Academic literature on the topic 'Greek Bronze sculpture'
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Journal articles on the topic "Greek Bronze sculpture"
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Barringer, Judith. "François Queyrel. La Sculpture hellénistique I: forms, themes et fonctions." Journal of Greek Archaeology 3 (January 1, 2018): 492–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.32028/jga.v3i.554.
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Queyrel’s latest tome is a big, richly-illustrated one: the first of two dedicated to Hellenistic sculpture projected for Picard’s Les Manuels d’art et d’archéologie antiques. The series, which already includes volumes on the Bronze Age, on Classical Greek sculpture (by †Claude Rolley, one of the persons to whom this volume is dedicated), and on Greek architecture, has become an essential tool for scholars, teachers, and students.
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Gill, David W. J. "Expressions of wealth: Greek art and society." Antiquity 62, no. 237 (December 1988): 735–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0003598x00075189.
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In the 2nd century AD Pausanias (i.2.4-15.1) walked through the agora at Athens describing some of the statues and naming the artists; at least 35 of the statues were of bronze, yet not a single one survives intact today (Mattusch 1982: 8-9). Thinking only of the extant marble sculpture does an injustice to the civic art of Athens. This problem is commonplace; almost any classical site has numerous stone bases for bronze statues which have long gone into the melting-pot. Yet so often in modern scholarship stone sculpture is given a privileged position. Although modern histories of Greek art pay much attention to the marble sculpture of the Parthenon, ancient authorities were not so impressed; Pausanias (i.24.5-7) provides the briefest of descriptions to the marble sculpted pediments and omits to mention the frieze. For many scholars today the frieze has become an example of what ‘unlimited money can do’ (Ashmole 1972: 116), yet, as R. Osborne has recently pointed out, it merely helped the viewer to process to the east end of the temple where he or she would have been confronted by the great chryselephantine cult-statue of Athena: ‘this is what the temple was built to display, this is the object towards which worship is directed, and this is what the procession was all about’ (Osborne 1987: 101). And this is what Pausanias describes in detail, the great work of art and expression of Athens’ wealth which no longer survives.
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Keesling, Catherine M. "Misunderstood Gestures: Iconatrophy and the Reception of Greek Sculpture in the Roman Imperial Period." Classical Antiquity 24, no. 1 (April 1, 2005): 41–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ca.2005.24.1.41.
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Abstract Anthropologists have defined iconatrophy as a process by which oral traditions originate as explanations for objects that, through the passage of time, have ceased to make sense to their viewers. One form of iconatrophy involves the misinterpretation of statues' identities, iconography, or locations. Stories that ultimately derive from such misunderstandings of statues are Monument-Novellen, a term coined by Herodotean studies. Applying the concept of iconatrophy to Greek sculpture of the Archaic and Classical periods yields three possible examples in which statues standing in Greek sanctuaries may have inspired stories cited by authors of the Roman imperial period as explanations for the statues' identities, attributes, poses, or locations. The statues in question are the portrait of the athletic victor Milo of Croton at Olympia, a bronze lioness on the Athenian Acropolis identified as a memorial to the Athenian prostitute Leaina (““lioness””), and the Athena Hygieia near the Propylaia of Mnesikles. Inscriptions on the bases of Archaic and Classical statues in Greek sanctuaries typically named the dedicator, the recipient deity, and the sculptor, but did not include the subject represented or the historical occasion behind the dedication. These ““gaps”” left by votive inscriptions would only have encouraged the formation of iconatrophic oral traditions such as the examples examined in this article.
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Lusher, Andrew. "Greek Statues, Roman Cults and European Aristocracy: Examining the Progression of Ancient Sculpture Interpretation." Journal of Arts and Humanities 6, no. 12 (December 31, 2017): 25. http://dx.doi.org/10.18533/journal.v6i12.1313.
