The Early Classical Transition, to mid-5th century

Temple of Zeus at Olympia.  The epitome of Early Classical art, also called "the Severe Style", translating German strenge.  This detail is of the head of the corpse of the Nemean Lion, lying dead at Herakles' feet.

The generation between the Persian Wars and the rise of Perikles
Although many developments in Greek art from 500-480 B.C. anticipate what we see after the Persian sack of the Athenian Acropolis, the changes after c. 480 are radical rather than merely developmental.  The whole mood and purport of Greek art is different, not just more naturalistic, but naturalistic in a different way.  Art historians call the new mode of representation the "Severe Style"; it is severest, most intellectually austere, in the Greek peninsula itself, less so in Ionia and the islands, and its austerity in the western colonies feels like stylistic derivation from the mother cities.  Still, everywhere Archaic formulas, which had worked very well for Archaic purposes, and Archaic luxuriant decorativeness are abandoned.  Only in the architectural development of the Greek Doric temple is there straightforward evolution.  The sculpture that adorned the temples changed radically.  The change can be easily appreciated by comparing the west and east pediments of the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina, which were made about 15 or 20 years apart; the east pediment is in the new style.  The kouros and kore statuary types are replaced, too.  In vase-painting, we see many more scenes from the everyday life of ordinary people, as well as "severe" stylistic expression.  The generation from 480 to 450 B.C., more or less, is called the EARLY CLASSICAL PERIOD, and the "Severe Style" is its dominant expression.  This was the time, also, when Greek tragedy first came to maturity, beginning with the plays of Aeschylus; human characters become important as such, so that legendary names like Orestes and Electra are given unique, three-dimensional personalities.  It is also the period when, according to written sources, Greek wall paintings (all lost) began to have shading in color and figures began to be placed as they would look in space.  Concern for optics is part of the growing Greek interest in empirical science, science separate from tradition and religion and based on observation and other experience.  Did the Persian Wars play any part in causing these changes?  Did democracy cause the changes, or the changes bring about the Athenian democracy?  We do not fully understand what happened; it is impossible to recreate in our minds being there as a part of it.  These changes and those to follow, however, are vitally important to all of us (wherever our ancestors came from), because they are fundamental to our own world view, much of which is now shared by the whole world.  For example, we take for granted that urban art is public and that the theater is for everyone.  Well, the Greeks were the first to make urban art civic rather than palatial and priestly, and, significantly, they were the first to build public theaters, because Athenian tragedy and comedy were available to all residents of both sexes, to resident aliens as well as citizens.  Some recent writers have emphasized the male-dominant character of Greek civilization, comparing it with our own.  It is more meaningful to compare it with all its predecessors and contemporaries and regard it as prerequisite to ours: as soon as the Greeks created tragic drama, they made no distinction between the tragic dilemma of male and female protagonists; it is the human dilemma.  There could be no stronger evidence of their feeling for equal personhood (civil rights was something else; yet Greek citizen women had better property rights than in many modern nations).

The dying warrior in the west pediment is still Late Archaic in character and dies like a warrior by the Berlin Painter

The exploration of the expressively collapsing muscles and suffering of the dying warrior in the east pediment, only perhaps a decade later is Early Classical 

The figure of Herakles as archer likewise breaks the bounds of Archaic style

[MA 91] [A 80] [A 79] [A 82]  We have just discussed the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina as a Doric Temple of ca. 500 B.C.  Greek temples were not built in a day or a year; the west pediment sculptures of the Aphaia temple (with Athena standing straight in the center) seem to date to ca. 490 B.C. and are still Late Archaic in character; the east pediment, on the other hand, though it represents the same School of sculpture, participates in the new post-Persian-War approach to art and is Early Classical in character (some call this the "Severe Style").  The east pediment (with Athena striding, her arm outstretched with the aegis over it) is usually dated in the 470's B.C.  The choice of language in the foregoing sentences is important; this is not linear evolution; Early Classical is not only a transition from Archaic to Classical but an attitude distinct from both.  B. S. Ridgway has rightly pointed out that it is more realistic than either Archaic or Classical; this is the generation when they strive with unmitigated earnestness to transform the raw data of empirical human vision concentrated on real things into forms of art.  E. R. Gombrich similarly has called it the shift from conceptual to optical representation: the Greek revolution.  We see the nature of the change also in the emotional sobriety of Early Classical art.  Compare the Dying Warriors from the corners of the West and East Pediments at Aegina, some 10 or 15 years apart.  Neither has any important deficit in anatomical knowledge; the real difference is one of approach.  The West warrior dies in a ballet pose that makes a clear silhouette (the Berlin Painter would approve of him) and his grimace of pain is expressed (perfectly well) in a variant of the "archaic smile".  The East warrior is based on real study of an expiring body collapsing; the contours of his body result from this and do not give priority to the clarity of silhouette.  Neither is better than the other, but they are radically different.  Herakles as archer also is from the East Pediment; he is a younger Herakles than we usually see in Archaic art, and his face has the new proportions that we already saw in the "Critian Boy"; the heavy chin with level brow and cheekbones impart sobriety to the features of the face.

[MA 64] which ornamented the gable of some small building at Olympia in the sanctuary, where it was found, is made in the same technique as the Etruscan striding Apollo from Veii, of hollow terracotta; indeed some written sources say that the Etruscans learned how to make terracotta sculpture from a Greek named Euander.  This work exhibits the new natural drapery and facial proportions of Early Classical art combined with a cheerful buoyancy left over, perhaps, from Late Archaic.  Despite the damage, notice the ease with which the sculptor renders the boy's body being carried in the crook of the god's arm; it is Zeus abducting Ganymedes to take him to Olympos where he will be cupbearer to the gods, rather like a page at a medieval court.

hand-held and pre-digital but it looks more real

[A 60] [MA 55]  Everyone knows about the Olympic Games, which were the oldest Panhellenic religious-athletic event.  But there were Nemean Games, too, and the Pythian Games (of Apollo Pythios) at Delphi.  Pindar, the great poet whose Odes date from the same decades as Early Classical art, wrote Odes for the victors in all of them.  In this period, Athens was already a democracy, but many other city states, including those of the colonies in Sicily, still had tyrannies (like that of Peisistratos in Archaic Athens and of Polykrates in Archaic Samos).  The famous bronze Charioteer of Delphi is part of an extremely expensive monument set up at Delphi (the foundations of it and part of the inscription still exist) to commemorate the chariot-race victory of the team of one of the Sicilian tyrants probably in the Pythian Games of 477 B.C., since the style should not be much later than the mid-470's--in other words, only a little later than the "Critian Boy" but not Athenian and of bronze rather than marble, or (compare the faces) about the same time as "Herakles the Archer" from Aegina.  We have, besides the Charioteer, only some horse hooves and a bit of tail in bronze.  There were four horses led by a young groom, the chariot, and the charioteer standing in it; though you couldn't really see his feet, they are perfect and beautiful.  Think of the group as slowly parading past the reviewing stand, the young charioteer standing straight (like a modern Olympic victor on the stand) but turning his head slightly towards the judges: contrapposto like that of the "Critian Boy" thus is precluded.  The "lost-wax" hollow-cast bronze was made in six pieces (the left forearm is missing), with a bronze belt concealing the waist joint; no statue so large and complex as this can be cast in one piece, since there is a limit to how far molten bronze will flow before it cools.  When it was new it was bright as a new penny (but less pinkish), there was silver inlay in the headband, and the clipped sheet bronze eyelashes were neither corroded nor crumpled, but the inlaid quartz over brown eyes cannot have looked much different from what they do today.  If the "Peplos Kore" seems like a perfect Greek girl, the "Delphi Charioteer" is a perfect Greek boy, beautiful and candid and noble, kalós k'agathós.  Certainly, the head is the standard for an "Early Classical face"; note, besides the round large chin and the level cheeks and brow, the very short upper lip; note how the curls escaping from the headband force forward the shell of the ear.  The drapery is no less remarkable.  Only to the most cursory and insensitive viewer does it seem uniform; it is characteristic of Early Classical not to exaggerate for effect.  Study how with infinite variety the folds constrained by cords and belt respond; notice that no two of the long folds obedient to gravity are the same (if you made a cross-section, it would not look like regular fluting, just the opposite to Art-Deco drapery) and how the falling drapery subtly responds to the youth's turning his head and shoulders to his right.  Once again we have an original masterpiece that is "anonymous" to us, though surely by an artist who was well known by name in his own time.

[MA 29]  The "namepiece" of the Penthesileia Painter, the huge cup (27" diameter!) in Munich showing Achilles slaying the Amazon queen Penthesileia--and falling in love with her, too late, as their eyes meet--is not much later than the "Delphi Charioteer".  It comes from an Etruscan tomb and never was meant to be drunk from, not only because its size would guarantee everyone's being sloshed by wine as banqueters tried to pass it one to the next, but because it is not in pure red-figure technique; the water-soluble pale pink and blue and lavender and the barbotine earring and bracelet with gold leaf added could not be washed after use for drinking.  In general, Greek kylikes, up to ±12" diameter, were made for real use, but some outsize and elaborate pieces, cups and other shapes, were made as showpieces for religious sanctuaries or for tombs in the west.  This is one such.  The additional colors and the tight fit of the composition in the tondo of the cup (it looks as if it would go better in a rectangle) also suggest that the Penthesileia Painter, who ordinarily draws in a notably naturalistic style (even in the pure red-figure drawings on the exterior of this same cup), has adapted this dramatic composition with its statuesque-proportioned protagonists from a panel painting or, perhaps, even from a mural painting.  This is, once again, the period when Greek painting is reported to have made fundamental breakthroughs much as the Renaissance did all over again 2,000 years later.  I am showing you another piece in the Penthesileia Painter's independent style, lest you suppose that vase-painting now merely tried to copy full-color painting.

[MG 222] [MG 223]  The Old Hera Temple at Olympia, which extends, in the photo of a model in the Olympia Museum, between the round Late Classical Philippeion and the semi-circular Roman Fountain of Herodes Atticus, is nearly as long as the Early Classical Temple of Zeus, which was finished by 457 B.C. and is thought to have been built through the 460's, but it is not nearly so large.  In the model, the Zeus Temple is all white and looks like marble; actually, Elis (Olympia's district) has no marble quarries, and the temple is built of the local conglomerate, stuccoed (as Aphaia at Aegina and Corinth were), with only the sculptured parts and the roof tiles made of marble.  It is by a local architect and has clear and simple proportions; the development of the Doric Order is by now complete.  The columns were not monolithic and today are represented by rows and jumbles of fallen column drums.  The restored drawing of the East in [MG 223] shows the rather static composition of the East Pediment and the akroteria at the corners and peak of the gable; it also indicates the use of paint (e.g., dark triglyphs) and shows the gilded bronze shields that were placed in the metopes.  The twelve sculptured metopes with the Labors of Herakles [A 90] were not on the exterior peristyle (colonnade) but over the porches: above the columns in antis of the pronaos and the opisthodomos.  The restored cross section of the temple shows its double-decker interior columnar order, like that at Aegina; it also shows the famous statue of Zeus Olympios made of gold and ivory (chryselephantine) over an armature, which was included in the list of the Wonders of the World that started with the Gizeh pyramids.  But Pheidias worked from the 440's to the 420's, so the Zeus statue is not of the Early Classical period.  Besides, it no longer exists.  It is because of the sculptures of this temple, in particular, that the nickname "Severe Style" came to be used of Early Classical art, although it is really the German adjective, "strenge" and not English "severe" (which has some different connotations) that is meant.  Athena, Atlas, and Herakles are represented as soberly and plainly as they possibly could be; to ease the burden of the world on his unaccustomed shoulders, Herakles is given a common pillow, folded double, and Athena herself is dressed in a plain peplos with her hair in a young woman's everyday coiffure, without a helmet or shield and even without the aegis that is her usual attribute.  The artist relies wholly on narrative clarity of the composition for his story and wholly on human dignity to express superhuman characters.  Only a half century after the Acropolis kore #674, the sculptor uses no fancy pleats and diagonal drapes, and Herakles is not made extra burly as he often was in Archaic art and will be again in Hellenistic and Roman art.  He is content, too, with the simplest composition, with three figures side by side.  Here once more Greek art has done something revolutionary, something that also Early Renaissance artists, like Masaccio, re-accomplished in the 1400's A.D.

This is one of the very oldest of the University Prints!

MA 66] [A 86] [A 446] [A 89]: The West Pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia.  As comparison of the two pediments in the reconstructions shows, although the east is the front of the temple, it is the west pediment that is really exciting and original as a composition (the individual figures are equally wonderful in both).  Its subject is the battle that ensued when the centaurs crashed the wedding party of Perithoos of Thessaly who was the best friend of the Athenian hero Theseus, according to the legends.  Centaurs were thought to be native to Thessaly; they were half horse, half human, and their nature, also, was only half rational; they were particularly impulsive when they had drunk wine.  By this period, Greeks used centaurs and satyrs to express the irrational roots of their own nature.  At the opposite pole was the god Apollo, a very ancient god whose name is not even Greek and may be Anatolian.  In Homer and in some old myths (like that of Niobe, as we shall see) he is a plague god whose arrows kill; by now he has become a healer and, especially at Delphi, the embodiment of the Greeks' highest cultural values, such as self-knowledge and self-control.  This pediment says it all.  The centaurs have come uninvited, drunk some, lost all control, and are handling the girls, including the bride.  The centaurs snort and pant, the Greek girl expresses distress by only slightly flared nostrils.  The young Greeks do their best to defend their sisters, but the equine and mature centaurs are physically stronger.  Apollo intervenes, exerting his power by contained strength rather than expended energy; he outstretches his right arm and the mêlée ceases.  To unify the composition, the sculptor carves the scene in blocks that include more than one figure, and he links all in the general mêlée; this is a unique experiment that will not recur.  He studies real cloth very closely and does not seem to care whether it looks decorative or not.  The head of Apollo is about a decade later than that of the "Charioteer": the nose is longer, the chin shorter; the proportions are beginning to change toward the ideal that will prevail in the next generation.

