Allegory

Sleeping figures appear for the first time in Hellenistic sculpture, notably a famous Ariadne and a sleeping faun slouched back in sensuous indolence, both expressive in their uncontrolled movements and gestures of a new awareness of man's instinctual nature. Their unconscious bodily responses betray a temporary disjunction of body and mind. An exceptionally fine bronze beautifully catches the complete relaxation of a tired child in deep sleep, legs apart, one arm thrown across the body, and faithfully renders the appearance of loose, dimpled infantile flesh (5,14). As the wings with ruffled feathers reveal, however, this is no ordinary child. He is usually identified as the god of love, Eros, son of Aphrodite, though why he should be sleeping is something of a mystery. (Deities were usually shown in characteristic attitudes and actions.) Does he represent the tranquillity attained, so the Stoics believed, when desires are laid to rest? Is he one of the brothers Hypnos and Thanatos - sleep and death - who were visualized as winged children? Is he some other personification reflecting that shift in emphasis, to which we have already alluded in connection with Hellenistic thought, towards the inner life and introspection and philosophies of withdrawal? Or is he simply a decorative figure? It is impossible to give a certain answer: but it is indicative of the expanding range of Hellenistic art that such questions should arise.

It is in this context that allegory, which means literally 'saying something else', first occurs in European art. By the second century BC the Greek gods had lost much of their credibility as inhabitants of a superior world influencing the life of mankind below. In Hellenistic art they tend increasingly to become personifications - of love, death, wisdom, courage, and even of such abstractions as opportunity, luck, strife and forgetfulness, which had not been previously deified. Lysippus carved a statue of Opportunity, running on tip-toe with winged feet, a razor in the right hand, the proverbial forelock in front of the face, the back of the head bald to indicate that he cannot be caught from behind. Such statues were intended to be ‘read'.

A Greek statue of a deity, hero or athlete had been self-sufficient, a thing in itself. In the Hellenistic world such figures might acquire allegorical significance from their contexts. One of the most famous examples of Hellenistic art is a case in point: the Nike or 'Victory' set up about 190 BC by the inhabitants of the small north Aegean island of Samothrace to commemorate a naval victory (5,15). Here the context redefined the meaning of an old image and so reanimated it, as comparison with the late fifth-century Nike at Olympia reveals (4,32). Whereas the earlier figure flutters atop a high column, the Nike of Samothrace lightly 'touches down' as if in a sudden gust of wind on the prow of a ship, which was originally set in a fountain with boulders emerging from the water in the foreground. Although both were made in connection with historical events, the former is generalized, with the goddess Victory shown as if ready to descend where she will, while the latter is quite specific in representing the victory off the coast of Samothrace. The difference in meaning is reflected in the form, even in the handling of the marble. On the Nike of Samothrace drapery is rendered as thick wind-swept cloth rather than as a diaphanous, almost insubstantial membrane. The structure of her well-built form is, none the less, apparent beneath the rich folds and furrows of billowing material, which, with complex rhythms of light and shadow, heightens the figure's dramatic impact.

A taste for the small and exquisite was combined with a love of the vast and grandiose, both extremes becoming typical of Hellenistic art and contrasting very strongly with the aims of fifth-century Greek artists and their ideal of the 'golden mean (see p. 144). Lysippus was renowned for his ability to work on either scale. One of his sculptures is said to have been a little bronze Hercules he made to stand on Alexander's table, another was a colossal bronze Hercules some 58 feet (18m) tall set up in the Greek city of Taras (present-day Taranto) in southern Italy. His pupil, Chares of Lindos, nearly doubled this height in his famous Colossus of Rhodes.

The over-life-size figure poses problems of structure and also of proportions, for it cannot be simply a mathematical enlargement. The optical distortions, due to the spectator's viewpoint, would make any simple enlargement appear grotesque. It may well have been in this context that Lysippus is said to have boasted that where his predecessors had represented men 'as they really were', he represented them 'as they appeared to be'. He is credited with a complete revision of the Polyclitan canon of proportions (see pp. 153-5), which had been based on actual measurements of the human form. Although none of his reputed 1,500 works survives, and very few are known even from copies, numerous Hellenistic statues are based on the scale of proportions associated with him, which involved mainly a slight reduction in the size of the head and a corresponding extension of the limbs, thus producing an appearance of greater height.

One of the finest of the Lysippic statues is a slightly more than life-size male nude, an original Hellenistic bronze variously dated between the early third and the late second centuries BC (5,16). There is a characteristically Hellenistic combination of naturalism and rhetorical allegory in this work. The traditional walking posture is given a more vivid sense of lively movement by the wider spacing of the feet and the placing of the arms in a bold spiral curve. Somewhat overdeveloped broad-shouldered muscularity conforms to a new ideal of physical vigour, which stresses strength and weight rather than the nimble, light-foot agility of earlier Greek athletes. Yet the face is anything but idealized and would seem to be that of an individual, a portrait head, in fact. This type of portrait statue - the 'ruler portrait', as it is called, with only the head as a likeness - was a Hellenistic invention. The physical perfection which, in Archaic and Classical Greece, athletes had shared with the gods was now attributed to the ruler, to whom divine honours were paid.