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 8^th 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.