[A 94] [MA 44]  Not all Early Classical art participates in the so-called Severe Style of Olympia.  In the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome (until recently housed in the Baths (Terme) of Diocletian, so often called the Terme Museum) there is a three-sided relief that was found in Rome.  Like so much else, it had been taken there in antiquity, probably from a Greek city in South Italy.  It is not earlier than the 460's B.C., but probably not later than ca. 450, advanced Early Classical art.  It is called the "Ludovisi Throne"; the Ludovisi family once owned it, but it is not a throne.  Also, it is uncertain whether the main picture is the Birth of Aphrodite from the sea or Ariadne from the earth, nor do we know the significance of nude girl piping and the veiled female putting incense in a censer--though theories abound.  Make up your own.  If the western Greeks had left us as much literature as the Athenians did, we'd know better what they thought and meant.  The "Ludovisi Throne" is certainly, however, a masterpiece, in the refined delicacy of the chisel work, in the wonderful pattern of six arms, in the subtly observed and beautifully foreshortened figure of the nude girl (one of the earliest real female nudes in Greek art, and it will be another century before we get a nude female statue).  The folded cushions remind one of Herakles' head cushion on the Olympia metope.

[MA 36] [A 450]  Like the "Delphi Charioteer", the God (Zeus or Poseidon) from the sea near Cape Artemision (the north tip of the island, Euboea, alongside Attica and Boeotia) is an original bronze masterpiece of the Early Classical period, obviously by a major master.  We have names recorded of famous sculptors of the generation before Pheidias and Polykleitos, but we don't have a real idea of their work, so there's no telling whether the Cape Artemision god is by one of them or by someone just as good whose name happens to have escaped inclusion in the later lists.  The Cape Artemision god is not earlier than the west pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia; it already has the long nose and shaded eyes that point towards the middle of the century, and the tresses of the hair and beard (only a half century since abandoning bead patterns for hair!) go much further in suggesting the separateness, and hairiness, of the tresses than on the "Delphi Charioteer".  Here again there is no contrapposto, because, instead, it is one of those balanced, poised stances on the verge of action that Classical Greek sculptors loved--the pose of preparing to hurl a javelin, which could be studied as athletes prepared for the Games, but this is a god: Zeus if the missile was his thunderbolt, Poseidon if it was his trident; they are brother gods who otherwise in Classical art look just alike.  A god because it is over lifesize and too mature for an athlete type and wears his hair long, braided and wrapped around his head, an old-fashioned style (note: it is now that we begin to see divine figures in art represented in the fashions of the past, as the Virgin Mary is in Christian art).  The inset eyes as well as their eyelash casings are missing; the groove around the mouth shows that the lips were copper (pink metal), and so were the nipples.  We owe its preservation to shipwreck; this masterpiece never got to Rome.  Had it reached its destination, we might have descriptions or marble copies of it and know who did it, but the valuable and splendidly nude original would surely have been lost.  In the perilous years of Late Antiquity or the Early Middle Ages either Christians or Moslems would have coveted the metal and hated the nudity.  Notice, however, that the ideal nudity really does seem divinely beautiful rather than humanly sexy; it is very hard to imagine anyone's finding this statue immoral.  The mastery of human anatomy here approaches sublimity.  Even Middle School children respond appropriately to it, as to Myron's "Diskobolos".

Note: This statue has a whole blog-Post-essay of his own in TeeGee Opera Nobilia

[A 64]  The Print gives you a modern bronze cast combining the best parts of two of the best surviving marble copies of Myron's famous Discus Thrower, the Diskobolos, with his discus complete.  More than thirty full-size copies survive besides small bronze statuettes.  It is time to say something about these copies that we must rely on when the famous originals are lost.  They were made because in the last two centuries B.C. and the first two centuries A.D. (and somewhat less thereafter) there was great wealth in a fairly large economic upper class, and there were new cities, too.  Every gymnasium needed appropriate athletic, every library literary, every theater dramatic, every school philosophical and literary statuary; every wealthy garden court required garden sculpture.  A mechanical method called pointing had been invented, probably in the second century B.C., to make accurate replicas of famous "appropriate" masterpieces.  It was easiest to copy bronzes: piece molds were made from the originals (they could be shipped to workshops in the marble-producing regions), plaster casts were made from the piece molds, measurements were made off the casts for the pointing machine (the same device was used down to the early twentieth century to help in making marble replicas); only the eyelashed eyes and convoluted hollows had to be protected and could not be molded, so we find that eyes and fluffy hair, for example, were done partly freehand.  The best copies were made taking many, many measurements; those for middle-class gardens, say, or to fill the niches in a theater or bath, to be seen from a distance, might be quite generalized.  The very best copies of bronzes were done in bronze, cast in molds off the plaster cast, but these are just as rare as originals; mostly we deal with marble copies.  When we have dozens of a single statue, as with the Discus Thrower, we know that the good ones are pretty reliable even though comparison with one of the rare originals, like the Cape Artemision god, shows us how important the original master's finishing touches are in bringing it to life, so to speak.  So, the fine composite cast in the Print is fully justified, and it helps us to imagine the original; notice how important it is to have the legs unencumbered by the tree trunk support that was necessary in marble.  The small statuette copies, of course, were made freehand, and cannot be dead accurate, but many of them are quite fine, and in cases where none of the full-size copies is complete can answer questions about the pose.  The Discus Thrower seems to have been designed to be set up, perhaps in front of a wall, to be seen primarily from one side, in which we see the full spread of the arms, which tie the composition together, and can look straight up into his face.  Photography proved long ago that a real discus thrower is at no single moment in just this position, just as a horse is never in the "flying gallop".  This pose is not only finely designed to suggest both poise and energy but to sum up the essentials of preparing to hurl the discus; in this respect it is like the Cape Artemision god: a synthesis of equilibrium in one case, of the act of discus-hurling in the other.  Myron was famous for the realism of his sculpture; we are flabbergasted to read that his most famous work was a great bronze cow, and we wish we had written sources about ancient sculpture that would tell us more from the artist's point of view, with fewer anecdotes about fool-the-eye effects.

[MA 90] [A 68] [A 95] [A 458]  At about the same date as the Discus Thrower, which is to say right about the middle of the fifth century and right on the borderline between Early Classical and Classical style (so that either/or is a false choice) we have four very great statues, two original bronzes discovered just over thirty years ago by sponge divers working near Riace in south Italy and numerous copies in marble of two extraordinary lost statues which were of bronze.  All of them have been discussed in connection with the name of Pheidias, the most famous of all Greek sculptors, which is not to say that there are any sound reasons for an attribution.  On the other hand, they are all three work contemporary with his youth and they seem to be Athenian, so they tell us something of where he's coming from, in one sense or another of that phrase, and it seems quite possible, though not certain, that the Apollo copies in marble go back to an original by the same sculptor as the Riace statue designated "Warrior A", the one of which you have a print.
Riace Warrior A is more likely a semi-divine hero than a mortal warrior, but he held a spear and wore a shield on his left forearm.  He stands in contrapposto with the free leg forward, as Athenian Early Classical male statues usually do.  With the torso turned slightly to his left and his head and standing leg to his right, his whole stance is dynamic, expressive of physical and mental fitness.  There were groups of ethnic heroes dedicated at Olympia and Delphi; this statue, and Warrior B which was found with it, having sunk with their ship before reaching Rome, may belong to one of those groups.  Since the great sanctuaries seem not to have permitted the taking of molds for production of pointed copies, and the statue was lost to view in the shipwreck, that possibility would explain our having no copies of such a splendid statue.  While the Cape Artemision god is still typical of Early Classical art, this statue is on the threshold of art with the attitudes and skills of the Periklean period of Athens and is quite unlikely to date earlier than ca. 450 B.C.  The head and beard hair is now very elaborate (some of the curling tresses had to be cast separately).  The eyes were inlaid; in this case, it is the quartz and colored material of the irises that has fallen out.  As conservation experts cleaned the head a quarter century ago, they revealed under a coating of oxydized bronze the rarely preserved copper for pink lips and (!) the silver teeth; the aureoles of the nipples also were copper.  With these imagine the bronze body not quite so dark as it is today (think of one of the stars of the Italia soccer team), and you will have a good idea of an original bronze statue.

From now on until the end of independent Greek civilization in this course, unless I say otherwise (for there are exceptions) all architectural sculpture is both original and of marble; all freestanding statues shown in marble are copies of original bronzes, and all bronzes in the slides are original Greek bronze statues.

"The Kassel Apollo", [A 68] is the name of nearly 30 surviving copies, some of them statuettes but most of them full size pointed copies, of a single famous mid-fifth-century statue of Apollo: as a young god, he wears his long hair loose, the long hair at this date, again, betokening the unchanging character of a god (but also due to the influence of prexisting famous images).  It is named for the Kassel Musem in Germany, because this is the most fully preserved fine copy, but the National Archaeological Museum in Athens has the largest number of copies, two of them very fine.  We do not have the original.  The head in Athens shown in the slide (the rest of this copy is lost) shows the mouth just open and teeth inside, as on Riace A, and even in marble renders the long tresses of hair very corkscrew-like.  These are precisely the features that in copies made at a distance would have to be made up and rendered freehand, because when you take molds from the original you must protect delicate parts like the eyelashes and inlaid eyes and you cannot get molds of convoluted hollows as in the hair and the open mouth; before taking the mold, such parts had to be covered with wads of lint.  Copies of the "Kassel Apollo" made of marble from Italy or Asia Minor (so made based wholly on molds) have the mouth closed and have the heavy-lidded, almost Elvis-like eyes that the Romans of the 2nd century after Christ preferred, but the Athens head of the "Kassel Apollo" has eyes and eyelids shaped similarly to those of Riace Warrior A.  Evidently this copyist could look at the original statue in rendering these details.  Both the number of copies found around Athens and these convincingly Classical details in the Athens copy of the head suggest that the original statue stood in Athens before it was abducted.  Some scholars think that it was one that books mention, the Apollo Alexikakos, "warder-off of evil", which was by Kalamis, a famous sculptor.  Others think that both this Apollo and Riace A are Pheidias.  We cannot resolve such contradictory possibilities, especially in this course.  The reason that it is important to mention and discuss them is that, although Greek art is largely anonymous to us, it was not anonymous when it was made; we simply have lost most of the information (during the upheavals and poverty of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages).  Authors such as the Elder Pliny and Pausanias give us long lists of names and titles and lots of anecdotes about famous artists; we even have statue bases with signatures without statues, as well as statues without signatures.  It is as if we had the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and had lost all the links of evidence that would permit us to attribute it to Michelangelo.  Ancient Greek artists, beginning in this period, were star personalities just as in the Italian Renaissance.

A third, equally important and tantalizing bronze masterpiece of the middle of the fifth century is the Athena [A 95] known primarily from (a) an exquisite copy of the head in Bologna, Italy, (b) a pretty good copy with a belonging head of the same type as Bologna (but not exquisite) in Dresden, (c) an excellent copy without the head in Dresden, and (d) a torso (skirtless, armless, headless) in Kassel in which the copyist strove to express in marble the metallic scaliness of Athena's aegis.  A century ago Adolf Furtwängler made the connection among these copies.  He also thought it was the Athena dedicated by the people of Lemnos on the Acropolis in Athens, which was by Pheidias; we doubt that identification today and prefer not to use the name "Lemnia" for this statue-type.  Even unnamed and unattributed, the statue is no less beautiful and important; really knowing art and its history is not truly a matter of knowing labels, although real knowledge to go with the names we possess would be a boon.  Here, finally, we see a draped statue in contrapposto.  It is one thing to make mimesis of the human body in movement, balancing and turning, quite another (much more difficult) to imply such a body concealed by drapery and to make mimesis of drapery such that it represents the response of the hanging cloth to the behavior of the concealed body.  No wonder it happens in a freestanding statue, where it has to work when seen all the way around, only about 30 years later than the "Critian Boy".  Compare the drapery of the Bologna-Dresden Athena with that of Athena standing behind Herakles on the metope from the Zeus Temple at Olympia [A 90] only about 15-20 years earlier, or compare the Delphi Charioteer.  This Athena's drapery implies body action very similar to that of Riace Warrior A, only gentler for the young girl goddess, without showing anything of the body beyond the hint of the knee of the bent leg.  Nothing in figurative art is more difficult than what is done here; artists less than the very greatest either betray awkwardness or resort to formulas in handling this challenge.  Athenians liked to emphasize the girlhood of their goddess (although, like Apollo, she had once been fierce).  In this statue, as on some vases, she is represented as the maiden warrior at peace: she leans on her spear and holds her helmet to contemplate it, while her head is bare, unprotected.  Most Greeks have springy, curly hair; the sculptor gives her a headband which emphasizes the living springiness of hair by compressing it.  He also draped her supernatural aegis like cloth diagonally and cinched it together with the overfall of her peplos.  He made the clump of folds pulled up over the girdle under her right arm and the folds escaping from under the aegis under her raised left arm into sculptural nodes with expressive power of their own.  Here drapery moves beyond mere naturalism, from mimesis to poiesis, so to speak, as we shall see in the sculptures of the Parthenon.  These significant forms of drapery do not stand for, do not equate to, something else, the way that the aegis does (the aegis is Athena's supernatural protection, its origin so ancient that we don't know how it originated); rather, their expressiveness is part of what raises the statue from prose to poetry, from mere representation to art.  Even the copy of the head in Bologna has inset eyes, so we may be confident that the original had.  Notice that the Gorgon face on the aegis is still round-faced but no longer has the fangs and lolling tongue of an Archaic Gorgon.

