Classics Greek Art Sculpture

Today I plan to talk about making techniques of sculptures, primarily in marble and bronze, and I will also spend a little bit of time talking about the remaking of sculpture through later restoration and its impact on our understanding of sculpture. But first a little bit of background on different types of sculpture. So sculpture and especially the making techniques of sculpture are my own primary research interests and so naturally I find them sort of intrinsically fascinating. But if you're less familiar with sculpture and perhaps more used to working with text-based sources, why should you be interested in such aspects of material culture? Well, for one thing, we have excellent examples of sculpture surviving from the ancient world, especially in stone. So it's a really rich source of evidence relating to the material culture and beliefs of the ancient Greeks, which can be used in conjunction with other archaeological evidence and textual sources to learn about their lives, values and religion. So here I'm thinking about things like funerary reliefs as well as votive and commemorative statues and architectural sculptures. So here on the left we see the stele of Dexileos. And so set up by the parents of this young man who died in battle at the age of 20 Corinth in 394-393 BC. And we can see that Dexileos is paralyzed and presented as crushing his naked enemy. On the right we have the stele of Hegeso. And so this is quite different in its sort of quietly contemplative tone and depicting a domestic scene suitable for the virtuous Greek woman. So Hegeso is the seated figure and compared to her servant she's bigger and has a more elaborate dress and hairstyle. So these show us how there are different expectations for men and women in ancient Greece and how we can use objects like sculptures to learn about these aspects of society. Sometimes these sorts of stelae can be precisely dated but architectural sculptures can also be particularly significant for our understanding of the chronology of ancient art. And since the structures that they form a part of can often be fairly securely dated through inscriptions and other sources. So we might think here of the Parthenon and the building program instigated by Pericles in the 5th century BC. And so the Periclean building program was discussed by Plutarch in his Life of Pericles and the Parthenon was also specifically described by Pausanias. So both of these Greek writers lived several centuries after the buildings were completed but we have also a number of inscriptions surviving from Athens relating to the allocation of funds for these works and so through these combined sources of sort of text and inscriptions we even learn the names of various contracted architects and artists and of course the famous overseer Phidias. So we see, according to Plutarch, he says, the man who directed all of the projects and was the overseer for him, Pericles, was Phidias, although individual works were executed by other great architects and artists. Phidias himself worked on the golden image of the goddess, and his name is inscribed as the artist on the stele. So Phidias was also responsible for the great gold and ivory I'm going to read a story, a statue of Athena Parthenos installed at the Parthenon. And there's Zeus for his temple at Olympia, with this colossal statue of Zeus was also described by Pausanias, but neither the Zeus nor the Athena survive today. So in this slide we see the replica that was made by Alan Le Quire that's in Nashville. So Pliny says of this, Phidias, besides his Olympian Zeus, which no one can rival, also made an Athena of gold and ivory in Athens, the one which is in the Parthenon. And then Pausanias says in the temple which they call the Parthenon the cult's image itself is made of ivory and gold. In the middle of her helmet there is placed an image of a sphinx and on each side of the helmet griffins are represented. The statue of Athena stands upright And on her breast the head of Medusa made of ivory is represented. and wears a tunic In one hand she holds a figure of victory about four cubits high that reaches to the feet. and in the other she holds a spear. And so using these descriptions has allowed this modern artist to create this really quite impressive A reconstruction of the sculpture. Now Pausanias says of the Zeus, the god Zeus is seated on a throne made of gold and ivory, a garland, which is made to look like olive shoots is placed on his head. In his right hand, he holds a victory, also made of ivory and gold. He holds a fillet and has a garland on her head. In the god's left hand, there is a scepter, which is inlaid with many kinds of metal. The bird which is seated on the top of the scepter is the eagle. The shoes of the god are of gold and so also is his robe. On the robe there are animal figures and also lily flowers represented. The throne is variegated with gold and stones and still further with ebony and ivory. And in this slide we see a reconstruction drawing of this colossal figure of Zeus so we can get some idea of the impact of its enormous scale. The Temple of Zeus at Olympia, like the Parthenon, dates to the 5th century, but a little earlier than the Parthenon, say between around 470 and 457 BC, representing the severe or early classical style. The surviving sculptures from the pediments