Giant questions: dining with Polyphemus at Sperlonga and Baiae

And where are we now ? of recent origin Archaeology, like nouvelle cuisine, is seductive in appearance on the other hand nutritionally unsatisfying, and we may do well to be, in the Beazley manner, fastidious in our selection of missing causes, and refuse to be dominated by the agency of [it] ... (1)

If, to follow Sir John Boardman's analogy, you generously line a Roman Imperial dining compass with sumptuous polychrome decoration; desiccate representations of Polyphemus, the inebriated Cyclops, and scatter freely; season with literary respects according to taste; and obey with an accompaniment of other sculptural bring under rules what have you got? individual might have whetted one's appetite for an exciting free access into the hermeneutic interpretation of art, the semantics of viewing and the flirtatious interplay between plastic art and dining contexts ...

on the other hand the analysis of two dining-room grottoes--one at Sperlonga (Figs. 1-4) now, as seemingly in antiquity, a seaside resort near Terracina upon the coastal highway between Rome and Naples, and the other at Baiae (Figs. 5-6 12-14) formerly a favourite Neapolitan retreat for Rome's rich and famous--has conventionally serv up a les palatable dish. (2) In the pair cases, the focus has been upon the taxonomic classifications that have been with equal reason integral to classical art history: in actual Cyclopian style, a blind organ of vision has been turned to more interdisciplinary recipes. for a like reason when discussing the epic-themed statuarys at Sperlonga--among them, in addition to the Polyphemus cluster the so-called Scylla (Fig. 10) Theft of the Palladium and Pasquino clusters as well as a hotchpotch of other make submissives that have received less attention (3)--it has been Kopienkritik and the search for date, artistic seminary and type that have been the customary plat du jour. In particular, interpretation has conventionally been bogg down in comparing the Sperlonga material with the Laocoon clump (Fig. 11). (4) In his Natural History (Book VI, Chapter 37) Pliny famously named the Rhodian sculptors of the Laocoon as Hagesander, Athanadorus and Polydorus; for a certain quantity of this has constituted proof that we are dealing with the same artists at Sperlonga, where an inscription proudly emblazoned upon one of the sculptural collections reads: 'Athanadoros, son of Agesandros, Agesandros, son of Paionios, and Polydoros son of Polydoros, all from Rhode have made this'. (5) Moreover, when comparing the Polyphemus statuarys at Baiae with those from Sperlonga, greatest in quantity scholars have eschewed individual Imperial connections for a hotchpotch investigation of all Imperial Polyphemus representations: the different Polyphemus clusters have been blurred into a single story and reading.

[FIGURES 1-6 10-14 OMITTED]

on the contrary much more is at stake in cooking up of recent origin interpretations of Sperlonga and Baiae's visual tillage than our understanding of the sum of two units sets of sculptures alone. The hidden assumptions behind conventional approaches pertain to the actual pervasive notion of the unoriginality of Roman art--a notion that until fairly newly remained unchallenged. (7) Two returning phrases best encapsulate the traditional approach: 'Greek prototypes' and 'Roman copies'. (8) Blind classification and stylistic

description, allied to the nineteenth-century notion that Roman copies were in a faculty of perception hand-made ancient equivalents of Victorian plaster-casts, have prescribed interpretations of the clusters while the question of by what means sets of sculptures (whether indeed 'originals' or 'copies') functioned within specific connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss is lost in the thick broth of scholarly interpretation. It is a methodology that addresss to pine over works that have been not to be found (and which nearly always main stock from the 'glory that was Greece' rather than 'the grandeur that was Rome') instead of analysing artworks which actually survive; and it is a phenomenon that is more or les unique to classical archaeology.

Take the art historical analysis of Michelangelo's Drunkennes of Noah upon the Sistine Chapel ceiling (Fig. 7) Among historians of renaissance art, this sight is of concern not sole in its own right, on the contrary also--among many other things--as an artistic interpretation of a biblical true copy as part of the larger adjoining matter of the Sistine Chapel, and as a lock opener manifestation of renaissance Rome's theological and artistic Zeitgeist. (9) However, when Martin Robertson, an eminent historian of classical art, approached the representation in his encyclopaedic analysis of the history of of greece art, his 'prototype' mindset instantly sprang into action: the painting is used to argue for the availability of a now not to be found ancient Polyphemus group, from which Michelangelo must have 'borrowed' Noah's posture (10) In renaissance art history, as oppos to classical archaeology, the notion of a 'prototype' is solitary one avenue for exploration, not the one means of interpretation: after all, hardly any today would endorse Robertson's search for a of greece prototype as constituting the greatest in quantity productive approach to analysing this sixteenth-century pageant And yet, in the case of the Sperlonga and Baiae clumps virtually all attention has been directed back to the question of not to be found Greek 'originals', largely denying the clusters the right to exist within a Roman sphere. (11) As Brunilde Ridgway perceptively observ in 1984: 'it is alone in the realm of Roman statuary that we insist on seeing slavish duplication of of greece prototypes, while all later periods and manifestations are credited with having recast the received inspiration into different loams and meanings.' (12)