[MA 30]  The second slide shown in lecture shows the whole vase in the Louvre, Paris.  It is a calyx krater, a taller, slenderer (more evolved) version of the same vase-shape as Euphronios's krater with the Death of Sarpedon about a half century earlier.  The artist is called The Niobid Painter after the picture (on the less elaborately decorated side of the Louvre krater) in your Print; this picture is certainly a quotation of a lost major painting of the period, and so is the picture on the front of the vase, whether it represents Odysseus's visit to the Underworld (Nékyia) or the Argonauts (as older scholars thought).  Neither of these pictures is like most of this vase-painter's work; that is, the drawing is alike, so we know that it is the same hand, but the compositions are not.  His own compositions have the figures on one ground line, as in earlier vase-painting, which, we must admit, makes for more coherent vase decoration; in the pictures of the slaughter of the Niobids and the Nékyia the figures placed at differing levels look like pale spots scattered on a black background, reminding one of the large-flowered prints on black or navy blue of women's dresses in the 1930's, which is not so decoratively successful as one Euphronios's composition of Sleep and Death lifting the body of Sarpedon.  But imagine them in full color, with shading, and the dead Niobid half hidden by her hillock makes sense.  We can only guess that the vase-painter took the trouble to make careful sketches of the wonderful new paintings and quote them on his vase (which was exported, found in an Etruscan tomb) being either eager to emulate such work or aware that the reproduction of a famous composition would be a selling point.  A Niobid painting done at this time is recorded in Athens, and a Nékyia was in the Clubhouse (Leschê) of the Cnidians at Delphi; it was still there when Pausanias described it in the second century after Christ.  Both of these murals are described as having the kind of innovations that the vase-painting bears witness to--however unsuccessfully: for the Niobid Painter is not good at foreshortening (see Apollo's shoulder) and the scrambled overlaps in the scene on the other side of the vase suggest that he did not truly grasp the rudimentary steps toward a real optical (i.e., how we actually see) perspective, which the descriptions indicate was accomplished by mural painters like Polygnotos of Thasos who worked now and were still famous 500 years later (just as Raphael and Michelangelo are today, nearly 500 years after completing their works).  The Artemis (removing an arrow from the quiver on her back) gives us a simpler rendering of exactly the same kind of drapery as we just studied in the Bologna-Dresden Athena.  The Niobid Krater is not earlier than the 450's B.C.
The story is told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, an ancient book that is just as pleasurable and interesting to read today as the day it was written, during the reign of Augustus (30 B.C.- 14 A.D.).  Niobe boasted that, as the mother of seven fine sons and seven fine daughters, she was a better woman than the goddess Leto, who had only the twins, Artemis and Apollo; they, zealous for their mother's honor, slew all fourteen of Niobe's children, and Niobe was transformed into a great rock, from which water oozed perpetually: her tears never cease.  This is a good example of a cruel and primitive myth, in which Artemis (as with Aktaion) and Apollo (shooting plague arrows as in Homer) are still vindictive, fierce gods, which Classical taste has modified to concentrate on the piteous fate of the innocent children and adolescents (the same kind of modification as in Classical drama); for the artist, it is wonderful--so many poses (some of which can be half-draped or nude), so many emotions, so many different ages of both sexes.

[A 413]  Another innovation of this period is the introduction of the portraiture of statesmen, and literary men, too, not portraits for the tomb to house the ka as in Egypt but to be set up for public edification, as we set up Lincoln in his Memorial in Washington D.C.  Indeed, in so doing, we are heirs of the Athenian Greeks.  We have copies of only a few of the early Greek public portraits.  Rarely, we have a full length copy (for the Greeks portrayed the whole man, recognizing that his body language was part of his essence), as of the poet Anakreon, but usually we have what the Romans made most of: busts, which decorated their schools and libraries; luckily, many of these, like the Themistokles found in the excavations of Ostia, the port city of Rome, are inscribed to identify them unambiguously.  The Romans, who traditionally had kept death masks of their ancestors enshrined in their homes, had no problem with busts for portraits.  The Themistokles does seem like a copy of Early Classical work of the same date as the Olympia, Temple of Zeus, sculptures, but we need to remember that the original was a full-length standing statue, as was the famous Perikles to which we now turn, to discuss him in the next section.

Notice the slight tilt of the head in the unbroken and superior copy at right, in the British Museum.

The Centuries of Reorganization: 2

Babylon, Persia, Saitic Egypt, Archaic Greece and Etruria

This lovely early 6th century BC head in the Louvre is thought to be  the Saitic (Dyn. XXVI) king Apries.  A colleague of  mine, seeing the photo on my desk, said that it looked like Greek work.  She is a specialist in this period, and I have been thinking of the possibility ever since.  In Egypt at this period the Greeks in their trading posts had been learning all sorts of techniques and ideas (such as the 'kouros' and stone temple building), but the Greeks were very apt pupils, and it is not unthinkable that this head was carved by a Greek working for Egypt.  It is very interesting to compare the Calfbearer (see below).  But the fact is that collaboration probably did occur and that both parties benefited.  So "Apries" (if it is he) aptly heads this section.

There are so many Prints for this period that I shall not be able to make additions, since the page would get too long for many computers, but you can find good images also on line.  Google and Wikipedia will take you to them.

[G 28] By the end of the 7th century (612 B.C.), as the syllabus describes, with the collapse of the Assyrian Empire, Babylon entered what has become the period of her greatest fame, thanks to excavations a century ago and, not least, to the stories of Babylon in the Hebrew Bible, though these stories are not only biased but ill informed.  Culturally, the Neo-Babylonian period was indeed brilliant; it was also brief, since the Persian king Cyrus captured Babylon in 538.  The reconstruction drawings made by the architects attached to the excavations give some idea of the grandeur of the temple quarter.  All we really know of the Hanging Gardens is how famous they were, included in the Hellenistic period list of the Wonders of the World.

[G 25] [MG 361] [1515] The Ishtar Gate is known to most of us in the reconstruction in the Pergamum Museum in Berlin; in this reconstruction, all the decorative parts are original (ancient) with the plain blue filled in with matching blue modern bricks.  The museum, one of the largest in the world, was literally designed around and for the Ishtar Gate and the Pergamum Altar, which we shall study later.  Even so, the reconstruction is only of the center of one face of the Ishtar Gate and only in its final form.  All within the long reign of Nebuchadnezzar, the technique of decorating the gate was changed twice; bulls (of the god Adad) and sirrush dragons (of Babylon's own god, Marduk) from all three successive versions were found in the excavations and can be seen in Berlin (if not also in Baghdad?).  In the first version, the brick clay was painted with colored glazes, cut into bricks, and fired; this kind of glazed brick with designs and animals had already been used as early as the Late Bronze Age Middle Assyrian period, when Tukulti-Ninurta built Ashur (see Section VII).  In the second, they invented something new: the brick clay was molded so that the animals were in relief, then cut into bricks (with wires, probably) and fired; except when the sunlight raked across them, these must have looked rather dull.  In the third version, the final one, completed in the 570s B.C., the animals were both molded in relief and painted with colored glazes; these are the blue-background gates represented by the full-scale reconstruction in the museum; in the site photograph [G 25], you see towers of the second version still standing at the site of Babylon.  This is, need we add, very good brick!  Mesopotamia has come a long way in the treatment of brick surfaces since the cone mosaics from Innana's sanctuary at Uruk two and a half millennia earlier.  No wonder Babylon was famous.  Notice that the basic form of the gateway, with an arched opening recessed between two square towers, is still the same as we saw as Khafaje, Ur, Ishchali, and Ashur (Iraqi pride in their long, distinguished history is fully justified, though it does not sanction invading smaller nations).  The pacing lion glazed brick reliefs lined the walls on both sides of the Processional Way.  You may see examples facing in the opposite direction if you go browsing (a good way to study); those come from the opposite wall.  The lions were done with the same technique as the final version of the Ishtar Gate.  Notice that these Babylonian lions, as well as the bull and sirrush, have less sharply defined muscles and an easier gait and somehow a gentler and more natural stylistic character than the Assyrian ones.  Indeed, Neo-Babylonian art is arguably the most elegant and graceful art in the whole history of Mesopotamia.

[M 218, center and bottom--the top picture is somewhat later]  Since the end of the Bronze Age, we know, there were Iranian-speaking peoples in what is today Iran, but not only there.  From Greek historians as well as from Russian excavations we know of the Scythians in southern Russia and the Crimea.  They were not yet urban; their art was such as could be carried when they moved.  By the 6th century B.C., they sometimes commissioned work from Greek craftsmen or bought it from traders in the Greek colonies that had been founded on the north shore of the Black Sea, but the magnificent panther and stag, weighing pounds of solid gold, which you can see in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, are examples of Scythian art in the purest, original form of "animal style".  Notice the cells for inlaid gems and how the panther's tail and paws are made in the shape of small curled-up panthers; notice the extravagant development of the stag's antlers and, in both animals, the powerful stylizations of the parts and junctures of the body, with convex and concave surfaces meeting in sharp ridges.  This art is not naturalistic, but it could hardly be improved on in the beauty of its design.

[M 126] [Cf. statue of Ranofer in Section V]  It was not only the Babylonians who profited from the hiatus between the end of the Assyrian and the beginning of the Persian Empire.  Egypt, free of Assyrian domination, reunified herself one last time and also made a great artistic revival, looking back especially to the Old Kingdom, 2,000 years (and more) earlier.  This period, Dynasty XXVI, the Saitic Period, is particularly important in art history, because Egypt was reviving its monumental past just as the Greeks were beginning to have firsthand knowledge of Egypt.  Although Dynasty XXVI began in 663 B.C., the Greek trading posts in the Nile delta are not quite so early as that, and we see in full force the impact of Egypt (the only nation alien to themselves that the Greeks never called barbaroi but rather tried to relate to, trying to determine, for example, the equivalences between their gods and Egyptian gods: since Zeus and Amon are both sky gods, they "must be" the same) only about 600 B.C.  In fact, the addition of real firsthand knowledge of Egypt to the already complex orientalizing blend that existed in the seventh century makes the difference between Early Archaic (Orientalizing) and Middle Archaic (often called just plain Archaic) Greek art.  In Egypt, Greeks saw great stone temples and lifesize (and larger) stone sculpture; remember that Egypt also made lifesize bronze sculpture.  The Greeks, as this sank in, must have thought: "But we have islands and mountains of fine limestone and an even better stone, marble, and being Greeks we must emulate this--surpass it, if we can."  Anyway, that's what they did: quarried their own limestone for temples and marble for statues.  They doubtless learned about the basic tools from their neighbors, probably Egypt.  They certainly learned dry stone fine ashlar masonry there and fluting of column shafts (although the Mycenaeans had used fluting, it was now buried).  This makes a radical difference to Greek art; it is the birth of Greek architecture and sculpture as we know it.  Although Greek art would have been great without the example of Egypt, it would not have been the same.

[MA 1] [A 443]  The Greek kouros statue is a standing, nude, male used primarily as the type for a votive statue in a sanctuary or a grave statue in a cemetery (replacing the great amphoras as grave monuments).  With the addition of attributes (such as a bow and arrows for Apollo), it could also serve for a young god.  The kouros type began, tentatively, in the seventh century, but it is one of the hallmarks of sixth-century Archaic Greek art.  Although kouroi (plural) come in several regional styles from different parts of Greece, nothing could be more obvious than that the type itself, the frontal pose with fists clenched and one foot forward, as well as the ambitious idea of making a substantive (lifesize or larger) statue out of a single quarried block (in this case, marble from Mount Pentele < Pentelic Marble), came from Egypt.  Therefore, the differences from its Egyptian models that distinguish the Greek kouros from the beginning are significant: (1) he is nude; the Egyptians, like the Hebrews, thought nudity indecent and only showed little boys or servants nude; (2) he stands balanced on his own slender ankles (a plumb line can be drawn right through the statue), as only wooden or bronze statues did in Egypt; all Egyptian stone statues are, technically considered, high reliefs; there is a back slab, and the statue leans back.  The New York kouros [MA 1] came from Attica and is by the same sculptor (though we don't know his name) as another kouros and a gorgon found in Athens.  It was, almost certainly, a youth's grave marker.  Compared with a Saitic Egyptian statue, or with Ranofer, the New York kouros is remarkably four-sided (we really feel the block he came from!) and remarkably abstract in its structure.  This tectonic bias, which we already saw in the Dipylon Amphora, runs straight through Greek art.  It is patently obvious here because the sculptor, knowing no more of skeletal and muscular anatomy than he could deduce from his Egyptian models, relies wholly on tectonically related pattern-forms (schemata:plural) to hold the figure together meaningfully instead of the subtler structures of organic forms; it is enough at the moment for him to master the statics of a standing stone figure and to try to make transitions from front to side to back.  The most remarkable and curiously successful of his tectonic schemata is the tubular ridge that takes the place of a pelvis, running from either side of the genitalia, continuing on the flanks, and ending tucked in between the buttocks.  One cannot call it a bad attempt at a pelvis; it is a tectonic equivalent to a pelvis, which sculpturally serves perfectly in relating the legs to the torso.  We see, therefore, that even when they adopt something from an older civilization that they greatly respect, the Greeks felt that they had to make it their own; they never produced "provincial" art.  Notice, incidentally, the "beaded wig"; the Greeks wore not wigs but their own hair, shoulder length, and Egyptian statuary could not suggest to them how one might do that in stone; the beaded pattern is a tectonic schema (singular) derived from some Egyptian wigs, which many sixth century sculptors will use for three generations.  For female hair, they have different schemata.

[A 11, right pair: Kleobis and Biton]  Here is a good example of regional difference.  This pair of statues are kouroi, but only the kouros type is like the Attic New York kouros.  They are not at all blocky but fleshy and rounded; their proportions are different; they have hair like the Dame d'Auxerre statuette of ca. 640 and the little ivory kneeling boy from Samos of about the same date; they also have the quasi-inlaid eyebrows, round eyeballs, short noses, triangle-cornered mouths, angular jaws, wide-spread pectorals, double-curving arch of the rib cage, trapezoidal pubic hair, large genitals, short arms, and hands with large, square-tipped thumbs--everything, in fact, that characterizes a male figure in the Daedalic style.  Sixty years ago they already were recognized as the last major works done in the Daedalic style.  Notice that although they are more natural looking than the New York kouros, they are not to be dated later; on the contrary, their Daedalic character requires dating them no later than necessary.  The inscription on one of the bases is fragmentary, but enough is left to be sure (1) that the sculptor signed his work
(----]medes of Argos), something that artists today take for granted, precisely because, beginning about now, the Greeks began to do so; this means that the statue had more prestige if it was signed by a highly regarded artist, so the artist was gaining status as more than a skilled workman, and (2) that the pair of statues was dedicated, at Delphi in the sanctuary of Apollo where they were found, by the city of Argos, since the sculptor was Argive.  (Note that work found in all the great sanctuaries of Greece was brought there and dedicated by cities, and private citizens, all over the Greek world; there is no such thing as a Delphic style).  As twin statues, therefore, they have been thought, ever since they were found, to represent the legendary paragons of filial piety of the city of Argos, Kleobis and Biton, who, when the oxen were not brought in from field work in time to be hitched up to take their mother to the great Argive Sanctuary of Hera for the goddess's festival, yoked themselves to the cart and got her there on time; they died of exhaustion as they slept in the temple (in a state of grace, to put it in Christian language).  Since, also, Herodotus tells us in Book I of his Histories that the Argives set up statues at Delphi of Kleobis and Biton, the identification would seem as nearly certain as we can hope for.  The statues have a magnificent presence and are over life size, but details such as their eyes and hair are very finely carved.

