Zeus and Ganymede, Temple of Zeus at Olympia

This terracotta statue of Zeus (c. 470 BCE) transporting Ganymede to Mount Olympus, where eternal youth will be his, has always struck me as slightly absurd. Both characters adopt stiff, artificial poses, and the scene is unconvincing either as rape or as seduction. However, I believe it is an effective acroterion, and I can well assume it looks better from below looking up. Zeus' archaic smile is in full bloom, and although the figures may be a bit more vigorous than their Archaic counterparts, it seems to herald the end of one style rather than the opening of another.

Thematically, the piece fits into a program, of sorts, at the Olympia site, where pederastic motifs associate with the theme of athletics and with the story of Pelops and the chariot race with king Oinomaus. Pelops was beloved of Poseidon, the god of the sea. Pindar, as Judith Barringer points out, links both couples in his first ode [Pelops is the son of Tantalos]:

Meet is it for a man that concerning gods he speak honourably; for the
reproach is less. Of thee, son of Tantalos, I will speak contrariwise
to them who have gone before me, and I will tell how when thy father
had bidden thee to that most seemly feast at his beloved Sipylos,
repaying to the gods their banquet, then did he of the Bright
Trident[6], his heart vanquished by love, snatch thee and bear thee
behind his golden steeds to the house of august Zeus in the highest,whither again on a like errand came Ganymede in the after time. (Pindar, Olympian Ode #1, translated by Ernest Myers)

The word catamite, incidentally, derives from the name of Ganymede.

The Bronze Krater of Vix

The Vix Krater, around 500 BCE

This huge krater was found near Chatillon-sur-Seine and is still in the little folkloric museum there. Somehow, the Louvre failed to get its paws around this thing, which may have been described by Herodotus himself.

It is a volute krater, identified by the volute (scrolled) handles. The decoration is especially rich. The elaborate volutes are decorated with snaky Gorgons, one of whom was peeping out of the ground in 1952, leading to the discovery of this magnificent vessel. Running around the top is an elegant frieze which caps a continuous band of warriors accompanying horses and chariots. The design of these is boldly stated and carefully patterned with especially fine horses.

Herodotus 1.70:

This was one reason why the Lacedaemonians were so willing to make the alliance: another was, because Croesus had chosen them for his friends in preference to all the other Greeks. They therefore held themselves in readiness to come at his summons, and not content with so doing, they further had a huge vase made in bronze, covered with figures of animals all round the outside of the rim, and large enough to contain three hundred amphorae, which they sent to Croesus as a return for his presents to them. The vase, however, never reached Sardis. Its miscarriage is accounted for in two quite different ways. The Lacedaemonian story is that when it reached Samos, on its way towards Sardis, the Samians having knowledge of it, put to sea in their ships of war and made it their prize. But the Samians declare that the Lacedaemonians who had the vase in charge, happening to arrive too late, and learning that Sardis had fallen and that Croesus was a prisoner, sold it in their island, and the purchasers (who were, they say, private persons) made an offering of it at the shrine of Juno: the sellers were very likely on their return to Sparta to have said that they had been robbed of it by the Samians. Such, then, was the fate of the vase.
Classics, MIT

On the Kouroi

Kenneth's Clark's The Nude is a classic study of this classical theme. Here is an extended passage in which he explains the role of Apollo and the significance of the Kritios Boy.

The Greeks had no doubt that the god Apollo was like a perfectly beautiful man. He was beautiful because his body conformed to certain laws of proportion and so partook of the divine beauty of mathematics. The first great philosopher of mathematical harmony had called himself Pythagoras, son of the Pythian Apollo. So in the embodiment of Apollo everything must be calm and clear; clear as daylight, for Apollo is the god of light. Since justice can exist only when facts are measured in the light of reason, Apollo is the god of justice; sol justitiae. But the sun is also fierce; neither graceful athlete nor geometrician’s dummy, nor an artful combination of the two, will embody Apollo, the python slayer, the vanquisher of darkness. The god of reason and light superintended the flaying of Marsyas.

