Significant Others: The Male-Female Pair in Greek Geometric Art Author(s): Susan Langdon Source: American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 102, No. 2 (Apr., 1998), pp. 251-270 Published by: Archaeological Institute of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/506468 Accessed: 06/05/2010 10:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aia. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
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Significant Others: The Male-Female Pair in Greek Geometric Art SUSAN LANGDON
The visual arts of the Geometric period are important sources for reconstructing social realities and transcendent cultural values of early Iron Age Greece. Surviving vase paintings, sculptures, and other figural media provide evidence for such an undertaking, yet defy consistent and satisfying interpretations, either of freestanding sculpture or figural scenes. The problem arises from factors both inherent and external to the art. Displaying a relatively narrow range of types and short on detail, Geometric figural works frequently lack clear Bronze Age precedents or Archaic successors. The penchant for surface simplicity so dominates the style that even in cases where multiple elements accumulate, as in extended battle scenes or group sculptures, there is only a thin network of associations with which to
sustain an interpretation. The controversies of Geometric art are basic, well known, and persistent. Do references to epic or myth exist, particularly in Attic art? How do funerary images on kraters and amphoras relate to the deceased the vessels commemorate? Are actual eighth-century rituals and social life depicted, or does the art reflect only a vague "heroizing" atmosphere? The lack of scholarly consensus on fundamental social and religious reference points makes the consideration of external factors in the creation of Geometric art equally challenging. Are artistic developments to be linked, for instance, with the innovations of a beleaguered aristocracy, the new interest groups of the rising poleis, or the traditions of a relatively peaceful status quo enduring to the end of the century? What are the respective roles of craftsmen-artists and their patrons in formulating style and imagery? Modern reconstructions of early Greek art and society depend in no small measure on a distilled canon of important Geometric art works that was formed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from materials recently excavated at Olympia, Delphi, the Athenian Acropolis, the Kerameikos cemetery, and other major sites. The objects judged by prevailing standards to be aesthetically finest and therefore most significant formed the basis of a common body of works, often cited and illustrated, in which were read the critical features that defined the Geometric age and its use of imagery. Just as this canon continues in important ways to inform our understanding of the period, so the process of its creation, involving the neglect, loss, or dismissal of objects and information, has exerted an equally great influence on modern scholarship. The accepted corpus of Geometric art seems to offer only meager prelude for the Archaic explosion of motifs. Instructive in this matter is Theodora Rombos's study of motifs in Late Geometric Attic pottery. Of her 39 motifs with hu-
* This study concerns an aspect of Geometric culture that was not fully treated in a recent exhibition of Geometric art,"FromPastureto Polis:Art in the Age of Homer," for reasons that are explored below.Some of the ideas were presented in 1995 at the 97th Annual Meeting of the
Archaeological Institute of America in San Diego (AJA100 [1996]397-98, abstract)and at the 13thInternationalBronze Congress in Cambridge,Massachusetts(1996).I especially appreciate the thoughtful comments of two anonymous AJAreviewers.
Abstract After a century of scholarship, Greek Geometric figural art continues to pose fundamental problems of identification and interpretation.The intractablenature of basic iconographic questions is in part the result of the historiographiccircumstancesthat formed the present canon of major and minor Geometric works. This study focuses on the specific iconographic theme of the male-female couple and traces its disappearance from histories of Geometric art as a result of academic and cultural biases operating in the early 20th century.Two examples, a pair of terracotta heads from Amyklai and a group of misidentified female figurines from Geometric bronze tripods, illustrate the progressive marginalization of the theme from the art historical mainstream. An inquiry into the origins of scholarship on Geometric sculpture demonstrates how crucial contextual information could be lost and what its restoration can offer in terms of a richer corpus of Geometric iconography with which to approach the challenges of interpretation. Emphasizing the iconographic flexibility of Geometric style, this study suggests that the image of a warrior with female companion was newly introduced in the mid-eighth century by elite patronage and found widespread social utility in the changing world of early Iron Age Greece.*
251 American Journal of Archaeology 102 (1998) 251-70
252
SUSAN LANGDON
[AJA 102
Fig. 2. Female head from Amyklai, frontal view. Athens, National Museum 4382. (Courtesy Deutsches Archiiologisches Institut, Athens, neg. 3347)
Fig. 1. Male head from Amyklai,frontal view.Athens, National Museum4381. (CourtesyDeutschesArchdiologisches Institut, Athens, neg. 72/364) man subjects, fully 82% decreased dramatically or disappeared altogether in Early Protoattic painting.1 It is difficult not to see Geometric to a certain extent as a style that had fully run its course by 700 with little but formal principles to bequeath to the next generations. The question arises whether these disappearing motifs and interpretive problems are linked in some way to a larger loss of cultural context. In other words, might not the very categories 1 T. Rombos, The Iconographyof Attic Late GeometricII Pot-
tery(Jonsered 1988) esp. 35-37, table 1.
by which figural motifs are defined, interpreted, and tracked have arisen ultimately from the selective process by which Geometric art was first admitted into a preexisting history of Greek art? It is imperative to discover to what extent our understanding of Geometric art is shaped by century-old perceptions. One particular iconographic theme, the malefemale pair, offers a case in point. In an important assessment of early Greek figural scenes, Klaus Fittschen examined 26 examples of paired figures and concluded that nearly all of them date to the seventh century and represent divine or mythic couples, thus situating the theme squarely within the familiar iconographic landscape of the Archaic period.2 Closer study of overlooked examples of Late Geometric sculpture shows how the academic establishment of the late 19th and early 20th centuries consigned the theme to scholarly oblivion. This reassessment demonstrates that paired male and female figures were well known in the Geometric period, suggests how and perhaps why this fact became lost through prevailing cultural and scholarly biases, and finally shows how restoring the motif 2 K. Fittschen, Untersuchungenzum Beginn der Sagendarstellungen bei den Griechen (Berlin 1969) 132-42.
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THE MALE-FEMALEPAIR IN GREEK GEOMETRIC ART
253
Fig. 4. Female head from Amyklai,profile view.(Courtesy Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Athens, neg. 3348)
Fig. 3. Male head from Amyklai, profile view. (Courtesy Deutsches ArchaiologischesInstitut, Athens, neg. 72/365) opens new paths to understanding both Geometric and Archaic art. THE AMYKLAI HEADS
The first case history concerns two terracotta heads from the Apollo sanctuary at Amyklai in Laconia, one male and one female, which were excavated in 1890 and published by Christos Tsountas in 1892 (figs. 1-5).3 The heads are 11.5 and 8.0 cm high, and the total height of the male may have approached 40 cm.4 Tsountas noted that the two heads had been found together near the peribolos wall along with a headless female terracotta and fragments of Ar-
SC. Tsountas, "EKtoo Ago•xaiou," ArchEph 1892, 1-26, at cols. 13-14, pl. 4.4-5. Male head, Athens, National Museum 4381; female head, Athens, National Museum 4382. 4 E. Georgoulaki, "Letype iconographique de la statue cultuelle d'ApollonAmyklaios:Un emprunt oriental?"Ker-
chaic aryballoi. Not far to the north were found Geometric sherds, some of which composed the wellknown pyxis decorated with male dancers with lyre and scorpion, two terracotta animal heads, and a wheelmade animal body. He concluded that the two human heads were Early Archaic. The two figures are remarkably alike. Their dissimilarities, aside from their different headgear and earrings on the female head, lie primarily in the treatment of the eyes. The female head's eyes are painted slightly lower in relation to her eyebrows and the right pupil is not perfectly centered. Her eyebrows are straighter, less arching than those of her male counterpart, an impression that is somewhat heightened by the loss of the nose. Her upper lip curves up just perceptibly at the ends. The peculiar odyssey of the heads through the scholarly literature began in 1906 when in their Catalogueof theSpartaMuseumMarcus Tod and Alan Wace cited the pair as Late Minoan/Mycenaean, a dating with which Adolf Furtwingler in 1918 concurred.5 In 1927 Ernst Buschor drew a radical distinction between the heads. He identified the female head as that of a Mycenaean goddess, and several pages later
nos 7 (1994) 100. 5 M.N. Tod and A.J.B. Wace, A Catalogueof the Sparta Mu-
seum(Oxford 1906) 222-23; A. Furtwingler is cited in E. Fiechter, "Amyklae.Der Thron des Apollon,"JdI33 (1918) 127.
