Sculpture

"You are fifty years old and would worship a day old statue!"

"Modern technology has revealed an irrefutable, if unpopular, truth: many of the statues, reliefs, and sarcophagi created in the ancient Western world were in fact painted. Marble was a precious material for Greco-Roman artisans, but it was considered a canvas, not the finished product for sculpture. It was carefully selected and then often painted in gold, red, green, black, white, and brown, among other colors."

"A friend peering up at early-20th-century polychrome terra cottas of mythological figures at the Philadelphia Museum of Art once remarked to me: “There is no way the Greeks were that gauche.” How did color become gauche? Where does this aesthetic disgust come from? To many, the pristine whiteness of marble statues is the expectation and thus the classical ideal. But the equation of white marble with beauty is not an inherent truth of the universe. Where this standard came from and how it continues to influence white supremacist ideas today are often ignored. Most museums and art history textbooks contain a predominantly neon white display of skin tone when it comes to classical statues and sarcophagi. This has an impact on the way we view the antique world."

"In general, just as painters in working from models constantly gaze at their exemplar and thus strive to transfer the expression of the original to their own artistry, so too he who is anxious to make himself perfect in all the kinds of virtue must gaze upon the lives of the saints as upon statues, so to speak, that move and act, and must make their excellence his own by imitation."

"The men who ushered in the Dark Ages were men like Theodoric and Cassiodorus, who were intent on restoring the cities, preserving the statues, and transcribing the classics. Their adoration of the ancient world was matched only by their inability to understand it, for by the time that they were born, classical culture was already dead. They were the first of the great medievals and began to build a new civilization in an attempt to restore the old."

"The Magi of Egypt looked round in every quarter for phenomena that might produce astonishment among their countrymen, and induce them to believe that they dwelt in a land which overflowed with the testimonies and presence of a divine power. Among others the statue of Memnon, erected over his tomb near Thebes, is recorded by many authors. Memnon is said to have been the son of Aurora, the Goddess of the morning; and his statue is related to have had the peculiar faculty of uttering a melodious sound every morning when touched by the first beams of day, as if to salute his mother; and every night at sunset to have imparted another sound, low and mournful, as lamenting the departure of the day. This prodigy is spoken of by Tacitus, Strabo, Juvenal and Philostratus. The statue uttered these sounds, while perfect; and, when it was mutilated by human violence, or by a convulsion of nature, it still retained the property with which it had been originally endowed. Modern travellers, for the same phenomenon has still been observed, have asserted that it does not owe its existence to any prodigy, but to a property of the granite, of which the statue or its pedestal is formed, which, being hollow, is found in various parts of the world to exhibit this quality. It has therefore been suggested, that the priests, having ascertained its peculiarity, expressly formed the statue of that material, for the purpose of impressing on it a supernatural character, and thus being enabled to extend their influence with a credulous people."

"Colored statues? To us, classical antiquity means white marble. Not so to the Greeks, who thought of their gods in living color and portrayed them that way too. The temples that housed them were in color, also, like mighty stage sets. Time and weather have stripped most of the hues away. And for centuries people who should have known better pretended that color scarcely mattered. White marble has been the norm ever since the Renaissance, when classical antiquities first began to emerge from the earth. The sculpture of Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons struggling with serpents sent, it is said, by the sea god Poseidon (discovered in 1506 in Rome and now at the Vatican Museums) is one of the greatest early finds. Knowing no better, artists in the 16th century took the bare stone at face value. Michelangelo and others emulated what they believed to be the ancient aesthetic, leaving the stone of most of their statues its natural color. Thus they helped pave the way for neo-Classicism, the lily-white style that to this day remains our paradigm for Greek art. By the early 19th century, the systematic excavation of ancient Greek and Roman sites was bringing forth great numbers of statues, and there were scholars on hand to document the scattered traces of their multicolored surfaces. Some of these traces are still visible to the naked eye even today, though much of the remaining color faded, or disappeared entirely, once the statues were again exposed to light and air. Some of the pigment was scrubbed off by restorers whose acts, while well intentioned, were tantamount to vandalism. In the 18th century, the pioneering archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann chose to view the bare stone figures as pure—if you will, Platonic—forms, all the loftier for their austerity. "The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is as well," he wrote. "Color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty. Color should have a minor part in the consideration of beauty, because it is not [color] but structure that constitutes its essence." Against growing evidence to the contrary, Winckelmann's view prevailed. For centuries to come, antiquarians who envisioned the statues in color were dismissed as eccentrics, and such challenges as they mounted went ignored."

"After a long time the great and awful Name was forgotten and the people, men, women and children, only recognized an image of wood or stone and the temple of wood or stone which they had been brought up from infancy to serve by bowing down. ... Abraham ... knew that all were mistaken and that what caused them to err was worship of the images which drove the Truth out of their minds."

"By the end of the fifth century B.C., a few wealthy patrons began to exhibit panel paintings, murals, wall hangings, and mosaics in their houses. Ancient authors are vocal in their condemnation of the private ownership and display of such art objects as inappropriate luxuries (for example, Plato’s Republic, 372 D–373 A), yet pass no judgment on the statuettes these patrons also exhibited at home. The difference in attitude suggests that even in private space, statues retained religious significance."