But the earliest nudes in Greek art, traditionally known as Apollos, are not beautiful. They are alert and confident, members of a conquering race, “the young, lighthearted masters of the waves.” But they are stiff, with a kind of ritual stiffness; the transitions between their members are abrupt and awkward, and they have a curious flatness, as if the sculptor could think only of one plane at a time. They are notably less natural and less easy than the Egyptian figures upon which, to a large extent, they are modeled and which, over a thousand years earlier, had achieved a limited perfection. Stage by stage, in less than a century they grew into models that were to satisfy your western notion of beauty till the present day. They have two characteristics, and only two, that foreshadow this momentous evolution. They are clear and they are ideal. The shapes they present are neither pleasant in themselves nor comfortably related to one another, but each one is firmly delineated and aspires to a shape that the measuring eye can grasp. Historians who have written in the belief that all art consists in a striving for realism have sometimes expressed surprise that the Greeks, with their vivid curiosity, should have approached nature so reluctantly; that in the fifty years between the Moscophoros and the funeral stele of Aristion, there should have been so little ‘progress.’ This is to misconceive the basis of Greek art. It is fundamentally idea. It starts from the concept of a perfect shape and only gradually feels able to modify that shape in the interests of imitation. And the character of the shapes chosen is expressed in the word used to describe the earliest form of Greek art, geometric; a dreary, monotonous style and at first ill adapted to realization in the round. But the head yields easily to geometric treatment, and already in the most archaic heads of Apollo we see how geometry can be combined with plastic vitality. In a century the same unifying power will subordinate the dispersed and intractable forms of the body.

So Apollo is clear and ideal before he is beautiful. How and when did the transformation take place? Ranging in a hypothetical order of time the kourai—the nude male figures—of the sixth century, we see the transitions from shape to shape becoming smoother, and absorbing, in the process, details that had been left as decorative notations. Then, quite suddenly, in about the year 480, there appears before us the perfect human body, the marble figure from the Akropolis known as the Ephebe of Kritios. Of course we was not really a sudden, isolated creation. We have only a slender reason to attribute him to the sculptor Kritios, and we have even less reason to suppose that Kritios was the initiator of so momentous a change. Literary sources give the name of Pythagoras of Rhegium as the sculptor who ‘first gave rhythm and proportion to his statues.’ All the evidence suggests that the new concept of form would have been first expressed in bronze and not in marble; and the Apollo of Piombino, although slightly earlier and stiffer, may give some notion of what had been going on in the first twenty years of the fifth century. But since almost every bronze statue made in Greece in classic times has been melted down, the Ephebe of Kritos remains the first beautiful nude in art. Here for the first time we feel the passionate pleasure in the human body familiar to all readers of Greek literature, for the delicate eagerness with which the sculptor’s eye has followed every muscle or watched the skin stretch and relax as it passes over a bone could not have been achieved without a heightened sensuality... [T]wo powerful emotions ... dominated the Greek games and are largely absent from our own: religious dedication and love. These gave to the cult of physical perfection a solemnity and a rapture that have not been experienced since. Greek athletes competed in somewhat the same poetical and chivalrous spirit as knights, before the eyes of their loves, jousted in the lists; but all that pride and devotion which medieval contestants expressed through the flashing symbolism of heraldry was, in the games of antiquity, concentrated in one object, the naked body. No wonder that it has never again been looked at with such a keen sense of its qualities, its proportion, symmetry, elasticity, and aplomb; and when we consider that this passionate scrutiny of the individual was united to the intellectual need for geometric form, we can estimate what a rare coincidence brought the male nude to perfection.

Perfection hangs by a thread and is weighted in the jeweler’s balance. We must therefore submit the classic nude, at its first appearance, to an examination that may seem fastidious, until we remember how the rhythmic organization of this form was still dominating sculpture 2300 years after its invention. When, a page ago, I used the Apollo of Piombino as an example of bronze casting, how strikingly it brought out the classic character of the Kritios youth! In twenty years a basic alteration of style has taken place. It can be illustrated by examining the lower part of the torso—to be precise, the junction of the hips, abdomen, and thorax. One of the most peculiar features of the early kouroi—for example, the Apollo of Tenea—is their thin, flat, stomachs. They conform to a sharp, ogival rhythm, which we may describe as Gothic. The chief areas—thighs and stomach—are inscribed within elongated ovals. Gothic nudes, dominated by the pointed-arch form, do in fact display very much the same characteristics, and one of the earliest nude studies that have come down to us, a drawing in the Ufizzi from the circle of Uccello, combines Gothic and naturalistic forms with a remarkable likeness to a sixth century kouros. In the Apollo of Piombino these Gothic forms are less marked. The thorax is of classic rectangularity, but it bears an uneasy relationship to the flat triangle of the stomach. Like Perrault’s facade of the Louvre, we feel that a richly classical upper story is resting on a base too stiff and thin to support it. In the Kritios youth this uneasiness has vanished altogether. The legs and divisions of the torso flow together with the same full and fruitful rhythm. How is this achieved? To begin with, the hips are not parallel, but since he rests his weight on his left leg, that hip is slightly higher. The full implications of this pose are more easily seen from behind, for, as usual in early Greek sculpture, the back is more naturalistic and more plastically developed than the front. But even from the front we can perceive, for the first time, that subtle equilibrium of outline and axis which is to be the basis of classical art. This delicate balance of movement gives the torso its unity of rhythm. It also allows the sculptor to solve the problem of the abdomen by realizing it as a dominant, as opposed to a recessive form: and this has involved an anatomical emphasis that was to be exaggerated to the point of distortion in the next fifty years. I refer to the muscles that lie above the pelvis and mark the junction of the thighs and the torso. They are largely absent from archaic sculpture, and since it seems unlikely that between the years 500 and 450 Greek athletes really did develop these muscles to such an unequaled extent, we must reckon them chiefly a device by which the rhythmic structure of the torso might be set in motion, and its lower half supported by two buttresses, before descending to the arc of the abdomen. They were elements in the classic architecture of the human body, and as such they lasted as long as metopes and triglyphs.