and metopes are more dynamic than earlier works. But don't yet have the sort of naturalism that we can see in many of the sculptures from the Parthenon. So if we compare the top part of this slide with the bottom of the Parthenon here. So the Parthenon sculptures give us examples of what has typically been the most revered period in Greek art, the High Classical period. But we have lots of other examples of architectural sculpture across a really broad chronology, which is really useful to look at to try and get an idea of the way that Greek art looked at different points in time. So for earlier archaic examples, for instance, we can look to the top part of the slide, so the Temple of Artemis, which is on Corfu. So this is an early limestone temple built perhaps just after 600 BC. And the best preserved section is the west pediment which we can see is carved in quite deep relief with the Gorgon Medusa at the centre, so perhaps intended to be an apotropaic figure, so a figure to ward off evil and also to inspire fear and reverence. And then with the beasts which are perhaps leopards sort of on either side and controlled by the goddess Artemis. At the bottom, these are metopes from the temple at Selinus in Sicily from the late 6th century BC, so these are from temple C. And we see again on the left-hand side Medusa here being beheaded by Perseus with Athena standing by and the winged horse Pegasus being born from Medusa's blood. In the other, on the right hand side, Heracles has tied up the mischievous creatures of the Cercopes and is carrying them off. And one other example, famous example, is the Temple of Aphaea on Aegina. So this was built in the late archaic period around 500 to 490 BC. And these pediments depict scenes from the the Trojan War. As we can see in this slide too with the fallen warrior and then we have what is the Trojan arch often labelled as Paris to the right hand side. So these are quite nice examples from across various different time periods and showing how sculpture can provide information on various different aspects of myth and religion. But another key point to remember when starting to think about sculpture in ancient Greece is just how widespread it was. So we're familiar to this day with objects like gravestones, obviously you know we have whole parks of them, but ours tend to be inscriptions only, we don't so much have pictorial reliefs, and we also have what we might consider a commemorative sculpture. So statues of the important people like those of the political figures in Parliament Square which I've included on this slide. So on the right hand side we have the 19th century prime minister Sir Robert Peel, on the left we have the South African political leader Nelson Mandela and in the centre is Millicent Fawcett, one of the leaders of the women's suffrage movement. So and this happened in ancient Greece as well, so certainly from the time of Aristagoras and And I'll move you. So this was the statue group of the tyrannicides or tyrant slayers, which was originally a bronze sculpture but shown here in the later marble version. So the Peisistratids were the tyrants who ruled Athens in the mid-late 6th century. So first Peisistratus and then his successor sons Hippias and Hipparchus. And Harmodius and Aristogiton assassinated Hipparchus at the at the Panathenaic Festival in 514 BC. Harmodius, say the one on the right here, was killed during the attack and Aristogiton was later put to death. But probably a decade or so later, once Hippias had also been ousted, a bronze statue group of the pair was made by a man named Antenor and set up in the Athenian Agora. Now it's not clear that the motives of Aristogiton and Harmodius had been political, rather in fact they were tales of love rivalry. But the statue group certainly came to represent victory over the tyrants and became an emblem of Athenian democracy as it developed. But such sculpture was also used much more widely for all different sorts of reasons. So from the Archaic period we have numerous examples of these koroi and korai, including a large group of korai excavated from the Athenian Acropolis in the early 20th century. See the korai and the koroi. Chiton forms some of the earliest freestanding stone sculptures in ancient Greece, dating from around about 600 BC and through the 6th century and into the 5th. So the korai, like those in this slide, are female sculptures. So they typically wear the chiton and on top a thinner draped garment called the himation. Which often falls in quite elaborate folds as we see on the right hand side of the screen here with the Acropolis kora 684. Sometimes though they just wear a sort of simpler peplos so on the left the Berlin standing goddess here wears a peplos belted at the waist with a shawl over the top. And we can see that they're quite frontal in design. The earlier ones have what's called the so-called archaic smile, as we can see with the Berlin standing goddess. And they tend to have their arms by their side, sometimes with one hand sort of holding their dress or holding forth an object. And often, but not always, they will have the left foot placed slightly forward to indicate And they frequently have quite elaborate hairstyles, jewellery, and incised details on their garments. Those discovered on the Acropolis are mostly dated to the second half of the 6th century