[AJA 102
SUSAN LANGDON
254
d CAA
AL -~~riB~ * ilki:-_:::--~ %:i"r,---:::: -
4
5
.•
Fig. 5. Terracotta heads from Amyklai. (After C. Tsountas,ArchEph1892, pl. 4.4-5) elaborated on the "unmykenisch" facial features, hair treatment, and decoration of the male, which he now termed a Geometric "Apollo Amyklaios," with no reference to its female counterpart.6 Three years later, in his groundbreaking article "Zuden Anfiingen der griechische Plastik," Emil Kunze followed Buschor's lead and fully explicated the differences he saw in the two heads, now accepted as Mycenaean and Geometric.7 Nothing better shows the individuality of the male head's "jugendfrisch" style, Kunze wrote, than a comparison with the Late Mycenaean female head of the same findspot and technique; their differences are not technical, but rather speak for the expression of two antithetic worlds. He described the Geometric male head in terms of freedom, openness, activation, and vigor, while the female head evoked for him softness, weakness, and passivity, her faint smile expressing the "Beschaulichkeit einer sinkenden Welt."8Included in the article were the first four published photographs of the pair.9 Two brief protests about their divergent dates by RomillyJenkins had little subsequent effect.10 Peter Knoblauch, who agreed with Jenkins in a footnote, was an ex-
ception to the prevailing consensus." By 1936, when Roland Hampe set forth a more comprehensive survey of Geometric art in his influential Friihe griechische Sagenbilder in B6otien, the female head had been dropped from discussion altogether.'2 Frederick Grace rebutted these earlier theories at length in 1939 in an appendix of his Archaic Sculpture in Boeotia.'3 Drawing attention to the nearly identical features and scale of the two heads ("almost literally one might say that the two are tarred with the same brush"), and their unusual technique as handmade elements set atop wheelmade necks, he dated both to the end of the eighth century. The thrust of his argument was primarily chronological and he offered no identifications. Grace's observations came when the figures had been out of the ground for half a century and had little impact on the trend to consider them separately, despite Hampe's support of Grace's dates for the heads in his 1941 review of Archaic Sculpture in Boeotia, which was in turn cited by other scholars.14 Karl Pfeiff followed Hampe's judgment regarding the contemporaneity of the two heads but maintained the female
6 E. Buschor, "VomAmyklaion,"AM 52 (1927) 11, 15. 7 E. Kunze,"Zuden Anflingen der griechischen Plastik," AM 55 (1930) 155-56. 8 Kunze (supran. 7) 156:"Dergeometrische Kopf blickt heiter, frei und offen, ist voller Aktivitit, der mykenische verbirgt unter seinen weicheren Zfigen, unter einem leisesten Liicheln etwas wie tatenlose Beschaulichkeit einer sinkenden Welt." 9These photographs demonstrated how faithful the 1892 drawings (fig. 5) were to the objects. 10 R.J.H.Jenkins, "LaconianTerracottasof the Dedalic Style,"BSA33 (1932-1933) 67-68 and n. 1, disagreed with the Mycenaeandate proposedfor the femalehead, although
he concurred that it was"certainlyan inferior work."Both here and in his Dedalica(Cambridge1936) 13 n. 4, Jenkins noted that they are likely to be by the same hand.
11P. Knoblauch, Studien zu archaisch-griechischenTonbildnerei in Kreta, Rhodos,Athen und Bjotien (Bleicherode 1937) 18 n. 23. 12R. Hampe, Friihe griechischeSagenbilderin B6otien (Ath-
ens 1936) 32-38 passim, pl. 31.2.
'1 ER. Grace, Archaic Sculpture in Boeotia (Cambridge,
Mass. 1939) 77-79. 14R. Hampe, rev. of Grace (supra n. 13) in GGA1941, 354-55.
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THE MALE-FEMALEPAIR IN GREEK GEOMETRIC ART
figure's stylistic opposition to the male, a contrast he perceived in terms of moisture and of physical and spiritual weakness. For Pfeiff, the female face is in flux, the eyes floating as if unfixed in the face; tied to the material realm, it is in need of binding forces, discipline, management. The male face attains almost polar opposition: all moist elements have evaporated in the flame of the spirit.'5 After the Second World War a fresh wave of studies of early Greek art and particularly sculpture added the male Amyklai head (now regularly dubbed Apollo) to the canon without his companion, a trend that continues to the present.16 One variation on the theme has been to date the female later than the male. Ludger Alscher described "Apolld' as more vigorous, lively, energetic, and formally unified than the unnamed female, who is consequently considered either somewhat later or by a less talented artist; Josef Floren follows Alscher's lead. One of the few scholars to cite the nearly forgotten female figure, Michael Byrne considers it Mycenaean, surprisingly, since its contemporaneity with the male would support his thesis of cults shared by male and female deities.," In general, the male head has been judged a masterpiece, encapsulating the energy of the new Greek world; as expressed by Bernhard Schweitzer, its "splendid profile has an explosive power."Absent from earlier editions, it has made its companionless
15K. Pfeiff, Apollon: Die Wandlung seines Bildes in der grie-
chischenKunst(Frankfurt1943)20-22: "Darinliegt insofern ein richtiges Empfinden, als in der Tatbei dem weiblichen Kopf noch alles im FluBzu sein scheint:die Augen 'schwimmen' noch wie ungefaBt im Gesicht, die bindenden Krafte haben sich noch kaum in ihm entfaltet .... Im Apollon-
kopf dagegen ist fast der andere Pol erreicht: die gewaltsame Bandigung, das Verdampfen alles feuchten Elements im geistigen Feuer."Compare the "fiery"terminology used by Buschor in the previous year for the face of the similar Acropolis bronze NM 6612, which is regularly compared to the Amyklai male: "Der Ausdruck des Kopfes spricht das angespannte Vortasten zur monumentalen Form ..., ist dabei aber von der feurigen homerischen Phantasie getragen" (E. Buschor, VomSinn der griechischen Standbilder
[Munich 1942] 50; cf. p. 10). 16E. Homann-Wedeking,
Die Anfiinge der griechischen
Grossplastik(Berlin 1950) 28, figs. 8-9; G. Lippold, DiegriechischePlastik(HdA5.3.1,Munich 1950) 11 n. 2; F.Matz, Geschichte der griechischen Kunst I: Die geometrische und die
friiharchaischeForm(Frankfurt1950) 83, pl. 31; L. Alscher, I (Berlin 1954)33-34, pls. 32-33; G.KaschGriechischePlastik nitz von Weinberg, MittelmeerischeKunst:Ausgewidhlte Schriften
III (Berlin 1965) 266, pl. 56.1; W. Fuchs, Die Skulpturder Griechen(Munich 1969)542-43, fig. 634;B.Schweitzer,Greek GeometricArt (London 1971; trans. of Die geometrischeKunst
255
way into the latest edition of Reinhard Lullies' Griechische Plastik, a compendium of "die hervorragendsten Sch6pfungen der griechischen Bildhauerkunst in Erz und Stein."'8 A separate thread of discussion of the male head alone has cited it in stylistic comparison with certain bronze figures from Geometric tripods, particularly warrior NM 6613 from the Athenian Acropolis, thus ever more firmly fixing it in the canon of important Geometric art as an isolated work.19 A minority of scholars has agreed that two heads are better than one: Hans-Volkmar Herrmann, Reynold Higgins, R.V.Nicholls, and L.E Fitzhardinge have all discussed the male and female figures together. Roland Hampe and Erika Simon, who both earlier acknowledged only the "Apollo," included in their TausendJahrefriihgriechische Kunst the female head, along with the surprising proposal of a third figure, now lost, with which they composed the first ApolloArtemis-Leto triad (three heads apparently being better than two).20 A turning point for the hapless pair came in 1988 when they both were included in the traveling exhibition "The Human Figure in Early Greek Art" and displayed side by side at the various venues. The exhibition catalogue, nevertheless, reflects their history of separateness: the heads' similarities are emphasized, but the entry for the female notes its "living Mycenaean tradition," while
1.3-1.6;J. Boardman, GreekArt (London 1964) 37 fig. 26; Boardman, Pre-classical: From Crete to Archaic Greece (Har-
mondsworth 1967) 66 fig. 34; Boardman, GreekSculpture:
The Archaic Period (London 1978) fig. 6; R. Lullies, Griechische Plastik von den Anfdngen bis zum Beginn der romischen
Kaiserzeit4(Munich 1979) pl. 7a;J. Floren, Die geometrische und archaische Plastik (Munich 1987) 56-57, pl. 5.3; LIMC
II, 256 no. 579,s.v.Apollon (W.Lambrinoudakis);B.Alroth, Greek Gods and Figurines: Aspects of the AnthropomorphicDed-
ications(Boreas18, Uppsala 1989) 28 n. 89; M. Pettersson, Cults of Apollo at Sparta (Stockholm 1992) 86 fig. 13; J.G. Pedley, GreekArt and Archaeology2(Englewood Cliffs 1998)
114 fig. 4.16.
17M. Byrne, The Greek Geometric Warrior Figurine: Inter-
andOrigin(ArchaeologiaTransatlanticaX, Louvainpretation la-Neuve 1991) 96 n. 65. 18Lullies (supra n. 16) 5.
19Athens, National Museum 6613: Kunze (supra n. 7) 156-57; Hampe (supra n. 12) 35-36; Schweitzer (supra n. 16) 142. 20 H.-V.Herrmann,"Werkstlitten geometrischen Bronzeplastik,"Jdl79(1964)68 n. 187;R. Higgins, GreekTerracottas (London 1967) 24, pls. 9A-B; R.V.Nicholls, "GreekVotive Statuettes and Religious Continuity, c. 1200-700 B.C.,"in
B.E Harris ed., AucklandClassicalEssaysPresentedtoE.M. Blaik-
Griechenlands, Cologne 1969) 142, pls. 162-63; E. Simon,
lock(Auckland1970) 34 n. 202; L.E Fitzhardinge,TheSpartans(London 1980) 45-46, fig. 31; R. Hampe and E. Simon
Kranz,"Friuhegriechische Sitzfiguren,"AM 87 (1972)5, pls.
eds., TausendJahrefriihgriechischeKunst (Munich 1980); The Birth of GreekArt (New York 1981) 254.
Die G6tter der Griechen (Munich 1969) 118, 121 fig. 114; P.
256
SUSAN LANGDON
the male is described in terms of the "free plastic forms of the Archaic period" it heralds.21 Recently, Eleni Georgoulaki has bucked tradition by stating that the male head cannot possibly represent Apollo because of the female companion found with him.22 The post-excavation history of these two fragmentary sculptures seems to ignore the obvious: that the two figures were created and dedicated as a pair. The reluctance to unite them cannot be blamed on incomplete information. They were presented objectively in their original publication, accompanied by drawings that did little to distort their similarities and made even clearer than could photography the identical zigzag rendition of their hair (fig. 5). The photographs published in 1930 juxtaposing their profiles presented the opportunity to observe that the same hands had molded their incurving chins, crisp brows, and angular edges of lips and jaw. It takes very little imagination to fill in the female's pointed nose and the broken flips of her hair, as well as the ragged edges of her companion's generous ears. The same vivid face, the same rounded neck with hollows below the jaw, and the same palette of added color reveal their common ancestry and the intention that they belong together. Even if their stylistic twinness were discounted, there remains the unusual shared technique of hand-molded heads mounted on wheelmade necks and presumably bodies as well.23 What had happened? Grace documented in 1939 the changes that occurred over 50 years in their dating and the incomprehensible separation of the Amyklai heads without offering his own explanation. Sixty years later we might assume that the initial prob21J. Sweeney,T. Curry,and Y.Tzedakiseds., TheHuman Figure in Early GreekArt (Athens 1987) 87 cat. nos. 16-17.