[G 64]  Now we turn to one of Greece's most venerated temples.  Later referred to as the Temple of Hera, alone, it may have been for both Zeus and Hera until the Early Classical Temple of Zeus near by was built in the 460s B.C.  It stands in the sanctuary at Olympia, where the Olympic Games were by the time of its construction about 175 years old, and it replaced an earlier temple that had stood in exactly the same place; its predecessor, however, did not have a colonnade around the cella.  So long as pagan religion survived, this temple was maintained and cherished; thus it remained in use for about a thousand years.  There are many questions about its architecture that we cannot answer; except for a great terracotta ornament from the peak of the roof (which you can see in the museum at Olympia), we have no parts of the superstructure, nothing above the capitals of the columns, not even a fragment.  We assume that the upper parts were of wood, which was still the traditional structural material of temples on the Greek peninsula, perhaps especially in so ancient a sanctuary as Olympia.  We know that the original columns were wood (Pausanias who wrote in the middle of the second century after Christ saw a surviving oaken column in the back porch of the temple, and the stone columns which we see are all different and of widely different dates), and wood columns could not have borne a weightier superstructure (the superstructure is called the entablature).  We know that above the orthostats, the cella walls were of mud brick, because the top surfaces of the orthostats are not fixed to take courses of ashlar above.  Considering that Corinth had built an all-stone temple with terracotta tiles for the roof (but without any columns) in the seventh century, and would very soon build [A 46] an all-stone colonnaded temple at her colony on Korkyra (Corfu), the use of traditional materials for the Hera Temple at Olympia, ca. 600 B.C., was conservative.  The plan of the temple, on the other hand, is up to date and sophisticated.  In the cella, instead of a row of columns down the middle to support the roof, the need to reduce the span of the roof beams was met by columns on both sides of the cella interior, near the wall.  Thus, entering the door, one had a clear view of the statue at the opposite end of the cella; these interior columns also give the interior rhythm and a sense of scale, so it won't be just a vast, dark box.  The peristyle (exterior colonnade), in the case of a temple with a mud brick wall, protected it from rain; what is remarkable here is an innovation in the spacing of the columns: subtly closer together towards the corners of the temple.  This is called angle contraction, and it indicates that the lost superstructure had a proper Doric frieze, consisting of alternating triglyphs and metopes, which we shall see in the next temple: one needs to adjust the spacing of the columns in order to have triglyphs meet at the corners.  In fine, both the Doric Order and the Ionic Order took their design elements from traditional wooden forms (remember our seeing the bundled column with a bud capital in Egypt in a wooden model in Dynasty XI and in a stone temple in Dynasty XVIII) and recast the traditional forms in terms of building in ashlar stone.  The architects recast them so thoroughly that it is impossible to "translate" the stone forms back into wooden construction, even though some things are obvious, such as that guttae derive from dowel pegs.

[A 46]  Corinth had a colony on the lovely island (find it on the map opposite the present border between Greece and Albania) of Korkyra, often called by its Italian name, Corfu.  It was prosperous, and early in the sixth century built a state-of-the-art temple in the Doric Order, dedicated to the goddess Artemis, that is the earliest known to us (a) built entirely of stone, with a stone peristyle, and (b) with stone sculpture in its pediment.  Any structure with a pitched roof must have either gables or a hip roof; if it has gables, they may be open (but birds and bees build nests in them, and rain gets in) or closed; if closed they may be blank, or the back wall may be concealed by decoration.  Pedimental sculpture in closed pediments is what the Greeks preferred, from this time forward, for their temples.  The Corfu pediment has the Gorgon Medusa in the center, flanked by her children sired by the god Poseidon: the wingèd horse Pegasus (only Walt Disney gives him a whole family of baby pegasoi, in Fantasia) and the hero Chrysaor, both only partly preserved.  Flanking this group are heraldic cats; since they have spots, leopards might be intended (if the artist had heard tell of African spotted cats), but art historians call the Archaic cats "panthers" unless they have male lions' manes.  Left and right of the panthers, in the corners of the pediment, quite small, are gods in battle (the one with a thunderbolt must be Zeus).  The artist who composed this pedimental composition did not yet address three challenges that will have been met a hundred years later, when, as in Greek drama, also in the fifth century, they will strive for Unities: Unity of Scale and Unity of Subject Matter; also, they will avoid heraldic symmetry.  It is indeed a challenge, because the low, wide triangle with very acute angles (constricted space) at the sides is one of the most difficult shapes to compose coherent pictures in.  Notice, too, that this pedimental sculpture is in half-round relief; before the end of the sixth century, pedimental sculptures will be carved fully in the round and set into the pediment, fastened with strong metal pins to the back wall and secured in cuttings in the floor of the pediment.  Yes, its floor; the pediment of the Parthenon, for example, is deep enough that one could sit up there and have a picnic without fear of falling (being much smaller than the sculptures).  The Corfu pediment is still shallow, and the moldings (geisons) framing it are not yet like what we shall see on Classical temples.  But it is very perfect in its own way.  The Gorgon indeed is carved with such almost metallic crispness and in such fine detail that we are led to suppose that, in this early effort, the sculptors did not yet realize, had not yet considered, that, from the ground, such delicate detail could not be seen.  The pediment is dated ca. 580, so the temple may have been initiated a decade or two earlier; the dating of the pediment is derived from comparing the Gorgon with Corinthian vase-painting of the early sixth century (which is dated on intricate grounds that you may study if you take Art 4409) and the head of Chrysaor with the statue to which we now turn, but in the latter case it is this temple, once we have it dated, which dates the statue that is developmentally comparable.

[A 24]  The kore from Keratea, some miles from Athens in Attica, now in the Berlin Museum, is our first sixth-century maiden statue.  Kore (which is Persephone's name, as the daughter of Demeter, and still means daughter in modern Greek) is the feminine form of kouros; the plural is korai.  Like the kouros, the kore statue has its roots in the seventh century; not only is the Dame d'Auxerre a proto-kore but we even have a full size statue of similar type (too badly battered to be easily appreciated).  As with the  kouros, however, the great series of real korai is a hallmark of sixth-century Greek art.  The maiden from Keratea was once thought by many to be a goddess, because of her cylindrical headdress and the pomegranate; thirty years ago, however, an Attic kore of ca. 550 B.C. was found, and we have her inscription (with her name, Phrasikleia), which tells us that death took her before she could be married--and she is dressed the same way as the Keratea girl, also with jewelry, also wearing red, so evidently these are girls dressed as the brides that tragically they never were to be, just as the kouroi are beardless: adolescent ephebes or doing military service (one married only afterward).  Although one is Corinthian and male, the other Attic and female, the facial structure and proportions of the Keratea kore and Chrysaor at Corfu are so alike that they are generally thought to be contemporary.  In any case, she falls between the flat-eyed, flat-cheeked New York kouros [A 443] and the Calfbearer [A 19] both of which, like her, are Athenian work.  It is wonderful to have a statue like this one with so much of the color preserved, reminding us that Greek sculpture (as distinct from neo-Classical) was never chalky white and in the Archaic period was very vividly colored, though they seem always to have left the flesh the off-white of the marble, for both sexes (for limestone sculpture, which was coated with gesso and painted, just as it was in Egypt, the males were red-brown and the females pale, following the ancient color code).  Notice the loving attention the sculptor gave the finger and toe joints and nails; long before artists can master the organic whole of the entire figure, they can lavish care and close observation on the small parts.  I have saved the most remarkable detail in this statue for the last: it is an epoch-making innovation.  Most of her drapery is just done with ridges and grooves, as we have seen occasionally in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and to show her feet the artist just cuts out an arch to expose them.  But look at the ends of the shawl!  It seems to us such an obvious thing to do, show the actual folds with a zigzag, but here it is done for the first time in the history of the world (unless an earlier one should turn up tomorrow); the artist has shown cloth behind cloth, cloth lying over cloth, to show how many times the shawl is actually folded; he is showing its three-dimensionality structurally, so we can count the folds and see the tassels on both corners.  If this were just an experiment with no future, it would not matter so much; it would be in a class with those occasional Egyptian experiments with a face drawn in three-quarter view--mutations without progeny.  But from this beginning, they will continue experimenting; look ahead to [A 27] and [MA 22]; a person born ca. 590 who lived to ca. 510 would have seen that whole development in the works all around him or her.  We shall see more change in those 80 years in Greece than we have seen in the whole 2,500 years (so far) of Egyptian art.  Good or bad?  Simply a fact.

Greek art is different because it is the beginning of western art as we know it, art in which change is largely artist-motivated, art for a society that begins to be interested in art for the thrill or quiet satisfaction of looking at it, that does not expect it to be magic or replace the perishable body or appease potentially angry gods.  The families who place a kouros or a kore either on the tomb of a beloved child or as a votive statue in a sanctuary, as on the Acropolis in Athens, are vying with each other to see who can set up the finest and most admired statue.  They intend for their fellow citizens to admire them and envy them, grave statues included; now, like the great cathedrals of Europe later, Greek sanctuaries and even cemeteries begin to function somewhat as museums, too.  After all, is it not like dedicating a memorial stained-glass window in your church?  Doesn't one expect everyone to admire it?  Does it not boost your social standing?  This is the secular and social function of much religious art from now on.

[A 19]  If we wish to study a kouros a generation after the New York Kouros and Kleobis and Biton, not far in date from the Keratea Kore, we find that there is, unless one turns up tomorrow, none of the same quality and state of preservation.  The Moschophoros (English: Calfbearer) from the Athens Acropolis (and ,like the other Acropolis sculptures, on view in the Acropolis Museum), however, is a masterpiece and will serve just as well: he is older, he wears a cloak, and his arms hold the newborn calf that is an offering to the goddess--all traits that depart from the kouros type, but his legs in the striding position, his frontality, and the exposed anatomical parts are all comparable.  Like the Keratea Kore, he has tremendously muscular, massive arms and shoulders (this massiveness is favored in some Athenian workshops and at some times more than others), and he is far less four-sided than the New York Kouros.  The organization of the planes of his face, his smaller eyes, his less emphatic mouth all suggest that he could be as much as a decade later than the Keratea Kore (note that now we talk of decades rather than centuries and millennia; as we discuss the chronology, thus do we inform you how to study it).  The sculptor uses beads for the hair (most Greeks have curly or wavy hair, so the beads serve pretty well), but they no longer could be mistaken for a wig.  It is an expensive statue, fully lifesize and with inlaid (rather than painted) eyes.  Its masterly quality resides in the coherence of the parts (it all hangs together) and in the artist's making design sense out of what would be in life an awkward, visually confusing composition: a new calf, all legs and joints, draped around a man's shoulders.  The dumbest assumption we can make about this art is that "natural≈better"; no, the very dumbest is that "more detailed≈better".

[A 22]  Not all kouroi and korai are Athenian or even from peninsular Greece.  Indeed, the most important temple of this generation, arguably, was the Rhoikos Temple (named for its architect), the third of four successive Temples to Hera in the greatest of her sanctuaries, that on the Ionian island of Samos (on [MAP 2], it is the island nearest the coast between the coastal Ionian cities of Ephesos and Miletos).  Only copyright law prevents our having it in the University Prints.  We must take note of it because Rhoikos and Theodoros of Samos, in this temple, first used stone-cutting lathes for making the bases of Ionic columns, and here for the first time we know that there was an Ionic capital with a volute across it (the earlier Samos Heraion already had the deep prostyle porch of an Ionic temple plan).  The Archaic temples of Ionia, here on Samos and a little later at Ephesos and Miletos, not only are the largest, most expensive temples of the sixth century B.C. in Greece but also the places where some of the masons and stone carvers drafted by the Persian king to build Persepolis (look ahead to [O 408, ff.] in your Prints) had learned their craft.  So the amazing quality of the statues dedicated to Hera on Samos in the generation of the Rhoikos Temple is perfectly consistent with the wealth and brilliance of this, one of the loveliest, best watered Greek islands.  In the 19th century, the Louvre called its statue "Hera", mistakenly thinking that a statue dedicated to Hera (as the inscription tells us this one is, by a citizen named Cheramyes) would be a Hera, just as some kouroi dedicated to Apollo (inscribed) led to museums' calling all kouroi "Apollos".  Since then finds in many sanctuaries have settled the question: in sanctuaries, the statues of girls and boys are set up by their parents as votaries of the deities in question--and to show off wealth and social status, just as debutante balls and quinceañeros are staged for the same purpose.  The Louvre Kore of Cheramyes, in fact, has a sister, literally her sister, from the same family dedication (the Samians who could afford to set up statues of the whole family in a row on one base!), now in the Berlin Museum.  The Louvre girl has a cloak, the Berlin girl none, but she holds a pet rabbit; I suppose she is the younger daughter, whereas the Louvre girl has put away childish things, such as pets.  Both bear Cheramyes' dedicatory inscription.  Until recently we had no good idea what Samian heads of this period looked like (the primitive feeling that carved faces harbor a personal force has led to their destruction in many places), but recent excavations have produced kouros statues with heads; the faces are rounded and plump and smiling.  Cheramyes' dedication (the korai in the Louvre and Berlin survive) dates from about 560 B.C.; notice that the Ionian Greek sculptor is less interested in articulation (how the parts fit together) than the Athenians, but he was more interested in showing a girl's softly rounded bodily form and his skill in a sensuous detail: how knuckles look with soft wool wrapped over them.  One of the most remarkable things about ancient Greece to us is that, without political unification under a central government, the Greeks were always keenly aware of being one people; at the same time, each city state (polis) had its own particular institutions and artistic traditions.

