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Classical Exceptionalism 04/27/19 p.1

[02_ Gaul1] The Dying Gaul, a masterpiece of Hellenistic sculpture, can teach us a good deal about the classical tradition—as an artistic tradition that needs to be understood not in terms of style, and not as a tidy set of conventions, but as a distinct way of seeing and recreating nature, and the human figure above all.A superb ancient marble copy of a lost bronze dating to around 200 B.C., it portrays a fallen nude warrior in the prime of life lying on his shield and broken trumpet with a mortal wound in his flank. He props himself up on one arm, his other arm extended forward with the hand perched on his thigh, his head bent toward the ground. [03_Gaul2] Viewed from any angle, the sublime orchestration of anatomical forms contributes to the warrior’s powerful physical presence, heightening the emotional impact of his courageous bearing. Agony is indicated only by the Gaul’s bent head and the vigorous modeling of his furrowed brow. Energy suffuses his lithe body in defiance of death. The thrust from his left foot raises part of his rump slightly off the ground. The supporting right arm generates an opposing force, while the left arm perched on his thigh accentuates the upper body’s slight rotation. Deeply incised folds of flesh at the juncture of abdomen and pelvis also emphasize the abdomen’s lateral slide, like a tectonic plate, along the pelvis.The exquisitely articulated torso becomes the medium through which the contending forces are resolved into a


state of equilibrium in tension. The warrior is thus suspended in time and space. Death is a moment away, yet we have no sense of imminent collapse. In fact, this slightly larger than life-size, subtly torsional figure is seemingly poised to unwind into our perceptual space even as it draws us towards it like a magnet. Photography can hardly capture these paradoxical qualities.The Gaul’s limbs are all bent at the knee or elbow, the right leg on the ground with its flexed calf muscle sharply so, and they each form divergent planes. The limbs are like leaves or petals to the torso’s stem, and their arrangement makes the figure intensely dimensional. As one moves around the sculpture, limbs and torso frame either space or views of portions of the figure. Continuity of form and contour are central to the Gaul’s design: The sculptor wanted forms to terminate as little as possible. The eye thus follows countless trajectories up, down and around his mesmerizing creation, which was intended to make the warrior more real, more vividly present, than the human figure as experienced in nature. The Dying Gaul represents the best of Hellenistic humanism in its deeply moving ennoblement of a barbarian adversary. It belongs to a realist genre involving psychological as well as spatial complexity; but it also perpetuates classical formal techniques that had existed for centuries. For example, the muscles flanking the warrior’s pelvis are downplayed or subordinated so as to emphasize the unity of the pelvic region as a whole and allow it to hold its own in the torso’s design.


[04_Gaul3] The treatment of the warrior’s back similarly emphasizes the large anatomical units on either side of the spine. This hierarchy of greater and lesser forms makes the figure more legible….and more monumental.The sculptor attained this formal clarity without sacrificing the structural complexity of the Gaul’s body. Anatomical shapes defining the sculpture’s topography are not simplified, and the sculptor gauged formal and proportional relationships between them with immense skill in making the warrior read as a seamlessly integrated whole from any viewpoint. This majestic portrayal of greatness of spirit in the face of a cruel fate is thus a symphony in a minor key whose tragic grandeur unfolds for us in space and in time.Since ancient times the Greek achievement in fine art has been taken to lie in its unprecedented naturalism. But as the Dying Gaul attests, naturalism is only part of the story.[05_Sphinx] Monumental sculpture emerged in Ancient Egypt and elsewhere in the Near East as a pictorially rather than dimensionally oriented art. It presented a massive spectacle to the eye, but it was conceived quadrifrontally, like the façades of a building, not with the overriding focus on spatial continuity we’ve observed in the Dying Gaul. [06_Hybrid] Quadrifrontal orientation could even lead the sculptor to think in terms of discrete pictorial profiles, so that hybrid Assyrian


creatures like this one, which dates to the ninth century B.C., are equipped with five legs instead of four. [07_Ramses] Art historians tell us the experience of Egyptian statuary inspired the Greeks’ passion for monumental sculpture during the seventh century. It is certainly not difficult to spot the close kinship between this statue of Ramses II from the Luxor Temple and this [08_MetKouros] archaic Greek statue from the early sixth century, a larger than life-size funerary monument to a young Attic nobleman that resides in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The rigid pose is obviously derived from Egyptian work, but this ill-proportioned, crudely stylized creature more resembles a Martian than a pharaoh. Nevertheless, the sculptor’s pictorial orientation is evident in his reliance on schematic linear patternizations, starting with the eyes, mouth, [09_ MetKourosHd] ears, and hair, which are akin to the patternized forms on this more skillfully carved [10_AssyrnHd] Assyrian figure.