BC, so the peplos kore here is one of the most famous examples. And these can probably be considered dedications, so made perhaps representing the girls who serve the goddess Athena, and they're often found like this, made as offerings in sanctuaries. But sometimes they also served as funerary monuments, as in the case of the Phrasikleia, who was accompanied by a funeral inscription, so we know this context. While the Korai are elaborately clothed, again we see this sort of difference in the way that male and female figures are presented. And so their male counterparts, the Kouroi, are naked standing figures but presented in similar sort of rigid poses to the Korai, again often with one foot slightly forwards and their arms by their side. And we can note again the sort of frontality and schematic anatomical details. And again, these might be offerings made to sanctuaries or they might be funerary monuments. So this particular chorus was discovered at the Sanctuary of Apollo on Mount Ternion in Boeotia. But funerary examples include the New York chorus on the left here, which is also a very early example from the early 6th century. And then slightly later to the centre, we have the Anavyssos kouros from the mid-6th century. So that one was set up as a grave marker for the warrior Croesus, which again we learn from an inscription on the base. The pose is still very rigid, but the body has become sort of fleshier and somewhat less systematic. On the right hand side, the Aristodikos is another funerary example from Attica. This is a relatively late example of the type from around the turn of the 5th century. are marked by this shorter hairstyle and slightly freer arms. Another type of sculpture that you might be familiar with are the bronze victory dedications, won by athletes of course at the ancient Olympic Games. So again, lots of these are lost, but some of the statue bases like this one survive. So this perhaps again makes it sort of harder for us to understand the sheer quantity of ancient sculpture. So ancient writers like again Pausanias and Pliny described cities and temples filled to the brim with statuary. So Pliny writes that each of Rhodes, Athens, Olympia and Delphi had at least three thousand statues. and claims that the fourth century sculptor Lysippos was alone responsible for creating 1,500 bronzes. So one of the things you'll have noticed so far is that most of the examples I've given, certainly those with images, are of stone sculpture. So the countless bronze sculptures known to have been so popular in ancient Greece are now often only known through these textual sources like Parthenius and Pliny, through the empty statue bases. And three later Roman versions made in stone. Now the stone sculptures have not been untouched of course by the ravages of time, many of them are broken and they lack the polychromy with which they would originally have been adorned, but they do tend to survive much better than the bronzes, most of which will have been melted down And so many of the examples that we do have were only spared this treatment because they were lost in shipwrecks in antiquity and much more recently discovered. So such cases of this include the Artemision bronze on the left and the Antikythera here on the right. So these are some points that we can return to, but I want to start thinking a bit more about the sort of practical, technical knowledge needed to make the sculptures. So first of all, stone. So there are various good sources of workable stone in Greece both on the mainland and on the islands. So some of the main ones close to Athens were the quarries at Mount Hymettus and Mount Pentelikon, so the latter producing pentelic marble, and the quarries can be seen in the image here kind of running along the slopes of the mountain. And this marble was used very widely in Athens for buildings including the Parthenon. In the islands Paros at the bottom of the picture here was an important source of marble known as Parian marble and there were also quarries on neighbouring Naxos and from the northerly island of Thassos. So both limestone and marble were used for freestanding and architectural sculptures typically depending on availability. So softer limestones could be worked almost like a wood so using sort of gouges and knives. While there are also much harder varieties. So we now recognise marble as the recrystallised metamorphic product of calcium carbonate stones, so like limestone. And so it tends to be harder and less porous and so weathers more slowly. Unfortunately it's often softer to work when it's freshly carved, freshly quarried, sorry. And so it's quite easy to start with and then it will It will get harder and harder over time. And so this sort of more slow weathering of marble is evident in the sculptures from Selinus, and so as in this sculpture of Hera and Zeus. So to make Hera's face brighter it was carved in marble, which you can just about see in this image I hope. And so Sicily has no marble quarries and so limestone was more typically used, but for some of the features of a goddess or an Amazon, Parian marble is specifically imported and so that could be carved. much more finely and is also more durable so you can sort of see that her body in the limestone is rougher and has weathered more than her face. In the archaic period freestanding sculptures like the