In the Print [G 59] showing the former reconstruction of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi in the Old Delphi Museum, a very large votive sphinx (far larger than those that come from grave stelai) faces us.  I am showing you slides of her taken in the New Museum, sitting on her volute capital, an early Ionic capital (columns were not used only in buildings); the sphinx was dedicated by Naxos, the largest of the Cyclades Islands, as we know not only from written evidence but because it is made of Naxian marble, about 560 B.C.  Naxian style (note the face of the sphinx) is somewhat sharper and crisper than Samian, but the capital of the sphinx shows you what an early Ionic capital looks like.

[MA 17]  We have not yet looked at Archaic vase-painting.  By the 560s B.C., the Corinthian industry was in trouble, and the Attic potters were no longer farouche experimenters.  To state simply changes that occupy us for several weeks in a course devoted to Early Greek Art, by the second quarter of the sixth century we have had real (not proto-) black-figure technique for a whole generation, and Athenian vase-painters have mastered everything that they could learn from the Corinthians: how to marshall figures in neat friezes, how to avoid mixing incised details with details rendered in other techniques--in a word, professional discipline.  The mature black-figure technique will prevail until near the end of the sixth century.
Like the Late Protocorinthian Chigi Olpe [MA 13] the François Vase comes from an Etruscan tomb and, like it again, it is an exceptional piece, not typical of its time even though that time is a great period in vase-painting.  It is called after the Italian archaeologist, Alessandro François, who spent half his life finding all its pieces and putting together the jigsaw puzzle; it is a volute krater; a krater with volute handles is new; they look alien to clay (hard to make of clay) and probably in fact derive from bronze volute kraters; cf.[MA 89]
The François Vase with its two hundred neatly inscribed figures and fascinating subject matter and double signatures (each twice: "Ergotimos made" and "Kleitias drew", with "me" or "it" understood) and great size is so stupendous that we are prone to overlook the most important thing of all, especially for a course like this one: a basic change in taste.  Like the kouros in [A 14] and the rider in [MA 41], all of the figures, including the animals and the miniature figures on the foot, express a new ideal in physical beauty, trim and neat and slender and sprightly; this is the new ideal of the middle third of the sixth century, especially in peninsular Greece (art of the Cyclades and of Ionia had never been massive like the Calfbearer and the Keratea Kore, anyway).  Notice that such a change has nothing to do with any kind of progress or evolution; it is a change in attitude, like the change in our own century from Modern to Post-Modern.  Other changes, such as evidence of increasing knowledge of and ability to incorporate the anatomy of the human body and three-dimensional drapery, also continue, independent of the change in taste.
Like the Chigi Olpe the François Vase may be related to paintings with similar subject matter, and drawn at a not much larger scale, done on gessoed wooden panels and dedicated in sanctuaries.  But wood usually does not survive in Greece, so the hypothesis cannot be tested against any evidence.  Similarly, I cannot test my suspicion, based on our having very few pieces of vase-painting by Kleitias, that he himself may have spent much of his working life doing paintings on something other than vases.  Not that in this period vase-painting was an inferior medium.  We think of "painting" as having light and shade, and landscape or room interiors in the background, and emphasizing the play of brushstrokes, but from literary sources relating to the fifth century we know that trying to show roundness by shading began only then, so a better parallel, technically, for the lost paintings of sixth-century Archaic Greece would probably be the colored outline of Egypt, as in the Tomb of Nakht.
The main scenes on the François Vase relate to the hero Achilles in the Trojan Epic Cycle (only part of which is actually in the Iliad and Odyssey).  On your Print, showing one side of the krater, on the lip is the Calydonian Boar Hunt, in which Peleus, Achilles' father, participated; on the neck are the Funeral Games in Honor of Patroklos, Achilles' friend and comrade in arms, who died at Troy (Iliad, Book XXIII); in the main frieze, all around the vase is the procession of the gods themselves attending the wedding of Achilles' parents, Peleus (who was mortal) and Thetis (who, as daughter of Nereus, was immortal and divine, thus expressing the feeling that there is something divine about a hero); in the frieze below the handle roots is the Death of Troilos--Troy would not fall while he lived, and Achilles lay in ambush until the boy came to water his horses at the fountain house; the animal frieze below is purely decorative.  You can just see on the left, on the handle, if you know what is there, a hero bearing the body of his comrade off the battle field.  Finally, on the foot, a miniature battle of miniature scope.  Among the post-Homeric poems in epic style are playful miniatures, like "The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice"; if you have a very small frieze, therefore, you want to draw a very small epic; on the foot of the François Vase we find the "Battle of the Pygmies and the Cranes" (this is not the only time it occurs in Greek art, so we know that Kleitias didn't just make it up).  The pygmies ride goats, being too small for horses.  Do not make the mistake of taking this for bad anthropology.  Any knowledge they had of the real small forest people of western Africa was at many removes from first-hand knowledge; it is like their knowledge of Central Asia, where they put the Amazons.  What it is instead is a bit of artistic and literary sophisticated play.

[A 14]  Now, if we return to Corinth, we can see in a famous kouros (one of the first discovered; that is why the old nickname, "Apollo", has tended to stick to him) the same basic change in taste as in the figures on the François Vase.  The Tenea Kouros takes its familiar name from the village near Corinth, Tenea, where it was found; it was almost certainly the grave marker of a young man.  It takes only a couple of moments to grasp that this kouros embodies the same sprightliness as we saw in the figures on the François Vase; that the sculptor also knows more about anatomy and how to carve marble to suggest soft, breathing flesh than we have seen before; that the Tenea Kouros is not Athenian--for example, the hair is stylized like a soft washboard.  Balancing all that mass of marble on such very slender ankles and tiny feet is really audacious.

[MG 363]  The elegance of the Tenea Kouros prepares us to find at Corinth the most sophisticated of all Archaic Doric temples completed in the mid-6th century.  Excavations since the label on your Print was written (always remember that the University Prints are, literally, stereotyped; they can't just change the label on the computer) have shown that the foundations were laid no later than ca. 560 B.C.  Today only seven monolithic columns still stand, at the west (rear) end of the temple, but before a 19th-century earthquake there were eleven, and an old engraving shows them, and the entire plan is attested to because, instead of having had to dig deep to bedrock and lay many courses of masonry to ensure that the stylobate would remain stable and the columns would always stand without tipping (the stylobate was slightly domed and the columns were made to tilt very slightly inward, as in later Classical temples), here on Corinth's Temple Hill, which is an outcrop of sold limestone, the Corinthian builders had to make cuttings in the living rock to receive the levelling courses, and these cuttings remain visible.  The surviving columns give us the intercolumniations (distances between column center and the next column center), so the whole plan can be calculated.  The temple is 6 X 15 columns, which is long proportions, but, look, it has two cellas, back to back, requiring the extra length.  Thus, too, each porch with columns in antis is a pronaos (front porch) rather than an opisthodomos (back porch).  In both cellas, there is a central space with columns at both sides, forming the interior Order.  It is typical of Archaic temples to have monolithic column shafts, and in earthquake-prone Corinth it is also common sense.  In the capitals, the echinus is still very broad, but not pancake-like, as at Corfu a generation earlier, and the columns themselves are slenderer and more widely spaced.  Although the frieze of triglyphs and metopes is lost (doubtless a victim of the lime kilns of medieval and early modern Corinth), we are confident that it existed, because on the face of the architrave block that is in situ, and visible in the Print, we see carved in relief the taenia and one regula with guttae plus half each two more regulae.  In Doric Order design, the regulae line up, one under each triglyph [see G 58 and G 37].  When a Doric building is complete, we read the taenia and the regulae (as we are meant to) as part of the frieze, but in construction in stone it makes good sense to carve them in one piece with the architrave.  Students who know some Latin will notice that some of these terms are Latin words; this is because, like the architects of the Renaissance, we take for our basic authority the Roman architect and writer, Vitruvius (he lived in the time of the emperor Augustus).  The Corinth temple is built of the local limestone (building whole temples of marble was not yet customary); as usual, this was coated with a fine stucco made of marble dust, which sealed the surface and made it gleaming white.  Architectural details were painted in bright colors, just as details were in Archaic sculpture; for example, the taenia was always bright red, the triglyphs and regulae midnight blue or black.  If this seems gaudy, remember that the bright, dry air of Greece tends to "bleach" color.

[MG 57]  At Paestum, south of Naples, the Old Hera Temple (ludicrously nicknamed "Basilica") sits right beside the New Hera Temple (nicknamed "di Nettuno", Italian for Poseidon, just because Poseidonia is the original Greek name for Paestum).  Most architectural historians date it as late as ca. 530 B.C., a generation later than Corinth, since, obviously, in the absence of records, we must date things by their latest traits.  The earliest trait of this temple, a row of columns right down the middle of the cella (so, where do you put the statue?), had been outmoded since ca. 600 B.C.  We emphasized that "colonial" (as at Corfu) does not necessarily imply "provincial" in the sense of being less sophisticated and somewhat backward, but in the western colonies, in south Italy and Sicily, we find both interesting regional traits and backward and awkward traits.  In the "Basilica" at Paestum, decoration on the underside of the echinus and the strong swelling profile of the columns are regional traits, but the columns down the middle of the cella and the very flat, broad echinuses are old-fashioned while the construction of the frieze is inept; notice too that this temple has nine columns across the front.

[A 38]  Returning to Athenian sculpture, we should understand that sphinxes from grave stelai, like the one from Spata in your prints or one, even finer, found built into the Themistoklean wall in Athens, can be compared with kouroi and korai; they have human heads, and the change to a slender, springy anatomy affects their feline bodies just as it does anthropoid bodies.  In this period, the sphinxes do seem to have slightly larger eyes at any given date than mortal figures or those of the gods.  Also, when we have the entire grave monument, and the figure of a deceased youth is carved in profile view on the shaft, he looks almost exactly like a kouros of comparable date viewed from the side.

[MA 41]  On the Acropolis in Athens, there were fewer Archaic kouroi than korai, but we have parts of several riders, exceptionally expensive sculptures, dedicated by the families of young men.  Owning fine horses then was like owning an Italian sports car now.  The fragmentary sculpture known as the Rampin Rider (the original head was taken to France in the 19th century and is in the Louvre; the fragments of his body and the horse were excavated later and are in the Acropolis Museum; the join of the head and body was made 60 years ago, and today the Louvre has a plaster cast of the body, Athens a plaster cast of the head) is the most interesting of these riders; some have wondered whether it might not be one of the sons of Peisistratos himself, the date (middle of the sixth century) being about right.  The youth wears the wreath of an athletic victor.  It is Athenian work showing development comparable with the Corinthian Tenea Kouros (the dating on the Print is too late).  Evidently, the main view of the statue had us looking at the horse's left flank; for that reason, the youth turns and tilts his head, towards the viewer.  In a kouros statue, the head never turns; here we even have a slight turn of the shoulders.  Because the youth is mounted, shifting the head and shoulders does not entail shifts in the spine, pelvis, and knees, as it would in a standing statue that has to be balanced around a plumb line.  When we look at the head alone, we see how refined the carving is, how gracious and elegant the whole expression of the head; this statue is the epitome of mid-sixth-century sprightliness; it is so fine that only gradually do we realize that the eyes are still rather large and flat and that the corners of the mouth are still rendered with little triangles--a warning not to date it too late just because it's so good.

[A 21] [A 445, right, showing the statue as all these statues were meant to be seen, outdoors in natural sunlight]  Equally fine Athenian work, closely related to the Rider but dated in the 530s rather than the 550s, is one of the loveliest korai dedicated on the Acropolis.  We have some dedicatory inscriptions from the excavations, but we rarely know which one might belong to a given statue, so we have to find other "titles"; this kore is the only one wearing as her overgarment the tubular woollen peplos, and she is usually called The Peplos Kore, but we also use the Acropolis Museum inventory numbers to specify which kore we mean, so her unambiguous "title" is Kore #679.  For reasons that we cannot pursue in this course, the black-figured vases can be dated rather confidently; look ahead to [MA 19], and you will see that the Peplos Kore is most comparable with the figure of Leda, the woman standing to the left of the horse on that vase; this and other such comparisons help to secure her date.  The point is, dates are not random digits to be memorized like phone numbers; you can, and ought to, begin to make determinations yourself; none of these works has a date written on it or recorded in an archive.  The Peplos Kore justly has been called the image of perfect girlhood; especially in the photograph taken in sunlight, she looks as if she might say something slightly teasing, but not cruel, and break into laughter.  The korai are adolescent girls, about fifteen years old, the age of the girls who embroidered a new peplos for the ancient wooden statue of Athena every four years for her festival, the Panathenaia, which had been founded in 566 B.C.  Despite the severity of her garment, the sculptor of the Peplos Kore has shown not only the fullness of her breasts through two layers of wool and one of linen but the way that the wool belt cinches in her waist and, in back view, even the calves of her legs.  We notice that the popularity of slender sprightliness is waning; this kore has very solid shoulders and forearms.  Comparison with the sphinx from Spata shows how the sculptor now wants to indicate real tresses in the rickrack pattern of the hair over her shoulders.  But the real marvel is the head itself; for the first time looking at marble we are made to think of living flesh and skin over bone and, more, a living personality of a unique girl; this would be so even if some of the color were not preserved on the eyes and lips, though, of course, having the original color helps.