22Georgoulaki (supra n. 4) 100-101. Neglect of this detail has led Lambrinoudakis(supra n. 16) to speculate that the "Apollo's"body must have resembled that of a headless terracotta male figure from the same site with raised arms and separated legs;for the terracotta, see W.von Massow,"VomAmyklaion (Einzelfunde)," in Buschor (supra n. 6) 42 fig. 21. 24This list of the female tripod attachments includes their approximatedates and attributions, which I have discussed at length in S. Langdon,"FemaleFigurineson Greek Geometric Bronze Tripods,"in C. Mattusch ed., Actsof the 23
13th International Congress on Ancient Bronzes (JRA Suppl., forthcoming). 25Delphi, Museum inv. 7730. Excavated in 1939 on the Sacred Way between the base of the Boeotians and the opposite exedra; found with pottery datable to 750-725 B.C. Max. ht. 16.5 cm; base 2 x 2.5 cm. Complete but surface corroded. Bibliography: P. Amandry, "Petits objets de Delphes," BCH 68-69 (1944-1945) 38-39, pl. 1.1; HomannWedeking (supra n. 16) 21, fig. 5; Alscher (supra n. 16) 129; Herrmann (supra n. 20) 48, figs. 33-35; N. Himmelmann-
[AJA 102
lem of pinning down the heads to the correct century, or even the correct period, was due to the youthfulness of Late Bronze Age and Geometric studies, but their dissociation effected by earlier German scholars and sustained in varying degrees up to the present is harder to fathom. A second case history suggests a larger pattern within which to understand the treatment of the Amyklai heads. FEMALE
TRIPOD
FIGURES
By most definitions, Greek Geometric tripod cauldrons with their figural attachments of horses and warriors constituted a thoroughly male preserve, and were deployed in a context that was simultaneously agonistic, aristocratic, and heroic. This monolithic picture of social status and iconic power in a heroizing early Greek society has been constructed over the past century without considering the female figurines that decorated tripods as well. Five known examples were dedicated at four different cult sites, and apparently represent three or more different bronzeworking centers.24 Found in the Apollo sanctuary at Delphi, a nude female with flat-topped headdress stands on a rectangular plaque with arms clasped against thighs in the pose of an Oriental nude goddess (fig. 6). The weight of scholarly opinion attributes it to Corinthian production of the mideighth century or slightly earlier.25Two other figures imitate the same Oriental type, with markedly different styles. A wiry nude female from the Polis Cave, Ithaca, stands on a rectangular plaque and is considered to be either Corinthian or locally produced under Corinthian influence in the mid-eighth century (fig. 7).26 A more robust version comes from Wildschiitz, Bemerkungen zur geometrischen Plastik (Berlin 1964) figs. 31-33; Schweitzer (supra n. 16) pls. 130-31; G.M.A. Richter, Korai:ArchaicGreekMaidens (London 1968) 21, figs. 13-15; C. Rolley, FdD V: Monumentsfigures, les statuettes de bronze (Paris 1969) 17, 19-26, no. 1; P. Kranz, rev. of Rolley 1969, in Gnomon 45 (1973) 479; J.N. Coldstream, Geometric Greece (London 1977) 176, fig. 58c; M. Maass, OlForsch X: Die geometrischen Dreifiisse von Olympia (Berlin 1978) 101; Floren (supra n. 16) 48; S. B6hm, Die 'NiickteG6ttin' (Mainz 1990) 151 cat. B3, pl. 10b; Byrne (supra n. 17) 49, 53, 231 no. 1. 26Stavros, Museum. Excavated in 1932 in Polis area C-3. Legs broken above the knees, feet broken at ankles. Max. ht. 13 cm. Bibliography: S. Benton, "Excavations in Ithaca III,"BSA 35 (1934-1935) 61 fig. 12, 62-63 no. 15, pl. 16; Benton, "Evolution of the Tripod-lebes," BSA 35 (1934-1935) 86; Homann-Wedeking (supra n. 16) 21, fig. 4; Herrmann (supra n. 20) 48, 49 n. 132; Himmelmann-Wildschiitz (supra n. 25) figs. 28-30; Schweitzer (supra n. 16) pls. 128-29; Rolley (supra n. 25) 19 n. 5; Coldstream (supra n. 25) 176; C. Rolley, FdD V.3: Les trepieds a cuve clouee (Paris 1977) 64 n. 2; Floren (supra n. 16) 66 n. 331; B6hm (supra n. 25) 152 cat. BII, pl. 10d; Byrne (supra n. 17) 141, 246 no. 13.
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THE MALE-FEMALE PAIR IN GREEK GEOMETRIC ART
Fig. 6. Bronze statuette from Delphi. Delphi, Museum inv. 7730. (Courtesy Ecole franpaise d'Athenes)
257
Fig. 7. Bronze statuette from the Polis Cave, Ithaca. Stavros, Museum. (Courtesy Marburg Archiologisches Seminar)
the Athenian Acropolis (fig. 8). General consensus places it in an Attic workshop of the third quarter of the eighth century.27 Two other female statuettes wear ankle-length robes, unusual for Geometric bronze sculpture. A second figure from the Apollo sanctuary stands on a rectangular plaque with arms riveted together at her waist (fig. 9). It is thought to be an Attic production of the second half of the eighth century.28 Finally, a figure from Olympia in
a robe decorated with incised designs seems originally to have been posed with left arm down and right arm raised to the biconical vessel (?) on her head (fig. 10). The unique figure probably represents local Elian work of the late eighth century.29 These five figures include the largest and most finely executed Geometric female sculptures known in bronze. Most discussions of these bronzes over-
27Athens, National Museum inv. 6503. From the excavations of 1885-1889. Max. ht. 15.8 cm; width at shoulders 4.45 cm; base 2.4 x 2.1 cm. Complete but surface heavily corroded. Bibliography: A. de Ridder, Cataloguedes bronzes trouves sur l'Acropoled'Athenes(Paris 1896) iv-v, 293 no. 771, 294 fig. 279; V. Stais, Marbres et bronzes du Musde National I (Athens 1910) 266-67; Herrmann (supra n. 20) 49-50, figs. 36-38; Himmelmann-Wildschfitz (supra n. 25) 16, figs. 34-36; E. Kunze, "Kleinplastik aus Bronze," OlBerVIII (1967) 226 n. 31; Richter (supra n. 25) 21, figs. 23-24; Kranz (supra n. 16) 37 n. 129; M. Weber, "Zu fruihen attischen Geratfiguren," AM 89 (1974) 43; Rolley (supra n. 26) 101 n. 3; Floren (supra n. 16) 42, pl. 3.7; Bohm (supra n. 25) 151 cat. B1, pl. 10a. 28Delphi, Museum inv. 3144. Excavated in 1895 near the baths in the east. Max. ht. 19.6 cm. Complete, surface pitted. Bibliography: P. Perdrizet, FdD V: Monumentsfiguris: Petits bronzes,terres-cuites,antiquites diverses (Paris 1908) no. 2; V. Miiller, FriihePlastik in Griechenlandund Kleinasien(Augs-
burg 1929) 74; C. Zervos, L'art en Grece (Paris 1946) fig. 71; Alscher (supra n. 16) 125; Herrmann (supra n. 20) 49; Schweitzer (supra n. 16) fig. 124; Rolley (supra n. 25) 28, no. 8; Kranz (supra n. 25) 479; Coldstream (supra n. 25) 127 fig. 40, 128; Floren (supra n. 16) 54; Byrne (supra n. 17) 232 no. 35. 29Athens, National Museum inv. 6218; Olympia Br 12607. From the 1875-1881 excavations in the black layer north of the Prytaneion. Max. ht. 12.9 cm; max. width at arms 3.9 cm; width at feet 1.75 cm. Missing both arms just below shoulders, front part of right foot. Bibliography: A. Furtwiingler, Die Bronzen: OlympischeErgebnisse IV (Berlin 1890) 42 no. 266, pl. 15; Miller (supra n. 28) 71, 86, 168, pl. 24, 300-301; U. Gehrig, Die geometrischenBronzenaus dem Heraionvon Samos(Hamburg 1964) 22 n. 3; Herrmann (supra n. 20) 43 n. 118; R. Tille, FriihgriechischeReigentdnze (Waldsassen 1964) 81; Kranz (supra n. 16) 37 n. 130; Byrne (supra n. 17) 24-25, 229 no. 65. This statuette presents numerous problems, not least its apparent connections with Italy.