Let me digress for a moment on an important aspect of monumental sculpture’s migration from Egypt to Greece. The ancient Egyptians, like the ancient Mesopotamians, believed statues could play several distinct magical roles. Assyrian hybrid creatures stood at city gates to ward off hostile spirits. In all likelihood, the Ramses statue we just saw was intended to perpetuate the deified pharaoh’s beneficent powers. Egyptian sculptors were highly competent. They produced compelling individual portrait likenesses as early as the third millennium before Christ;


[11_Ankhhaf] a noteworthy example, a portrait bust of an Egyptian prince dating to around 2500 B.C., is on view in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Egyptian monumental sculpture nevertheless retained a distinctly hieratic stylistic character over an extremely long period of time. It didn’t need to evolve to serve its magical purposes.A long evolutionary path extends, however, from the archaic figure in the Metropolitan Museum to the Dying Gaul. That’s because the patrons and creators of Greek sculptural monuments did not regard them as magical entities. They regarded them as means of perpetuating the memory or fame of particular individuals and events and of embodying the presence of the gods in the life of the community.It was principally the [12_Anavysos] structure of the male nude that the Greek sculptors articulated with ever-increasing realism while remaining shackled to a pictorial conception of the figure and a quadrifrontal, schematic mode of representation. POINT Note also the linear patternization of this figure’s abdomen. [13_Kritios Boy] Around 500 B.C. Greek sculptors forsook the schematic archaic pose for a much more life-like one in which the standing figure’s weight rested on one leg, while patternized forms gave way to much more supple modeling, POINT as we see here.[14_Ilissus1] Over a term spanning some 150 years, the human figure in Greek sculpture evolved from that


crudely stylized youth in the Metropolitan Museum to the spatially continuous, emphatically dimensional and non-pictorial entity [15_Ilissus2] that leads the spectator from one view to the next, as with this majestic reclining figure representing the Ilissus River in Athens, from the Parthenon’s west pediment. The Dying Gaul, in turn, was created more than 200 years after the Ilissus, but there is an intimate formal kinship between the two.

The Ilissus testifies to a revolutionary breakthrough—and again, a breakthrough that went much deeper than mere life-likeness. How did it occur? The Egyptians may not have been conscious of the fact that we view the world pictorially. In other words, the lens of the human eye focuses reflected light from the world around us onto the optic movie screen that is the retina. Gradations from light to shade and diminution in perspective allow the flat images that appear on that movie screen to serve as two-dimensional, pictorial reflections of three-dimensional reality. Photography, of course, is closely aligned with the mechanism of human vision, and mechanically generates optical records of sights we see.Over time Greek sculptors realized that the pictorial nature of human vision was impeding their quest for a fully lifelike representation of the figure. They somehow internalized, as no artists had ever done before, the distinction between what we see and what is. They struggled for generations to override the pictorial constraints of human vision. [16_Lapith Woman] We can see this process underway in the pedimental


sculpture of a single Greek monument, the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, erected in the second quarter of the fifth century. The drapery of this female from the temple’s west pediment, who is being accosted by a now very fragmentary centaur, is totally arrayed in frontal planes, in line with a pictorial conception of form. But the lines of drapery of [17_Kneeling Charioteer] this crouching figure from the temple’s east pediment, POINT lead the eye around the figure so as to emphasize its spatial continuity.The brilliant Bryn Mawr art historian Rhys Carpenter, who noted this development in the Olympia temple’s sculpture, emphasized that the revolutionary breakthrough it betokened did not occur in isolation. It involved a sort of feedback loop between the development of the Greek sculptural canon and the Greek architectural canon.The classical architectural orders were originally conceived as articulating the support of massive weight in pictorial terms. [18_Colonnade] To put it another way, the mere silhouette of the U.S. Treasury Building’s fine Ionic colonnade on Fifteenth Street in Washington articulates a structural equation: the gravitational equilibrium between the column and the entablature it supports. And of course it does so in an anthropomorphic way, leading us to register that structural equation in terms of our own embodied state.


