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.

Roman Women

Dickison, Sheila K. and  Hallett, Judith P.   A Roman Women Reader: Selections from the Second Century BCE through Second Century CE
ISBN: 978-0-86516-662-2 Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers 2015
Paperback  $19.00 

This reader is part of a series from Bolchazy for intermediate and advanced students of Latin.  Some are conventional, based on extracts from a particular author (Cicero, Livy, Propertius etc.), but this a thematic selection about the life of women in Rome based on a wide variety of texts.  It aims to and succeeds in extending the range of the students’ reading beyond the usual suspects to inscriptions, archaeological finds and unusual texts found in extracts from Aulus Gellius.  It contains an excellent introduction to Sulpicia or rather the two Sulpicias who are among the few authentic women’s voices we have.  Extracts are short and can give only a glimpse into the complex texts which are included, such as the attack on Clodia in Cicero’s pro Caelio, or the story of Nero’s disastrous relations with his mother Agrippina, which is told here in the version of Suetonius rather than the better known one of Tacitus.  However, a picture of the way women were seen by men begins to emerge from the selection.  Men’s attitudes tend to dominate of course as men have written the majority of the texts, but the selection and the extensive and well-judged commentary enables us to begin to hear the women’s voices.  Cornelia on her son Gaius Gracchus, the strong character of Sophoniba in Livy, the few poems of Sulpicia (found in Tibullus) and several funeral inscriptions show some of what life was like for women right through the Roman period.  The epigraphic and archaeological material is particularly welcome, especially Claudia Severa’s birthday party invitation, found in Vindolanda by Hadrian’s Wall and now in the British Museum.  This recently found text is quickly establishing itself as standard reading for Latin students.  The attitudes found in some extracts will be quite shocking to younger readers encountering, for example, the full fury of Juvenal’s misogyny perhaps for the first time.  In addition, the texts and commentary are not reticent about including material of a sexual nature which will demand mature reactions from the young readers at whom this book is aimed.  Some teachers may well feel more comfortable setting some passages for private reading rather than dealing with them in class, but Dickison and Hallett deserve credit for giving us the full picture.  This is a manageable and student-friendly selection with a full vocabulary and notes that explain most difficulties and give a full context to each section, which move from Plautus to Juvenal.  It will lead students off into new directions, but does not itself need a lot of extra material and resources to be worked through.   I found this an exciting and significant development in the way material is presented to students.  We should no longer rely on (or prescribe as set texts) the traditional commentary on a whole book of Cicero or even Virgil. This selection is more attractive and manageable with the inevitable time constraints imposed on over-worked teachers who will find that a lot of the work of searching out and editing suitable material has already been done for them, and a whole new aspect of the ancient world has been opened up for their students.

Orfeo at the Roundhouse

Orfeo: Royal Opera at the Roundhouse

There are multiple layers in this production.  Underneath it all lies the Greek myth of Orpheus and his wife Eurydice, the best known version of which is in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Latin.  She dies, Orpheus the mythical singer-songwriter goes down to the underworld to ask for her back, Pluto agrees but sets a condition that Orpheus must not look back at her as they emerge from Hades, he does, she dies again, Orpheus meets a strange end.  Next layer is the renaissance opera form invented by Monteverdi in Italy in 1607; then the recreation by a modern opera company in an English translation and finally the relocation of the Royal Opera from its home in Covent Garden to the more hip area of Camden.  Add to these diverse elements a local community dance group of young people performing acrobatics and dance sequences (they become the gates of hell at one point and the river Styx at another), a band of musicians playing authentic instruments of the period of Monteverdi, and an interpretation by the director and designer which places everything into a Christian context where Orfeo becomes a Christ-like figure and the whole drama is played out apparently in a Christian court with institutionalised figures (orphans, prisoners?) taking on the dramatic roles.  In the original country setting of acts 1 and 2 the pastori  (shepherds) become pastors or Catholic priests sinisterly dressed in black soutanes.  This is an attempt at outreach by the Royal Opera which is trying to bring opera to a new audience, and the night I attended this seemed to be successful.  A mixed audience in the sold-out former engine turning shed in Chalk Farm, representative of the whole of London, was there with only a few regular Covent Garden patrons looking confused.  Peeling back these layers you eventually come down to the original Greek myth.  Perhaps opera as a new genre was inspired by Greek tragedy and the new enthusiasm for Greek and Latin culture at the time.  While this production moves far from a traditional view of Classical culture it is still nonetheless there and this shows perhaps the fundamental position of the classical world in western culture, even in such a modern contemporary take on it as this. 