[MA 63]  The kouros from Anavysos is as much as a decade later than the Peplos Kore; in him the reversion to solid bulkiness is complete, and some details of bodily articulation also are more advanced.  Anavysos is a deme site in Attica south of Athens, and this statue almost certainly belongs with an inscription on the middle block of a three-step base found near the statue, which tells the passer-by to stop and mourn for Kroisos whom furious Ares slew in the front ranks; since Ares is the god of war, Kroisos died in battle, but we have no idea what battle that may be.  Most art historians think that the Anavysos Kouros is Kroisos's tomb statue.  The name is interesting, anyway, because it is the name we usually spell, Latin-fashion, as Croesus.  We say, Rich as Croesus.  Croesus, king of Lydia, a non-Greek kingdom in western Asia Minor, provided funds towards building the great Archaic Temple of Artemis at Ephesus; he died in 549.  It is interesting that this Attic boy was named for him.  This statue is a little larger than life size and is so masterly in emphasizing muscular articulation that it looks more realistic than it actually is.  There is always the risk of falling into the aesthetically primitive assumption that real≈better, so that someone might feel that in pointing out features that do not agree with a real human body we are finding fault with the sculpture.  No.  No statue can be absolutely better than this masterpiece.  Greek sculptors will take another generation to finish incorporating anatomical knowledge into their sculptural vocabulary, however, and the Anavysos Kouros still has Ranofer's impossibly wide shoulders and nothing but oblique muscles covering the absence of pelvic bones, although the pronation of the hands (forearm muscles crossing) and similar details are addressed.  This kouros looks great, and is great, but the knowledge of the body and the articulation of that knowledge in sculptural forms are not yet sufficient to encourage sculptors to think of carving statues in motion (which no one ever had done) as they could do when carving reliefs (sculpted pictures) or as painters could do.  These observations still apply to the slightly later bronze Piraeus Kouros [A 12]—if indeed that one isn't neo-Archaic.

[MA 19] [1505]  The art of Athens in this phase of Archaic art, from about 540 to about 525 B.C. is best exemplified by the art of the greatest of all the Attic black-figure vase-painters.  Exekias was also the potter of his vases, and as such invented (on the evidence) three new vase shapes, or new models of basic shapes: a new model of the one-piece amphora, like the Vatican amphora [MA 19 is drawings from it], a new kind of broad drinking cup, which we call the Type A kylix [1505 is the inside of the bowl of his famous kylix in Munich], and the calyx krater [MA 74, second row, at left], a shape that we shall study in a later example.  He signed his vases several times, in beautiful lettering, with both the verb-forms, "drew me" and "made me", and it is true that the shapes of the vases are just as fully masterpieces as the drawing on them.  He also introduced a new kind of inscription, in which the name of a popular boy (or more rarely a woman) is followed by the adjective kalos; like the French beau, this word implies "fine" in all respects: good as well as handsome.  Kalos-names are useful to art historians, because a boy had that sort of popularity for less than a decade (not before puberty, and not once he was of an age for military service and thereafter eligible to marry), so all vases praising the same boy (sometimes a person who in middle age was a well known man) are closely contemporary.  The youth whom Exekias praised was Onetorides.  Although many Greek vases have a principal side with an obviously more important picture, great vases like the Vatican Amphora of Exekias have two equal, original pictures.  The story of Ajax and Achilles playing a board game during the long siege before the walls of Troy is not in the Iliad; it was in one of the lesser epic poems.  It makes a wonderful subject for Exekias.  First, the equilateral triangle of the composition, countered by the inverted triangle of their spears and varied by Ajax's helmet on his shield and Achilles' on his head (making him dominant).  Second, the epic nature of the characters justifies Exekias's giving them elaborate shields and densely embroidered cloaks; this dense-packed elegant incision (also on their beards and on the horsehair crest of Achilles' helmet) virtually makes an intermediate tone, setting off the pale background and the solid black areas; this is a new, artistic use of incision.  Third, the absence of physical activity in the scene permits us to concentrate on that which Exekias is the first artist (known to us) to really do: he conveys the psychology of the two legendary heroes as he conceives it by the way that he draws, in a way radically different from expressing grief, for example, by open mouth and tearing of hair and abandoned gestures.  Here we move from melodrama to tragedy--and earlier than the birth of Athenian tragedy in the theater.  Achilles is confident, relaxed.  Ajax is tense: he has an eyebrow drawn with two short straight lines, his left arm is folded tight and he grips his spear tight, and the tensing of his leg muscles is expressed by the heel lifted off the ground; also, he is hunched over and on the edge of his seat.  The scene on the other side shows an everyday event in the life of the Dioskouroi ("Zeus's boys", known in Latin as the twins, Gemini), Kastor and Polydeukes, born from an egg that Leda laid when Zeus, in the form of a swan, impregnated her; the adult male at the right of the picture is her husband, Tyndareus, the boys' putative father.  Greek boys (like their Cajun counterparts) entertain themselves by going hunting; here the Dioskouroi are returning from a hunting expedition, are welcomed home by Leda and Tyndareus, as well as the family dog and a small servant boy (in Archaic art, children are still drawn like small adults).  This picture exists for its own sake; it is pure charm.  We already have compared the Peplos Kore with Leda.  Polydeukes, reaching to let the dog lick his hand, is like a kouros statue come to life, a little more developed than the Rampin Rider, a little less so than the Anavysos Kouros.  Exekias's beautiful horse makes us realize how great is our loss in having so little of the Rampin Rider's horse.  And look at Tyndareus's drapery!  Men had long worn mantles (himatia) wrapped diagonally, but heretofore they were drawn flat; Exekias indicates the diagonal folds and shows just how it is draped.  This is another important breakthrough.
Although Exekias was primarily a painter of large vases, the Munich cup [1505] is perhaps his most famous piece, because of the unique and original picture of Dionysos in a boat.  The whole inside of the bowl is coated with a special glaze that we call "coral red", which provides the effect of the "wine-dark sea" and sets off the white of the sail.  The story was that the god of wine, Dionysos, desiring sea passage sought it of Tyrrhenian pirates (Greeks called "Tyrrhenian pirates" those who called themselves "Etruscan merchants").  As they sailed, the Tyrrhenians began to feel that their passenger was too spooky and should be disposed of, overboard.  Dionysos, being divine, knew their thoughts and, by his power, transformed the mast into a living grapevine, seeing which the Tyrrhenian pirates, in insane fear, themselves jumped overboard; Dionysos kindly turned them into dolphins, leaned back, and continued his voyage.  It is a Just-So Story: Why the Dolphin Follows Ships at Sea.  As with so many of Exekias's pictures, this is a rare subject in Greek art, and no other version is so fine as this.  There is nothing superfluous, but the whole story is here, yet it is also a masterpiece of pure design, a perfect composition in a circular frame, with both the vine and the dolphins nearly enough symmetrical to fulfill decorative requirements but freely enough disposed to seem alive.

[MA 89]  Since Greek art is ancestral to all the basic assumptions of western art, we easily forget that in the two and a half millennia (five times as long ago as the Renaissance) since it was made wars, greed, religious objections to the subject matter of Greek religion, and ordinary deterioration of materials all have taken their toll.  We have only bits of late Greek books.  We have hardly any Greek painting, though we know how famous it was.  We have an even tinier fraction of all the Greek bronzes that once existed (both statues and vessels) than we have of the original stone statues.  The griffin heads gave us a glimpse of Orientalizing metalwork.  Even books of the Roman Empire period mention Archaic bronzes, as well as later ones, with admiration.  Occasionally one is found, almost always in a rich burial of some foreign people, for example the Thracians who lived in what is now Bulgaria.  The great Vix Krater, today the principal treasure of the Archaeological Museum at Châtillon-sur-Seine, comes from the tomb of a Celtic princess or priestess of the Hallstatt A period; she was buried, judging from the latest objects buried with her, shortly before 500 B.C.; the krater is hard to date exactly, but it is much closer to 550 B.C.  It is five feet tall and five feet in diameter, a masterpiece of extraordinary value from one of the famous bronze-working centers, such as Corinth or Laconia (Sparta), and it is not surprising that it should have taken a couple of generations to travel all the way to northern France.  It may have belonged first to Etruscans; it may have been traded at Marseille (a Greek colony, Massilia) and travelled up the Rhône river system; it may have been enjoyed as a prized object by the Celts before it became funerary wealth.  Why do we not find such things in Greek tombs?  The Greeks regarded death differently and did not stuff tombs with worldly goods.

[MG 364] [G 59]  It must seem strange, considering the fame and grandeur of the panhellenic sanctuary at Delphi on the lower slopes of Mt. Parnassos, that we concentrate on two of the smallest buildings.  But the larger ones are later and less well preserved.  The small buildings were called  thesauroi, treasuries, even by the Greeks themselves; Greek cities all over the Greek-speaking world built them at Delphi and Olympia, East Greek cities and their colonies building in the Ionic Order, peninsular Greek and most Western Greek cities in the Doric.  They vied with each other to build the finest, but the little buildings also housed precious objects dedicated to the god by each city or its wealthiest citizens.  At Delphi, the treasuries lined the Sacred Way climbing up to the Temple of Apollo and its oracle.  Siphnos is one of the Cyclades Islands; its treasury must have been complete by 525 B.C. (and the style can hardly be much earlier) when, historical sources tell us, the collapse of its finances occurred.  This is as good a date peg as we have, and we make it the watershed between Archaic and Late Archaic art, because of the innovations in the sculpture on the Siphnian Treasury, because they are correlated with a major change in vase-painting, and because, also, this is the decade when the expansion of the Persian Achaemenid Empire begins to affect Greek cities, beginning with the Ionians in western Asia Minor.  The old reconstruction of the façade of the Siphnian Treasury is inaccurate in details but still better than nothing.  A treasury is like the cella of a small temple, without a peristyle.  In this one (and not for the first time) between the antae forming the porch we have caryatid (architectural korai) statues instead of columns; these are a canonical option in the Ionic Order (as we shall see in the Classical Period on the Erechtheion on the Athens Acropolis): an Order is a design vocabulary, not just a column-type.  Here we see the essentials of the Ionic Order, its continuous frieze and its fancy moldings: leaf and dart, egg and dart, bead and reel.

[A 44]  There are inscriptions by some of the figures on the east and north friezes of the Siphnian Treasury and even a signature, unfortunately too fragmentary to be sure of, but it points to one of the Cycladic sculptors who are also known from signatures to have worked in Athens in this period, when there is much more Island influence than before in Athenian sculpture.  Siphnos did not have its own school of sculptors, much less a major artist like this one.  In the details that we are studying we have part of the Battle of Gods and Giants (in Greek myths, a more primitive, earth-born race of divinities), Dionysos at left, then Kybele, the great goddess of Asia Minor with her lion chariot--one lion biting the buttocks of a giant who turns his head so we see his helmet frontally, then striding in step the twins, Apollo and Artemis, and a fleeing giant.  The bodies are massive and bulky, reminding us of the approximately contemporary Anavysos Kouros.  Even though we must emphasize again that a relief sculpture is a carved picture, so that the artist can do any kind of pose or effect that he could do in drawing on a vase, still this is extremely bold and innovative work, with its wind-blown drapery, twisting figures, convincing renderings of the dead and dying (appealing to the artist not for their gore but for the challenge that they afford), and elaborate but clearly thought out composition.  The drapery of the seated assembly of the Olympian gods on the east frieze takes the drapery that Exekias used on Tyndareus on the Vatican Amphora one step further; it is not more than a decade later.  Notice how Ares turns his upper body in three-quarter view.  But there is something more.  When we turn back to Athenian Late Archaic art, we shall see a new vase-painting technique, which reverses black-figure; now the background will be black, and the figures the reddish colors of the clay.  In architecture until now Greeks had colored the figures and left the background pale, following the example of Egyptian reliefs, but in the friezes of the Siphnian Treasury you can clearly see, especially in the crevices around the figures, the remains of dark paint, and the figures were pale (marble) with only facial features, hair, and border patterns in color; in other words, the relief figures here are painted like kouroi and korai.  Art historians are convinced that there is a real connection between the change to a dark background in the frieze of the Siphnian Treasury and the change to the new red-figure (black background) technique in Athens only a couple of years later, at most.  The change to red-figure vase-painting is a hallmark of the Late Archaic period.

[O 408] [O 406]  Iran (±50°E.) seems a long way from Greece (±22°E.), but the Achaemenid Persian Empire already extended from Asia Minor (and had terminated Egypt's Saitic Revival of Dynasty XXVI in 525 B.C.) to modern Pakistan and some of northern India and, when peninsular Greece showed concern for the Ionian cities that had been swallowed up, Darius I, the Great, was convinced that Greece could not be let be.  Not that the Persians were heavy-handed overlords; the Hebrews greatly preferred them to Babylon; ordinarily they set up a satrap (a local dynast, what we would call a puppet government) to maintain order and collect taxes.  Remarkably, the tiny Greek city states stood up against the Persians, even managed to cooperate with each other to an unusual extent and, not without great cost, eventually kept their independence.  Given the Persians' logistical difficulties fighting overseas (none of our large transports!), their eventual defeat was not due to Greek valor alone, but the Greeks did defend themselves valorously; they never forgot it.  Did the Hebrews ever forget that David overcame Goliath?

Darius the Great, besides enlarging the palace built by Cyrus, began in 521 B.C. an entirely new capital at a site that the Greeks called simply Persepolis, the Persian capital.  First he built his own palace, then a great Apadana (audience hall); the remaining buildings at Persepolis were completed by his successors.  These buildings remind us in one way of the Mycenaean palaces, which had traditional Mycenaean building forms but columns and wall decoration borrowed from the Minoans.  The Persian palace buildings are unique plans, square platforms with columns arranged as in an orchard and on three sides great porches with wide stairways; it has occurred to one of the French specialists in Iranian archaeology that they are the translation into stone of great tents; the nearest thing today would be the great tents of Arabian princes, with their forests of tent poles.  For the Persians had until their conquests been nomadic as Genghiz Khan.  Darius's inscription at Susa tells us that there he brought his workers in glazed brick from Babylon, got the great timbers for the ceilings from the cedars of Lebanon, and brought stone masons from Ionia and Egypt; he could, of course, commandeer skills from all the conquered lands.  The doorways of the Palace of Darius at Persepolis tell the same story: they are Egyptian doorways, but the half-round moldings are carved with Greek bead-and-reel.  The columns have bases turned on the sort of stone lathe that Rhoikos and Theodoros had invented to build the Hera Temple at Samos a generation earlier; it had most recently been used for the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos for which Croesus of Lydia had contributed funds.  The shafts of the columns have the many fine flutings of Archaic Ionic (compare the column shaft of the Naxian Sphinx).  Even without the Susa inscription we would realize whom Darius had drafted for this great undertaking.  The reliefs show animals derived from the mainstream Mesopotamian tradition, but they are more patterned and decorative than either Babylonian or Assyrian animals.