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<p>In 1747 Frederick II of Prussia acquired a rare and highly valuable statue from antiquity and gave it the description of Antinous (the ill-fated lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian). Although the bronze statue had always been accepted as an original from ancient Greece, the statue eventually assumed the identity of the Roman Antinous. How could Frederick II, an accomplished collector, ignore the blatant style and chronological discrepancies to interpret a Greek statue as a later Roman deity? This article will use the portraiture of Antinous to facilitate an examination of the progression of classical art interpretation and diagnose the freedom between the art historian and the dilettante. It will expose the necessary partition between the obligations of the art historian to provide technical interpretations of a work within the purview of the discipline with that of the unique interpretation made by individual viewers. This article confirms that although Frederick II lived before the transformative scholarship of Winckelmann, the freedom of interpreting a work is an abiding and intrinsic right of every individual viewer. </p>
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Bintliff, John. "Journal of Greek Archaeology Volume 6: Editorial." Journal of Greek Archaeology 6 (2021): v. http://dx.doi.org/10.32028/9781789698886-1.
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Our latest volume maintains our goal to cover the broad chronological spread of Greek Archaeology, ranging from a new review of the Mesolithic occupation at Theopetra, one of the most important hunter-gatherer sites in Greece, to a detailed analysis of how the distribution of Middle Byzantine churches in the Peloponnese enlightens us into the evolution of human settlement and land use. Prehistory is richly represented in further articles, as we learn about Middle Bronze Age society on Lefkas, the dispute over exotic primates portrayed on the frescoes of Santorini, a new Minoan-style peak sanctuary on Naxos, and Post-Palatial settlement structure on Crete. Bridging prehistory to historical times, a detailed study rethinks the burial and settlement evidence for Early Iron Age Athens, then entering the Archaic period, an original article links textual analysis and material culture to investigate dedicatory behaviour in Ionian sanctuaries. As a special treat, that doyen of Greek plastic arts Andrew Stewart, asks us to look again at the evidence for the birth of the Classical Style in Greek sculpture. Greek theatres in Sicily are next contextualised into contemporary politics, while the sacred Classical landscape of the island of Salamis is explored with innovative GIS-techniques. For the seven-hundred years or so of Roman rule we are given an indepth presentation of regional economics from Central Greece, and a thorough review of harbours and maritime navigation for Late Roman Crete. Finally we must mention a methodological article, deploying the rich data from the Nemea landscape survey, to tackle issues of changing land use and the sometimes controversial topic of ancient manuring.
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Dickinson, Oliver. "Marisa Marthari, Colin Renfrew and Michael J. Boyd (eds). Beyond the Cyclades. Early Cycladic sculpture in context from mainland Greece, the north and east Aegean. pp. 328, 265 b/w ills, 8 tables. 2019. Oxford: Oxbow Books. ISBN 9-781-58925-063-2, hardbac." Journal of Greek Archaeology 5 (January 1, 2020): 575–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.32028/jga.v5i.452.
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This is the third in a series produced to publish a sequence of symposia in Athens that started in 2014 with ‘Cycladic Sculpture in Context’. Such ‘sculpture’ consists in all cases of figurines (rarely very large, although a few are more like statuettes or even, very rarely, something like life size). These figurines are almost entirely of stone, generally white marble, and belong to a well-known tradition that had its home in the EBA (Early Bronze Age) Cyclades, of which the ‘folded-arm figurine’ (FAF) is an internationally recognised type. Until recently, a large proportion of this class of material was represented by holdings in museum and private collections, generally the results of looting and often lacking even a claimed provenance. However, the momentous discoveries in excavations on Keros, a small island south-east of Naxos that was an early reported source of such material, have revolutionised our view of the whole class and the part they played in Cycladic EB culture. The lively debate on their interpretation and significance that followed the new discoveries led to the series of symposia in Athens, that was deliberately focused on the proportion of the material that could be given an archaeological context or at least a secure provenance. Previously published volumes have concerned the finds with provenances in the Cyclades and in Crete; this volume incorporates examples from the Greek mainland, other Aegean islands – mainly the Dodecanese, but there are examples from Skyros and Lesbos – and a solitary find from Miletus, seemingly ‘recontextualised’ in a phase succeeding the EBA.
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Sparkes, Brian A. "Greek Bronzes." Greece and Rome 34, no. 2 (October 1987): 152–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383500028102.