The clear hierarchy of parts the classical Orders manifest, starting with their division into base, shaft and capital and continuing on to the subordinate elements within each division, contributes to their legibility. We’ve already noted this quality of structural legibility in the Dying Gaul; [19_Caryatids] we also encounter it in the famous Caryatids of the Erechtheum on the Athenian Acropolis, which date to the classical period but derive from archaic precedents. The Caryatids and their marvelous crowns are endowed with a structural clarity akin to that of the Orders and likewise read well from a distance, thus bearing witness to the historic interaction between sculpture and architecture.

+++In classical sculpture—and what I’m saying of classical sculpture includes Hellenistic work such as the Dying Gaul—the linear, pictorially-oriented patterns we observed in archaic figures evolved into an infinitely more complex interplay between shapes comprising the figure. [20_ParthMetope] The head of the fallen combatant in a Parthenon relief makes this principle clearer precisely because the face is missing. [21_MetopeDetail] We can observe that the geometry of the shoulder and pectoral muscles relates to and indeed derives from the shape of the head. Greek sculptors derived other parts of the figure—buttocks and knees, for example—from the head, abstractly conceived (that is, without eyes, nose, mouth or ears) so as to serve as a geometric matrix. The gifted Baltimore sculptor Brad


Parker calls this technique “shape orientation.” It demands enormous skill, not only because it involves subtle modulation of forms so derived, but also because it must accommodate a sculptural topography that expresses the figure’s deep anatomical structure. It is no exaggeration to say that the topography of the human figure seemingly radiates or even erupts, in the best classical sculpture, from an inner core. Shape orientation is the cardinal source of the sense of organic unity Greek masterworks like the Dying Gaul convey.[22_Goddesses] Classical drapery’s sinuous lines of light and shade lead us around the figure in countless trajectories, intensifying our sense of its dimensional presence, as with these majestic goddesses from the Parthenon’s east pediment. [23_Venus] Increasingly sophisticated compositional techniques, evident in this Hellenistic Crouching Venus in the Louvre, whose multiple alignments are evident even with the head, arms and feet missing, virtually compel the spectator to experience the figure in the round instead of just standing in front of it to take in a static view. POINT You can also see how folds of flesh are being used like drapery folds to direct the eye around the figure.I’ve mentioned the feedback loop between classical sculpture and architecture, so I’d like to comment briefly on [24_Parthenon] how this culminates in the architecture of the Parthenon. Like archaic statues, Greek temples, of which the Parthenon is universally recognized as the greatest, were quadrifrontal entities. The


Parthenon, however, was situated on the Acropolis in a way that emphasized oblique rather than frontal views, allowing it to read more spatially. Architectural adjustments for optical effect, employed on earlier Doric temples, were applied with greater subtlety at the Parthenon. There were many such adjustments, but to cite just a couple, the slight doming of the Parthenon’s floor was accompanied by the rise of its entablature toward the middle on all four sides and the very slight inward tilt of its colonnades and walls—actually a diagonal tilt of a little over two inches in the case of the corner columns. The almost imperceptible swell or entasis in the shafts of the Parthenon’s columns—amounting to three-eighths of an inch on shafts 34 feet tall—conveys a subconscious sense of organic life while the resulting column profiles discourage the eye from a simplistic upward movement.While the Parthenon, like the Dying Gaul but at a much larger scale, acts with magnetic force on its environment, its columns’ inward tilt generates a tension—a countervailing outward thrust. One art historian thus compared the temple to a crouching lion, limbs and muscles contracted, poised to leap at its prey. This ambivalent, even paradoxical dynamic is closely akin to that conveyed by the Dying Gaul. And even if it registers at the subconscious level, it further removes the Parthenon from the realm of commonplace experience and instills in the sensitive viewer a state of heightened awareness that the sculptural decoration, itself