258
SUSAN LANGDON
[AJA 102
Fig. 8. Bronze statuette from the Athenian Acropolis.Athens, National Museum 6503. (CourtesyDeutsches Archiiologisches Institut, Athens, neg. 3412)
Fig. 9. Bronze statuette from Delphi. Delphi, Museum inv. 3144. (Courtesy Ecole fran;aise d'Athenes)
look or disregard their connection to tripods and consider the figures in isolation as though they were independent sculptures, which has arguably lessened the art historical stature of the more mediocre works. Yet, there is no intrinsic reason why they could not have been recognized as tripod fixtures when the various methods of figure attachment were first understood, since they have been part of the archaeological record as long as the male figures. The female attachments were excavated well over a century ago at Olympia (fig. 10; excavations of 1875-1881) and Athens (fig. 8; excavations of 1885-1889), while another was found in 1895 at Delphi (fig. 9); the re-
maining two examples, from Delphi and the Polis Cave (figs. 6-7), were unearthed well over half a century ago. The initial suggestion that male figures supported tripod handles was proposed by Karl Purgold in 1885, a theory accepted and expanded by Furtwiingler five years later.30Aided by the accumulation of tripod parts from various sites, Sylvia Benton was able by 1935 to observe that some tripod figures were affixed by means of vertical tabs and some by a rectangular horizontal plaque, both methods found among the five female figures. Since Benton's groundbreaking study numerous monographs and articles have been devoted to tripods and their dec-
30 K. Purgold,AdI 1885, 171, in connection with the famous bronze "youth"from Olympia, Br 616, and the "Minotaur" in the Louvre. Furtw~ingler(supra n. 29) 87-89 recognized only the handle-holder tripod figures, believing that figures with vertical tabs beneath their heels were
meant to be inserted into bases;also K.A.Neugebauer,Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Katalog der statuarischen Bronzen im Antiquarium I: Die minoischeund archaischengriechischenBron-
zen (Berlin 1931) 10-11 no. 13.
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THE MALE-FEMALEPAIR IN GREEK GEOMETRIC ART
259
orations, but none of these has included female attachments in interpreting the Geometric tripod phenomenon.31
Fig. 10. Bronze statuette from Olympia.Olympia Br 12607, Athens, National Museum 6218. (After A. Furtwangler, Die Bronzen: Olympische Ergebnisse IV [Berlin 1890] pl. 15
no. 266)
31 General studies of tripods include Benton, "Evolution" (supra n. 26); E.Willemsen, OlForschIII:Dreifiisskessel vonOlympia(Berlin1957);Schweitzer(supran. 16);M.Weber, "Die geometrischen Dreiffisskessel. Fragen zur Chronologie der Gattungen und deren Herstellungszentren,"AM 86 (1971) 13-30; Weber (supra n. 27); Rolley (supra n. 26); Maass (supra n. 25). 32Benton, "Excavations"(supra n. 26) 62-63. Benton connected the human figure and horse 16 with handle 3, which has two rivet holes appropriate for a horse attachment, although the feet are broken off horse 16. The human figure'sbase was described as having been wrapped around the edge of an object, and in Benton'sopinion "perfectly"fit a breakin handle 3, a placement that set the figure at an odd angle to the handle's vertical axis. This fit, and therefore the figure'spairing with the horse, was not universally accepted. An unconvinced Piet de Jong reconstructed handle 3 carrying only the horse (Benton, "Excavations" [supra n. 26] 59, 65 fig. 15; Benton, "Evolution"
That these figures come from tripods is well established but seldom remarked; indeed, there has been a certain blindness to this fact. Benton, who excavated the Ithaca figure (fig. 7), considered it to be male (despite its applied breasts) and attempted to associate it with a horse found nearby, by analogy with a horse-and-groom pair from Delphi.32 This pairing helped to establish the horseleader type more firmly in the repertoire of tripod decoration, falsely in this case. Benton's recognition that the Polis figure came from a tripod seems to have prevented her from identifying the figure as female, although she could cite only female comparanda. After Pierre Amandry pointed out its connection with Near Eastern Astarte figurines, Benton subsequently conceded that it might be female; but if so, she added, then it should be taken off the tripod.33 In the most recent extensive discussion of tripod figures, Byrne seems to have experienced a similar difficulty. He catalogues the Ithaca bronze as "(?female),"noting that it came from a tripod, but in his text the figure is "presumably male."34 The Ithaca figure's problems do not stop with gender identity; some have denied the figure its legs and feet. Nikolaus Himmelmann-Wildschiitz noted that a female figure had been falsely connected with the lower part of a tripod figure from Ithaca, citing only P. Gottschalk's unpublished opinion.35 Floren and Stephanie B6hm followed HimmelmannWildschiltz in this belief.36 It is possible that Gottschalk was swayed by the fact that the lower legs are
[supra n. 26] 86). But the horse and groom image had become fixed, and the figure reappeared with the horse in hypotheticalreconstructionsof tripods no. 7 and no. 9 (Benton, "Excavations"[supra n. 26] 66 fig. 16b,67 fig. 17). Rolley (supra n. 26) 64 n. 2 settled doubts about the figure's position and relation to the horse by dissociating them and placing the human figure not atop the handle as Benton assumed, but alone on the vertical strap inside the handle. 3 S. Benton, "Further Excavations at Aetos," BSA 48 (1953) 343 n. 570; Amandry (supra n. 25) 39. 4 Byrne (supra n. 17) 141. Similarly, de Ridder (supra n. 27) xvii refers once to female Acropolis figure NM 6503 as an "Apollo,"although in all other instances he describes it as feminine. 5 N. Himmelmann-Wildschiitz,"Die LanzenschwingerBronzen Olympia B 1701 und 19997'AA 1974, 540 n. 16. 36Floren (supran. 16) 66 n. 331;B6hm (supran. 25) 152.
260
SUSAN LANGDON
[AJA 102
significantly thicker than the thighs above the break, and that he was not otherwise predisposed to reject a female tripod figure. Yet the situation was already clear in Benton's original publication photographs of the figure. A photograph taken before cleaning shows the upper and lower parts perfectly in proportion, with parallel breaks.37 The mass of the upper body apparently was reduced further than the legs during cleaning, and in all subsequent photographs the legs look too large. Although scholars have been drawn to their formal correspondence with the male spear-swingers, the two Delphi bronzes 7730 and 3144 (figs. 6, 9) were slow to be identified as tripod fixtures. In 1950 Ernst Homann-Wedeking first suggested that Delphi 7730 might be an attachment like the Ithaca figure it resembles.38 Claude Rolley subsequently demonstrated beyond doubt how both Delphi figures had been attached to tripods.9" Both stand on small rectangular plaques; the plaque under the feet of 7730 is slightly concave. Rolley identified them as tripod figures through comparison of these plaques with those of certain male warriors that, unlike the horseleaders that topped the handles by means of vertical tabs below their heels, were riveted to the straps that fastened ring handles to the cauldron rims.4) Even Rolley's unambiguous identification has gone largely unremarked. Exceptions are Nicolas Coldstream and Martha Weber, who cited the Ithaca and both Delphi females as tripod figures. More recently, Floren's lengthy study of Geometric sculpture does not acknowledge this context for any of them.4' The tripod setting of the figure from the Athenian Acropolis (fig. 8) is even less frequently recognized. The bronze female shares correspondences in size, base form, and pose with Delphi 7730 and the Polis figure (figs. 6-7). Moreover, formal affinities with the male tripod figures of the Athenian tradition clearly mark the statuette as a tripod attachment. To date, only Weber has noted it as a "Geriitfigur."42 As with the Delphi figures, its rectangular plaque can be reconstructed as fastened onto the strap within the ring handle.
The feet of the female bronze from Olympia are connected by a vertical plaque now mostly embedded in a modern wood display block. Drawings published in 1890 in OlympischeErgebnisseIV show that this was a rectangular tab, broken but apparently preserving part of a rivet hole, the type of fixture known only from tripod figures (fig. 10).4s The size of the figure also supports this interpretation. At 12.9 cm she fits the range of 13-21 cm for all known (usually helmeted) male tripod handle figures, and exceeds the smaller scale of independent figurines. Although the Olympia bronze has rarely been cited in the literature, both Herrmann and Peter Kranz noted her possible connection with a tripod.44 In sum, the evidence for female figures mounted atop tripod cauldrons has existed for a century and has been readily available since 1935, when Benton first clarified the various methods of figure attachment and began the conventional corpus of horseleaders and spearbearers that has been continually updated since then. In the three major monographs devoted to Geometric tripods, Franz Willemsen cited none of the five female figures, Michael Maass noted only Delphi 7730, and Rolley identified three, the two from Delphi and one from Ithaca.45 Clarifying the function of these five figures does not dramatically change the corpus of tripod sculpture: females constitute five - only 9% - of the 55 human figures with known provenience.46 Nevertheless, the distribution of these figures among four sanctuaries, their typological variations, and their origin in at least three and possibly four different bronzeworking shops or centers demonstrate that they were not an isolated anomaly and require a general reconsideration of the Geometric tripod's social and religious significance. One might argue that the female figures simply represent part of the Homeric gift-of-honor package in which tripods are "mentioned in the same breath as a pair of horses or mules, or a gold cup, or a woman,' as in Iliad 8.290-91.47 As will be seen, the full scope of evidence suggests a quite different interpretation. The specific arrangement of these five figures on
37Benton, "Excavations" (supra n. 26) 61 fig. 12. s Homann-Wedeking (supra n. 16) 21. Rolley (supra n. 25) 19. ,. For this method of 41 attachment, see also Willemsen (supra n. 31) 155-56; Maass (supra n. 25) 94-104. 41Coldstream (supra n. 25) 128, 176; Weber (supra n. 31) 19 n. 49; Weber (supra n. 27) 43; Floren (supra n. 16) 42, 48, 54, 66 n. 331. 42Weber (supra n. 27) 43. 4 Benton, "Evolution" (supra n. 26) 100 first suggested that figures with pierced vertical tabs could have been riveted onto tripod handles, citing examples from Delphi and
Olympia but ignoring this female figure illustrated on the same plate (pl. 15) in Furtwiingler (supra n. 29) as her male example from Olympia. 44 Herrmann (supra n. 20) 43 n. 118; Kranz (supra n. 16) 37 n. 130. 45Willemsen (supra n. 31); Maass (supra n. 25) 101; Rolley (supra n. 25) 17, 19-26, 28. 46This number includes only those figures attached on top of or inside handles and not the class of handle-holders. 47W. Lamb, Ancient Greek and Roman Bronzes (London 1929) 44.
