And two of the most fabulously energized figures here are female, from the fifth century B.C., together at the center of one room, both loosely draped but striding headless and armless deities, caught in marble: Iris from the Elgin marbles and a Nereid from a Greek building in Turkey. Several of these are sixth century B.C., suggesting that he was the chief precursor of the various godlike men whom the fifth century rendered more classically harmonious. The exhibition has plenty of images of the virile Herakles (Hercules in Latin), the hero of epic labors, eventually made a god. It’s the athletic warrior who so often became godlike in Greek culture. (Two Greek images of Africans are especially arresting.) It also shows depictions of people other than Greeks. Without making an issue of what influenced what, this exhibition places ancient Greek art in the contexts of Assyrian, Egyptian and Cycladic antecedents and of Indian and Roman sequels. You see not only the goddess of beauty, Aphrodite, but also other deities - Athena (wisdom and heroic endeavor), Iris (the rainbow messenger), Nereids - as well as mortal women, some of them bathing or at play.
You see heroes, athletes, warriors, hermaphrodites and male beauty feminized and/or languid but here, too, are satyrs and Socrates (both traditionally depicted as unlovely). Some items are colossal others could fit in a pocket. The exhibition shows the body naked and draped, male and female, in white marble and with colored paint it includes vases and terra-cotta as well as marble sculpture. Yet the overall project here is something far messier, more complicated and more stimulating than showing the ideal alone. This is one of many works here that you can imagine the sculptor, like Pygmalion, falling in love with. It’s like watching a chrysalis become a butterfly: The prototypes are impressive, but the kouros is timeless he might be about to breathe, move, speak. Though chronology is only intermittently an issue, there’s a nice row that demonstrates the evolutionary process whereby the classic Greek kouros image (the unclothed free-standing youth) evolved from an Egyptian prototype. Yet the distribution of weight on one supporting leg, the counterbalance of weight throughout the torso, and the way the head is slightly inclined toward one shoulder are what make it, paradoxically, both realistic and sublime at the same time.
The Polykleitos Doryphoros simply stands with spear in hand. Roman copy of Myron’s great Diskobolos (Discus-thrower).Įven in relatively static positions, the implication of movement is the transfiguring achievement of these classical figures. The first room contains a 1920s German bronze reconstruction (by Georg Römer) of Polykleitos’s Doryphoros (Spear-bearer) and a second-century A.D. Many of the works here are replicas so many of the Greek originals were lost long ago. Multiple facets of that complex perfection are indeed present here - and all followers of ballet, which has continually drawn from the ideal, may feel that here they are drinking from the source. The classically ideal body, as established in sculpture in Greece in the fifth century B.C., has been the most constantly copied style in all the arts. This exhibition features some of the Elgin marbles and other items from its collection and from around the world. When the Merce Cunningham company first visited London in 1964, Cunningham took his dancers to the museum every day. The British Museum has always been a place for dance people Isadora Duncan famously derived inspiration from its Elgin marbles (taken, controversially, in the 19th century from the Parthenon in Athens). What this exhibition shows is that the body in movement, both realistic and transcendent, was at the center of Greek art and thought. LONDON - Energy, movement and impetus within stillness line, harmony and proportion: These things, so vital in the art of dance, also pervade “ Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art,” now at the British Museum.