Kore would have been cut from blocks quarried to the appropriate size and then probably carved to a certain degree within the quarry itself because it's you know so heavy and difficult to move around. You want to get rid of as much bulk as you can Before you have to go moving it anywhere. So they would use things like picks and wooden wedges to remove the blocks that they might also drill close together along the line where they want the stone to separate to produce a sort of honeycomb effect which then makes it easier to remove the stone with the pick. So from what we can work out by looking both at finished pieces with practicing sculptors today and by looking at sculptures left unfinished in antiquity, which are really important sources of evidence for looking at things like tool marks. This so-called block method of carving seems to have involved sort of drawing or incising the profile of the figure on each side of the block and then partially carving that profile and that may have been outlined also with the help of a grid pattern to help keep everything balanced. And then they would also draw or incise the front of the figure on the front of the block and partially carve this view too. And so this rough modeling would be achieved with a tool like a punch or a point, so like the tools in this image here, so these sort of single pointed tools. And so we can see in this example of the statuette that all of the blocks were, all of the sides of the block, were slowly being carved into shape at the same time. Then they would round off the negative space between the different views, so sort of round the arms and the legs. And this would probably be done to start with also with a pointed tool but then finer modelling would be achieved with a chisel with a flat round or a serrated edge. So this image here is of flat edge chisels very much like the ones they would have in antiquity. And then you'd smooth the surface and add forms like hairstyle, facial features, add any inside detail, polish the surface and paint. So as I mentioned, statues would often be worked quite far along in the quarry, particularly in the case of very large statues, so these would be worked as far to completion as possible in the quarry because they were so heavy and difficult to move around. So there are some really nice examples of this, quite famous ones in Naxos which is still there. So you can go and sort of drive around the island and see them. And so these pieces were probably abandoned there because of a fault in the stone that was discovered during carving. So that's another reason to kind of start lots of the carving while you're in the quarry so that you pick up through your kind of initial outlining whether there are any problems in the stone. So it's difficult to know for sure but you know you waste a lot of sort of time and money if you just ship a great big block and then find that there's a big problem with it. So the sculptures made using this method were initially rather blockish as we might expect but more movement was slowly added to the poses making them seem more lifelike. So we see a total shift really by the classical period. When we look at sculptures from the Parthenon and consider the kind of diverse and dynamic range of poses that these figures are carved in combined with their much greater naturalism. They certainly no longer appear like they're kind of confined to this block structure. The reasons for this shift and any difference in the making techniques employed is not fully known but through looking at the developments in style and also through discussions with contemporary sculptors It seems likely that the difference in making technique partially stemmed from the use of a model. So carving directly into the block as was done for pieces like the korai didn't necessarily require any working model but it's possible that they did use one. But such a model would have been really helpful and probably essential for these more complex and dynamic poses. So by this use of the model what I mean is that the sculptor first works up their design using a plastic or pliable material like a wax or a clay. So when you're carving from stone it's a reductive sculptural technique so you're cutting pieces away and you really need to be absolutely sure of what you're doing because you can't really reverse it. On the other hand using wax or clay it's an additive more flexible process where you can kind of continually build on and adjust your model as you work and once you have this model you can then pick out its high points and recesses and the sculptor can start to visualize better how it would fit into a stone block and begin to cut pieces away probably using measurements taken and transferred from a model to help. So I have a little video that I want to show you if it will hopefully work. So this is a sculptor that I've been working with for a few different projects. So he's called Thomas Merritt, he's based in London and I have found it really helpful you know to get the input of someone who works really closely with materials. So you can see here that he's working from a model, so in this case a plaster model that's been made from the original clay. And then he's using that model to start to carve his marble block. So he's using here a chisel. So very much sort of similar tools as they would have had in the ancient