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When I first began to study Greek art, back in the mid 1950s, a book on Greek sculpture had recently been published in Germany and in England that did much to encourage my interest. It was Reinhard Lullies and Max Hirmer's big picture book, Greek Sculpture, since enlarged and running into three German and two English editions. Its basic idea was not totally novel but was rare for its time and never previously done so well. It presented large, clear photographs of original Greek works (by Hirmer) with a scholarly commentary to each piece (by Lullies); it omitted anything that was known, or considered, not to be original. In doing so, it provided a strong contrast to the sort of book with which I had already come into contact, the sort best characterized perhaps by Ernest Gardner's Six Greek Sculptors of 19252which contains not one single original piece by the six chosen sculptors and in which all the photographs are seen through a glass darkly. Gardner's title and approach, with heavy emphasis on literary evidence and Roman copies, accompanied by a sprinkling of original, unattributed pieces for ballast, was typical of a traditional line of study-that of Kopienkritik, an approach not dead yet by any means and in fact one which must continue to be pursued, though nowadays it is tackled with more caution than earlier. But until one incontrovertible example of a named sculptor's work is found, all attributions must be arguable approximations.
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Borodovsky, Andrew P. "An Eastern Toreutics Item from Novosibirsk." Archaeology and Ethnography 20, no. 5 (2021): 96–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.25205/1818-7919-2021-20-5-96-104.
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Purpose. The article dwells upon the description and interpretation of a unique anthropomorphic Eastern toreutics item that was discovered by accident on the territory of Novosibirsk. This item comes from the traditional Ob river crossing site where a cult place with References to the Early Iron Age has already been identified. The study is aimed at attributing the imported item in terms of historical and cultural as well as material science aspects and establishing its relative chronology and possible intended purpose. Results. The functional purpose of the artifact is considered in terms of both its initial origin and possible use in the local environment. The structure and origin of the clothes depicted on the toreutics item are analyzed as being one of the most insightful elements of the cultural background of the product. Based on these data, an assumption concerning an image of silk clothes on the figure was made. Special attention was given to characteristics of a dynamic nature evoked by a volumetric depiction of the tiny sculpture that is likely to correspond to a ritual dance. The established direct and indirect analogies for the toreutics item from Novosibirsk allow state its Eastern origin related to the consequences of the impact of the ancient culture on the vast Eurasian territories. The anthropomorphic product has obvious features of a Buddhistic background represented by an image of the point on the figure's forehead. The energy-dispersive analysis of the metal product allowed determine an alloy composition. It comprised of 62.1 % copper, 15.3 % tin, 15.2 % lead, and 7.4 % zinc. Conclusion. The share of tin in the alloy allows it to be identified as a ‘classic’ bronze piece. An extensive share of copper in the metal product brings it closer to the formula of ancient bronze. The item dates back to the turn of the epoch and is likely to be related to the Indian and Greek cultural tradition.
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Miller, Allison R. "Painting Bronze in Early China." Archives of Asian Art 72, no. 1 (April 1, 2022): 1–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00666637-9577685.
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Abstract Scholars of Greek and Roman art have long recognized that many sculptures that today appear unpainted were originally covered in bright, polychrome paint. In contrast, the hallowed works of China's classical antiquity, the bronzes, are generally believed to have been monochrome works. In recent years, however, many varieties of bronzes have been unearthed with polychrome ornamentation including sacrificial vessels, figural sculptures, mirrors, lamps, weapons, and personal ornaments. This article summarizes and interprets the current evidence for painting on early Chinese bronze artifacts based on recent archaeological discoveries and on newer advances in technical analysis. In particular, I show that the practice of applying paint to bronzes goes far beyond embedding pigment into the intaglio channels of bronzes such as occurred during the Shang and Western Zhou eras. I also demonstrate that especially in the Warring States and early imperial periods, painted coloration on bronzes took off in diversely rich and compelling ways. This article highlights the various modes and techniques of painting bronze in early China, and offers several hypotheses as to why such polychrome ornamentation was desirable in early China, reconciling those motives with our quite different modern sensibilities.
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Owczarek, Piotr. "Prace konserwatorskie przy kamiennej rzeźbie Matki Boskiej autorstwa Andrzeja Pruszyńskiego z elewacji kościoła pw. Matki Bożej Pocieszenia w Żyrardowie – wybrane zagadnienia historyczne i technologiczne." Artifex Novus, no. 3 (October 1, 2019): 158–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.21697/an.7072.
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SUMMARY
The stone sculpture of the Virgin Mary from the facade of the church Our Lady of Consolation in Żyrardów is one of the numerous sculptural implementations of Andrzej Pruszyński workshop. In 2018 the monument was under conservation and restoration works. Preliminary macroscopic examination of the monument showed that under the numerous secondary layers of paint on the stone sculpture there is a dark green, multi-deck colour layer that could imitate a statue had made in bronze casting technique. As a result samples were taken and subjected to laboratory analysis. The research carried out allowed us to conclude that the described layer is kind of a secondary nature and is a testimony to the restoration of the monument probably after the end of World War I. It was decided not to remove the patina and to fill in the gaps in the course of the ongoing restoration and conservation works. This layer had historical and documentary value and was a testimony to the popular in the 19th century and probably known at the beginning of the 20th century practice of patinating sculptures made in less noble and less durable material than bronze. Moreover, in the course of conservation works later layers of paint and cement repairs were removed. Then the structure of weakened limestone rock was strengthened and numerous small losses of stone were filled in. As a witness the defect on the left knee of the figure was left without filling in. It is a trace of the bullet that was probably created during World War I. Moreover, the missing figure’s right hand was reconstructed. A reconstruction of the gilded halo was also made. The design of the conservation work programme is always a very complex process as it requires the simultaneous consideration of many factors. The aesthetic and historical interpretation of the work is important, the understanding of the author’s concept and the essence of the destructive processes. In the case of the described sculpture from Żyrardów it was also necessary to take into account the technical possibilities, take into account the expectations of the owner and users, or customers in general, as well as the conservation community. Preservation and restoration solutions adopted in the work programme, including hand reconstruction and unveiling of the following items and the restoration of a painting layer imitating a green patina, restored historical artistic values to the monument. The aesthetic effect achieved this way brings a new quality to work that can be the object of criticism but by restoring the sculpture’s lost aesthetic values it is possible to continue to function as an object of religious worship.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Greek Bronze sculpture"
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Nouet, Rachel. "Archéologie de l'empreinte : techniques de fixation des statues en Grèce égéenne, de l'époque archaïque à la fin de l'époque hellénistique (VIIè - Ier siècle av. J.-C.)." Thesis, Paris 1, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017PA01H088.
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Ce travail vise à étudier les techniques de fixation des statues sur leurs bases dans le monde grec, depuis la fin du VIIe s. jusqu’à la fin de l’époque hellénistique, à partir des bases inscrites. Il se fonde sur l’étude d’un corpus de 387 monuments ayant conservé des traces de fixation, à Delphes, Délos et Athènes, décrits et analysés dans un catalogue dédié. La première partie est consacrée à l’établissement d’une chrono-typologie des techniques de fixation visant à les caractériser en fonction du matériau, de la taille et du type de figure, et à les dater. La seconde partie s’attache à l’interprétation des traces de fixation en comme empreintes de la statue disparue. On a d’abord déterminé le type d’informations qu’elles pouvaient apporter sur elle, comme son matériau et sa taille, mais aussi son type et surtout sa position. On s’est ensuite intéressé aux bases signées, afin de dégager des traditions artisanales propres à des régions ou des ateliers, en croisant la fixation utilisée et les positions révélées par les traces. Enfin, on s’est interrogé sur les évolutions de l’utilisation des matériaux ; on a pu dégager le rôle des contextes d’exposition à partir de l’époque classique, et contribuer à élucider le retour du marbre à partir du IIe s. Cette étude entend par là contribuer aux recherches sur les techniques de fabrication autant qu’à celles sur la sculpture dans son contexteThe study examines the techniques used to attach statues to their bases in the Greek world from the end of the 7th c. BC to the end of the Hellenistic period. Starting from bases bearing inscriptions, it builds on a corpus of 387 monuments from Delphi, Delos and Athens, showing traces of attachment. Their description and analysis can be found in a separated catalogue. In the first part of the study, a chrono‐typology was elaborated, identifying and dating each technique according to the material, the size and the type of the figures. In the second part, the traces of attachment were interpreted as signs of the missing statue. First, we showed that these traces brought information on its material and its size but also its type and its position. Then we focused on signed bases and proceeded to a cross‐examination of the kind of technique used and the position revealed by the traces in order to identify artisanal traditions specific to regions or workshops. Finally, we considered the reasons for using marble or bronze for statues; we thus showed the importance of the setting context from the classical period onward, as exemplified by the come-back of marble sculpture in the 2nd c. BC. The study is thus intended as a contribution to research both on attachment techniques and sculpture in its context
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Swaddling, Judith. "Greek sculptors : their employment, training and materials (with special emphasis on bronze)." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1986. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.337339.