[O 405]  A relief from the Treasury at Persepolis shows the king enthroned like a divinity, with incense burners in front of him, approached by a foreign ambassador who holds his hand before his mouth even as Hammurabi did before the god Shamash, in the Old Babylonian 18th century B.C.  This ambassador wears the sleeved and trousered garments of a central Asian, but the king and his bodyguards wear loose draped clothes, and in these we see the first pleated drapery in Middle Eastern art.  It is a regimented, formulaic version of Archaic Greek drapery at exactly the phase that we have just studied in the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi; in the latter, no two drapes are alike; here all are done identically--any hint of personal individuality in any of the figures is rigorously excluded.  Also, in Greece, within another 15 years, the drapery had evolved much further, whereas here in Persia, once they had imported sculptors create a style for them, it was maintained unchanged until Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire in 330 B.C.  Perhaps when you get a style readymade and not out of your own tradition (which in the case of the Persians was more like Scythian art than like this) you are not equipped to make it evolve; you can only clone it.  The remarkable thing here at Persepolis is that a small army of foreign artists was caused to create a brand-new architecture which, while using what they knew from their homelands, is definitely a unified, Persian style.

[O 414]  Nowhere is that seen more clearly than in the capitals in the form of addorsed bulls (as here) or lions.  This is a brand-new type of bracket capital; the primary ceiling beams fit between the backs of the bulls' heads, the secondary beams lie at right angle on the bulls' heads between the horns, and the forelegs are tucked under squarely to adapt the animal foreparts to their architectural function.  Between the animals and the fluted shaft are volutes, recognizably similar to those of Archaic Ionic capitals (which at Ephesus had rosettes in the center of the volutes) but used vertically instead of lying across the echinus horizontally.

[O 415]  Greek artisans were always skillful in adapting their styles to the taste of foreigners, not least the Persians, even in the later years of the Persian Empire when Greek art was Late Classical.  The wingèd ibex is a handle from a silver vessel; the ibex is an animal that goes back all the way to Late Neolithic (the Susa A beakers) in southern Iran, and here it is designed in accord with the decorative preferences of the Persians, except that the naturalistic wings are purely Greek, and the little plaque below the hind legs is a Late Classical mask of a Greek satyr.  This piece is not "possibly" but patently Greek workmanship; they also made wonderful pieces with Thracian or Scythian subject matter to the taste of those peoples.  Why "compromise" their own style?  Greece is not wealthy in natural resources, only in skills; also, her neighbors craved these products.

[A 29] [A 445, left]  We may now return to Late Archaic Athens.  In the subject matter of the art we see no hint of their being at war with Persia; attacks were sporadic (the ancients were incapable of waging a modern war), and the Greek peninsula was not attacked until the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C.  Kore #675 from the Athens Acropolis is made of Island marble, is in Island style, and is generally thought to be the work of a sculptor from Chios.  Its date is ca. 520-510 B.C.  It was found in two pieces, the head apart from the body, and might not be so famous but for the unusual preservation of color on the body.  Oxidation has blackened the colors, but the chiton (shirt) was blue, and the embroidered borders and spots were red, green, and blue; the reddish traces on the hair suggest that it was dark brown.  The diagonally draped himation with richly cascading pleats is Island fashion, but, as we shall see, Athenian girls also adopt it now.  Kore #675 is small and lacks the sense of character that we saw in the Peplos Kore, #679.

[A 27]  Kore #674, on the other hand, has a very marked personality.  This is the work of an Athenian sculptor of about 510 B.C.  It is almost lifesize and preserves nearly as much paint as the Chios Kore, #675, including the paint on her eyebrows and eyes.  Even though we have no reason to think that the korai are really accurate portraits, what is important is that beginning with the Peplos Kore the best ones are strong, individual characterizations, meaning, if nothing else, that the parents of daughters took them seriously as individual persons and wanted them represented in full personhood in the statues they dedicated--not just as pretty female horseflesh.  We have not seen such individuality in votive statues in any previous art.  The sense of quiet inwardness in Kore #674 is really remarkable.  The sculptor has given her more delicate facial structure, smaller, more sloping shoulders, half-closed eyes, and a sober mouth that looks as if it might speak.  The Archaic smile and the robust and bouncy forms that went with it were beginning to go out of fashion.

[A 12]  In June, 1959, in the course of road work in Piraeus, the port city of Athens, men came upon a warehouse that had burned down early in the first century B.C., perhaps in the time of Sulla, when a lot of Greek art was being transported to Rome.  The fire was the reason for four major bronze statues remaining buried there and thus being saved from the vicissitudes of history.  The other three date from the Late Classical period, but the fourth is this Late Archaic bronze kouros.  Since he is not only over lifesize but held a bow (probably) in his left hand, this should be an example of the kouros type serving for the statue of a youthful god: Apollo.  Prof. Caroline Howard, indeed, believes that all four of the Piraeus bronzes were booty from the sacred island of Delos in the Cyclades, one of the principal sanctuaries of Apollo and Artemis, who, according to the myth, were born there.  Because we have no other large bronze kouroi to compare, we can only say that based on the pelvic area the Piraeus Kouros must be a little later than the Anavysos Kouros, perhaps ca. 520-510 B.C.  It certainly is work by a major artist, and its discovery came as a great surprise.  The freedom with which the artist treats the arms and hands is due to its being bronze, hollow cast, by the same lost-wax method that we studied in the Dynasty of Akkad.  It was what we call a direct casting; when it was found, the clay core and the oxidized metal armature were still inside it.  It now is exhibited in the Piraeus Museum.

[MA 65] shows two sides of the very fine base of a lifesize kouros statue (cuttings for feet in kouros position can be seen on the top of the block); the third sculptured side (back is blank) shows youths pitting a leashed dog against a cat.  Since it was found near the Dipylon, the kouros probably was a grave statue--of a youth of eminent family, when even the base is so fine and elaborate as this.  The figures of athletes are less than a foot tall, no larger than the figures on a large vase; the background is painted red, the figures left pale, so they stand out like figures done in the red-figure technique, especially resembling the athletes on a calyx krater by Euphronios in Berlin.  The artist is very interested in details of musculature and experiments with showing how the rectus abdominis muscle (which he renders in a way that reminds us of a muffin tin) responds to twisting in the torso.  Euphronios's work coincides with the adolescence of a future general, Leagros, who was a strategos at the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C.; in the decade ca. 510-500, he was the most popular youth in Athens, praised, with the vase-inscription "Leagros kalos" by the principal vase-painters, by Euphronios most of all--thus the dating, ca. 510 B.C., for the reliefs on the statue base.

[MA 86] Of the two most wonderful vase-painters whose best work was done during Leagros's youth, Euphronios specialized in cups and kraters, Euthymides in amphoras and related shapes.  Euphronios's calyx krater, once in the Metropolitan Museum, NYC, made by the potter Euxitheos, is famous not only for its beauty and interesting subject matter but because in 1972 a million dollars was an unprecedented price for a Greek vase.  This calyx krater is still broad in proportion to its height, not very different from the first one by Exekias some twenty years earlier; it is a vase-shape that gives the artist an unbroken field to draw on.  The subject of the main picture is the piteousness of the death of the very young hero, Sarpedon--beardless and long-haired, he has only "peach fuzz" on his cheeks--raised to poetic tragedy by showing Hypnos (sleep) and Thanatos (death) in the form of wingèd men bearing his limp and bleeding body from the field of battle.  Hermes, the god who guides souls to the underworld, superintends this epic EMS.  Notice what Euphronios can do with the new technique, drawing with a brush instead of incising the lines; he can dilute the glaze-paint for a pale brown subordinate line or use it very thick for a strong contour line, and he can vary the thickness of the line.  Notice also the difference that red-figure makes in the drawing of the floral chains above and below the picture.  Finally, notice that this large punch bowl (kraters were for mixing wine with water at a symposium) has very adequate, well designed, sturdy handles.

[MA 22]  One of Euthymides' two famous amphoras in Munich will serve as an example for Euphronios's equally great contemporary (also, compare his drapery with that on Kore #674).  They seem to have been friendly rivals; alongside one vase-picture Euthymides wrote, "Thus never Euphronios".  There is some evidence that they both hobnobbed with the upper class.  Perhaps both of them, but certainly Euthymides, who signs his name, "son of Polios", in the formula that free-born citizens used, was an Athenian citizen; some of the artists and artisans were metoikoi (dwellers-with-us, i.e., resident aliens), and some were slaves or freed slaves.  These observations add nothing to his work, which would be just as great in any case, but they are significant for the social standing of artists in Late Archaic Athens.  Theseus, Athens' own hero, like the other Greek heroes, figures in stories where a bride is abducted (Athenian men did not abduct their wives; these stories are understood as occurring in a legendary past: the bronze age); here he carries off Korone.  Euthymides is more selective as to which muscles he will draw in detail and which only imply; he is more concerned with the powerful contour (as of Theseus's leg) and with drapery swinging with the action of the figures; his gestures are more emphatic.  That is just his personality.  Note that this amphora is a direct descendant of Exekias's, only it is not so fat; on this vase-shape, in this generation, it is not unusual to do part of the border patterns in black-figure.

With color digital photos, this cup is the subject of my
January post in Opera Nobilia

[MA 25]  Most of the best painters of the next generation, who began working after 500 B.C., descend from Euphronios or Euthymides, depending on whether they specialize in cups or in amphoras and the like.  The Brygos Painter, a cup painter,  was one of the greatest of Greek artists that we know, of any date or in any medium.  We aren't sure whom he studied with; probably even as a boy he found his own style.  We call him "The Brygos Painter", because many of his pieces are signed "Brygos epoiesen" (Brygos made [it]), the formula for the potter's signature, but we have no signatures with egrapsen (drew).  Every time we dare to assume that in such a case the potter and the painter were the same person, a piece turns up with two signatures, two names; it is not a safe assumption.  The Brygos Painter is known in hundreds of cups and fewer vases of other shapes.  His range of subject matter is vast and varied.  He is wonderful with human interest, in drawing a boy who has drunk too much, has become sick, whose head is being held kindly (but with subtle indication of the distastefulness of the task) by a young girl with bobbed hair: a girl with bobbed hair is a plain street girl or a slave girl.  In the Late Archaic period subject matter from everyday life is seen much more frequently in the vase-painting, done lovingly for its own sake and not caricaturing simple people; this too is an important change.  The Louvre kylix (shown in the Print in an unrolled drawing), however, shows the Greeks sacking Troy, a traditional subject but drawn in the same lifelike way as the scenes from daily life; these are no plaster-saint heroes and heroines!  The girl at right is wielding her implement (a pestle?) with real force, her chiton is moved by her limbs, and the ends of the girdle fly; the other woman's hair has come undone, and her clothes are loosened.  Here epic truly comes to life.  At the same time, he has with remarkable skill (so we hardly notice it) spread out the figures so that they cover the expanding bowl of the kylix (one warrior even obliges by dying under the handle) and make a clear and lively pattern.  Notice, too, the Brygos Painter's fondness for showing body hair, up and down the median of the torso and on the front of the thigh, on the adult males; it almost has the effect of shading.

[MA 23]  The Berlin Painter was Euthymides' pupil but is as different an artistic personality as he could possibly be.  He is the last vase-painter to decorate the Exekian Type A amphora, and even he abandons the frame around the picture.  After all, in red-figure, the picture is no longer a pale "window" on a black pot; the ground is also black behind the figures, so the Berlin Painter took the step of simply spotlighting his red figures on the black field.  This decision entailed very thoughtful grouping, as you see on the Berlin Amphora, from which he takes his name, since we have no signature.  Here there is no story, just the exquisite contrast between the satyr (Nature Boy) and the urbanely elegant deity, Hermes; one clothed, the other nude, one with a horse's tail and ears, the other with his wingèd helmet, both equally slender and long-legged, with their arms and implements reaching out to animate the solid black field.  The final characteristic touch is the fawn; it is a woodland creature, so it belongs with the satyr, but its real function in the design is to separate the legs of the two anthropomorphic males (which otherwise, visually, would be tangled) and in a gesture typical of the species to point up with its head to Hermes' hand holding his kerykeion (caduceus) and a kantharos [MA 74, row 4, right].  It is so artful and so natural, all at once.

[MA 28]  Our last Late Archaic red-figure vase-painter actually worked mostly in the next period, after the end of the Persian Wars; the give-away in his drawing is the wavy lines in the drapery and the proportions of the faces (there are other such date-indicators elsewhere in his work).  The Brygos Painter's Louvre kylix dates from the 480s, the Berlin Painter's amphora from about 490, but the Pan Painter's Boston bell krater with the Death of Aktaion on one side (and the god Pan chasing a young goatherd on the other: we take his name from the picture of Pan) should not be labelled "first quarter, V century B.C.".  It could perhaps date from ca. 475, but that's not the same thing.  If you take the senior course in Greek art, we shall see whom the Pan Painter actually apprenticed with, but here we need only observe that he admired the Berlin Painter and tried to maintain into the second quarter of the 5th century the emphasis on elegant design that the Berlin Painter epitomized.  We call such an artist, who works in the manner of pre-existing art rather than basing his style on primary experience, a Mannerist, and seeing Mannerism emerge at this point in Greek art is yet another indicator of the art's self-awareness, as Art.  The picture of Artemis slaying Aktaion is a perfect example of the Pan Painter's Mannerism: the V-shaped composition, the reaching out of limbs and three C-shaped doggy tails to animate the black field, the ballet-dancer poses of the angry goddess and the doomed hunter.  For the story, as such, is primitive and gory; the hapless Aktaion happens to see the fiercely virginal huntress goddess bathing in a pool, and she not only turns her arrows on him but maddens his own hunting dogs, so they attack him as they would prey.