unsurpassed in Western art, could only reinforce. Such states of intensified consciousness are of course conducive to reverence and even awe.The Parthenon thus serves to underscore the fact that in classical architecture as in sculpture monumentality’s supreme manifestations are grounded in the vividly dimensional presentation of structure in anthropomorphic terms. By “dimensional” I mean that the artifact doesn’t just occupy space in a static sense; it acts on its environment, transforming the space around it into a kind of aesthetic force field. Classical monumentality moreover is a relational monumentality. Grounded in the geometric and proportional relationships in the human body, it revolves around the interplay between lesser and greater parts, the forms they comprise, and the sculptural or architectural work as a whole. Classical monumentality, and monumentality in the humanistic architectural styles that derive from the classical—Romanesque, Gothic and so on—is thus a monumentality of scale. The Egyptian pyramids, in contrast, present us with a monumentality of sheer magnitude.At this juncture, it is worth pointing out that we find remarkably little light shed on the issues I’ve been discussing in the ancient literature. It was thanks to advances in the psychology of perception in the mid-twentieth century that Rhys Carpenter was able to elucidate the conceptual breakthrough from pictorially-oriented archaic sculpture to dimensionally-oriented classical sculpture.


In our most important ancient source, Books 34, 35 and 36 of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, it is actually the history of painting that yields the most important insights. I will quote what I take to be the most important. It has to do with draftsmanship, and it derived from the commentary of a Hellenistic sculptor who had lived three centuries earlier. This is the passage: “To paint bodies and their visible shapes is certainly a great task, but one in which many have won glory. To produce outlines that involve a method of the painted figure’s leaving off is a success rarely achieved in art.”— “Leaving off” might seem a little obscure but bear with me.—Pliny continues: “For the outline should turn back on itself, thus leaving off in such a way that it promises other contours behind it and even reveals what it conceals.” Note that Pliny, or more precisely the authority he is paraphrasing, is using the obscure term “leave off” in speaking of outlines to avoid speaking of the painted figure’s clear-cut visual termination, which would contradict the concept—the classical concept—of spatial continuity he has in mind. Hence the phrase about the outline turning back on itself. The passage almost reads as if it was written by an artist who had drawn the Dying Gaul.

+++High-quality antique sculpture, mainly in the form of copies, continued to be produced well into the Roman imperial period. But the high level of conceptual knowledge and manual skill it entailed couldn’t be sustained indefinitely, and by the time of


[25_Constantine] Constantine the Great, whose rather crudely rendered portrait head we see here, sculpture had regressed dramatically. Sometimes, as with this head, late antique work bore a noticeable relationship to the classical tradition, sometimes—as with this sculpture of the [26_Tetrarchs] Roman tetrarchs or four imperial rulers who preceded Constantine—little or none. In both works, a method of representation involving a high level of formal complexity has been supplanted by a more simplistic, primitive one. (The tetrarchs, as many of you know, are embedded in the façade of San Marco in Venice, having been seized as plunder in Constantinople during the Crusades).[27_LaMartorana] Byzantine sacred art represents a reaction against classicism no less radical, though far more culturally significant, than late antique art, but to really appreciate its artistic significance we need to understand the classical tradition it supplanted. Sculpture in the round found no place in Byzantine sacred art, whose definitive creation is antique sculpture’s pictorial and spiritual antithesis, GESTURE the icon: the schematic, frontally-posed image of Christ, Virgin, or saint, rendered in mosaic, fresco, or tempera and set off against a lustrous, often golden, background. Far from projecting into the viewer’s perceptual space like a classical statue, the icon beckons from a heavenly sphere beyond space and time.In many cases the icon persisted from generation to generation as an unchanging hieratic type.