The Ides of April

Davis Lindsey, The Ides of April  Paperback 368 pages Hodder Paperbacks 2013 ISBN 978-1444755848 £5.99

Lindsey Davis is best known for her series featuring the Roman detective M. Didius Falco.  She has now started a new series with a fresh central character: Flavia Albia.  This may seem to be nothing more than a shrewd marketing move, as after all women read fiction more than men and may be presumed to like the idea of a woman in the leading role.  It also fits in with 21^st century ideas, even in Classics research, which seeks to find out and listen to the female voice in the ancient world.  Flavia Albia is, however, not a politically-correct figure who is just a back-projection of contemporary feminism onto an imperial Roman canvas.  Lindsey Davis is concerned to give her a proper back-story and an on-going concern throughout the book of her insecure and dangerous place as an investigator in a male-dominated world.  She is always concerned with her safety and her social position, forever calculating how far she can push the boundaries to get away with something outrageous in pursuit of her case.  Her world is the teeming inner city chaos of Domitian’s Rome, with a selection of cheats, drunks, social climbers and lazy officials as her surrounding companions.  All this is convincingly done; her world is far from the elite governing class known from cultural histories of Rome and to the great credit of the author there is scarcely a character in the plot who is known to us from history.  We are far closer here to a wall-painting from a bar in a museum exhibition of life in Pompeii than to the pages of Tacitus or Suetonius.  This gives the author the opportunity to create figures who have a life of their own, but who do not have three archaeological or literary footnotes attached to back up every little detail of their lives.   The plot is well-constructed (though not too difficult to solve) and involves a serial killer on the loose in the local streets of the Aventine.  Flavia uses her skills and intuition and the fact that she is a woman to gain access to the female witnesses and victims to help the professional investigators, some of whom are blundering males.  This book is the first in a new series (already there are two more titles) which can be recommended to students and young people who would like to enter the ancient world imaginatively, and to engage with life in Rome from ground level, and not only from the elite world of the surviving literature.  Such engagement can only be positive and appealing to young people’s love of entering a different world through the written word.  Flavia Albia’s world has the advantage of being a real, historical one rather than a fantasy.

Stinkfoot and others: Sophocles on stage

Sophocles on Stage

Ajax at Southwark Playhouse in the sands of Afghanistan, all the Oedipus plays as a new opera from Julian Anderson at ENO, Women of Trachis at the Young Vic a few years ago, and now Electra at the Old Vic with Kristin Scott Thomas and finally Philoctetes at The Yard in Hackney Wick: all seven plays of Sophocles have been recently reinterpreted for the London stage.  Why Greek tragedy?  What does Sophocles have to say to all these young creative people today?  It seems that each age can find something to communicate in these strange texts from two and a half millennia ago.  Some of these productions have been small scale and experimental but others have been big budget productions with long runs, and all have been fully professional.  Sophocles is no longer the property of student groups and amateurs but is being taken seriously by the arts community at the highest level.  English National Opera commissioned the full-length opera Thebans and the Old Vic managed to get a very well known film actor to take part in their four-month run of Electra in autumn 2014.  Yet all of them have remained faithful to the original texts, although they have been transformed into a workable English version, by Frank McGuiness (Thebans, Electra), Timberlake Wertenbaker (Our Ajax), Jeff James in Stinkfoot (his version of Philoctetes) and Martin Crimp whose Cruel and Tender is a version of Trachiniae.  The myths found in Sophocles are all treated seriously as archetypal narratives while their settings may be updated: (Our Ajax and Cruel and Tender in a modern military world), or left vague and unstated in a ancient world which can almost unnoticed metamorphose into our own times (Thebans, Electra).  The simplicity of the plots and settings seem to appeal to experimental or rough theatre (in Peter Brook’s phrase) as seen in Our Ajax and Stinkfoot, where unconventional spaces have been transformed into theatres and a different audience has been engaged with Greek tragedy, perhaps for the first time.  The Young Vic, which staged Cruel and Tender, is also an experimental space but this production was part of a European tour with a known name (Kerry Fox as the Deianeira figure) and an experienced director, Luc Bondy.  Joe Dixon who played the Heracles figure again appeared as Ajax in the Southwark Playhouse Our Ajax.  In addition Sophocles provides plays for us today that have excellent female parts for leading actors.  Top women actors are attracted to roles like Electra or Antigone, which like Euripides’ Medea or Clytemnestra in the Oresteia, are not always there in other theatrical traditions.  Juliette Binoche is due to play Antigone in London in English soon.  On the other hand Philoctetes has no female parts at all, although this did not worry the Stinkfoot team who recast Odysseus as a female and simply changed all the pronouns.

