique photographs as images intended for a homosexual audience, this essay argues they are better understood as souvenirs of a durable popular entertainment tradition intended for a mass audience.

Classical Sculpture from the Athenian Agora, Part 2: The Friezes of the Temple of Ares (Temple of Athena Pallenis)

Classical Sculpture from the Athenian Agora, Part 2: The Friezes of the Temple of Ares (Temple of Athena Pallenis)