Hellenistic sculpture
[3] Among his original contributions to the Greek tradition of sculpture were the development of new techniques, the refinement of the representation of human anatomy and emotional expression, and a change in the goals and approaches to art, abandoning the generic for the specific.
The attention paid to man and his inner life, his emotions, his common problems and longings, resulted in a realist style that tended to reinforce the dramatic, the prosaic, and the moving, and with this appeared the first individualized and verisimilitude portraits in Western art.
At the same time, a great expansion of the subject matter occurred, with the inclusion of depictions of old age and childhood, of minor non-Olympian deities and secondary characters from Greek mythology, and of figures of the people in their activities.
He had worked his ideas out from his research with mathematics and music, but it wasn't long before they were applied to the other arts, encouraging an eminently ethical use for artistic creation and fostering collective rather than individual values, which Plato's idealistic philosophy eloquently corroborated.
Even though the Greeks founded a number of colonies around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and maintained contact with several other countries, their cultural reference remained the metropolis, whose society was based on the experience of defined groups living in the most important cities.
[17] With the Macedonian presence on Greek soil, and with Alexander's imperialistic spirit, this more or less static world suffers a profound shake-up and begins to experience a transformation that would make that traditional, communal life a thing of the past.
Alexander founded several cities in his campaigns, encouraging important migrations of Greek populations, including thousands of artists,[18] who went to try their luck in an entirely foreign ethnic and cultural environment, building new societies whose dominant note was insecurity and mobility, at all levels.
[19][20] In the opposite direction, Rome began its bellicose and predatory expansion, and self-confidence, idealism and the old social and religious collective values declined, generating a withdrawal and disenchantment in individuals in face of the moral poverty, political cynicism and violence of the times, aspects that were masked by the search for mere pleasure and formalized artistically through a realism sometimes full of drama.
The diverse origins of the colonists and the notorious Greco-Macedonian xenophobia made lasting and reliable social alliances difficult in the conquered lands, and for the artists, patronage was subject to personal whims and frequent oscillations in the taste of the ruling elite as the political leanings changed.
Socrates before him had suggested that art could express individual pathos, and Aristotle, taking this motto and opposing the general lines of Platonic idealistic thought on aesthetics, approached the issue empirically, trying to discover other uses and meanings for artists' creations.
With this, private taste - which was not always the most refined and cultured - began to prevail over collective conventions, favoring a purely aesthetic practice that widely opened its thematic range to include the picturesque, the trivial, the painful, the comic, the terrifying, the sensual, the shapeless, and the grotesque.
A decline in the credibility of the ancient myths causes moral principles to be personified in other ways, and whereas in earlier art the gods embodied a series of immaterial attributes, now conversely the abstractions themselves, such as courage, forgiveness, wisdom, combativeness, take on human form and are individually deified.
With a centralizing personality, Alexander's charisma promoted a reorganization in the scenes of battles and hunts, starting to highlight the figure of a leader, when before it was usual to treat all the characters with the same visual importance in compositions without a main focus.
The multiplicity of production centers, the great mobility of sculptors among them, and the prevailing stylistic freedom have created a multifaceted and multifocal panorama, where various tendencies coexist and intersect,[29] but the mentality of the Hellenists, and its repercussions on the art of sculpture, can be more or less defined through five dominant lines: I.
There was even a technical terminology borrowed from literary rhetoric to describe the formal elements favored in Hellenistic sculpture: auxesis (amplification), makrology (expansion), dilogia (repetition), pallilogia (recapitulation), megaloprepeia (grandeur), deinosis (intensity), ekplexis (shock), enargeia (vivacity), anthitesis (contrast), and pathos (emotional drama).
Although this historicism was born from a look to the past, it worked on themes that were still valid, and the resulting eclecticism, although aesthetically ambiguous, created a repertoire of new forms and updated old ones that contributed to a greater artistic richness and variety to the period, formulating a new language that was essentially current and cosmopolitan for them [34][35] IV.
[36] V. A cosmopolitan vision, the corollary of the characteristics invoked above and the mark of an expanded and perpetually changing world, subject to a multiplicity of forces, where different nations were seen by the philosophers as fraternal participants in a universal community and individuals as unique agents of their evolution and responsible for their own lives, no longer privileged by birth or nationality, synthesizing a humanism that over time dissolved much of the ancient Greek dislike for the barbarians, opened space for the creation of a liberal, pragmatic, and self-sufficient bourgeoisie - a substantial new market for sculpture - and made possible the production of works where even physical decay, vice, and poverty could be empathetically and comprehensively represented.