[28_Abraham] Eventually, however, icons in the form of painted panels assumed greater pictorial complexity, with less static figures and more elaborate architectural or landscape settings, while still retaining much of their un-naturalistically schematic character. (This icon dates to about 1400 and portrays the hospitality Abraham extended to his three mysterious visitors on the eve of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.) In the West the art of panel painting had largely disappeared after the fall of the Roman Empire, while formally unsophisticated sculpture was profusely employed in the decoration of churches from the [29_VeronaMadonna] Romanesque period onward. (This sculpture from Verona portraying the Madonna and Child with Two Angels actually dates to the early fourteenth century and yet bears a significant formal kinship to the Four Tetrarchs carved a thousand years earlier.)Increasing commercial and cultural interaction with Byzantium led to panel painting’s resurgence in Italy. [30_Nativity] Byzantine sacred art thus set the stage for masters like Cimabue, Giotto and GESTURE Duccio, providing a conceptual framework which their successors progressively modified by incorporating more realistic modeling and perspective into their work. [31_St. George] A parallel development in sculpture, but in this case with no Byzantine influence, led to Donatello’s refined, classically-influenced medieval realism. (This St.


George is a bronze copy of his marble original, which dates to 1416.)But again, as in classical antiquity, there was a conceptual breakthrough, manifest in the best work of Florentine sculptors from the second half of the fifteenth century. Whereas Donatello’s pictorially-oriented St. George recedes into its spatial setting, Verrocchio’s far more dynamic [32_Verrocchio] Christ and St. Thomas projects outward. (This is a copy of the bronze original completed in 1483. Like the St. George it was created for the decoration of the Church of Orsanmichele in Florence.)In his mature work the greatest Renaissance artist of all wholly eschewed the pictorial orientation which the medieval art of both eastern and western Christendom had bequeathed to the Renaissance. [33_Belvedere] Study of the Belvedere Torso, a Hellenistic masterwork, inspired the male nudes, [34_Sistine ignudo] or ignudi, arrayed on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. Along with his [35_Notte] sculptural masterworks, such as his majestic Medici Chapel figures at San Lorenzo in Florence, that vast mural resulted from a direct re-engagement with antique principles of form. That was the definitive Renaissance breakthrough.[36_LibyanSibylSheet] Few works express the structural essence of the classical tradition as powerfully as Michelangelo’s sheet of studies for the Libyan Sibyl on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Exquisite articulation of human


anatomy, dimensional continuity of form, and the shape orientation I mentioned in connection with Greek sculpture are all evident. Regarding the latter technique, POINT note how the heart-like shape of the model’s left deltoid, or shoulder muscle, corresponds POINT to the shape of the group of small muscles at the foot of the model’s thumb. [37_Libyan Sibyl] Shape orientation allowed Michelangelo, who surely had many such correspondences in mind as he drew from his model, to heighten his figures’ organic coherence. These formal principles, then, were not only relevant to sculpture. Nor were they narrowly prescriptive. They informed the work of [38_Rubens] artists as divergent in style and sensibility as POINT Rubens and his school and [39_Caravaggio] Caravaggio and his. So there is a vital continuity between the great classical works of antiquity and the modern age that dawned with the Renaissance.During the Renaissance and baroque periods, the highly-informed classicism of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo and their successors—the classicism that involves the complex formal techniques we’ve been exploring—always coexisted with more pictorially-oriented modes, some of which might be [40_Vermeer] considered not classical at all, as with Vermeer’s exquisitely refined optical records. In his sculptural decoration of [41_Teresa] the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, Bernini took a strikingly pictorial approach, an approach quite far removed from classical


norms. In the chapel’s dramatically top-lit apse gilt sunrays form the backdrop to his St. Teresa in Ecstasy, with the smiling angel standing at her side poised to pierce her heart. A classical figure should wear his or her vesture rather than vice-versa, but St. Teresa’s body is submerged in a theatrical pile of drapery that takes on a life of its own apart from the form underneath, with the deep folds creating spectacular chiaroscuro effects. Only the saint’s head, hands, and feet are exposed. [42_Cornaros] Bernini’s design makes of the chapel apse a stage, while members of the Cornaro family, situated in what cannot fail to suggest box seats on each side of the sanctuary, observe the spectacle below or converse among themselves. Had he been alive to see it I strongly suspect Michelangelo would have walked out of this show in utter disgust. I also suspect many in this audience have a very different take. The fact remains that the classical norms I’ve been discussing are an essential point of reference in assessing Bernini’s composition.Of course, the classical tradition in sculpture did not disappear with the closing of the Renaissance. While many European sculptors were deeply influenced by the increasingly pictorial trajectory Bernini’s art took over his long career, the fact remains that [43_GW] pound for pound, the finest statuary monument in the United States is Jean-Antoine Houdon’s thoroughly classical George Washington in the Virginia Capitol in Richmond. Houdon, a Frenchman, had a comprehensive