Treacle as metaphor

Stinkfoot has a single image around which the production is based (perhaps more influence from Peter Brook).  This image is treacle.  Treacle is so central to the action that the front rows had to be protected with plastic sheeting.  Blankets were also provided even for the back rows where I was sitting, but I eventually realised on a chilly December evening that this was against the cold.  Philoctetes is discovered on stage with his left lower leg wrapped in a foul bandage, lying in a pool of dark brown viscous liquid.  It emerges from the text that he has a chronic condition, perhaps some kind of ulcer, which seems to be incurable and most importantly smells awful.  For this reason he has been abandoned by his Greek fellow-soldiers on a desert island and left to rot.  He has his bow that enables him to survive by shooting vultures, some of whose bodies are littered across the acting space.  The image of the wound and its implications are the central to the moral questions which make up the plot, and while the director can show the appearance of this repellent wound on Philoctetes’ leg, and even the foul suppurations which ooze from the ulcer, it is more difficult to convey the overwhelming aspect of this condition: the smell which caused his companions to send him away and confine him to this island.  This is where the treacle comes in:  it makes us conscious of this aspect of the ulcer by filling the room with a sweet and cloying odour.  The physical presence of the treacle can also be heard and almost felt and tasted as the actors slip about in the pools of the stuff which cover the stage.  The audience’s feet even stick to the floor as they enter the space.  The sensory effect of this substance is all-encompassing and inescapable.  In an attack of pain, accompanied by shrieking sound, Philoctetes wallows in a pool of it as Odysseus flings exploding bags of treacle at him, causing one audience member to flee to the back of the room.  There are many things to talk about in the production: the way the chorus was completely cut out; the final parody of the god figure Hercules who appears at the end of the play to resolve the issues; the paring down of the text to an essential colloquial register that sounded how military men would naturally speak to each other; the bare, minimal set and crude lighting effects and the dodgy-looking sports wear for the actors.  Yet much original material remains: the Trojan war setting, the gods, and the bow that passes from Philoctetes to Neoptolemos and back as a symbol of the xenia or guest-friendship between them, even as Neoptolemos is deceiving him and trying to trick him into coming back to Troy to win the war for the Greeks.  Daniel Millar as Philoctetes was outstanding in the episodes of pain that affect his diseased foot and as he reached the depths of despair in the filth; Joshua Miles as Neo is innocent and noble at first but then is drawn into the immoral game of deception and gets himself covered in the same metaphorical corruption as Philoctetes; Rosie Thomson is suitably tough-talking and scheming, as the unlikeable Odysseus of the Iliad.  The remoteness and strangeness of the characters, mythical archetypes onto whom all kinds of modern preoccupations can be projected, is one thing that makes Greek tragedy suitable for a modern audience, and the awkward juxtapositions and anachronisms seem to melt away, or perhaps become dissolved into the treacle, when given such a vivid and committed performance.