world. And you'll see in a moment that he sort of checks his measurements using calipers. Yep, so the calipers are used to transfer measurements across from model to block. So to check that you're getting the right kind of proportions to kind of guide this process. So it's not, there are more sort of refined and precise ways of doing this, but this is kind of a quick way using tools that we know that they had in the ancient world. So I'll just let you watch a few more minutes of that just to kind of get a sense of the process. So again, these are the calipers, sort of, you know, checking the design on each one. Now he's using actually a toothed chisel here which they they did use also in Greece but often they would use the flat one after using the point to start with and that's sort of checking the angle of the chisel again from working from the model to the block. You can see on the back of the marble block there you can see some rougher tool marks. So more angular ones, so they were made with the point at an earlier stage of the process compared to the face here, which is a relatively sort of finished level. So I think that's probably given you a good idea of what some parts of the process may have looked like for these slightly more advanced sculptures, shall we say, the more complex ones. So moving on, so creating models like this would be particularly important for architectural sculptures, so which need to fit into a kind of tightly designed space. So we find raised bumps, sometimes quite large, presence on some sculptures including some of the pediment sculptures from the temple of Zeus at Olympia. And so these appear to have been used as kind of measuring points either for plumb lines which is like a line that you dangle down from the or calipers like we saw in the video so used as a point to measure from and which we see in the left hand figure here this is a large raised lump in the forehead and on the right hand side we see where this point has been removed not particularly carefully and so these could have been used both to take measurements from the model and to check kind of proportion and symmetry internally within the sculpture and there are gems At the bottom of this slide, which also shows some of these processes, on the right, modelling, and on the left, this use of the plumb line, where there's some debate over to what extent this sort of measuring was used to transfer a model to a block or just to judge the symmetry within a piece itself. But despite these careful making processes, marble sculptures do have some limits. So when we compare it to a material like bronze it has much less tensile strength and so this restricts to a certain extent the range of poses possible. So a sculpture kept more closely within the confines of the block without sort of extruding limbs for instance will be much more stable in marble and much less likely to break than if you try some of the ambitious poses with your arms quite outstretched attempted in bronze if they were tried in marble. However, unlike marble sculptures where the precise extent and nature of the use of preparatory models is still a bit of a contentious issue, models would have been an essential part of the process for the production of ancient bronze sculptures. So there were some very early attempts to hammer sculptures out of sheet metal in Greece in the late 8th century. And so this was a technique called sphyrelaton, meaning beaten or hammered, and the separate parts would be pinned together with nails, as is described by Pausanias when writing on the statue of Zeus Hephaestos in Sparta. So he says that this image was set up, the oldest image that is made of bronze. It is not wrought in one piece. Each of the limbs has been hammered separately. These are fitted together, being prevented from coming apart by nails. So the statues produced in this way seem to have been stiff and frontal. We don't have very much evidence, surviving evidence of them. There's a few sorts of fragmentary pieces. But the technique didn't really lend itself to fluid movement, of course. But bronzes were being cast by the middle of the 6th century. And this casting process necessitated some sort of use of a model. So casting in bronze, of course, also required the necessary raw materials. So bronze is a copper alloy. And so copper was needed, together with other materials, metals to alloy with it. And so tin and lead were commonly added to the copper. And these added metals would change the making and the working properties of the metal. So copper has quite a high melting point and so it's 1,083 degrees centigrade. In contrast tin has a melting point of 232 degrees centigrade, so much lower, and lead of 327 degrees centigrade. And so by adding either of these into the alloy you can bring down its overall melting point. Copper cast by itself is also rather porous and brittle because it absorbs gases in the process and adding tin and lead can reduce this absorption and to help to create a stronger but a more malleable alloy. So scientific analysis of ancient Greek bronzes has shown that they tend to comprise between about 70 and 90 percent of copper. around two to ten percent of tin and one to twenty percent of lead. So both lead and tin might be included or just one or the other. And in terms of style, we can see many similarities between the bronzes and