Although Athens lost its ancient primacy, it remained active - and in fact started a neoclassical movement through the Neo-Attic School, of great influence on Roman sculpture - along with Olympia, Argos, Delphi, and Corinth, while several new centers were established for example in Messene, Miletus, Priene, Cyprus, Samothrace, and Magnesia.
For quite some time Rhodes was judged to be a hotbed of innovations in sculpture, associating it with the formulation of the "baroque" style of the Hellenistic period, but recent studies have revised this opinion and placed the island's output within a more modest profile of originality, having possibly received the influence of another major center, Pergamos.
Atenodorus, Polydorus and Agesander, three natives of Rhodes, are the authors of one of the most paradigmatic works of the Baroque phase of the Hellenistic period, the Laocoön and His Sons, and of another remarkable set of sculptures found in the cave of the Villa of Tiberius in Sperlonga, depicting scenes from the adventures of Odysseus.
The famous Library, which included one of the world's first museums, was built there, and around it flourished an important group of philosophers, literati, and scientists, who made a very relevant contribution to Hellenistic culture as a whole, but in the field of sculpture, contrary to what had been thought for a long time, recent research indicates that the result was much poorer.
In this period a process of reversion to ancient traditions began, the effect of which spread beyond the borders and determined an anti-Hellenistic reaction also in India, Syria, Arabia, Anatolia and other regions, declining local interest in sculpture.
In sculpture there survive from various sites high quality relics from the Seleucid period, especially in bronze, images of regal figures and diverse gods and statues, and from the Arsacid phase there are reliefs engraved on rocks, of great interest and distinctly hybrid style.
This School flourished until the 5th century A.D.[54] The temples and public buildings of the Hellenistic period generally do not continue the practice of lavish decoration on their facades as in previous phases, with large sculptural groups on the pediments, metopes, acroteria and friezes in relief.
Tanagra, along with other cities in Boeotia, became known from the late 4th century BC onwards for its vast production of polychrome statuettes depicting mostly women and young girls dressed in sophisticated clothes, wearing fans, mirrors, hats, and other fashionable apparatuses, creating a new formal repertoire in the long tradition of ceramic statuary, believed to have been inspired by Menander's comedy.
But from the end of the 4th century, with the greater penetration of Eastern influences, where funeral pomp was appreciated, along with the Etruscan example, coffins for whole bodies and urns destined to receive the ashes of the cremated, in stone and terracotta, multiplied, often with sumptuous work in relief and large dimensions, bearing architectural elements such as colonnades and roof-shaped lids with acroteria, repeating the model of the temple, which gave them the character of an autonomous monument, and in these cases they could leave the closed environments of the tombs and be installed outdoors in necropolis.
In Lebanon, in the royal cemetery of Sidon, several examples of fine workmanship were found, among them the famous Alexander Sarcophagus, so called because it shows scenes from the life of the conqueror in its reliefs, although it was meant to receive the body of a local potentate.
In the last decades, research has intensified enormously, but even though it brings a lot of new and important information, most of the time its interpretation takes place among endless polemics and disputes, overturning one after another apparently established concepts, thus arousing lively opposition from other critical sectors and throwing more confusion into a study that, according to François Chamoux, is far from defining even its starting point.
Let us add that all the recent progress in criticism had - and still has - to face a strong historical prejudice against Hellenistic sculpture, which sees in it only a tasteless degeneration of Greek Classicism, a view that only a few decades ago began to be dissolved to make room for more positive and comprehensive views of its intrinsic merits,[9][78] although some still consider, with their reasons, that technical virtuosity may have replaced content, that aesthetic freedom and the privatization of taste have led to a decline in overall quality, and that the works often suffer from triviality and sentimental excesses, which easily descend into melodrama and give rise to an emphasis on the pathological side of reality.
"[83] It is becoming increasingly clear that the period can no longer be considered merely a confused and unhappy transition between the classical Greek and imperial Roman civilizations, nor analyzed through simplifications and comparisons with other eras, that it deserves specific attention, that its artists showed their importance by preserving alive a venerable tradition while being open to innovations, to the life of the common man and to the future, they have attested their erudition in the creative handling of a great formal repertoire inherited from their predecessors, they have proved their competence by developing new techniques and narrative modes, and they have produced, at their best moments, works of extraordinary refinement and powerful plastic effect.