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THE MALE-FEMALE PAIR IN GREEK GEOMETRIC ART
their tripods is directly relevant to this question. The iconography of tripod decorations associates them with the horseleading, spearbearing warriors, not only implicitly but perhaps explicitly as well. Physical evidence indirectly allows the females to be paired with males, or less likely, with other females, facing each other across the cauldron on opposite ring handles. Although no tripod is sufficiently preserved to indicate that both handles bore figural attachments, the numerous representations of tripods with handle attachments known from bronze miniatures and Geometric vase paintings consistently depict symmetrically paired figures.48 This is supported by extant pairs of matching tripod warriors and handle-holders that might have come from the same tripods.49 Compared with the large number of extant warrior attachments, the relatively small number of female tripod figures, as well as their close correspondences in style and scale with the male figures, makes it plausible that they were paired with male rather than with other female figures. Perhaps most compelling, this reconstruction finds support in the iconographic sources for the tripod figures. The three nude females are Greek adaptations of the Oriental nude standing goddess, the "'Astarte" type with hands clasping thighs. I have argued elsewhere that at approximately the same time that this type first appears in Greece in the tripod workshops, the traditional Greek horseleader also undergoes a transformation, acquiring a helmet and developing a stronger resemblance to the Near Eastern "smiting gods." The resulting tripod pairs would have reflected the old Oriental tradition that paired nude fertility goddesses with smiting gods.5" EARLY HISTORIOGRAPHY OF GEOMETRIC SCULPTURE
These two case histories follow a similar course: female figures discovered early in the formative years of scholarship on preclassical art quickly lost the status that should have been conferred by their excavated contexts, which clearly marked them as significant votive offerings. Much of this story of ne48Miniaturetripods:Maass(supra n. 25) pl. 58, nos. 391, and 396, pl. 59, no. 397; E. Brann, AgoraVIII:LateGeometric ProtoatticPottery(Princeton 1962) pl. 19, no. 338. Painted representations: Benton, "Evolution"(supra n. 26) 103 no. 4, 105 no. 13, pl. 26.2. 49For pairs of handles preserving a single figure, Maass (supra n. 25) 68-69 and n. 21. "Matched"pairs of tripod figures: E. Kunze, "Bronzestatuetten,"OlBerIV (1944) pls. 43-46; Kunze, "Kleinplastikaus Bronze,"OlBerVII (1961) 148 figs. 85-86, pls. 62-67; Kunze (supra n. 27) pls. 110-13; Schweitzer (supra n. 16) pls. 140-43. 5o For this connection, Langdon (supra n. 24).
261
glect and misrepresentation can be understood within the larger context of the late 19th- and early 20th-century disinterest in the Dark Age stratum of Greek art. At the turn of the century Geometric sculpture and pottery were greatly outclassed by the exciting new revelations of Mycenaean culture, which was understood to represent the world of Homer's heroes. Geometric art as yet lacked an identity of its own and even an obvious relationship to the glories to come.51 Although this attitude characterized European scholarship in general, the fate of the Geometric period as an art historical entity lay particularly in Germany, where a normative, idealist view of Greek culture tied the study of its art, especially sculpture, to the larger conflicts between the forces of radical nationalism and the academic establishment.52 Traditional German academic training and discourse have been characterized as marked by dependence upon a hierarchy of authority in which scholarship progresses through consensus rather than debate."• A review of the pioneering scholarship on Geometric sculpture shows how the intellectual climate and dominant personalities of the early 20th century have cast long shadows on the succeeding decades. The discovery of Olympia's Geometric bronzes between 1875 and 1890 may indeed have been, as Ian Morris has recently described, an "unintended side effect" of excavations directed toward the site's classical history, producing figurines that held little interest to their excavators.54Yet such a view does little justice to the seriousness with which their study and publication were undertaken by Furtwingler, whose reliance upon skilled visual perception (Anschauung) over more traditional text-bound approaches well suited him for pioneering the study of Geometric sculpture. Dealing with an enormous body of material (7,500 inventoried bronzes in 1879 and nearly twice that number by 1890), his two major publications of the material in 1879 and 1890 established the parameters of future discussion of Geometric bronzes: the intersections of form and technique, of stylization and imitation, and the chronological
51 I. Morris, "Periodization and the Heroes: Inventing
a Dark Age,"in M. Golden and P. Toohey eds., Inventing
Ancient Culture:Historicism,Periodization,and theAncient World
(London 1997) 96-131. 52S.L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton 1996). 53On the "desire for continuity and consensus" as a guiding factor in the German intellectual tradition, see H. Hdirke, "The Hun Is a Methodical Chap," in P.J. Ucko ed., Theoryin Archaeology:A WorldPerspective(London 1995) 46-60. 54Morris (supra n. 51) 113.
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SUSAN LANGDON
dimensions of these factors; their art historical context (already in the title of his 1879 article); workshop divisions; and stratigraphical correlations within the Altis.55 Although it would be decades before there was sufficient interest to foster a comprehensive history of Geometric art, the inventory lists and excavation daybooks of 1879 show that Furtwingler and his colleagues were already associating certain bronze figurines with stages of Dipylon pottery
[AJA 102
painting. The post-war involvement of British scholars in refining the study of Dark Age pottery revolutionized the field, as Morris has demonstrated, but their interest in going beyond chronology to explore its expressive potential is less obvious. Even by 1932, when German scholars had begun to invoke Greek genius in their discussion of Geometric art, John D. Beazley and Bernard Ashmole could sum it up as "small, bleak, thrifty"'56The pre-war history of Geometric pottery, like that of sculpture, is a German story. Until 1929 the study of Geometric art was confined to ceramics, where one of the most important issues was the systematizing of chronology and regional styles. In this area Schweitzer built upon the work of his predecessors, especially Sam Wide, and transformed the field in what his colleagues recognized as an epoch-making dissertation, published in two parts in 1917 and 1918.57The study of sculpture and other arts was much slower to develop, however, and Schweitzer himself returned to the material to formulate a comprehensive history of Geometric art only after another 50 years. Other sites, particularly Delphi and Athens, were producing Geometric bronze figurines from the 1880s on, but as a class of art or artifact these were virtually ignored. Because of their inherent limitations as small, often broken or corroded objects, among which the mediocre far outnumber the masterpieces, the figurines awaited a particular approach
that could best exploit their restricted formal properties. It was to scholars of the Strukturforschungschool developing in the 1920s that Geometric sculpture had much to offer. The bronzes that had accumulated by then from Olympia, Delphi, Sparta, Thermon, Athens, and Crete formed an essential element in the first synthetic work on early Greek and Near Eastern sculpture, Valentin Muiller'sFriihe Plastik in Griechenland und Vorderasien,which sought to apply general formal categories across cultural boundaries. Alth6ugh Miiller's structuralist principles eschewed issues of content and function and bound the construction of types to prevailing styles, he brought to wider attention the growing corpus of Geometric sculpture. It is no coincidence that two of the most important later treatments of Geometric art, those by Friedrich Matz (1950) and Schweitzer (1969), came from scholars whose work was heavily grounded in the structuralist tradition.58 This early structuralist work was far outshadowed during the Weimar era by the ascendance of essentialist, interpretive art history, which rejected the earlier historicist positivism. Geometric vase painting found a small but secure foothold in the new art history: typical of the time, Gerhart Rodenwaldt in his monumental volume of the Propylaen-Kunstgeschichte proceeded directly from Mycenaean to Archaic art bridged by two Geometric vessels in which the "Urform der klassischen Kunst" was to be recognized. While the discipline of Geometric pottery decoration offered a clear foundation for classical principles, sculpture was left out of the picture. The decisive turning point for Geometric sculpture came in Kunze's pioneering article of 1930, "Zuden Anffingen der griechischen Plastik," which gave the longneglected Geometric figurines a critical role at the inception of Greek art.59 It is likely that Kunze's pronouncements on the Amyklai heads, and indeed on Geometric sculpture
55A. Furtwdingler,"Die Bronzefunde aus Olympia und deren kunstgeschichtliche Bedeutung,"AbhBerl1879 (reprinted in KleineSchriftenI [1912]);and Furtwangler(supra n. 29). For more on Furtwiingler'smethods and contribu-
287-90 summarizes the early study of Geometric pottery. 58Schweitzer1969 (supra n. 16); and Matz(supra n. 16), who dedicated his volume to V.Milller and G.Rodenwaldt. See also Matz'searlier review of V. Miiller,FriihePlastikin
tions, see W.-D. Heilmeyer, OlForsch XII: Friihe olympische Bronzefiguren (Berlin 1979) 1-6. 56J.D.Beazley and B. Ashmole, GreekSculpture and Paint-
ing (Cambridge 1932) 4. 57S. Wide, "GeometrischeVasen aus Griechenland,"JdI 14 (1889) 26-43, 78-86, 188-215; Wide,Jdl 15(1890) 49-58;
B. Schweitzer, Untersuchungen zur Chronologie der geometrischen Stile in Griechenland I (Karlsruhe 1917); and Schweit-
zer,"Untersuchungenzur Chronologie und Geschichte der geometrischen Stile in Griechenland, II,"AM 43 (1918) 1-152. R.M. Cook, Greek Painted Pottery3 (London 1997)
Griechenland und Vorderasien(Augsburg 1929), in Gnomon
6 (1930)245-62. Similarly,G.Kaschnitzvon Weinberg(supra n. 16), like Matz a student of K6rte, a disciple of Riegl, and part of the Marburg circle of structural analysts, explored the Geometric phase of Greek art as a key to understanding formal principles within a broad Mediterranean context. For the Marburg group, see U. Hausmann, Allge-
meine Grundlagen der Archdologie (Munich 1969) 89. 59 G. Rodenwaldt, Die Kunst der Antike (Hellas und Rom). III (Berlin 1927); Kunze (supra n. 7). Propylden-Kunstgeschichte
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THE MALE-FEMALEPAIR IN GREEK GEOMETRIC ART
generally, were influenced by the views of Buschor, whom he met in Athens in 1929. Having been schooled at Leipzig in the strongly positivist method. ology of his supervising professor, Franz Studniczka, in Athens Kunze was deeply impressed by the intuitive methods of this student of Furtwaingler and by his pursuit of a universal spirituality in Greek art.60 Buschor's own views on Geometric sculpture appeared in his Die Plastik der Griechenof 1936 and were couched in Winckelmannian terms of a living process of bloom and decay.61 In his passionate return to the inspiration ofJohannJoachim Winckelmann, Buschor was an outspoken proponent of the new aestheticism of the 1920s and 1930s, which sought not historical particulars but universal truths in Greek art.62Kunze's isolation of art historical statements in Geometric figurines through the criteria of tension, clarity, and corporeality often stands close to Buschor's focus on the expressive inner dynamic. Contrasting his own use of style as "the expression of a unique, historically bound spiritual condition" with Mfiller's rather mechanical divisions ("Spreizstil," "Gliederstil"), Kunze believed that measuring Geometric sculpture against absolute standards of quality could reveal works approaching greatness, a stance from which he continued to assess newly excavated Geometric bronze figures in the Olympia Berichten.63 Kunze's seminal study of 1930 established an authoritative canon of major Geometric artworks to which later scholarship invariably deferred. Not only did this essay have a lethal impact on the Amyklai female head, but it also helped to keep the female tripod bronzes on the scholarly sidelines. Finding in the Dipylon Goddess (fig. 11) an ideal prototype of an Eastern-inspired, Greek-interpreted figure of exceptional quality, Kunze had no particular need to involve the related but inferior Acropolis or Delphi bronzes. After nearly four decades of anonymity, the small in particGeometric sculptures featured by Kunze-ular the male Amyklai head, the bronze tripod figure NM 6613 from the Acropolis, the centaur group in New York, the Samian lion fighting group, the Dipylon goddesses, the "Steiner"warrior, and two (seventhsecured a century) bronze siren attachments-had place in the changing focus of art history in the Ger-
60
H.-V.Herrmann, obituary for E. Kunze in Gnomon67
(1995) 570. 61 E. Buschor,Die PlastikderGriechen (Munich 1936) 10: "Ein sinnvoller Ablauf lebt sich dar, Knospe und Bliute im neunten Jahrhundert, Reife, Aufl6sung, Erstarrung und Verwandlung im achten: ein Vorspiel und Abbild des gesamten Ablaufs der antiken Kunst."
