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Klaus Junker, Adrian Stähli (Ed.), Original Und Kopie: Formen Und
Klaus Junker, Adrian Stähli (Ed.), Original Und Kopie: Formen Und
Klaus Junker, Adrian Stähli (Ed.), Original Und Kopie: Formen Und
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Klaus Junker, Adrian Stähli (ed.), Original und Kopie: Formen und
Konzepte der achahmungen in der antiken Kunst. Akten des
Kolloquiums in Berlin, 17.-19. Februar 2005. Wiesbaden: Dr.
Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2008. Pp. vi, 272; 67 p. of plates. ISB.
9783895006296. €78.00.
Adrian Stähli's opening chapter conducts, from a new position, a trial against
the method known to art historians as copy criticism (Kopienkritik). A case
study of the Samsun Boy shows how this bronze statue and other replicas
inspired by several Polykleitan statues (Diskophoros, Hermes and Herakles and
their late Hellenistic hybridizations) cannot be used to reconstruct any of the
lost originals unless arbitrary decisions are taken; the same applies for the
Croatian Apoxyomenos, the Idolino and so on. This is mainly because "copies"
are actually moving in a continuum between replication and invention1 and, on a
different level, because we know so little about the polychromy of both
originals and copies. The author accepts, with recent research (E. Gazda, P.
Stewart) that Roman sculpture is never purely imitative. He states (to translate):
"decisive for the conception of a statue was its aesthetical and ethical adequacy
to the needs and demands of the client, its goal, subject and future exhibition
place, and not the fact that it reproduced, and recognizably so, the work of a
famous Greek sculptor" (p. 23); R.M. Kousser, Hellenistic and Roman Ideal
Sculpture, Cambridge, 2008, speaks also of "adaptation for context". For Stähli,
copying is ultimately a problem of workshop practice--the crux of the matter
being how "style quotes" help to differentiate mass produced copies of which
many are then re-copied as originals. Like J. Elsner and J. Trimble ("If you need
an actual statue", Art History 29.2/2006), he warns that the term "copy" has
become utterly insufficient to describe Roman sculpture.
Sascha Kansteiner's point of departure is that some statues that truly were copies
of famous originals have been demoted by modern research to the status of
classicizing and eclectic works. He moves on to show that, for statues of boys
and youths as athletes from Hellenistic and Roman Imperial times, it is actually
characteristic for the sculptor to obtain inspiration from two different Greek
models at once. Two previously unrecognized instances of this artistic
behaviour are also identified. They are a torso in Berlin (Pergamonmuseum Inv.
Sk. 1942) copied from the Dresden Boy, with a matching head, after the
Doryphoros, in Madrid (MAN, Inv. 2002/114/2); and an athlete statue in Castle
Gandolfo combining a Westmacott Ephebe body with an Idolino head. This, for
Kansteiner, testifies to the remarkable connoisseurship in elite Roman circles.
Christian Kunze puts forward a very appealing idea: the rococo of late
Hellenistic sculpture is neither the symptom of a culture of indulgence nor the
expression of some change in mentality, but the consequence of the adoption in
the Greek world of the Roman attitude to decorative art. The use in sculpture of
Dionysiac and erotic themes, together with mythological subjects, is thus
imported from the Roman world and responds to a new social contextualization
of sculpture by means of specific commissioning and exhibiting habits. Whereas
late Hellenistic Delos and Priene show no trace of the typical rococo (as defined
by Klein in 1921), Casa degli Capitelli Figurati and Casa del Fauno in Pompeii
(and later the Oplontis villa, Casa di Marco Lucrezio or Casa di Loreio
Tiburtino in Pompeii) already organize these objects in coherent decorative
programs. This opens up a thoroughly new perspective on how Romans changed
Greek art.
Helga Bumke's article argues that Greek cult statues were never directly copied
in Roman times so as to not impair their sacredness. The case study focuses on
the cult statue of Nemesis from Rhamnous. Bumke corrects Despinis's
reconstruction of the statue, enhances the list of identified copies provided by
him in 1971, and shows that only the statue's body was copied, and only at a
smaller scale.2 Such copies of Greek cult statues' bodies, she hints, might be
suspected in many statues of the imperial family, as it happened with the
Nemesis from Butrint (lost since 1943), for which a re-examination of the
archaeological records shows that it must have borne the head of empress Livia.