understanding of anatomical structure. The clothes on this life-size portrait statue resemble a membrane beneath which the informing body is readily legible. The border of Washington’s open coat is employed, much as classical drapery would be, to intensify the statue’s spatial presence: POINT It guides the eye from the back of his legs, up his right side, along his chest, and around the back of his neck.The shapes comprising this figure were modeled with great precision and serve to animate it. Moreover, Houdon’s composition, like the Crouching Venus in the Louvre, entails multiple alignments, with a subtle (and utterly artificial) tension generated by the turn of Washington’s head and left leg and the rotation of his torso toward the right arm clasping the walking stick. Washington seems poised not to pounce, like the leonine Parthenon, but to unwind into his spatial setting like the Dying Gaul. Houdon’s powerfully dimensional statue thus dominates the large rotunda space in which it is situated.The tradition Houdon epitomized unquestionably went into decline during the nineteenth century. Houdon’s Italian contemporary [44 Cupid&Psyche] Canova—this is a detail view of his Cupid and Psyche in the Louvre—would develop a highly stylized and extremely influential idiom whose main feature is the pictorial play of light and shade on highly polished and lustrous marble surfaces. Canova’s figures tend to come up short on underlying structural content. [45_Thinker] Though his sculptural approach was far removed from Canova’s


neoclassicism, a preoccupation with optical surface effects rather than a sculptural topography growing out of the figure’s internal structure likewise characterize Rodin’s histrionic attempts to redefine Michelangelo’s terribilità. In other words, Michelangelo’s figures are conceived from the inside out; in Rodin’s work they are conceived from the outside in. This is the version of his famous Thinker at the Musée Rodin in Paris.Photography, which appeared on the scene around the time Rodin was born, played a decisive role in marginalizing the classical idea of the human figure as a thing-in-itself of great complexity—as an entity logically prior to the incidence of natural light though by no means worked out, as the design of drapery shows us, without regard to the effects of light. Thanks to photography’s influence, the figure was ever more relentlessly condemned, like everything else within the artist’s purview, to the status of an optical byproduct of reflected light, and academic training swiftly accommodated the new dispensation.The work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens reflects this new dispensation. He designed [46_Met Hiawatha] his first full-length statue, Hiawatha, in Rome when he was in his early twenties, and it is an impressive work reflecting study of Michelangelo’s ignudi as well as antique masterpieces like the Belvedere Torso. It is not the work of a master. POINT Saint-Gaudens has mishandled the rotation of the figure’s rib cage and abdomen on the pelvis. More to the point, however, Hiawatha is an outlier


in Saint-Gaudens’ oeuvre, and in fact quite antithetical to the three years of Parisian academic training which preceded its creation. The word of advice from his Paris years which seems to have stuck with him over the long term came from the hyper-naturalistic artist [47_Met Joan of Arc] Bastien-Lepage, famous for his Joan of Arc in the Met, who advised Saint-Gaudens to “paint in clay.” That’s not at all what Saint-Gaudens’ Hiawatha is about. It is a dimensionally-oriented, notably monumental work.And yet for his first major American monument, [48_Farragut] the Farragut statue in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park, Saint-Gaudens took for his exemplar not a classical masterwork but [49_St. George] Donatello’s medieval-realist Saint George. The Farragut statue offers [50_Farragut2] a handsome portrait of the hero of Mobile Bay, but in diametric opposition to Houdon’s George Washington, it is intended to be viewed frontally, period, even though it’s situated in a park, not a niche. Realism likewise predominates in [51_Shaw Memorial] Saint-Gaudens’ Colonel Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, in which the only classically modeled figure happens to be Shaw’s magnificent mount. The memorial’s pictorial qualities are sufficiently pronounced that the rifles born by the African-American soldiers under his command call to mind the array of lances in [52_Surrender of Breda] Velasquez’s great painting, the Surrender of Breda.[53_Adams Memorial] Saint-Gaudens’ celebrated memorial to Clover Adams in Washington’s Rock Creek