263
Fig. 11. Ivory statuette from Kerameikos grave XIII. Athens, National Museum 776. (Courtesy Deutsches Archiologisches Institut, Athens, neg. 3282) man academy. In 1936 Buschor's student Hampe published his doctoral dissertation as Friihe griechische Sagenbilderin B6otien, ostensibly on Boeotian fibulas but in actuality a wide-ranging survey of Geometric
62Marchand (supra n. 52) 336-37. For Buschor's scholarship in particular, see J.L. Benson's introduction to his translation of E. Buschor, On the Meaning of Greek Statues (Amherst 1980) ix-xxiii, esp. xi-xv; also, Heilmeyer (supra n. 55) 9. 63Kunze (supra n. 7) 142-43; Kunze (supra ns. 27 and 49). See also Heilmeyer (supra n. 55) 8-9.
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art and its permeation by epic subject matter. As the first monographic synthesis of Geometric art it reiterated the importance of Kunze's shortlist of major sculptures by illustrating them again and lowering their chronology. All the figures discussed by Kunze and Hampe were selected for illustration once more in Matz's survey of Geometric art of 1950, Geschichte dergriechischen Kunst I, including the two sirens now (following Hampe) dated to the seventh century. To this group Matz added eight more Geometric and Subgeometric bronze figures published by Kunze in the OlympiaBericht IV of 1944 with the same focus on artistic qualities. Matz's intensely theoretical and densely written book explored the worldview ("Lebens- und Weltgefifihl") of the different periods, regions, and artists through a structural analysis revolving around categories such as "tectonic" and "static," and by uncovering the essence of the artists and their period through their response to "space" in all its external and inner manifestations. His ultimate purpose was to reveal anew the universality of Greek art for a world in need of spiritual healing.64 Geometric art had rarely been approached with such analytic fervor and seriousness of purpose, or with so little need for contextual details. Once Geometric art had been embraced by the Great Tradition, the terms of discourse could become quite heroic. Published posthumously in 1969, Schweitzer's Die geometrischeKunst Griechenlandsconstituted a return at the end of his career to his dissertation on Geometric regional pottery styles. In this final work he sought to encompass all the arts of the period, setting out his understanding of Geometric art as a "completely new artistic horizon.... The Greek people of the Iron Age, now enlarged and settled, prepared for their world mission, of which Geometric art was the first step."65In such a grandiose view many long-neglected works were brought into play to support Schweitzer's essentialist arguments. So, for example, four of the five tripod females appear in excellent photographs with multiple views, but only to illustrate the primacy of an Argive style. Although the post-war era saw a sudden growth not only in synthetic treatments but also in important articles and even a monograph devoted entirely
to Geometric sculpture, these continued for the most part to focus on stylistic and formalist issues.66 The impact of the early treatment of the figures, especially the females, had fossilized. Throughout this century the markedly different treatment of the Amyklai heads by German art historians and Anglo-American archaeologists is paradigmatic of contrasting scholarly traditions, idealism and positivism.67 In this connection must be noted, as Morris has done, the role of British and American women archaeologists-Sylvia Benton, Hilda Lorimer, Edith Hall, Harriet Boyd Haweswhose position in the vanguard of Dark Age studies reveals the field's marginal status within classical archaeology of the early 20th century. To this list should be added Winifred Lamb, whose 1929 Greekand Roman Bronzes, appearing in the same year as Milller's Friihe Plastik, provided a complementary survey of Geometric bronzeworking within a roughly sketched cultural and archaeological context. Benton's 1935 study of tripods was the first attempt to found a typology on technological development but also assessed representational evidence in order to understand their function within early Greek society.68 Despite the subsequent appearance of monographic treatments of tripods from Olympia and Delphi, her article remains a basic reference work. The prominence of women among the non-German scholars working in the field of archaeology of the Dark Age is directly relevant to the general issue of gender stereotyping, to which we now turn. One can trace many of the specific personal and institutional circumstances under which a history of Geometric art was formulated, but these factors do not tell the whole story. Most specifically, they fail to explain why distinctions between the nearly identical Amyklai heads were drawn at all, nor do they explain the particular semantics used to contrast them, or why scholars otherwise known for their visual acumen ignored tripod attachment pieces beneath the feet of large female bronzes. It is fair to suspect that a fundamental gender bias underlies the readiness of scholars to project onto a female the softness and decadence of a dying Bronze Age, and onto a male the energy of the progressive new
~4Matz (supra n. 16) 3: "Aber wer die heilenden Krifte kennt, die in der groBen Krisen des Abendlandes von dem griechischen Erbe ausgegangen sind, wird auf ihre Hilfe in der gegenwairtigen um keinen Preis verzichten wollen." 65Schweitzer (supra n. 16) 12. On Schweitzer's scholarship, see alsoJ. Whitley, "ArtHistory, Archaeology and Idealism: The German Tradition," in I. Hodder ed., Archaeology as Long-TermHistory (Cambridge 1987) 13-14.
66E.g., Himmelmann-Wildschiltz (supra n. 25); Herrmann (supra n. 20). 67 Whitley (supra n. 65). 68Morris (supra n. 51) 114-15; D. Bolger, "Ladies of the Expedition: Harriet Boyd Hawes and Edith Hall at Work in the Mediterranean," in C. Claassen ed., Womenin Archaeology (Philadelphia 1994) 41-50; Benton, "Evolution" (supra n. 26); Lamb (supra n. 47).
THE MALE-FEMALEPAIR IN GREEK GEOMETRIC ART
1998]
era, a prejudice with which their colleagues fell into line. Buschor, for example, presented a strikingly conflicted approach to the Amyklai heads. The appearance of this "Mycenaean" female goddess figurine at the shrine of a male god warranted, and duly received, lengthy deliberation (priestess? maternal deity? mother goddess? nature goddess?); the male head was immediately and unquestioningly dubbed an Apollo.69 Scholarly chauvinism of the early 20th century favored the aesthetic of the early Iron Age once its formal anticipation of Periclean Athens had been defined. In archaeology as in art history, the prevailing romantic vision of an early Homeric Greece prefiguring the cradle of a "European spirit" tended to focus interest on the heroic warrior and his male society.70 Within this epic world as on the battlefields of the Iliad, the hero stands alone. Horse and weapons define his world, which seems to be encapsulated in the monumental tripods. A historically grounded reluctance to complicate the purity of the symbol with female figures may be one way to interpret the contemporaneous neglect of the female handle attachments from secure contexts. It would be simplistic to argue for a misogynic conspiracy of male scholars keeping their Homeric gods and heroes "pure."It was, after all, Benton who provided the clearest application of gender stereotyping to the Ithaca tripod figure. My intention is not to disclose the neglect of females in Geometric Greek art, but to examine through selected cases one specific result of the perhaps inevitable projecting of the present onto the past. Indeed, one female figure, the ivory Dipylon Goddess, may well be the single most discussed work of Geometric sculpture (fig. 11).71Time and again in surveys of Greek art or sculpture, this figure stands as the sole representative of the period. The difference in its treatment from that of the similar female bronze from the Acropolis (fig. 8), for example, is readily comprehended: the outstanding artistry, exotic material, and fine state of preservation make this figure the perfect paradigm for the Greeks' relationship to Eastern art and the ascendancy of a Hellenic style. The
69 Buschor
(supra n. 6).
