The Aphrodite of Knidos and Her Successors: A Historical Review of the Female Nude in Greek Art. - book reviews

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Pres 1995 194 pp 39 b/w ills. $4750

The Doryphoros of Polykleitos and Praxiteles' Knidian Aphrodite were sum of two units of the most famous statues of classical antiquity and remain among the greatest in quantity influential in the history of art. each museum, it seems, has at least a Polykleitan torso or a Praxitelean figurine. We diocese these familiar bodies, often single fragments, in bronze and marble as well as terra cotta, in statues and statuettes, upon reliefs, coins, gems, and jewelry, not to mention grateful odor bottles and television screens. These celebrated artworks of the 5th and 4th centuries BC draw near to mind's eye without illustrations. on the contrary the original statues, cast and carved by means of master craftsmen, Polykleitos of Argos and Praxiteles of Athens, no longer exist. Ancient literary sources reckon us that the marble (said to be Parian more repeatedly than Pentelic) Aphrodite was purchased in the middle of the 4th hundred B.C. by the inhabitants of Knidos, upon the western coast of Asia Minor, having been throw overboarded by their neighbors on the island of Ko who favored another Praxitelean statue of the goddes clothed rather than exposed Later sources inform us that the Knidia was not to be found in a fire that ravaged the Palace of Lausos at Constantinople in A.D. 476: it disappeared together with individual of its few rivals for fame, Pheidias' chryselephantine Zeus Olympios, which, along with other masterpieces of art, ancient level then, figured in Lausos' Christian allegorical program.(1) Of the Doryphoros, one as well as the other its beginnings and end are unknown: Where was it sited? Whom did it represent? What view did it serve beyond, as we are told, illustrating in and zinc the proportional system enumerated in its sculptor's treatise, the Canon, or "Rule"?

Despite their los these statues continue to use tremendous visual power. As they tendered compelling models of ideal bodies, they were widely copied, imitated, and adapted the couple in antiquity and thereafter. The of greeces no less than we today, were obsess with the human material part Like us, they exercised and trained, toned, and smooth dieted - or, at least, freeborn males did.(2) Like more [i]or[/i] less of us, moreover, they also assigned moral qualities to the beautiful material substance In the early 4th hundred B.C., Xenophon, the Athenian general, sportsman, historian, and pupil of Socrates, recorded the latter's remark that "the softening of the material part involves the serious weakening of the mind."(3) External states were ofttimes considered to reflect those internal; as Keats was later to remark "Beauty is truth, truth beauty."

From their earliest experiments with direct lost-wax casting of tin figurines in the so-called Geometric manner of writing of 8th century B.C., of greece sculptors sought to depict, indeed, to generate ideal male figures, a practice continued in Archaic monumental stone statuary of the 7th and 6th centuries.(4) solitary in the 5th century BC however, was the "Greek ideal" we recognize today created. Although a certain number of scholars have seen the gradual disentanglement toward the naturalistic depiction of the human material part as conditioned by unchangeable evolutionary laws,(5) "advances" in the depiction of the human form have more traditionally been attributed to the hands of individual masters. In this practice of Meisterforschungen, the sculptor Polykleitos, a native of Argos in the northwestern Peloponnese loom large. His true name, in fact, means "far-famed." Cited by dint of the Hellenistic Laterculi Alexandrini as a sculptor of men (andriantopoios), as oppos to his contemporary Pheidias, a sculptor of the holy trinitys (agalmatopoios), he ranked as single of the consummate sculptors of classical antiquity. level in his lifetime, or before long after, Polykleitos did not escape the notice of intellectuals: Plato mentions him explicitly, while Xenophon, too, compos a dialogue in which Socrates interrogates a sculptor named Kleiton, perhaps a thinly veiled reference(6)

Polykleitos himself has been touted as not just a sculptor on the contrary also a philosopher and theoretician upon account of his written Canon, which survives single in enigmatic fragments quoted by means of other ancient authors, for example, "Perfection arises little by means of little [?] from many numbers," "the work is greatest in quantity difficult when the clay is upon the nail." Although it, too, does not survive, the tin version of the Canon, since the days of Winckelmann, has widely been considered to be the Doryphoros, or Spear-bearer, a statue of a manly youth (viriliter puerum) listed by dint of ancient authors among Polykleitos' works. No ancient source, however, explicitly makes the connection between the Canon and the Doryphoros: the identification is pendent on the emendation of an intruding "and" from the body of the Elder Pliny (Natural History 3455) Polykleitos' visual manifesto was sole recognized in an actual surviving Roman marble through Karl Friederichs in 1863, and since that date no fewer than sixty-seven representations of the Doryphoros have been identified, chiefly marble figures in the circular but also reliefs, bronzes, terra cottas, and smooth gems, almost exclusively of Roman date.(7)