Greek Sculpture in a New Light:
Defining Beauty at the British Museum
The British Museum has not only the historical objects in
its collection, but also world-class sculpture galleries. Do visitors see these statues as aesthetic
art objects or as historical and anthropological ones? How is a visit to the British Museum a different
experience to a visit to an art gallery?
Could the presentation of the sculptures be improved? The show goes some
way to answering these questions by taking some of the statues of the museum’s
own collection and displaying them with spectacular loans in a new way; putting
them literally in a new light. This is
done in a suite of dark galleries in which the pieces are placed under
spotlights and picked out in a dramatic chiaroscuro. The rather chilly Duveen gallery where the
Parthenon sculptures are displayed under a grey northern light is exchanged for
a warmer atmosphere. Picked out against
a dark background in a light more reminiscent of candles or oil lamps the cult
statues can be envisaged as still being objects of worship in a dimly-lit temple,
and the Parthenon sculptures can be imagined in the bright sunlight bouncing
off the stony ground. The portions of
the frieze with their horsemen in the procession gain especially from this
effect: the marble changing from cool greys to a glowing light yellow. The familiar pieces seem to take on a new
significance from this simple change of angle, background and lighting and
become again objects of awe and reverence.
The first room contains the familiar Lely’s Venus, reoriented correctly
so we see have to look on her from behind first, the Doryphoros of Polykleitos
in a reconstructed bronze version, Myron’s Discobolos and a recently found
Apoxyomenos found off the Croatian coast: all are displayed in a way that takes
the breath away. No longer remote
idealised forms, these figures seem to be living, breathing people who threaten
to step off their pedestals. We move on then
to be shown that these ideal types were rendered more life-like by being painted
in bright colours; this is often stated but we see here what the results would
look like with some casts painted in a manner that best seems to reproduce the
original and a recreated gold-covered Pheidian Athena. All this makes Ovid’s story of Pygmalion in
the Metamorphoses in which he falls in love with the statue of a girl he has
made more understandable.
The British
Museum is not only an art gallery but a centre for the study of historical
objects and the change of emphasis is shown by a series of figures of Herakles
in vase-paintings. In this section the
use of the body to tell stories is demonstrated through the depiction of the
tasks of Herakles, and in the tiny and extraordinary figure of Ajax from the 8th
century BCE where he is about to stab himself.
This early sculpture appears to have been languishing for years in a
kind of gabinetto segreto of the British Museum because of its
mysteriously erect penis. This openness
about the questions of sexuality in Greek art and society is another welcome
feature of this exhibition. The nudity
of the male subjects is interrogated: whether they are to be seen as erotic
objects or seen in the context of kalokagathia
where the young man is to be seen as beautiful but also as morally good. The beautiful form of the body is thought by
Sokrates and others to be part of the public character of the young man, who is
showing his moral worth to the others in the gymnasium through his
nakedness. This also explains the lack
of prominence of the genitals in these statues showing they are not intended to
be seen primarily as erotic creations.
Comparisons are made with Egyptian and earlier Greek statues to show how
the fully nude body emerged gradually, changing from a naked body representing
a disgraced defeated enemy to a heroic figure.
The body of a woman was on the other hand not generally shown nude,
apart from Aphrodite, although the flimsy drapery against the form of the
Nereid figure from Xanthos scarcely makes much difference. Women’s figures are further traced through
sections on birth and children and on sex and desire, which includes the
deceptive Hermaphroditus from the Louvre. The exhibition continues through rooms
portraying the aesthetics of the monstrous figure, including centaurs, satyrs
and controversially Amazons. The ideal
is contrasted with the real in a collection of characters and portraits where
the forms are shown as less than perfect in portrayals of such figures as
Sokrates with his fat belly and snub nose.
The final vision of the show is
the placing of the Dionysus from the Parthenon pediment almost in conversation
with the Belvedere torso from the Vatican.
Here the supplementary material of prints and drawings show the
influence of these male figures on the renaissance sculptors, particularly
Michelangelo. The perception of Greek
sculpture as cool grey unadorned marble figures true to their natural material
all stems from this period, transmitted to us through the eighteenth century
collections, the Elgin marbles and the academic art schools, and still with
us. This exhibition is both a
continuation of this tradition and a re-examination of it, perhaps not radical
enough for some, but a statement of our current knowledge of the actual condition
of the body in Greek sculpture, looking back to the reality through the lens of
our long and varied aesthetic reception of it.