Cemetery is again totally frontal and pictorially-oriented, with Stanford White’s pedestal serving instead as a backdrop. Here we encounter little more anatomical indication of the form under the drapery than in Bernini’s St. Theresa. This is about as close to painting in clay as a statuary monument can get—I’m referring of course to the clay model in which the bronze originated. And what are we to make of [54_Diana] Saint-Gaudens’ Diana, a larger version of which once crowned Stanford White’s long-gone Madison Square Garden building? A beguilingly naturalistic Art-Nouveau weathervane perhaps?To get an idea of the road Saint-Gaudens did not follow, [55_Kraus Crispus] here’s the beautiful Liberty figure from the Boston Massacre Monument on the Common, the work of Saint-Gaudens’ German-born contemporary Robert Kraus. And while we’re on the subject of Liberty, [56_SoL] Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor is itself far more dimensional in conception than Saint-Gaudens’ mature work, one big reason she avoids perceptual obliteration in her vast spatial setting.So we have a polarity within Western figurative art between dimensionally-oriented classicism and more pictorially-oriented styles for which the classical tradition might or might not serve as a point of reference. It’s worth emphasizing that since ancient times a great many sculptors have absorbed classicism in more or less superficially stylistic terms. Needless to say, Bernini, Canova, and Saint-Gaudens were exceptionally gifted


artists. There is a noteworthy common denominator in their work, however: the artistic methods they adopted were less demanding—requiring less time and labor in the design and modeling of the figure—than those espoused by the likes of Michelangelo and Houdon. But the more pictorial outlook they adopted was also the more natural outlook, given the mechanism of human vision.There’s reason to doubt our civilization will produce another great classical sculptor, at least in the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t mean figurative sculpture is done for. I’m not going to discuss contemporary work this morning, but let me just say that there are obviously sculptors in our midst who are capable of enriching the public realm, the principal concern, I would like to think, of everyone in this room. A sculptor who has spent many hours studying classical masterworks may not be able to produce work on that level, but he or she will likely produce better work than would have eventuated without such study. Modernists have long since concluded that, because photography has nature covered—which, of course, it doesn’t—classical standards of competence in the representation of nature are obsolete. [57_Demoiselles] To be sure, such standards could hardly be permitted to undermine modernity’s, or the modernist artist’s, self-esteem by the time Picasso burst onto the scene after the turn of the last century. But now more than ever, we have


dire need of a pedagogy, both art-historical and strictly artistic, that gauges classicism’s unique significance.We need a pedagogy that challenges pupils to understand an elementary truth that has sailed right by the privileged guardians of our cultural anomie: that in the final analysis classicism does not conjugate as a style, but rather as a distinct way of seeing nature—and the human figure above all—that is unique to Western civilization and has manifested itself in a variety of arts and artistic genres over a very long period of time, immeasurably enriching humanity’s cultural patrimony. We need a pedagogy that recognizes that to speak of classicism’s exceptional status is to speak with regard not only to the art of other cultures but also to the art of the West itself.Because it involves a grasp of form that is unnatural in terms of the way we are hardwired to see the world, classical discipline is especially conducive to representing nature in a way that transcends our ordinary experience of the world. This doesn’t mean pictorial modes of perception are irrelevant to classical representation. Nothing could be further from the truth. The point is that the classical standard, having its origins in the Greeks’ abiding awareness that what we see and what is are two different things, is not only grounded, first and foremost, in reality—but is also the key to the creation of what we might call an intensified reality, a higher reality.


[58_Gaul1] No one comprehended more deeply the miracle of the occupation of space by the animated volume that is man than the Greek sculptor. The Dying Gaul thus captures, about as well as a work of art can, man’s essential identity as the point of intersection between the realms of matter and spirit.Thank you.

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