Stories in Marble and Gold
Trip Start
Sep 07, 2008
1
68
148
Trip End
Dec 09, 2008
Athens,
Attica,
Greece
Thursday, October 9, 2008
First we saw the Cycladic marble figurines, so named because they were found in graves on the Greek islands in the Cyclades group such as Naxos, Paros, Syros, and Melos. Their spare, angular design was said to have strongly influenced the artwork of Pablo Picasso. Indy said the figurines were carved out of a single block of stone, then brought to the grave and broken into pieces to fit into the grave to serve as a guide to the underworld for the deceased.
Then we moved on to the Mycenean haul of gold made famous by the bull-in-a-china-shop archaeology of Heinrich Schleimann
Cycladic figurine
. Indy pointed out a gold crown with huge points radiating out from it that was found in the grave of a wealthy Mycenean woman. He turned to me and said, "I guess that's the original tiara."The sculptures were arranged chronologically, so first we saw the gigantic kouros, the stone figures of men standing stiffly in a very Egyptian-influenced pose. The stance was necessary, Indy explained, because a marble statue cannot be taken many degrees off vertical before the ankles fail to support the weight of the massive stone torso.
That changed with the switch to hollow bronze sculptures. It was easy to see the freedom of movement in the sculpture of the bearded god who is either Zeus or Poseidon. Either he's hurling Zeus' thunderbolt or Poseidon's trident, we don't know. Indy votes for Poseidon's trident. When the Romans conquered Greece, they transported many priceless works of art back to Italy. This sculpture was on a ship bound for Rome before it sank at Artemedium. Two thousand years later, a fisherman pulled the bronze arm up with his net, and he sent divers down to rescue the rest of the sculpture.
The next captivating piece was a Roman 1:12 scale copy of the lost chryselephantine sculpture of Athena Parthenos that stood in the Parthenon during the fifth century BCE. We know what the original statue looked like from these copies and written descriptions from Pausanias, the original travel writer of Greek antiquity. The massive original sculpture was made by Pheidias, and it featured a sphinx and two Pegasus horses on Athena's helmet, an aegis cloak with the Gorgon's head and fringed with snakes, the smaller golden figure of winged Nike (manifestation of victory) in one hand, and a huge shield in the other hand with a snake on one side and a battle scene on the opposite side that included Phideas' own face, which got him banished from Athens
The ultimate tiara
. It was made of a wooden core covered in gold and ivory. When financial times got tough for Athens, the statue's gold armor could be melted down, but until it was needed it would be safe, since what thief would steal the clothes off a goddess' back? We don't know when or why the original statue disappeared from history. It might have been destroyed in a fire after the fifth century, or it might have been hauled off to another city and eventually burned there.Finally we came to the Phryne statue of Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles. Ancient Athenian married women were almost completely cloistered, and were not permitted to interact with any men except their husbands. Indy explained that slowly sculptors began to depict women in advancing stages of undress, but they got the anatomy all wrong because they really didn't get to look at a lot of real women.
There were a class of women called the hetaerai, however, who were well-educated, lovely courtesans who could spend time publicly with the men because they were not Athenian citizens. Phryne was a hetaera whose beauty made her famous and wealthy. Legend has it that when she was prosecuted for blasphemy against Demeter, her lawyer's best argument in her defense was to disrobe her before the Council
Massive Kouros Statue
. They were awed by her body and dropped the charges.Phryne was much beloved by the sculptor Praxiteles, and it is rumored that she was his model and muse for many of his famous works, like the statue of the Aphrodite of Knidos. The people of the island of Kos commissioned the statue, but they were so scandalized by its nudity that they sold it to another island, Knidos, where it became a tourist attraction for its astonishing beauty.
After we got back to our own neighborhood (thank you, Click, for getting us home on the bus -- I will have much more to say in praise of Click and her friends Wreath of Roses and Blink Blink in a future post) and survived Greek language class, Papia, Scout, Wedding Belle, and Traveling Pants invited me out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant (hey, one needs variety even amidst all the great Greek food). Scout decided her favorite word in the English language is "squirt."
On the walk home, we had to brave a trip up the endless, steep Stairs of Death with a sick student in tow. Scout was having an allergic reaction to the cheese wontons she ate at the Chinese restaurant. So to take it slow, we stopped at every landing on the stairs and made Traveling Pants recite her numbers one through ten in Greek. When written phonetically: enah, thee-oh, tree-ah, tess-er-ah, pen-day, ecks-ee, ep-tah, ok-toe, en-yah, thay-ka. By the time we were breathing the thin air at the top of the stairs, Pants could count to ten.
