 In this case study, we're going to do sort of a really quick crash course in developments in Greek sculpture from the archaic period into the early, high and late classical periods, and finally into the Hellenistic period. And really what I want you to look for is the ways in which Greek artists became increasingly more comfortable with the medium of large scale stone sculpture. And I'm going to be trying to concentrate on works that we know primarily through marble originals rather than works that we know primarily through copies in marble of original bronzes, so that we're kind of keeping with the marble all the way through. If you don't know what I'm talking about, please go back and read the text section first and then come back. So what we're looking at here in three views are views of the New York Chorus figure. Chorus is simply a generic term that means young man, and a number of sculptures like this were made in the archaic period, so that's roughly about 750 BCE to about 500 BCE. And works like this represent the earliest attempts by the Greeks to create large scale stone sculpture. Prior to this, they were working in much more small scale with stones that were the sort that you could pick up fairly easily. But here, as you can see in the comparison that I brought in with King Menkaure and his queen, and his queen may be a woman named Camara Nemti. He had three queens, so we don't know exactly which one. That's why she tends to be called just his queen. If you look at this sculpture, this gives you an idea of the initial model that the Greeks were working from. The Greeks and the Egyptians came into contact through trading colonies, and the Greeks picked up the idea of monumental sculpture in stone from the Egyptians. Now, if you take a look at the Egyptian model here, you'll notice that it's actually a sculpture in relief. That is, the figures have not been completely freed from the stone background, and rather they emerge from it. But take a look at that space between the queen and the king, for example, and you can see that it's completely filled with that black basalt. And then similarly, her arm simply appears next to his waist, but then we have a whole bunch of stone that's still there. If we look back at the New York Chorus, you'll notice that he still does have some joins between the parts of his anatomy. His hands are still stuck to the sides of his leg, and there are extra bits of stone there to keep that together. And similarly, the upper portions of his thighs are kind of united together with a little bit of extra stone. And the artist is also using this very sort of formal Egyptian stance with clenched fists, a very frontal gaze, extremely stylized hair, and very linear and stylized treatment of body parts. Just about 50 years later, we have this particular Chorus figure called the Anavisos Chorus, and he is named that for his fine sight. This particular Chorus appears to have been used as a grave marker to mark the grave of a young man who had fallen in battle. And there's actually an inscription up on him that talks about who this young man was and the fact that he fell on the field of battle. But what I want you to notice here is how much more the marble looks like flesh. And that has a lot to do with the sculptor's treatment of this body as something soft and curvaceous. The lines haven't been sort of dug in and incised, but rather we have a lot more very subtle modeling that gives us the impression of muscles underneath this skin. We get some sense of a rib cage and a six pack on this figure. He gets a little bit linear down in his lower legs and his calves and his shins, and his proportions are not completely worked out, but I think you'll agree that this is a pretty tremendous change in just 50 years. And you'll notice that even though the hands are still united with the body on the side, there's a lot more sense of this figure as being an independent figure in the round without a whole lot of extra stone kind of holding him together. Now we're looking at the exception to what I promised at the beginning of this presentation, and that is we're looking at a Roman copy in marble of a Greek bronze original. I was going to try and bring in as many original Greek marbles as possible, but for this work and the work right after it, we just don't have originals in marble. The reason I'm bringing in this particular figure and the next one is because they are considered sort of turning points in the history of Greek sculpture. So with this figure whose name is the Deriferos or Spear Bearer, he was created by a famous sculptor named Polly Klytos originally in bronze. With the Spear Bearer, we have a shift from the rather stylized, stiff figures of the archaic period into the naturalism of the classical period. So this is really sort of a transition into classical art. And this figure dates to, is usually variously dated around 450, 425 BCE in the original, and he was, many, many copies were made of him because he was so famous. And so even though the original bronze has been lost, what we're looking at is what is considered to be the most authoritative of the surviving copies in marble. And this is a figure that is now in the Naples Museum. So what makes this figure so special? Well, it's because he doesn't look like he's just rigidly posed. He actually looks like he could take a step forward and move. And that's because of something called contra posto, which means counter poise. I'll get to that in a moment. I want to point out a couple of things first. First of all, you might notice that he's standing next to a tree trunk and has a strut connecting his wrist to his leg. These are both sort of products of the fact that this is a copy in marble of a work that was originally done in bronze. And the work in bronze would have been hollow. It would have had perhaps some sort of interior kind of architecture of rods helping to hold it up. And so its whole system of stability and standing up would be completely different from what you would get with marble. With marble, of course, you have to make sure that you have ample support for the various pieces so that nothing ends up falling off or collapsing. And so here we have a tree trunk acting as a strut to hold up the leg. And then we have this additional sort of branch between the wrist and the thigh of the figure. Now I talked to some of the folks at the Getty Museum and to some other classical sculpture experts about areas like this, these struts and these props that we see on these Roman copies after Greek originals. And I was asking, well, you know, why didn't the sculptors do a better job of kind of disguising these? In the work of Bernini, as we'll see later on, he was able to disguise sort of utilitarian pieces of extra stone as things that actually belonged on the sculpture. And so particularly that strut between the wrist and the thigh seems very discordant to modern eyes. But what was explained to me is that in the ancient world, in the classical world, using something like this might simply have been sort of an acknowledgement of the properties of stone and the differences between stone and bronze. And almost sort of celebrating the difficulties of working in stone as opposed to the difficulties of working in bronze, that there's a different set of challenges. And so the artist is choosing to almost accentuate some of those things without making it too disturbing to look