Frank Rumscheid shows that classical terracottas generally find little inspiration
in major statuary, but that when they do, such copies are more innovative than
those in marble. On the other hand, no major marble type has as yet been proven
to be a copy of a terracotta original. Rumscheid analyzes the Smyrna terracottas
(and dismisses as fake a sleeping Ariadne from Munich, Staatl. Ant. Inv. NI
9388), the Domus Tiberiana group, the Tanagra, and the Myrina group
(especially the Aphrodite types Louvre-Naples, Cnidus and Anadyomene). The
view of the famous Priene Spinario-type statuette as depicting an African is
rejected, while the terracottas from the peristyle-house in the Hanghaus 1 in
Ephesus, copying Aphrodite types and Eros-Psyche groups, are reinterpreted as
votive.
Ralf Krumeich scrutinizes the way a prestigious past can be visualized to shape
the political present and the image of the city. Many of the 33 preserved
portraits of Attic kosmetai (administrators of the gymnasion) from the 2nd and
3rd c. AD are inspired by the contemporary portraiture of the Roman urban
elite, and ultimately the imperial court; but, more interestingly, eight of them
hark back to Classical and early Hellenistic times. They were exposed in key
spots of the city: the Agora, the Acropolis, and particularly Dionysus's theatre,
which becomes the main stage of programmatic exhibition. The balanced
discussion can be bracketed by R.R.R. Smith's analysis (JRS 88, 1998) and,
after the Berlin colloquium, E. d'Ambra's (in J. Hurwit, J.M.Barringer, (eds.)
Periklean Athens and its Legacy, Austin 2005).
Harald Mielsch's poignant case study illustrates how, after two hundred years,
any original can become hard to comprehend for a copyist. Alexander's
whiskers in the famous mosaic of the battle of Issus, absent from the sculptural
representations, must have been then nothing other than the misunderstanding
by the artist in Pompeii of the hatchings typical for the mix of linear and pictural
representations at the end of the fourth c. BC, on the face of the painted
Alexander. To prove this, Mielsch discusses the hunter to the right in the hunt
frieze in Vergina, recently published with excellent photographs by Saatsoglou-
Paliadeli in 2004 (which supplements the older work of Andronikos).
Burkhardt Wesenberg and Helmut Kyrieleis tackle the imitative processes that
led to the invention of the Doric frieze. Wesenberg reviews the Vitruvius-
inspired "petrification" doctrine and adds to it new evidence from the
publication (by Petropoulos in 2001) of the stone elements in the temple of Ano
Mazaraki (700BC), in an instructive contrast with the wooden heroon at
Lefkandi. His dismissal of the most important recent critiques against this
doctrine (Barletta in 2001 and M. Wilson Jones in 2002) is, however,
undeservedly curt. Kyrieleis, on the other hand, seeks, in the footsteps of M. L.
Bowen (BSA 45, 1950), the origin of the trygliph frieze in Mycenaean
architecture (the palmette frieze from Knossos and Mycenae, the alabaster frieze
from Tiryns). As, for example, the form of the tripod (Archanes publication by
Sakellarakis 1997), the capital and, as Kyrieleis shows, the fluting, the frieze too
was taken over into the ornamental vocabulary of Greek architecture from
Mycenaean times as a recourse to an exalted model from heroic times; and to be
sure the oldest and most important Greek sanctuaries are built in places with
Bronze Age occupation.
Ortwin Dally proposes that inscriptions with no internal indications for dating
can be dated, as sculptures are, by style criteria. However, he does not engage
the usual discussion of the evolution of sigma and rho forms; rather, in a more
philological approach, he discusses the intentional transfer of archaizing words
and syntax from original inscriptions to copies. Case studies are the Croesus
inscription on the columns of the temple of Artemis, Attic psephismata, the
Acropolis inscription on the victory of Athenians against the Boeotians and
Chalkidians, and the inscription of the Messenians in Delphi.
The work of the two editors must again be saluted; the book is not only a first-
class piece of scholarship, but also arguably the most important recent effort to
reconcile Anglo-Saxon and German directions in the study of ancient copies and
originals.
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