of the sculptural work for Pericles’s building projects on the Athenian Acropolis (downtown Athens).
There is a sort of bloom of newness upon those works of his, preserving them from the touch of time, as if they had some perennial spirit and undying vitality mingled in the composition of them.
The surviving Parthenon statues (many in fragments and now in the British Museum) have the same qualities that ancient writers raved about:
Omnipresence: The figures seem to be watching themselves as they participate in the action, as if they were of this world and yet beyond it, part of the Greek heaven, Olympus.
Realistic spirit: Even though the heads of the Three Goddesses are missing, the superbly rendered fabrics (which have the wet or clingy look pioneered by Phidias) speak for them, revealing the moods, spirit, and down-to-earth sensuality of the flesh-and-blood women behind the clothes.
Participation: What are the three goddesses doing? Watching the birth of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, springing full-grown from the brow of her father Zeus.
Today, even though they are in ruins, the “vitality” of the Parthenon statues endures.
Fourth-century sculpture
After the fall of Athens in 404 BC, the city-state gradually got on its feet again, though it never rose to its former glory. Nevertheless, Greek philosophy peaked in the fourth century BC. (Maybe Athens’s defeat made all Athenians more philosophical.) Plato taught at his famous Athenian Academy from about 387 BC to 347 BC, and Aristotle, his greatest student, taught at the Lyceum in Athens from 335 BC to 322 BC, after educating Alexander the Great in Pella, Macedonia.
The fourth century BC also produced three great sculptors: Praxiteles, Skopas, and Lysippos (the personal sculptor of Alexander the Great). In fourth-century sculpture, the wet look got even wetter, but the timelessness associated with Phidias and Polykleitos gave way to an everyday or down-to-earth quality — less idealism, more realism. For example, Praxiteles depicts his Knidian Aphrodite preparing to take a bath, while his Hermes (see Figure 7-7) looks fondly on the playful infant Dionysus cradled in his arm.
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FIGURE 7-7: Praxiteles had a knack for giving statues a soft, sensual look, as you can see in this Hellenistic or Roman copy of his Hermes and the Infant Dionysus (circa 320 BC–310 BC).
Hallmarks of Praxiteles’s style include these qualities that illustrate a turn toward realism:
Depicting natural beauty: The fourth century also produced the first free-standing female nudes. Praxiteles stripped Aphrodite, the goddess of love, to reveal all her delicate beauty and grace. Naked Aphrodite was a hit; lots of copies followed. Praxiteles was an expert at depicting delicate curves and making marble look like soft, supple flesh. The original Knidian Aphrodite, like nearly all great Greek statues, has been lost and is only known through Roman imitations and writers’ descriptions.
Paying tribute to intrinsic grace: Praxiteles’s statue of Hermes and the Infant Dionysus (refer to Figure 7-7) is nearly as famous as his Aphrodite — and just as beautiful. Notice the softness and classical serenity of the facial features and delicate grace of Hermes’s body. The Hermes, once believed to be an original, is now considered to be a superb copy, closer to the spirit of the original than the copy of Knidian Aphrodite.
Figuring Out Greek Vase Painting
Greek vase painting progressed from the primitive Geometric style (tenth through eighth centuries BC, in which people and animals look like stick figures) to the highly realistic Early Classical style in the early fifth century BC. Greece also had a brief flirtation with an Oriental style influenced by trade with Mesopotamia.
Cool stick figures: The geometric style
At first glance, the paintings on vases from the tenth through eighth centuries BC look like the stick-figure doodlings of a child. Closer inspection reveals a complex network of geometric patterns: wraparound chains of Greek frets and chevrons (similar to a sergeant’s stripes), squares, dots, and squiggly lines, along with stick figures of people and animals. Geometric vases could also tell stories. The Dipylon krater (see Figure 7-8) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows stick figures pulling their hair out in mourning at the funeral pyre of a Greek warrior.
Rogers Fund / The Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIGURE 7-8: The Dipylon krater, Terracotta illustrates funerary scenes and was used as a grave marker c. 750–735 BC
In the next century, the more realistic Oriental style, which made a brief appearance, allowed for clearer visual storytelling. The neck of the Oriental-style amphora (a vessel used for storing and pouring wine or olive oil) The Blinding of Polyphemus and Gorgons depicts a scene from The Odyssey, in which Odysseus and his companions burn out the eye of the giant Cyclops Polyphemus. Odysseus pulls off this stunt by first getting the one-eyed giant drunk. The wine cup in the Cyclops’s hand suggests this earlier episode.
The Mesopotamian influence is confined to the figures. Odysseus and his men look like Mesopotamians, especially the upper part of the scorpion-man in the bottom band of Puabi’s lyre (refer to Figure 5-2 in Chapter 5). The animals in the middle band and the gorgons (sisters of the snake-haired Medusa) on the belly of the vase also have a Near-Eastern flavor. But the Greeks added their own playful charm to the monsters. If you look closely, you can see that the bug-eyed gorgons show off their sexy left legs like cancan dancers.
Black-figure