at or too distracting from the rest of the work. So think about that. I'm not sure I totally agree, but I can see their point. Back to Contraposto, this is my best diagram for kind of showing you what I mean by Contraposto. As you can see, he has one leg that's holding all of his weight, and that causes him to have an engaged leg, that weight-bearing leg, and a free leg. And that means that he sort of tilts his hips to the side, and then his shoulders respond by tilting in the opposite direction. And so we get sort of a twist and a turn in the body. And if you stand and talk to somebody for a while on the street, you'll find yourself kind of adopting that same pose, kind of shifting your weight from foot to foot. And there's that implied potential for movement that is what makes this sculpture so very important in the history of art because now these sculptures are starting to be sort of freed from their limitations, and we can actually imagine them walking and talking. I'm not going to spend too much time on this work, but this is another very famous work from that sort of transitional period as we're moving into the classical period. And you can see here two copies after the same original. This is the discus thrower, or discobalus, made famous by the sculptor Myron. And I think you can see that we have two different variations on display in the exact same museum here. These help to indicate just how famous this work was. There are a number of discobalus figures all over the world. And it's a way of seeing what the Roman patrons were attracted to when they demanded copies of famous works. And it also gives you an idea of how different sculptors dealt with some of these problems differently. I think you can see that on the figure who's missing his head, there would have been a strut actually extending upwards from the figure's rear end to help support that outstretched arm with the discus. And we don't have anything like that at all on the figure on the right, although we do have a strut that helps to attach his fingers to his calf and support them. So, again, we have these sorts of ways of dealing with the limitations in marble and the difficulties posed by this medium, which is much less forgiving in many ways than bronze. In the late classical period, when we get around the year 300 BCE, we start to see a different aesthetic emerging in Greek sculpture. Figures become much more elongated and they become somewhat more sensual, particularly the male bodies. And here you can see I've kind of exaggerated this line in the middle, but sculptors began to introduce sort of a sinuous S-curve into their works. This is a sculpture that depicts the god Hermes, the messenger god, with the infant Dionysus. And it is believed to possibly be an original sculpture by the master Praxiteles. He was the one who also did the Aphrodite of Canidos that you saw in some of your reading material earlier in this module. And if it wasn't done as an original, it was done by an extremely skilled Roman sculptor not too long after. But you can see there's a very different aesthetic here. I also want you to notice the real emphasis on different textures, the textures of cloth as compared to the textures of hair and of skin. There's a real appreciation for some of the possibilities of marble. And it's also clear that artists are becoming a bit more comfortable with what they can and can't get away with when it comes to having the parts of the sculpture all working structurally so that nothing falls off or falls down. Here's a view of the rear end of that sculpture, and here I think you can get a real appreciation for the different textures that are on the sculpture. You can see different textures in the upper back, for example, the drapery, the support sort of tree thing that you have, and then also on the buttocks of the figure. And I think you can also see that sort of creamy glow and that sort of sensuous fleshiness that some marbles acquire thanks to their crystalline structure and the effect of light on those crystals. We're going to finish with a very famous Hellenistic work of art. The Hellenistic period really is associated with the time after the death of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE, and it goes all the way up to the Battle of Actium in the year 14 CE, so it's a pretty lengthy period. And we call it Hellenistic because this is the period in which the Greek world, thanks to the conquest of Alexander and sort of what came after that in terms of trade and just back and forth exchange of ideas, the effects that that had on the world at that time. One of those effects we saw earlier in this course and that was the expansion of the garden industry because trade routes were opened into India. And another one of the results of the Hellenistic period was a very different type of clientele for works of art and architecture. A clientele that was less interested in a lot of the sort of stoicism and classical ideals that we saw in earlier works and much more interested in things that were very explosively dramatic. And that's exactly what we see here. This is a depiction of a figure named Leacowan. He was a priest in Troy who was described in Homer's Iliad. And he was one of those who warned against the Trojan horse and the dangers of accepting that gift, which of course we know was full of invading soldiers. And unfortunately the gods were on the side of the Athenians in the Trojan war. So even though he was a priest of Apollo, he was punished because he was on what had been determined to be the losing side. And so great serpents were sent to kill him and his two sons. And we see this incredibly arresting, pathetic portrayal of these figures who are doomed to die no matter what they do. And we see just incredible intensity in the way that they're portrayed. Their facial expressions, their musculature, their poses, these amazing snakes that sort of wrap them all up and unite them into one sculpture. It's just pure drama here. And this is the sort of thing that the Romans loved. We know this was in an imperial villa and it was actually also an incredibly influential sculpture for the late Renaissance. This was discovered in Rome in a very wealthy imperial villa and Michelangelo was one of the first whose work was affected by this. And if you think about all of the like really ripped sort of muscle bound figures that you get in much of Michelangelo's work, I think you can see what I'm talking about here. But I think you can see that if we're just simply tracing the timeline of Greek art and treatment of sculpture and increasing comfort with marble as a medium for sculpture here in this work, I mean, it's almost completely exploded. It's almost hard to look at that New York chorus and realize that in a relatively short period of years from that, you're going to end up here with something this explosive and this diagonal and with so many bits and pieces reaching out in all directions. And take a look also at the supports here and how cleverly they really have been included by the artists. The snakes are acting as support. There's drapery. There's the altar where they're all struggling. It's really a tremendous masterwork. So I hope you enjoyed this crash course in Greek sculpture in marble. And if you liked it, maybe you will take an Art History 111 type course, which is a survey that will take more time looking at Greek art or perhaps a Greek and Roman course.