All this we discover in the youth of Kritios when we compare him to the figures that precede him. But it is not obtruded. He is so straight-forwardly beautiful that we do not willingly use him to demonstrate the mechanics of form or the rules of an aesthetic theory. To the sculptors of the next generation this grace and naturalness was a defect, or at least a danger. It is as if they foresaw the frivolous beauty of Hellenistic art, and wished to defend themselves against it as long as possible” (Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, Doubleday Anchor Books, Garden City, New York, 1959, pp 55, 57, 61-3).

Fallen Warriors, Pediment, Aphaia Temple

Fallen Warrior, West pediment, Aphaia Temple, c. 490 (left)

Fallen Warrior, East Pediment, Aphaia Temple, c. 480 (right)

These two warriors have both fallen in battle. Both are dying. Yet their response to this calamity is presented by the artist--surely two different artists-in opposite ways, demonstrating, perhaps as well as can be done, the distinction between the grand Archaic style and the new Classical style.

The warrior from the west pediment [490] has been struck in the chest with a spear (of bronze or wood, now missing) which he grasps with his right hand while he props himself up on his left elbow. His expressionless face, sprucely set off by the beaded bonnet of his hair, stares out at the viewer. His right leg is arched over the left, giving a clear, almost delicate silhouette, evocative of the crisp figures of early Attic red-figure vase paintings. Rather than suffering from an excruciatingly painful wound, he seems to be posing for a dignified court tableau.

The fallen warrior from the east pediment [480] is another matter. As life ebbs away and he sinks toward the earth, he tries futilely, sword (now missing) in hand, to raise himself. His eyes narrow as his consciousness fades; his mouth is slightly open as his breathing grows difficult; he stares at the earth. His enfeebled movements contrast poignantly with his massive physical frame in which, for practically the first time, the individual details of musculature are fused and unified by a softening of the lines of divisions between them, and by increasingly subtle modulation of the surface from which one senses the presence of a unified physical force emanating from within the body. The sculptor who conceived the figure had obviously thought carefully about exactly what it meant. He must have asked himself what it must really be like when a powerful warrior is wounded and falls. What does he feel? How should we feel? And what meaning is there in our feeling? The warrior from the west pediment seems more like a recumbent kouros; his companion from the east pediment is a character in a drama (Pollitt 19-20).

The earlier, East pediment figure is, indeed, posing. "Look," he seems to say, "I have an arrow in my chest, which I will now remove." The sculpture is highly patterned and arranged, so that each of the limbs echoes the others, and each creates a singular triangle pattern repeated throughout the design. This is art expressed, as so much Greek art from the Geometric through the Archaic periods had been expressed, through repetition, design, parallel rhythms, and geometric shapes played out across the whole.

The later, West pediment figure, is dying, at the last moments of breath and consciousness. He has just tried to struggle valiantly up, it seems, but has collapsed. There is some awkwardness about the midriff-the artist is unused to depicting a body twisting around-but the scene is gripping and emotional.

Both of these pieces may be compared and contrasted with, for example, earlier depictions of the dead from the prothesis scenes of the Dipylon Vase, and with later manifestations of the theme found in the Dying Gaul.