stone sculptures, but when it came to the developing naturalism of the classical period, I would suggest that bronze perhaps took a slightly earlier leap forward, leading the way for her developments in marble. So if we look at the reactive bronzes for example, we can see a huge shift in the naturalism of the bodies when we compare it to the still rather stiff stone sculpture of the later 6th or even the earlier 5th century. And these bronze sculptures are typically dated to the early to mid 5th century BC, so between about 470 and 450 BC, so just before the classical, the high classical period, and often known as the severe style. This use of bronze for large sculptures took off towards the end of the 6th century, so previously it had been used mainly for smaller statuettes, often solid cast, and with similarly stiff poses to their stone counterparts. And it was at around this time, at the end of the 6th century, that bronze statues for victorious athletes were introduced. And so as art scholar Carol Mattish has pointed out, bronze then often became the medium of choice for freestanding statues, both because of the dynamic poses possible and because, as we'll see, it was relatively easy to make them in large numbers. And the polished bronze skin was also perhaps felt particularly appropriate versus male gods, heroes and victors. So the so-called Getty Bronze is one such example of a probable case of a victor statue. So he's reaching to his head to touch his victory wreath. We can imagine the statue gleaming in the sunlight, akin to the male bodies treated with olive oil and shining in the gymnasium, which were so approved of by the Greeks. One of the most interesting questions I think surrounding the development of these pieces and the precise nature of the models used to make them is the possible role of life casting in their production. So by this I mean casting either whole bodies or more likely separate limbs or hands or feet from life from a person and then incorporating them into the model from which the bronze would be cast. So This idea has been vociferously denied by some scholars, but has been argued for by artists, most notably Nigel Constand. And so I think it's quite important to keep an open mind, particularly given the Greek reverence of the refined human body, male body. And Constand points especially to details on the feet of the Riace bronzes, which he uses to support his arguments in favour of the use of life casting. But we should discuss a little bit more about how bronzes were cast. So as I've already mentioned, early small pieces could be a solid cast. So a figure would be made in wax and coated in clay, leaving an opening. So it was then fired to harden the clay and to allow the melted wax to drip out. And then into this hollow fired clay figure was poured the bronze. And once cooled, the clay shell would be chipped away to reveal the bronze statuette. But this isn't suitable for larger pieces which require too much metal, and which has a tendency to cool unevenly, resulting in distortions and cracks. Therefore they needed to be cast hollow. So hollow casting was used in Greece from the 6th century, but had been practiced much earlier in Egypt and in Mesopotamia. So this process uses a clay or plaster core often built around an armature for support which is then coated with wax modelled to the final form of the sculpture and this then has metal pins driven through the wax and into the core to hold it into place as you can see on the right hand side of the screen. So this was then covered in clay. and fired and the wax melts out so leaving this void into which molten bronze can be poured so as you see again on the right hand side of the screen so then we have our finished bronze and the clay core inside might be left or it might be kind of scraped or chipped out and you know you have to finish the surface removing all of the extraneous material and this is known as direct lost wax And it involved the loss of the original wax model. The outer clay mould is also lost because, of course, it has to be broken away to reveal the hollow cast bronze. The indirect lost wax casting method, therefore, is a step forward because it allowed multiple castings from the same master model. So in this case, the wax model was made using the same process, but rather than first covering it with the clay that would later be broken off, it was moulded with removable piece moulds, perhaps in plaster. And this meant that the wax model could be set aside for future use while a new Can you... hollow wax cast was made from the piece mould and then filled with core material, as we see in these slides, and then used in the same way as in direct casting. And the piece mould itself could also be reused. So this technique helps to explain how a sculptor ...like Lysippos, was reported to have created so many bronzes. As I mentioned before, we can learn a great deal about ancient bronze casting practices now through the scientific analyses of the pieces themselves, so looking at the composition of the metal alloys and the ways that the bronzes were fixed together and finished, and they would require a lot of finishing. So if you've ever been lucky enough to see bronze casting in action, then you'll know that the bronze that emerges from the mould doesn't look anything like really the figures that we're familiar