Full textBooks on the topic "Greek Bronze sculpture"
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Mattusch, Carol C. Greek bronze statuary: From the beginnings through the fifth century B.C. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1988.
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Haynes, Denys Eyre Lankester. The technique of Greek bronze statuary. Mainz am Rhein: P. von Zabern, 1992.
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Haimerl, Johannes. Der Bronzeguss in der Antike: Gedanken, Hypothesen, Experimente : ein Werkstattbericht, 1981-1985. Amberg: J. Haimerl, 1986.
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1900-1976, Schuchhardt Walter-Herwig, ed. Die antiken Gipsabgüsse aus Baiae: Griechische Bronzestatuen in Abgüssen römischer Zeit. Berlin: Mann, 1985.
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Ratka, Markus. Giesstechnologische Experimente und numerische Simulation zur Bestimmung der Fertigungstechnik hellenistischer Bronzestatuen. Aachen: Verlag Mainz, 1998.
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Ioakimidou, Chrissula. Die Statuenreihen griechischer Poleis und Bünde aus spätarchaischer und klassischer Zeit. München: tuduv-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1997.
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İnan, Jale. Boubon Sebasteionu ve heykelleri üzerine son araştırmalar. İstanbul: Arkeoloji ve Sanat Yayınları, 1994.
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Pharaklas, N. Koila chalkina agalmata klasikōn chronōn. Rethymno: Panepistēmio Krētēs, Tmēma Historias kai Archaiologias, Tomeas Archaiologias kai Historias tēs Technēs, 2003.
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Caroline, Wangenheim. Archaische Bronzepferde in Rundplastik und Relief. Bonn: Habelt, 1988.
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Gerhard, Zimmer, Hachländer Nele, and Staatliche Museen zu Berlin--Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Antikensammlung., eds. Der Betende Knabe: Original und Experiment. Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1997.
Find full textBook chapters on the topic "Greek Bronze sculpture"
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Evans, Dorinda. "5. A Challenge to International Neoclassicism." In William Rimmer, 117–64. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/obp.0304.05.
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Rimmer's major sculptural works, such as St. Stephen, Falling Gladiator, Dying Centaur, and Osirus (destroyed), were created for exhibition and in response to the international neoclassical movement. In different ways, they are actually critiques of the rage for neoclassicism. Much of what Rimmer was trying to do is conveyed in his teaching, and he used his exhibited art as an extension of this. He wanted an art based not on copying from antique casts or from life but, rather, on the artist's own imagination so that the work is self-expressive. The fact that the man in Falling Gladiator assumes an impossible position is an instance of his insistence on the imaginative. The St. Stephen and a cast of the Falling Gladiator were exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Refusés, where the Gladiator created a stir as it seemed, wrongly, to be a cast of a live person. Rimmer broke new ground in producing fragmented human figures with an antique reference, such as his Osiris, a classical-Greek-looking nude male without parts of his arms. They resembled the broken ancient sculpture of the present rather than of the revered past. Originally Osiris had the head of a hawk. As with his pictures, Rimmer also was unusual in frankly accepting and portraying abnormalities as in his Seated Man (Despair). The late Fighting Lions, showing a male and female in vicious combat is arguably an allegory of male dominance. As an original thinker, Rimmer, more than once, explored the problem of expressing the spiritual in the material, most effectively in his relatively abstract Torso, which is an attempt to show the divine awakening or creation of a human soul. Following the Bible, the plaster cast retains the effect of a man’s torso having been crudely fashioned from clay. Perhaps just as unexpected was his plan for a colossal sculpture, Tri Mountain (never executed), which amalgamated the effect of three men and three hills as a symbol of the city of Boston. His one major public statue is the over-life-size Alexander Hamilton on Commonwealth Mall in Boston.
