Sculptors and Physicians in Fifth-Century Greece: A Preliminary Study. - book reviews

Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Pres 1995 184 pp; 19 b/w ills. $3995

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 sole fragments, in bronze and marble as well as terra cotta, in statues and statuettes, upon reliefs, coins, gems, and jewelry, not to mention aroma bottles and television screens. These celebrated artworks of the 5th and 4th centuries BC approach to mind's eye without illustrations. on the contrary the original statues, cast and carved through master craftsmen, Polykleitos of Argos and Praxiteles of Athens, no longer exist. Ancient literary sources enumerate us that the marble (said to be Parian more ofttimes 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 cast asideed by their neighbors on the island of Ko who favored another Praxitelean statue of the goddes clothed rather than uncovered 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 single of its few rivals for fame, Pheidias' chryselephantine Zeus Olympios, which, along with other masterpieces of art, ancient plane then, figured in Lausos' Christian allegorical program.(1) Of the Doryphoros, the one and the other its beginnings and end are unknown: Where was it sited? Whom did it represent? What final cause did it serve beyond, as we are told, illustrating in tin the proportional system enumerated in its sculptor's treatise, the Canon, or "Rule"?

Despite their los these statues continue to 1 and 2 tremendous visual power. As they proffered compelling models of ideal bodies, they were widely copied, imitated, and adapted the pair 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 plane 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 part 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 pay attention to "Beauty is truth, truth beauty."

From their earliest experiments with direct lost-wax casting of alloy of copper figurines in the so-called Geometric phraseology of 8th century B.C., grecian sculptors sought to depict, indeed, to generate ideal male figures, a practice continued in Archaic monumental stone plastic art of the 7th and 6th centuries.(4) solitary in the 5th century BC however, was the "Greek ideal" we recognize today created. Although more [i]or[/i] less scholars have seen the gradual unravelling 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 means of the Hellenistic Laterculi Alexandrini as a sculptor of men (andriantopoios), as oppos to his contemporary Pheidias, a sculptor of heavens (agalmatopoios), he ranked as individual of the consummate sculptors of classical antiquity. flat in his lifetime, or shortly 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 other hand also a philosopher and theoretician upon account of his written Canon, which survives solitary in enigmatic fragments quoted through other ancient authors, for example, "Perfection arises little by dint 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 means 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 true copy of the Elder Pliny (Natural History 3455) Polykleitos' visual manifesto was alone 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, for the greatest part marble figures in the circular but also reliefs, bronzes, terra cottas, and smooth gems, almost exclusively of Roman date.(7)