70On the appropriation of Greece as the birthplace of Western thought, see I. Morris,"Archaeologiesof Greece,"
in I. Morris ed., Classical Greece:Ancient Histories and Modern Archaeologies(Cambridge 1994) 11-12; M. Bernal, Black Athena. The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 (New Brunswick 1987). 71G. Perrot, "Figurines d'ivoire," BCH 19 (1895) 273-95;
Floren (supra n. 16) 42 ns. 93-94 lists 21 references, an incomplete list. For a description and historiography of
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sources of derivation are clear and the style constitutes an immediate translation of the Oriental into a uniquely Greek idiom. In modern scholarship as in antiquity, the value of the famous figure is much the same. To the Greeks, the Dipylon Goddess and her sisters (including Delphi 7730 and Acropolis NM 6503; figs. 6, 8) were valued precisely for their Orientalism, which to an eighth-century audience must have been immediately apparent and lent the figures a certain added power residing in the cachet of the exotic.72 To scholars, the concept of a borrowed Orientalism transfigured into Greek masterpiece has been more important than the figure. As art historical platitude, it also carries some truth: Orientalizing Greek art is rarely mistaken for the Eastern original. In fact the same script could not have been applied to the figure's ivory companion, inv. 779, which looks Eastern enough to have fooled Orientalists, nor could the role have been played by any other of the many Late Geometric sculptures of the nude standing goddess type, all of which compare unfavorably with the sophistication of most North Syrian figurines.73 The fortunes of the Dipylon Goddess, like those of similar Geometric sculptures, have been tied to changing scholarly agenda. Multiple cultural factors contributed to the uneven treatment of Geometric sculptures, of which gender biases are certainly a part, and not only within German academe. But perhaps more influential than any diffuse misogyny or will to heroicize the early Greeks is simply the impact of a traditional academic discourse marked by a general tendency to consolidate rather than challenge existing scholarship. Buschor, Kunze, and their contemporaries established the field for later German scholars by taking the initial lead in the study of Geometric art and essentially formulated the canon of Geometric art that persists to the present day. The early 20th-century impulse to distill the characteristics of products of different ages into contrasting formal principles and expressive inner dynamics tended to disregard context, function, and even methods of manufacture.74 Attention paid to any of these aspects might have pre-
the figures, see J.B. Carter, GreekIvory-Carvingin the Orientalizing and Archaic Periods (New York 1985) 1-7. 72 On early interest in Oriental art, see S.P. Morris, Daidalosand the Originsof GreekArt (Princeton 1992), esp. 124-49; I. Morris, "The Art of Citizenship," in S. Langdon ed., New Light on a Dark Age (Columbia 1997) 9-43. 73R.D. Barnett, "Phoenician and Syrian Ivory Carving," PEQ 1939, 5 n. 3. 74See also Whitley (supra n. 65).
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SUSAN LANGDON
vented the Amyklai figures from becoming separated and the female tripod attachments from losing their identities. The sum effect on the art history of the Geometric period was notjust to lose sight of works of sculpture equal to the exceptional Amyklai male figure and certain bronze horseleaders, but to create a false impression of an outstanding, isolated, helmeted male that easily became for many the earliest representation of Apollo in Greek art.'5 Indeed, when the female is returned to the equation, it is difficult to know what to do with the pair. Hampe and Simon, to keep their Apollo, had to postulate a lost Leto to accompany this Artemis on the model of the Dreros triad; Georgoulaki simply stripped Apollo of his divinity, making him a mortal warrior. More fundamentally, this course of scholarship, like that surrounding the female tripod attachments, has both resulted from and actively perpetuated a distorted focus on the solitary hero in early Iron Age art. THE MALE AND FEMALE PAIR IN GEOMETRIC ART
This historiographical survey demonstrates how past scholarly trends have marginalized some important Geometric female images. By excluding the female sculptures from its vocabulary, the syntax of Geometric art history has been disproportionately influenced by warrior statuettes, Geometric incised fibulas, and especially decorated, mostly Attic, pottery, whose specific funerary and religious needs required the depiction of sex-segregated ritual acts. Men and women appear together on pottery, but rarely in fully integrated activities. They may congregate around a bier within their own gender groups or pursue their separate but juxtaposed mourning roles on the same vase, with women dancing on the neck and men driving chariots on the belly. Similarly, dancing scenes are found in all the figured Geometric pottery traditions, but more often show segregated than mixed dances. When male and female dancers intermingle, as in the unusual Euboean "Crane Dance" oinochoe, the males are specifically not garbed as warriors, which suggests the sort of
75Pfeiff (supra n. 15) 20-22; H. Walter, GriechischeG6tter: Ihr Gestaltwandel aus den Bewustseinstufen des Menschen dargestellt an den Bildwerken (Munich 1971) 327; Simon (supra n. 16) 118, 121; P. Karakatsanis, Studien zu archaischen Ko-
lossalwerken(Europaische Hochschulschriften, series 38, Archiologie 9, Frankfurt1986) 113;Lambrinoudakis(supra n. 16). 76 S.H. Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play in GreekReligion
(Baltimore 1993) 10,41, 214. Euboean oinochoe:J.N. Coldstream, "The Geometric Style: Birth of the Picture,"in T.
Rasmussen and N. Spivey eds., Lookingat Greek Vases(Cam-
[AJA 102
public courtship dances for a community's youths and maidens known from literary and later artistic sources.'6 In other words, Geometric females have become familiar to us (with a few striking exceptions) only apart from depictions of vital warriors, whether mortal, heroic, or divine, who inhabit the world of the living. Geometric figures thus are seen to inhabit a static world of sex-segregated activities where men engage in a great range of heroic pursuits and women only dance or mourn, a view that grossly oversimplifies a rapidly changing society and its shifting construction of gender. Does the recognition of the couple motif help in understanding Geometric imagery and its links with the seventh century? Two images, taken not from sculpture but from Attic pictorial pottery, are relevant here. Both images present a scene in which a woman is conjoined with a warrior in narrative circumstances, and both images have seventh-century recensions, as it were, that entail some transformation of the original motif. In one of the best-known works of Geometric vase painting, the so-called "abduction scene" on an Attic spouted krater of ca. 735 B.C. in London, a warrior grasps a woman by the wrist and steps onto a manned ship (fig. 12).77 A general air of sexual appropriation or union is implied by the man's proprietary grasp of the woman's wrist, and his stepping foot signals his intention: he is not taking leave of her, he is taking her along. Although this is the most widely accepted interpretation, consensus stops here. Despite the wealth of details- the woman's wreath, the ship full of rowers, the herds Dipylon shield awaiting him on board--the scene nevertheless remains ambiguous enough to support multiple readings by 20th-century scholars. The most popular interpretations include Theseus and Ariadne, Paris and Helen, Jason and Medea, and Hector and Andromache.78 Dissenting views include a herds departure in the company of a goddess, and funerary games by ship race.'9 It is particularly important to note that the image, far from being a one-time, innovative experiment in visual narrative for an educated patron, belonged
bridge 1991) 55 fig. 20. 77London, British Museum 1899.2-19.1. A.S. Murray, "A New Vase of the Dipylon Class,"JHS 19 (1899) 198-201; G. Ahlberg-Cornell, Myth and Epos in Early GreekArt: Representationand Interpretation(SIMA 100,Jonsered 1992) 26-27 and fig. 30; Fittschen (supra n. 2) 51-52. 78Coldstream (supra n. 25) 355; Coldstream (supra n. 76) 53-54; Hampe (supra n. 12) 78-79; Fittschen (supra n. 2) 59-60. 79Fittschen (supra n. 2) 59-60; Murray (supra n. 77).
THE MALE-FEMALEPAIR IN GREEK GEOMETRIC ART
1998]
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Fig.12. Ship scene from an Attic spouted krater.London, BritishMuseum1899.2-19.1. (After A.S. Murray,JHS 19 [1899] pl. VIII) to a common store of meaningful imagery in the late eighth-century world. It appears again in different places and media, for example, on a Late Geometric bronze rod support from the Idaean Cave and yet again on a seventh-century Laconian ivory plaque (fig. 13).80In all these images the wrist-grasping gesture, the bridegroom's well-established gesture of later art, leaves no doubt that possession or domination is the key to the scenes. Yet they are not precisely the same. It can scarcely be coincidental that on the London krater the conjunction of the woman's raised arms (in agitation and grief) and the man's body position (foot on board, head turned back) precisely anticipates the formula for rape and abduction in Archaic to Hellenistic Greek art.81 The woman on the bronze stand, now aboard the ship, also raises her arms, although it is unclear whether
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the warrior is grasping her wrist.82 The Laconian plaque, on the other hand, is more often described as a hero's departure than an abduction, and indeed it lacks the dramatic elements of the earlier versions. The man grasps the woman's wrist, but she is not obviously agitated, and even places an affectionate (?) hand on his shoulder. It seems more a leave-taking along Homeric lines, as when Odysseus, bidding Penelope farewell, grips her wrist (Od. 18.258). Even so, a clear formal and conceptual link unites these scenes: not heroes' exploits, nor theft, nor departure, but possession, the theme of the couple that transcends their specific stories. A second Attic work of painted pottery raises related issues. A ceramic stand of ca. 700-675 B.C. in Munich (fig. 14) features three or four separate scenes.83 Two fighting scenes belong to the stock rep-
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Fig. 13. Drawingof an ivory plaque from the Sanctuaryof Artemis Orthia, Sparta. (After R.M. Dawkins,BSA 13 [1906-1907] pl. IV; courtesy British School at Athens)
80 Bronze stand: P. Blome, Die figiirliche Bildwelt Kretas in dergeometrischenundfriiharchaischen Periode (Mainz 1982)
25-26, 98-101, fig. 8, pl. 11.1-2. Laconian ivory:R.M.Dawkins, The SanctuaryofArtemis Orthia at Sparta (London 1929)
214 pls. 109-10. 81 A. Cohen, "Portrayalsof Abduction in Greek Art: Rape or Metaphor,"in N.B. Kampen ed., Sexualityin AncientArt (Cambridge 1996) 117-35. 82The warrior's"arm"may actually be a lance; see views
of both sides of the fragmentin C. Rolley,"Bronzeset bronziers des ages obscurs (XIIe-VIIIesiecle av.J.-C.)," RA 1975, 156 figs. 1-2. 83Depending on whether a hunter carryinghis quarry is to be read alone. K.Vierneisel, "Berichteder Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen. Neuwerbungen. Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek,"MiiJb 18 (1967) 241-45; Ahlberg-Cornell (supra n. 77) 61-62, figs. 91-93.