with. So the bronze surface would be cleaned and polished repairing any casting flaws and then the separately cast parts of the statues would be joined together mechanically using rivets or soldered together and even additional sort of locks of hair might be soldered on separately. So this was a lot of work and creating multiple statues would have been time consuming even when it was possible to derive sort of a series of sculptures from the same original model. And we have some other surviving pieces of evidence from the ancient world besides statues themselves and the ancient texts. So to return to ceramics again today, perhaps the most famous is the so-called Berlin Foundry Cup. So this is a red-figured kylix or drinking cup from the 5th and the early 5th century BC, and it was found in an Etruscan tomb in the early 19th century that was made in Athens. So in the kylix there's a scene showing Hephaestus giving Thetis the armour that he made for Achilles during the Trojan war. On the outside of the cup are represented activities in a bronze foundry, although exactly what they're doing has in some cases been disputed. And this then is another case of sort of art reflecting life as Ellen Ellen was discussing with the representation of the symposium. So generally it's been considered that here the bronze workers are joining together the separately cast pieces of a bronze statue of an athlete. So on the left we have the furnace used for melting bronze and the figure on the right is perhaps removing the core from the hollow cast figure before joining to it the head which lies at his feet. Opposite a colossal statue is being cleaned by workers who scrape the surface with these strigil grasps and they are watched by two larger men on either side who are perhaps overseeing the work. So interestingly it's been noted that this colossal statue on the right, so surely of a god or hero, has been created in an archaic manner, so he has a sort of long lock of hair at the front in this quite stiff frontal pose, contrasting with the naturalism of the classical athlete on the left. And so this potentially complicates our ability to date sculptures based on style alone, so we have to be quite quite careful with that. I want to move, I'm running out of time a little bit but I want to move on to remaking the sculpture. So our knowledge of ancient bronzes is also limited by the fact that we have so few of them and rarely have good contextual information and much of what has been written about ancient bronze statues by famous Greek sculptors like Polyclitus has been based on Roman marble versions of these works created centuries later. So the Doryphoros A spear bearer is one of the most famous ancient Greek sculptures that is known only through marble versions of the Roman period. So the Doryphoros was first made in bronze in the mid 5th century BC by Polyclitus. It represents a well-built nude male warrior who would have been holding His spear in his left hand and he has this contrapposto stance so with the left foot back and the weight mainly in the straighter right leg which then pushes that hip slightly higher so this pose sort of adds to the sense of naturalism and balance of the composition and the Doryphoros was renowned in antiquity for its perfectly balanced proportions reflecting the sort of idealised male It was highly influential, as seen by the Roman Augustus of Prima Porta statue on the right here, which adopts very much the same stance. And Polyclitus himself is known to have written a treatise on sculptural proportion, but unfortunately along with the 5th century BC bronze that's now lost. But this is known as Polyclitus's Canon, and the Doryphoros is considered by some to have been a sort of physical embodiment of that canon. What we know again about the Doryphoros, we glean mainly through these Roman versions and that is of course a little bit of a risky business. It's difficult for us to say exactly to what extent the original bronze is reflected in these sculptures and to what extent they may reflect later trends and traditions. So there are certain features though we can see that have been added to the marble sculpture which wouldn't have been present in the bronze. So these are the struts and the supports necessary to render this composition in marble which as we mentioned has much less tensile strength than bronze. So we can see the supporting tree trunk by the leg and the small strut joining the arm to the body In the later 19th century, often different marble versions of Greek sculptures were brought together, so using photographs or casts, and then compared to try to determine which one or which features were closest to this lost Greek bronze. And this approach was called copying critique, and it's not typically used now because there are so many flaws to it. At one point, sort of almost every marble sculpture, Roman marble sculpture, not portraying a Roman period figure Figure like an emperor. was presumed to have been derived from some lost Greek bronze. Greek sculpture was certainly popular in Rome and sometimes close copies were made so we can see this for instance in the Caryatids from Hadrian's villa. So these are much easier to compare because the Greek Caryatids from the Erechtheion in Athens still survive but I don't know that we necessarily need to assume this was the case beyond these