"A means of display highly characteristic of the Roman empire was the arrangement of statues in tiers of niches adorning public buildings, including baths theaters, and amphitheaters. Several of the most impressive surviving statuary displays come from ornamental facades constructed in the Eastern provinces. Bolstered by wealth drawn from around the Mediterranean, the imperial families established their own palace culture that was later emulated by kings and emperors throughout Europe."

"Pygmalion loathing their lascivious life, Abhorr'd all womankind, but most a wife: So single chose to live, and shunn'd to wed, Well pleas'd to want a consort of his bed. Yet fearing idleness, the nurse of ill, In sculpture exercis'd his happy skill; And carv'd in iv'ry such a maid, so fair, As Nature could not with his art compare, Were she to work; but in her own defence Must take her pattern here, and copy hence. Pleas'd with his idol, he commends, admires, Adores; and last, the thing ador'd, desires. A very virgin in her face was seen, And had she mov'd, a living maid had been: One wou'd have thought she cou'd have stirr'd, but strove With modesty, and was asham'd to move. Art hid with art, so well perform'd the cheat, It caught the carver with his own deceit: He knows 'tis madness, yet he must adore, And still the more he knows it, loves the more: The flesh, or what so seems, he touches oft, Which feels so smooth, that he believes it soft. Fir'd with this thought, at once he strain'd the breast, And on the lips a burning kiss impress'd. 'Tis true, the harden'd breast resists the gripe, And the cold lips return a kiss unripe: But when, retiring back, he look'd again, To think it iv'ry, was a thought too mean: So wou'd believe she kiss'd, and courting more, Again embrac'd her naked body o'er."

"Tacitus says, that the Jews held God to be something eternal and supreme, neither subject to change nor to decay; therefore, they permit no statues in their cities or their temples. The universal Being can only be described or defined by negatives which deny his subjection to the laws of all inferior existences. Where indefiniteness ends, idolatry and anthropomorphism begin."

"“But that is what this sculpture is all about, Marie,” Aki said. He was talking faster now, gesticulating. “I hold the mirror up to nature and within the mirror there's another mirror that mirrors the mirrored nature I've created…reflections within reflections…art within art…the truth only agonizingly, momentarily glimpsed…and that which is most beautiful is that which remains unseen…come on, Marie. You will get to see my hidden world."

"Statues in ancient Greece and Rome were often placed at street level, tinted with accurate colors, and displayed free of barricades, (Ellis, 1942) (Hersey, 2009), thereby making them more lifelike and accessible to touch than most statues today. Statues and life-sized automata were incorporated in religious and sex practices in ancient times. Ptolemaic statue marriages of ancient Greece occurred when a ruler or religious leader wed a statue of Aphrodite (Hersey, 2009). Ancient literary and historical accounts describe the sexual use of statues and automata in Dionysian orgies (Hersey, 2009)."

"Pioneers in the field of sexology in the early 20th century such as Iwan Bloch, Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Magnus Hirschfeld, have referenced statue love in their research. A French journal dated March 4th, 1877 published a story which describes the case of a gardener who falls in love with a statue of Venus de Milo and was found attempting coitus with it (Krafft-Ebing, 1965/1978). Krafft-Ebing describes these types of acts: “Violation of statues...they always give the impression of being pathological...these cases stand in etiological relation with abnormally intense libido and defective virility or courage, or lack of opportunity for normal sexual gratification” (p. 351). Hirschfeld’s Sexual Pathology (1940) considers Pygmalionism as inclusive of more “primitive” human simulacra than statues: To be sure the nature of Pygmalionism does not exhaust itself in love of statues as such, but also in the artificial, and occasionally artistic, construction of a figure corresponding to the inner desire whose sight and contact, which may go so far as actions similar to cohabitation, bring about physical and psychic relief...I have seen dolls which a prisoner made as a substitute for a woman. We are justified only to a certain extent in speaking of hypereroticism in such makeshift intercourse. (p. 226) Hirschfeld goes on to differentiate between a type of “makeshift intercourse” and fetish: “hypererotic excitation is evoked usually not only through the similarity to humanity alone, but through some special property of the statue, much as the necrophile is attracted to the course by the cool skin...” (Hirschfeld, 1940, p. 227)."

"The stone unhewn and cold Becomes a living mould, The more the marble wastes The more the statue grows."

"Ex quovis ligno non fit Mercurius."

"A sculptor wields The chisel, and the stricken marble grows To beauty."

"Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought."

"In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoön how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal."

"Ex pede Herculem."

"Sculpture is more divine, and more like Nature, That fashions all her works in high relief, And that is Sculpture. This vast ball, the Earth, Was moulded out of clay, and baked in fire; Men, women, and all animals that breathe Are statues, and not paintings."

"Sculpture is more than painting. It is greater To raise the dead to life than to create Phantoms that seem to live."

"And the cold marble leapt to life a God."

"The Paphian Queen to Cnidos made repair Across the tide to see her image there: Then looking up and round the prospect wide, When did Praxiteles see me thus? she cried."

"Then marble, soften'd into life, grew warm."

"The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature."

"So stands the statue that enchants the world, So bending tries to veil the matchless boast, The mingled beauties of exulting Greece."

"The marble index of a mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone."