From Hephaistos to the Silver Screen: Living Statues, Antiquity and Cinema
2013; Issue: 91 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Architectural Studies
ResumoLynda Nead has pointed out that the dream of motion has haunted visual arts from the classical period to the present and the same can be said can be said of the literature that spawned many of these visual representations. (1) As the foremost image-maker of our time, it should come as no surprise that cinema itself reflects the animation of static people in its subject matter, for the tension between stasis and movement is at the heart of the medium. fascination for breathing life into the lifeless is, of course, as old as time itself. most prevalent creational myths implicitly or explicitly employ the image of the deity as a sculptural artist who breathes life into a clay or dust effigy; more often than not, the statue is fashioned in the deity's own image, essentially making it a self-portrait. (2) main literary sources for these myths are the writings of ancient Greek and Roman philologists such as Hesiod, Homer, Ovid, Pseudo-Apollodorus and Apollonius of Rhodes, who not only speak of the sculptural marvel that is mankind, but of other significant statuary as well. It is these ancient Greek and Roman myths that I will focus on. In most accounts, it was Zeus, king of the Olympians, who commissioned the Titan Prometheus and the Olympian god of fire Hephaistos to create man. (3) Out of water and earth, Hephaistos sculpted man in the likeness of the gods. Prometheus then secretly instructed this new being in the arts of Athena and Hephaistos so that man might fend for himself. Titan thus tricked the gods on several levels and topped things off by stealing fire from the heavens as a gift to humankind. Not only was Prometheus severely punished for his deeds, mankind also suffered a great blow in the form of the second divine sculpture, Pandora, the first woman. Hephaistos sculpted this creature and her beauty and cunning were meant to be the ruin of man. She was gifted to Prometheus' brother, Epimetheus, and inadvertently unleashed evils from a Greek pithos, or storage jar, that was a wedding present from Zeus. These evils would plague mankind forever, but would not be able to extinguish the flame of hope. (4) primordial Greek tale of sculptures coming to life was by no means restricted to a creationist context, however. Deborah Tarn Steiner has traced the function and form of statuary from Greek and Roman literary art histories, be they Homeric, Hesiodic, Ovidian or Virgilian, to the art of archaic and classical Greece in her astounding work Images in Mind: Statues in Archaic Greek Literature and Thought (2001). Her study lays bare a wide-ranging spectrum of representational strategies with regard to Greek statuary in both myth and reality. Steiner describes figurines and statues that doubled for the dead or absent and preserved the talismanic properties of its originals, an act of presentification that led to their symbolic use in rituals where the effigies would be honored or cursed, but one that did not dismiss the possession of other properties, for combined in the single piece, several kinds of image 'magic' are at work. (5) craftsmanship with which these statues were animated by late sixth-century and early fifth-century sculptors is a case in point. Steiner rightly argues that the artistry and materiality of these sculptures elevated them from mere representational objects to vivified artifacts. (6) This animation was effectuated through inscriptions and ornamentation that highlighted its status as an object of craftsmanship, and, more importantly, through posture and anatomy. development in Greek sculpture from the Archaic (800 to 500 B.C.) to the Classical (500 to 323 B.C.) period saw the stiffness of the kouroi give way to a more naturalistic freedom of movement of expression, or as Richard Neer describes it: The result was an amplified, hyperbolic version of the Archaic style. Classical contrapposto ratcheted up the internal inconsistencies of the kouros stance, and Classical movement bet everything on striking and awing the beholder. …
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