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"6. Roman Bronze Statuettes: Copies of Greek Sculpture?" In Ancient Bronzes through a Modern Lens: Introductory Essays on the Study of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Bronzes. Harvard Art Museums, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00015.010.
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Coltman, Viccy. "Collecting and global politics: The export of marbles from Rome and their transport to Britain." In Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain Since 1760, 117–58. Oxford University PressOxford, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199551262.003.0005.
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Abstract The restoration of Townley’s discobolus (figure 34) featured in the previous chapter as a compelling case study in the restorative operations of sculpture in Rome in the second half of the 18th century, specifically in the early 1790s, using innovative techniques implemented in the previous decade for cleaning post-classical sculpture. Restoration was cast as an art that was both material in its sculptural practice and rhetorical in its artful epistolary representation by Townley’s dealers. Another prosthesis that is (represented as) fundamental to Townley’s acquisition of the discobolus is the art of cultural politics. Once a collector had been seduced by a restored sculpture, or an idea of it via drawings and descriptions, the next stage in the business of collecting was the export of ancient marbles out of Papal territory and their foreign and domestic transport. On Jenkins’ initial application for an export licence in March 1792, the discobolus was refused on the grounds that it was considered the superior version of a surviving sculptural type, and a material survival, to the bronze discobolus preserved in ancient texts as a work of the 5th-century BC Greek sculptor Myron. When auspicious excavations unearthed another discobolus earmarked for the Papal collection, Jenkins assured Townley that a licence would be forthcoming. Papal permission to export the version destined for Park Street was not actually granted until six months later, in November 1792. In the intervening period, the lost head of the Papal version was restored on the basis of Townley’s variant—the (thought to be) superior prototype with its head looking downwards away from the discus.
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Coltman, Viccy. "Introduction: Lord Lansdowne’s Wounded Amazon ." In Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain Since 1760, 1–6. Oxford University PressOxford, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199551262.003.0001.
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Abstract At the auction of the Lansdowne collection of ancient marble sculptures in London in March 1930, the prize lot was a Wounded Amazon (figure 1) which sold for a then record of 28,350 guineas. This sculpture had been acquired by the 2nd Earl of Shelburne, later 1st Marquis of Lansdowne, in 1773 from the dealer Gavin Hamilton for £200, and is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.2 In the century and a half that had elapsed since its excavation in Tor Columbaro about 9 miles outside Rome on the Appian Way, its acquisition by an aristocratic British politician and its subsequent public auction, this restored ancient sculpture had been identified as one of the finest and best-preserved masterpieces of the canon of Greco-Roman art. Following a passage in Pliny’s Natural History (XXXIV, 53), the Lansdowne Amazon was identified as a type of Wounded Amazon executed by the 5th century BC Greek sculptor Polykleitos. ‘It is as like the head of the Doryphoros by Polykleitos as sister to brother.… an excellent translation into marble of the characteristics of a bronze original’, expounds the Christie’s sale catalogue, whose entries were founded on the ‘business-like descriptions’ of the British Museum curator A. H. Smith in his Ancient Marbles at Lansdowne House (1889). Smith’s ‘thorough, trustworthy, and unsensational’ catalogue in turn acknowledges its debt to the pioneering account of Ancient Marbles in Great Britain (Cambridge, 1882) by Adolf Michaelis, Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Strasbourg. The Amazon’s archaeological celebrity is reflected in her privileged treatment by Michaelis. For the early 1880s was a time when, to paraphrase Bernard Ashmole writing in 1929, photography was a rudimentary and costly new technology, and although Michaelis described thousands of pieces only a dozen or so were reproduced, one of which was the Lansdowne Amazon (figure 1).
