Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art
The British Museum
26 March 2015 – 5 July 2015

Panathenaia
The British Museum, BP Lecture Theatre
4 June 2015

Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art, edited by Ian Jenkins,
British Museum Press, 2015, 256pp, £30 (hardback)

 

The word diplomacy has roots in the ancient Greek δίπλωμα, but the practice of it does not seem to come smoothly to modern Greek governments. Just as financial negotiations with the ECB and EU have been conducted in terms of blame, so has the long-running dispute over the ownership of the Parthenon Frieze, or Elgin Marbles, been characterised by rancour and accusation. The recent British Museum exhibition ‘Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art’ could have been an occasion of mutually advantageous celebration, without the abandonment of any claims, but, alas, the Greek authorities refused all cooperation.

Discobolus: Marble statue of a discus-thrower by Myron. Roman copy of a bronze Greek original of the 5th century BC. Height 173cm x width 100cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Critics of Neil MacGregor, the soon-to-retire director of the British Museum – who does have critics along with many more admirers – hold that he is now more concerned with ideas than with beauty. Although curated by the learned and passionate Ian Jenkins, and despite the title, this show might have provided them with ammunition. As the director said at the show’s press launch: ‘Everyone knows the Greek body. It is one of the great achievements of this particular art form that it has become the currency of daily life from Bondi Beach to California and all stations in between. But the point of this exhibition is to show that this isn’t just an artistic tradition, but also connected to a set of ideas and ideals.’ The central argument was that, for the Greeks, ‘Man is the measure of all things’, as the Protagoras put it in the 5th century BC, and for them, the naked, for the most part male body was the ideal of beauty. This was in strong contrast to surrounding civilisations (both geographically and temporally); for Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians and Romans – at least until the last absorbed something of Greek aesthetics – bodies should be clothed, at least below the waist. To the Greeks we owe the distinction between nude and naked, which has persisted throughout Western art. A nude may well be erotic, but aspires to the ideal, while nakedness signifies shame and degradation. Thus athletes display perfect nude bodies, while prisoners are stripped naked.

It will have surprised many visitors to the show that comparativelyfew exhibits were actually classical Greek. This was partly because few original sculptures have survived, but also because the purpose was to show how Greek influence was diffused and how it has persisted. The most spectacular display was the first. On entering one recognised many old friends, crouching Aphrodite and the discus-thrower among them, before realising that many were Roman copies after lost originals. Less familiar was the wonderful, over life-size bronze apoxymenos, an athlete scraping himself down after his exertions, recovered from the sea off Croatia about 25 years ago. This is now thought to date from the late 4th century BC, and is particularly valuable, because bronze, not marble, was the principal material for sculpture. Eyes, nipples and lips would have been coloured. Startlingly, this figure was balanced by a fascistic 20th-century naked youth, intended to show the endurance of Greek influence.

The colouring leads to a matter that was perhaps over-emphasised. Most sculptures were coloured, often garishly, which explains the flat, empty eyeballs that mistakenly became a convention for later copyists. Reference to the use of colour on medieval Gothic sculpture and architecture was a side-track, and a couple of Nottingham alabasters added little to the argument.

Discobolus: Marble statue of a discus-thrower by Myron. Roman copy of a bronze Greek original of the 5th century BC. Height 173cm x width 100cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum

The exhibition was arranged loosely by themes – homosexuality, play acting, drinking, hunting, warfare and so on – rather than chronologically, which was not always effective. Three kouroi, free-standing striding youths, illustrating the progress from formulaic Egyptian to the Greek ideal by way of Cyprus, could have been an effective introduction, but came a room or two in, and other than them there was little answer to the great questions, why Greece, and whence came the Greek aesthetic? How did it evolve from the primitive figurine of a priapic Ajax, circa 700 BC to the near perfection of the apoxymenos? Similarly, while it was enchanting to see Herakles become a companion of the Buddha, those who knew nothing of Gandharan sculpture might have been puzzled to know just how, and where chronologically, it fitted.

The real joy of the show was the opportunity to see six of the Parthenon marbles, three sculptures in the round and three metopes, close to and at eye-level. This is how they were seen when they arrived in London in 1807, and it became very easy to understand why they made such an impact. When high on the Parthenon or less high, but still elevated, in the BM’s 1930s Duveen Room presentation, their quality as individual sculptures could never be seen to such effect, separate from the cumulative effect as a composition. They, and especially the river god Ilissos from the west pediment, recently returned from his Russian visit, were the undoubted stars of the show.

The Duveen Room might well have seemed a little forlorn during the show, but at least on the evening of June 4 it came into its own, with the second performance of Thomas Hewitt Jones’ cantata Panathenaia. The current ordering of the frieze there is the work of Dr Jenkins, and it has been accepted for the installation in the Athens Acropolis Museum. He says that he has ‘rearranged the musical score of the frieze so that it could be played in the sequence in which it was intended’. Pheidias, the sculptor, represents the annual procession through the city to the temple. As an introduction, Dr Jenkins explained how the compositional elements of the frieze are bound together like the harmonic blending of symphonic motif, with figures deployed like notes on a stave, and repeated themes in the scenes and episodes.

A further, more romantic, introduction was the reading by the poet Lucy Tregear of Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn. The cantata, to a libretto by Paul Williamson, not only tells the story of the Great Panathenaia festival in eight movements for soprano, mezzo-soprano, choir and orchestra, but puts it in its setting, both mythological and at the heart of Periclean Athens

The piece was commissioned by the violinist Hugo Ticciati for his Festival O/Modernt in Stockholm, and first performed there in 2014. At the British Museum, the O/Modernt Kammarorkester, conducted by William Kunhardt, was joined by Voces8, soprano Paulina Pfeiffer and mezzo Karolina Blixt. Although the acoustics of the Duveen Room were harsh and could be unkind, especially to the soprano, the music was powerfully moving in that setting. The swaying shadows of the musicians played against the frieze like dancing bacchantes.