sort of famous examples and even with most of these we don't We don't know how precisely they were copied. Pliny mentions a number of famous Greek bronze sculptures, one of which is a sculpture, Myron's Discobolus. It's also a bronze from 5th century Greece, now lost and again known through these Roman period marbles, and described also by Lucian. And so he says, surely, I said, you do not speak of the discus thrower, who is bent over into the throwing position and is turned towards the hand that holds the discus. And has the opposite knee gently flexed, like one who will straighten up again after the throw. Not that one, he said, for the Discobolus of which you speak is one of the works of Myron. Now this is an interesting case. So one of the most famous versions extant is the Townley Discobolus, now at the British Museum. This was excavated at Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli in 1791, but was broken in various places, including at the head. So the dealer who sold the Discobolus to Sir Townley told him that the heads had been found lying by the torso and certainly belonged to the sculpture. However, it's now accepted that while ancient, the head of the Townley Discobolus does not actually belong to that body at all. The attitude is also incorrect so as during restoration we can see that the head here was fixed to face outwards so rather than looking back at the discus as we now know is correct and as is seen in another example of a discobolus here so excavated from the Esquiline Hill in Rome slightly later. But the currently displayed at the British Museum, this sculpture to this day retains its misplaced but now rather iconic head. So the Discobolus type was not well known at the time of the excavation of this particular one and its restoration in fact isn't the most incorrect that we have. So earlier pieces that we now recognise as examples of the Discobolus type, which again was unknown at the point of their discovery, they were forced by restorers into other compositions. So here we have a few examples, so on the left we have the so-called Lansdowne Discobolus which was restored as a Diomedes carrying the Palladium, another Discobolus in the centre, was restored as a fallen warrior and is thought to have been inspired by the famous Dying Gaul statue at the bottom right here. These examples show us what a profound impact misinterpretation of fragmentary pieces can have on our understanding of sculpture and how scholars have tried to force them into these types that you know they sort of recognized for missing the actual one. I am overrunning but the one final aspect that I'd like to mention today is that of colour concerning both bronze and stone sculptures. So although the bronze sculptures to us might now seem quite uniform there was often a great deal of play in texture and colour with the highly polished gleaming skin contrasting with the rougher texture used for the hair And for other details, so there was copper. used for nipples or lips and tin or silver applied for fingernails or as in this slide we have eyes that were inlaid with glass or stone and sometimes you've been given these lovely little copper eyelashes and these finishing touches would have given the statues a much greater sense of life than we see in them today. It's also interesting to think about how this bronze polychromy might have been adapted and transferred to the later marble versions of these sculptures with pigments applied in paint. The precise nature and extent of polychromy applied to stone sculptures isn't fully agreed upon. So for instance whether sort of polished, highly polished marble flesh was painted or not. And of course we need to remember that such an approach doesn't need to be the same across all sculptures across the whole of the kind of Ancient Greek and Roman period. But it is quite clear that the vast majority of stone sculpture, certainly that from Ancient Greece, was painted. So one last slide, and so this is particularly clear in the archaic korai, and so many of which retain quite clearly visible traces of pigment as we can see here. So if we return to the phrasopoeia core we can see some pigment traces with incised details of rosettes and meanders on the central On the right we have a full colour reconstruction which is from the Gods in Colour exhibition a few years ago based on the examination of surviving pigments. An analysis of architectural sculptures like those from the Parthenon has also revealed more and more evidence for polychromy and even the details of that colour and so one study for instance has suggested that there were even figural designs in some of the drapery on the pediment sculptures. The use of colour on these high-up architectural sculptures has often been considered to help the readability of the composition to viewers at ground level looking up. But this new level of detail perhaps suggested seems to go beyond potentially such a purely practical function. And these new results have been made possible by increasingly sensitive imaging techniques which can detect even tiny surviving traces of ancient pigment. And that there's still a lot more work to do in this area, so I will finish on that note showing that the study of ancient sculpture is still very much an active and developing field with still, you know, a lot more research to do in the area.