[B 1]  The Pan Painter's clinging to Late Archaic design is understandable in a period when, as we know from literary sources and can see in the impact on most vase-painters, Greek painting began seriously to address the illusion of optical reality: showing light and dark with shading, abandoning the single ground line to try to show figures and things in deeper space, seeking ways of showing, for example, fish in water, figures in mist, the flash of light on metal, the frothing at the mouth of an exhausted horse at the end of a battle.  Alas, that we have not one of those paintings.  Such effects are impossible in red-figure, and the impact of such experimentation on vase-painting was deleterious to the design of the vase; now they sometimes forgot that pictures on vases are decoration as well as pictures.  Nor can their occasional efforts to imitate painting in full color really give us an idea of what the famous lost paintings were like.  Recently at the Greek colony of Paestum south of Naples, Italy, archaeologists discovered a tomb with full-color paintings of about the same date as the Pan Painter's bell krater.  On the ceiling is a remarkable picture of a man diving into a pond from a built diving platform, with a couple of spindly trees to show that it is outdoors; on the wall is a banquet scene.  This is the same kind of subject matter as we find in Etruscan tombs of the same date (so silly people can no longer pontificate about how only the Etruscans give us proto-landscape or how curious it is that the Etruscans, "unlike the Greeks" show funeral banquets in their tombs, as the Egyptians did; in fact, tomb paintings from Lycia, neither Greek nor Etruscan, in southwest Asia Minor of the Late Archaic period also have the funeral banquets).  Of course, Paestum is a western colony, and we have already seen that their Archaic temple is significantly different from one in the Greek peninsula, Corinth.  But, in any case, tomb paintings, whether Greek colonial or Etruscan or Lycian, give us no more idea of the famous innovative breakthrough paintings described in literary sources than vase-paintings do, and rather less than the few vase-paintings that (ill advisedly, so far as the decorative effect is concerned) actually try to imitate a full-color painting.

(author's photo, 1959)

[G 58] [G 37]  By about 500 B.C., the design of the Doric Order is canonical; that is, in its parts and in its proportions it resembles the textbook diagrams, which are based on examples of the Classical Period.  The Athenian Treasury at Delphi and the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina (an island in the Saronic Gulf just SW of Athens, see [MAP 2]) both were designed about 500 B.C.; the sculptures of the Athenian Treasury date from the 490s, but those of the Aphaia Temple were not completed until after the end of the Persian Wars, so will be studied later.  The Athenian Treasury is a perfect example of a Doric Order Treasury, a small Doric temple with triglyph and metope frieze and a porch with columns in antis.  The proportions of the parts of the frieze and the shape of the columns and of their echinus capitals are closely similar in these two buildings.  The Aphaia Temple at Aegina is an important temple, about the same size as its precursors at Corfu and Corinth, and it is preserved standing, at least in part, except for the roof.  At Corinth two generations earlier we deduce double-decker Doric colonnades in the cella to support the roof, but here we can actually see them, with the intermediate architrave and the taper of the column shafts in the lower tier continuing through to the upper tier.  Here we actually see the mutules, with their three rows each of six guttae, on the underside of the geison.  At the NE corner we even see the corner block where the raking geison begins to frame the pediment.  We also can see the euthynteria (levelling course) below the stereobate and, in a pit left by the excavators at the west end, the deep foundations and, under them, the plan of the earliest temple, hairpin-shaped, probably of the Geometric period.  On earlier temples we could not study some of these parts (at Corinth, for example, only the regulae with each one row of six guttae survive to guarantee that there was a regular Doric frieze).  There are a few still-Archaic traits at Aegina: one is that almost all of the column shafts are still monolithic; also, the columns are not quite so slender as they will be and are still more closely spaced and the echinus is still a little more flaring (here and in the Athenian Treasury at Delphi, too) than they will be on temples of the Classical Period.

[A 26] [A 57] [A 448]  Two of the latest Archaic korai from the Acropolis, which must date from the 480s, are almost among the most beautiful.  #684 at left on the print is at least lifesize (more fragments now have been joined, so we have 2/3 of the statue), #686 at right is smaller, no larger than the Peplos Kore, but she has such a serious presence that those who have only seen photographs are surprised by her smaller scale when they visit the Acropolis Museum.  We also have the base of #686, but it cannot be joined to the upper part because too much in between is missing: the Persians sacking the Acropolis did a thorough job.  The base is inscribed; the statue was dedicated by Euthydikos (her parent or guardian, as Cheramyes dedicated the korai on Samos), and she often is called by his name instead of her Acropolis number.  The larger one, #684, no longer has an inscription but is not less important on that account.  Both continue what we saw begin in Kore #674: the drapery abandons zigzags in favor of folds that are doubtless more realistic; the hair falls more softly, less decoratively; the eyes are half closed (and the eyes and cheekbones no longer tilt upward); the mouth is sober when you look at it straight on but subtly cheerful if you look up at it.  It is a wholly new expression.  Both these korai, like the Aegina Temple, are on the brink of Early Classical style.  The "Kritios Boy" has a sassier expression (he is a very young boy) but with the same level brow and cheekbones, and all three have the new chin: broad, deep, and rounded.  He is usually thought to be one of the very last statues dedicated on the Acropolis before 480 B.C.; the exquisitely preserved surface of the torso certainly was not long exposed to the elements.  But, of course, the "Kritios Boy" is not a kouros.  He serves the same purpose as a votive statue in a sanctuary, as many later statues will, too.  But a kouros is by definition in the Egyptian pose, like Ranofer, as even the Bronze Kouros from Piraeus still is.  This boy turns his head to his right, his pelvis (a real pelvis!) to his left; he throws all his weight onto his left leg, so the right leg is just for balance, is free, and bends at the knee (for the first time, the artist can actually make both legs the same length); the thrust of the left leg means that the pelvis is higher on that side, so the spine is curved.  A plumb line from the seventh cervical at the base of the neck will run through the left, supporting heel.  For the first time, we not only have a nearly lifesize freestanding statue supported on its own legs but the artist has understood the compensatory shifts of the parts of the living body so well that he could translate them into sculptural forms and actually balance all the weight of the stone around the axis to make a statue stand shown moving around its axis.  This is the new kind of young male statue that replaces the kouros; it is only the beginning of a new development.  The way that the artist has modulated the surface of the marble to make it seem like very young skin over muscle over bone (no more "muffin tin" for the rectus abdominis) is, of course, equally breathtaking.  From inscribed signatures on bases from which the statues are missing, and from the record that he made a famous statue group of which we have only Roman-period copies, we know of a famous Athenian sculptor of this period named Kritios.  A century ago Adolf Furtwängler, a great art historian, suggested that the Acropolis boy should be by Kritios, hence his name (in quote marks, because it's not sure).

[MA 70, left]  We did not study Etruscan Orientalizing, although their jewelry and other metalwork closely parallel Greek Orientalizing; their cinerary urns are very much their own.  Not since Samarra Neolithic of the sixth millennium B.C. have we studied a vase that literally expresses the metaphor of the human body as a vessel.  The Etruscans of Dolciano practiced cremation; a cinerary urn is for the ashes of the deceased: notice that the handles attach to the shoulder of the pot, where, on the front, there are nubs for nipples; the neck of the pot = the human neck and supports a schematic "portrait" of the deceased.  To complete the metaphor, the urn is set in a throne of the shape that was a seat of honor among the early Etruscans.  These urns are certainly interesting, but, to tell the truth, they have very little to do with Etruscan art of their century of greatest wealth and power, the sixth century, when Etruscan kings ruled Rome and when the impact of Greek art, acquired by trade, on their own art was pervasive.

[B 2]  It even extends to the subject matter.  No story could be more particularly Greek than that of Achilles lying in ambush to kill young Troilos so that Troy might be taken.  We saw it on the François Vase in the 560s; here it is in the third quarter of the sixth century on the wall of a tomb at Tarquinia, one of the most important Etruscan artistic centers (see [MAP 3], where "Corneto", the formerly used Italian name for the town, marks the site of Tarquinia).  The tomb is called the "Tomb of the Bulls" for one of its other motifs.  This is Etruscan Archaic art contemporary with Exekias, but the Etruscan artist, although he uses the same composition for the Troilos story as we see on numerous Greek vases, is much more prone to fill up all the "extra" space with plant life.  Also he is blithely unconcerned about bodily proportions of either men or horses but emphasizes expressive gestures, so that the scene is vivid.  Furthermore, these tombs are chambers the size of a room in a house and indeed are made to resemble house architecture, and they are covered by large tumuli.  Even the Tomb of the Diver at Paestum is not like these, while in Athens and Corinth and the Cyclades funerary customs were radically different.  For the Athenians, a stele or a statue was a monument to the departed (as the inscription on the Anavysoskouros makes clear).  For the Etruscans, the cemetery was literally the city of the dead, the tomb chambers dwellings, and the paintings on their walls (apart from a few like this one of Troilos and Achilles) representations of a good life in the beyond.  As we observed earlier, it is the Greek belief that is untypical and so, also, their funerary art, which is concerned with loss and memory rather than with rewards and punishment or a magical promise of everlasting banquets and sports.

[MB 27], a view into the Late Archaic "Tomb of the Lionesses" at Tarquinia illustrates those points.  The ceiling is painted to show the ridge pole of a house and there are Tuscan (=Etruscan) Doric columns at the corners; men recline at banquet on the walls at left and right; on the end wall dancers at a banquet flank servants on either side of a huge volute krater, which looks as if it is silver-plated.  Until the Vix Krater was found, we might not have believed that a real krater could be so large.  Above the krater we see the lionesses that supply a name for this tomb.  A detail of the confronted male and female dancers shows the same vitality, combined with disregard for proportions or articulations as the earlier picture of Troilos.  Note that the ancient "color code", red-brown for males, is observed.  We are not certain of the significance of the dolphins leaping over the sea on the lower wall, although it is easy to imagine that they might betoken passage to a world beyond.

(There is another one in the Louvre, which now has benefited from cleaning)

[MA 53]  The same banquet motif is seen in the famous terracotta sarcophagus from Cervetri (an Etruscan town site with a well preserved cemetery, between Rome and Tarquinia), but here, as they very often do on Etruscan sarcophagi, man and wife recline together.  The marble quarries in Etruscan territory had not yet been discovered; Etruscan sculpture was in limestone, terracotta, or bronze; they were famous bronzeworkers.  The sarcophagus figures are lifesize, so the piece had to be made and fired in sections.  These are Late Archaic, dating from near 500 B.C.  The relation to Greek sculpture is obvious in the Archaic smile, arched brows, and high cheekbones, but here, too, the sculptor is willing to make one arm longer than the other, one shoulder broader, for expressive reasons; gesture is preferred to structure.  Needless to say, this preference is neither better nor worse than the Greek way, but it is distinctively Etruscan, although it must be admitted that we sometimes see something similar in some of the art of some of the Greek colonies in Italy.  At least, it is distinctively Western (in this context, "western" means the western half of the Mediterranean).

[A 325, (B)]  Etruscan master bronzes survive as infrequently as Greek ones, but one of the most famous of all ancient bronze sculptures, the Capitoline She-Wolf, is probably Etruscan work of the last years of Etruscan rule in Rome, though we have no way of ascertaining that the artist had an Etruscan rather than a Latin (or even a Greek) name; the eyes, however, are executed similarly to those on some bronzes that are certainly Etruscan.  Although the babies now nursing from the wolf are Renaissance work, the familiar story, the foundation legend of Rome, the she-wolf nourishing the abandoned babies, Romulus and Remus, and her full teats make them appropriate, except that their Renaissance style would go better with the Classical Arezzo Chimaera, illustrated on the same Print, than with the Late Archaic She-Wolf.  The Wolf is a technical and artistic masterpiece, better than merely realistic, embodying the very character of the powerful animal protecting the future founders of Rome as fiercely as she would her own whelps.  She has never been lost or buried but has been on exhibit in Rome ever since she was made.  Roman coins show this or a similar she-wolf nursing the babies, and knowledge of these coins guided Antonio Pollaiuolo in making the replacement babies.

[MA 49]  The other towering masterpiece of Etruscan Late Archaic is the group of larger than (human) lifesize statues of gods that once were lined up on the ridge of the roof of a temple at Veii, just north of Rome.  Yes, on the ridge; Etruscan ideas of where to put sculpture on a temple were radically different from Greek ideas.  The terracotta sculptures from Veii are even finer than the Cervetri sarcophagus.  The coarse clay (to make large hollow objects of fired clay, whether sewer pipes or statues, there must be grit in the clay to prevent shrinkage and bursting in the kiln) is coated with fine clay slip (clay soup) and color is added.  The striding figure of Apollo is the most nearly complete; his relation to Greek Late Archaic is obvious in the zigzag-folded drapery that clings to his body and thighs and in the archaic smile on the face, but the exaggerated power of the torso and thighs and the heavy ropes of the hair and the small head on a very large body explain why the feeling of this statue is so different from a Greek Apollo of similar date, the bronze Piraeus Kouros.  The temple, like the Etruscan Capitoline temple of Jupiter in Rome itself, stood on a straight-sided podium instead of a Greek stereobate, its wooden columns were Tuscan Doric instead of Greek Doric and they were all in the porch of the temple rather than in a peristyle, the gable of the roof was open instead of made into a pediment, and, as we have seen, the sculpture might be placed on parts of the temple where the Greeks would not have placed it.  The Etruscan temple at this date had mud-brick walls and, necessarily, widely overhanging eaves (as an alternative to protecting the walls with a peristyle).  Eventually this type of temple was Hellenized and, as we shall see, in that form became the basic Roman temple.

[MB 30]  Finally, the "Tomb of the Triclinium" at Tarquinia has perhaps the loveliest of Etruscan tomb paintings; they are about contemporary with the Tomb of the Diver at Paestum, that is, probably later than ca. 480 B.C. but still essentially Archaic in style.  The musician walking or dancing along playing double pipes, in a springtime (we imagine) setting, with birds is so graceful that in the past some art historians wondered whether it might have been done for an Etruscan patron by a Greek artist resident in Etruria.  Of course, it is arrant racism to assume that no Etruscan could draw delicately or with graceful proportions.  Besides, within its gracefulness and elegance, this figure of the flutist has the same Etruscan characteristics as we cited as typical.  The fingers playing the pipes are exaggeratedly long, the structure of the neck and shoulders are glossed over as unimportant, the feet are extra long to give him a springy step, and, if you look carefully, he really has no middle body at all under the cascading drapery.  The Etruscan artist has captured the dance and the music and the bliss of it; he has not considered its structure or accurate proportions important so long as his total image is not impaired.  And we see the same luxury of plant life as in the Troilos picture in the "Tomb of the Bulls" as much as 75 years earlier.

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