The Strangford Apollo

The development of the kouros figure is marked by the tendency to increase both the physical naturalism of the male figures-they look increasingly real-and a growing humanity. The Strangford Apollo (500-490) is more of a human than a god-it is not easy to tell with some of the earlier kouroi. The modeling of the anatomy is getting closer to the real thing, but the face remains impassive, except for that Archaic smile, and the hair remains finely patterned. He has in common with all his kouroi ancestors the frontal, hieratic pose that removes him from inhabiting the same space we do as we look at him. He never looks back.

The Anavyssos Kouros

The Anavyssos Kouros, c. 520

Stand and have pity at the tomb of the dead Kroisos, whom raging Ares slew as he fought in the front line.

The kouroi figures (kouroi is plural for kouros) develop through the decades of the Archaic period from the delineation characteristic of the New York kouros to the modeling found on the Anyvassos kouros, which is dated to about 520. He marks the grave of one named Kroisos, who died in battle; the inscription is above. He is not, certainly, a portrait, but, rather, an idealized picture of a young man. Similar kouroi were placed at the graves of old men, again, not to portray the individual in life, but to suggest the ideal model of a man at the peak of his beauty and power. The modeling is beginning to show actual muscles, and the articulation of the limbs is far more naturalistic. For some (i.e. Woodford) the enhanced realism of the body clashes with the highly patterned and traditional treatment of the hair. It doesn't bother me, but, then, what do I know?

The man who looks on a kouros finds himself being looked upon by a figure that is male and impassive: here is a male who stands firm, unbending, and constant. Such a figure makes a dutiful servant to the gods or to the city, but also an image of the unageing constancy of the gods themselves.
...
Where the New York kouros is made up of flat planes, the Anavyssos kouros, though as tightly constructed, bears few traces of its origins in a block of stone—a contrast particularly marked in the treatment of the buttocks. Where the New York kouros simplifies the face so that only eyes, nose, and mouth impinge on the rounded surface, the Anavyssos kouros gives separate form to cheeks and chin. None of these features make the Anavyssos kouros into an individual, rather than a type, but they enrich the reference to the male body and in doing so enrich the sense of potential, the sense that this sculpted man belongs to the same world as the viewer. They show something of the scope that the naked male form offered to sculptors, who, in hundreds of kouroi produced during the sixth century, explored different ways of bringing out what it was to be a man” (Osborne, 81-2).

2 Archaic Korai

Acropolis 594, on the left.

The Chian Kore, on the right.

Korai is plural for kore, meaning maiden or daughter, the always clothed feminine figures of the Archaic period. These korai from the Athenian Acropolis, date to the latter part of the sixth century BCE. They wear a sleeved chiton and himation, or cloak, draped diagonally over the body, and would originally have held an offering in their extended hand. Both pieces revel in the fall of drapery around the bodies of the young girls, revealing both the breasts and the legs beneath. Our eyes engage with the folds as they make their sinuous tour of the bodies, which are made to appear lively and energized. Certainly, these girls are fancier and freer than the Peplos Kore, and their finery is more elegant. The Chian girl's hair is in an elaborate do. They were both painted brilliantly; paint remains on the Chian maid's dress show it was dark blue with a reddish band at the neck. Her cloak was originally spangled with red and blue spirals and triangles.

It is conceivable that we are getting increasingly towards more individualistic (rather than idealistic) representation.

The Peplos Kore

The Peplos Kore, from the Athenian Acropolis, c. 530 BCE

Here she is, truly one of the most delightful creations of all, wearing a peplos (hence her name) and still sporting some of her original paint. Her garment is heavy (wool), modeled to reveal both its own texture and something of the feminine form beneath. It is gathered at the waist where it is cinched by a belt, and pinned at the shoulders by fibulae. Her hair is braided elegantly and falls in three braids on either side of her breasts and arms.

Clearly, the artist is interested in that garment; as simple as it is, as plainly as it falls around the girl, it seems to reveal not only her body but. perhaps, something of her character. We are not wrong, it seems to tell us, to take her for what we see - a simple, charming, delicate young girl. It also reveals the artist's interest in the problems of modeling. This will become of very great interest to artists from now on, who will explore the contours of the body by way of the fall of garments around it in endlessly fascinating ways.

The peplos permits the artist to make a vertical base for the upper body. The gentle modeling only just reveals aspects of the anatomy beneath. The upper half is far more alive and revealing. The archaic smile seems not only pleasant, as usual, but personal, even quirky.

It is likely that the original statue was intended as some sort of votive offering, perhaps to Athena. Her left hand, now broken off, was extended - the shoulder above is lifted slightly - and may have held something for the goddess. However much the artist labored for Athena, however, he labored as much or more for the girl.