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SUSAN LANGDON
[AJA 102
ertoire of Late Geometric art: a pair of "Siamese twins" in combat with a single warrior, and a duel over a corpse. Neither theme necessarily refers to myth and epic. In the remaining scene, however, the presence of women paired with warriors has provoked interpretation based on epic, which for consistency has been extended to all the figure groupings. Two warriors confronted across a staff or standard brandish their swords in a fight or, more likely, an exchange of weapons (fig. 14). Behind each warrior stands a woman holding a branch in one
hand and grasping the man before her by the arm (left pair) or scabbard strap (right pair). The important point is not how the image is to be interpreted but the underlying assumption, which has been openly expressed by at least two scholars, that the very presence of women in the realm of the warrior indicates a specific narrative scene from myth or epic. Accordingly, the image has been construed as Achilles fighting Memnon,84 Orestes slaying Aigisthos,5 and Ajax exchanging gifts with Hector.86 In none of these interpretations are the women consequential but rather serve as iconographic accessories to help identify the men. The implicit point is that the occurrence of women with armed warriors is not natural and demands explication, an impression for which the disjunctions of the Amyklai pair and the tripod sets had already laid a foundation. Precisely the same prejudice has pervaded the approach to seventh-century art. A Cycladic amphora in Athens depicts a duel over armor waged by two armed warriors, each of whom is watched by an agitated (?) woman separated from the main scene by panel dividers (fig. 15).87 The image contains even more potential clues than does the Munich stand: the shield blazon of one warrior that might be a Gorgoneion, two different helmet types (suggesting Greek vs. non-Greek warriors fighting over Greek armor?), and different garments worn by the two women. Yet scholars are as divided on this scene as they are on the stand, and have suggested, for example, Achilles and Memnon, Ajax and Diomedes, and Ajax and Odysseus. The same basic questions remain unanswered: does the presence of women in a scene of war demand an extraordinary interpretation? And if they can be generic elements, how is the motif to be understood- that is, why does it persist? The restoration of the lost Geometric image of the warrior with female companion provides an enriched iconographic corpus with which to pursue these and other problems. One familiar debate concerns whether Geometric figural art should be inter-
84Vierneisel's view (supra n. 83) that Achilles and Memnon fight in the presence of their mothers Thetis and Eos has the advantage of fitting a documented, albeit later, iconographic motif. Such iconographic identifications are ultimately based on Pausanias's description (5.19.1) of the chest of Kypselos, the only source to mention the goddesses. 85Fittschen (supra n. 2) 196 n. 936 states that the presence of the women ensures that this is not a genre scene. His specific interpretation hangs on the identification of the staff as a scepter and on a close connection with
Aeschylus's version of the story. 86 Ahlberg-Cornell (supra n. 77) 61-62 implies that the presence of the women signifies a festive occasion. A.M. Snodgrass, "Homer and Greek Art,"in I. Morris and B. Powell eds., A New Companionto Homer (Leiden 1997) 574 notes that the presence of the women and an adjacent hunter renders the scene inappropriate to a battlefield context. 87Amphora, Athens, National Museum 3961: K. Schefold, Myth and Legend in Early Greek Art (New York 1966) pl. 10; Ahlberg-Cornell (supra n. 77) fig. 106.
Fig. 14. Stand with figural scenes. Munich, Staatliche Antikensammlungeninv.8936. (CourtesyStaatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek Miinchen, Foto Museum)
1998]
THE MALE-FEMALEPAIR IN GREEK GEOMETRIC ART
Fig. 15. Cycladic amphora from Melos. Athens, National Museum 3961. (Courtesy Hirmer Verlag, Munich, neg. 561.0268) preted in an epic, heroizing, or more prosaic light. All views have been extensively argued, and compromise seems difficult to maintain.88 The dismissal of the female sculptures demonstrates again how from its philological origins scholarship of the Geometric period has been held hostage by Homer, by herodriven epic texts. In the case of Geometric sculpture, the conferral of names justifies the study of "wholly unattractive, often ludicrous" figures, a not uncommon early 20th-century characterization.89 This historiographical lesson suggests that for past audiences as for present, names conferred power, and that the heroic-looking figures of Geometric art were likely to have been created with specific names in mind sometimes several for the same figure. It has been observed that even when Geometric artists had the
88See, e.g., J.L. Benson, "Symptom and Story in Geometric Art,"BABesch63 (1988) 69. 89S. Casson, "Bronzeworkof the Geometric Period and Its Relation to Later Art,"JHS42 (1922) 208.
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means at their fingertips to provide their figures with specific identities, including the written word, they demurred and perpetuated their chosen abstract style because it best suited their purposes.90 The essential ambiguity of the Geometric style, rather than hindering our efforts at understanding the imagery, offers a key: the lack of specificity allowed for powerfully multivalent symbolism. The association of the male tripod figures, for example, with horses and with the vessel's agonistic context enabled them to represent their audience of elite worshippers just as surely as their weapons, and their almost iconic figural treatment, replicated in scores of lavish bronze dedications throughout the major sanctuaries, evoked the heroes' world of violent clash and kinship with the gods. The figures' formal resemblance to Oriental smiting gods may have considerably enhanced this appeal and only increased with the addition of nude standing females. A bronze statuette could represent, at the same time and without contradiction, both its aristocratic viewers and a mythic hero. To seek a single specific identity misses the point: the iconographic details surrounding all the figures described in this study, including nudity, poloi, divine Oriental models, horses, Dipylon shield, and tripods, suggest that the full cosmic hierarchydivine, heroic, and mortal figures-was paired in art. However preponderant the divine and heroic pairings may be, this new interest in couples was embedded firmly in social structure. The imagery had social viability directly proportionate to its potential for the audience to see itself reflected. A man and a woman standing juxtaposed on a tripod or at Amyklai could have recalled, in addition to whatever heroic or divine figures local tradition held dear, the stabilizing social unity that circumscribed hearth and battlefield, the age-old union of war and fertility updated in aristocratic guise. The flexibility of the symbolism guaranteed its success. Narrative scenes were readily adapted to this allusive function, as the deeds of gods and heroes lend authority to human actions. So, for instance, in a society in which exogamous marriage was crucial in maintaining small communities and founding new colonies, could a ship-abduction scene not also have resonated with immediacy for its audience?9" Aristocratic patrons of such imagery may have had spe-
90 Snodgrass (supra n.
86), esp. 562-63. 91See Ahlberg-Cornell (supra n. 77) 26-27 for a similar interpretation.
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S. LANGDON, THE MALE-FEMALEPAIR IN GREEK GEOMETRIC ART
cial interest in these scenes, as the exchange of women as commodities was a powerful route to enhanced prestige and political alliance with local or foreign families. Similarly, the exchange of weapons or standards on the Attic stand in Munich could have served as an epic archetype for the rituals of truce that must often have arisen from communal rivalries and interfamily power struggles that may have punctuated eighth-century life with fair regularity. One might even speculate that the relatively narrow range of narrative subjects in Late Geometric art reflects precisely those images that offered mythic parallels for important social situations. CONCLUSION
Ultimately, the meaning of Geometric art must be sought not in the alignment of iconographic and contextual variables, but in the needs of the societies that created it. All archaeological evidence points to great changes afoot throughout eighthcentury Greece. An interpretation of art that restricts it to the narrowly illustrative excludes a powerful agent of change. Recovering the missing data of the six female sculptures examined here and understanding how they were lost offer starting points for constructing a new picture of Geometric society through different categories of cultural evidence. Paired with male warriors on cauldron rims, the bronze figures of females were executed for an elite clientele, as also were the Amyklai pair, which may have stood as tall as 40 cm. Their stylistic variety reveals that these sculptured couples were created at different production centers over a relatively brief span. Significantly, the image of the couple is not limited to a single region, such as Attica where the unusually rich iconographic system served specifically Attic interests. Rather, their public display at the sanctuaries of Delphi, Olympia, the Athenian Acropolis,
Polis Cave, and Amyklai suggests not only opportunities for the broad dissemination of an artistic motif but also a preexisting social context in which such imagery made sense at a panhellenic level. By the late eighth century the theme appeared in the decoration of vessels, votive objects, and seals, and was more expansively explored in narrative scenes. The significant question is not who are these Late Geometric figures, but what is the social utility of representing the union of male and female? The answer, which awaits another study, leads inevitably to the larger story of the shifting constructions of gender in the early Iron Age. Sensitivity to the way prevailing perceptions of Geometric art were formed can build a more richly nuanced corpus in which to read Geometric imagery and its subsequent evolution. Vital artistic motifs did not pass unscathed through the social upheavals of the mid-eighth to mid-seventh centuries, but must be approached in light of reaction, transformation, and most of all, local experience. One can readily imagine, for instance, that the increasing inegalitarianism of Athenian social and political institutions might have pervaded artistic expression by displacing, through iconography and inscription, the direct linkings of warrior and companion in Geometric art to a mythic realm in Archaic. Perhaps this transformation is already at work in the Munich stand, where the gathering of details reveals an artist attempting to make received imagery relevant to his contemporary audience, much as his 20th-century interpreters do today.
DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY UNIVERSITY COLUMBIA,
OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA MISSOURI
65211
[email protected]