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Davies, Glenys. "Clothing in Marble and Bronze: The Representation of Dress in Greek and Roman Sculpture." In Dress in Mediterranean Antiquity. T&T Clark, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9780567684677.ch-006.
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"9. THE HUMAN FIGURE AND ITS SCULPTORS." In Greek Bronze Statuary, 212–18. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/9781501746062-011.
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Neer, Richard. "Three Types of Invisibility: The Acropolis of Athens." In Conditions of Visibility. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198845560.003.0007.
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Classical Greek monuments were meant to be seen. The poet Pindar often refers to the conspicuousness of architecture: “When a work is begun,” he declares, “it is necessary to make its façade far-beaming” (Olympian 6.3–4), and a sacred precinct can be tēlephantos, “shining from afar” (fr. 5 SM). According to Plato, the works of Pheidias were made “conspicuously” (periphanōs), literally, “so as to seen round about,” a term that can also be used to distinguish freestanding sculpture from relief (Meno 91d). The philosopher may have been thinking of Pheidias’ great bronze Athena on the Acropolis of Athens, the spear and helmet of which, we are told, were visible to ships at sea. The conspicuousness of Greek architecture was integral to its function. The Acropolis itself, for instance, was the supreme monument of the most powerful and long-lived democracy of Classical antiquity. Soaring over Athens, its great buildings—the temple of Athena Nike, the Parthenon, the Erechtheum—were statements of the official ideology of the Athenian empire and testaments to its glory. Clustered around them were numerous private and public dedications: statues, objets d’art, and inscriptions on stone. Today these monuments are landmarks of art history and magnets for tourism. Curiously, however, many of the Acropolis monuments were more or less invisible in the 400s BCE. Visibility was circumstantial and contingent, in ways that I shall elaborate below. From this starting point flow two questions: what does it mean for a democracy that its most glorious public monuments should be, to a greater or lesser degree, unseen? And what are the consequences for art history? The Acropolis monuments were subject to at least three distinct types of invisibility. First, literal invisibility, in the sense of occlusion or concealment. In this case, any light that strikes the object does not bounce back and hit an observer’s eye. Were one to bury a statue in a hole, it would be occluded in this sense; the statue would be, literally, invisible.
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Hallett, Christopher H. "‘Corinthian Bronzes’." In Forgery Beyond Deceit, 44—C1F27. Oxford University PressOxford, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192869586.003.0003.
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Abstract A new type of miniature bronze came into being in the late Hellenistic period. Of exquisite quality, and furnished with their own bases, these figurines were designed to be portable. Many were fashioned in retrospective styles; some even purported to be antiques. Such statuettes are well attested in the ancient literary sources, and are referred to by Roman authors as ‘Corinthian bronzes’. This paper argues that many examples actually survive from antiquity. It also makes the case that these miniatures were sold to wealthy art collectors as originals—‘autograph works’ of the most celebrated Greek sculptors of the past. This explains the staggeringly high prices paid for them. Understood in this way, the craze for ‘Corinthian bronzes’ in the first century bce and the first century ce should be regarded as one of the most successful and artistically important instances of large-scale forgery in the history of western art.
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Barber, Robin. "The Greeks and their Sculpture Interrelationships of Function, Style, and Display." In ‘Owls to Athens’, 245–60. Oxford University PressOxford, 1990. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198144786.003.0028.
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Abstract The monumental free-standing sculpture of ancient Greece played a major part in determining the appearance of sanctuaries and, later, city centres. The installation of sculpture in sanctuaries began at least as early as the Archaic period, with works in stone, bronze, and wood. Wooden figures were probably prominent even earlier, though there is no archaeological indication of their numbers or precise locations. The functions of this sculpture, however, were not primarily decorative. Although the possession of fine works was surely regarded as bringing credit to the place where they stood, their main purpose was rather to communicate messages of various kinds between meil and gods or between men and menoften both at the same time.
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Wild, Tobias. "From Mold to Masterpiece: Producing Small- Scale Hellenistic Ruler Bronzes in Ptolemaic Egypt." In Greek and Roman Small Size Sculpture, 125–54. De Gruyter, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110741742-006.
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