Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture: Notes

 Chapter 1: Notes

"Whether operating by  eros or by philia, Greek statuary represents a standing invitation to fantasy: to believe that a block of stone can reciprocate affect. To yearn after a kouros, a kore, or any other statue is in some sense to wish–to fantasize–that the absent figure might exist, bodily, in the here and now. Apsukhon de empsukhon: the inanimate becomes animate. In this way, pothos and himeros recapitulate synaptic themes. They name the affective charge of beholding presence and absence.

It is, interestingly, in just these terms that Plato imagine our entry into authentic philosophical beholding. Socrates tells Phaedrus (whose name means "Radiant") that the perception of beautiful statues and people is a bodily correlate to the non-sensuous apprehension of the Ideas. It is through such embodies encounters that the noumenal world "shines" into the phenomenal. Socrates explains that, before birth, the soul must have apprehended true Beings (ta onta). But now, having fallen into corporeality, it can no longer do so. Our material eyes cannot see Ideas like Wisdom. Yet there is one Idea that remains perceptible, albeit indirectly: the Beautiful. We can see the Beautiful's  eidolon  or 'image'. We see this image in and as the body and face of a beloved, which partake of brilliance and erotic attraction. For this reason, the Beautiful is ekphanestataton kai eramiotaton, the 'most brilliant and most beloved.' of the Ideas. The beloved draws the incarnate soul by triggering its memory of the earlier apprehension of Being. This memory presents itself initially as amazement, ekplexis, but settles quickly into the mode of erotic desire. "
pgs. 55 -56

"Arousal by images seems to involve simultaneously the fantasy that the desired entity is real, not merely depicted, and an acknowledgement that the desired entity is real–that such presence as it has is the presence of an image. Omitting the latter half of the formula is, to repeat, a device of comedy, as for Pseudo-Lucian: only the erotomaniac really forgets the difference between an image and the real thing. Including the first half, on the other hand, implies that a monument can recruit a beholder's fantasy to the task of making present. Gratification, variously of pothos and himeros, is the incentive these monuments offer their beholders to enter their particular cycles of memory and presentification.

Desire may set its dialectic in motion, but it is not the only, or even the most important, response to statuary. In Archaic and early Classical literature, the characteristic reaction to a well-crafted image is thauma, 'wonder'. Raymond A. Prier has studies the usage of this word in Homer, but it has been almost entirely overlooked in current accounts of Greek art. But the importance of wonder can hardly be overstated. Even for Plato, 'astonishment', ekplexis, at the radiance of the Beautiful precedes erotic beholding." 
pg. 57

"...while wonder grips both 'deathless gods' and 'mortal men,' Pandora's guile is 'incomprehensible' to men alone. Men are victims of deception whiles gods are not. It follows that their respective wonderings will be slightly different: men wonder at that which they do not understand; that gods, at that which the recognize as duplicitous."
pg. 59

"Three interrelated features make the shield wonderful. First, and most obviously, it is radiant. Even more than Pandora's crown, it shimmers, glows, and shines. Unlike the polished mirror with which Perseus killed Medousa, Herakles' shield does not simply reflect light: it actively casts it. Second, the shield possesses a radical alterity. The Fear in its center stares back, empalin, at the beholder, rendering the act of looking strangely passive. That this alterity is of a piece with radiance is evident from the fact that Fear's staring eyes are 'glowing with fire.' (When Aphrodite looks at Helene with "marbling,' that is, flashing, eyes, ommata marmaironta, the result is amazement, thambos). Third, the wonder that results from this radiant otherness is not a state of free contemplation of the sort posited in modern aesthetics. On the contrary, the sight of 'unspeakable' Fear renders the beholder mute, like an image–'silent poetry,' as Simonides puts it. Where Pandora's crown depicted 'living beings with voices.' the shield provoke a loss of speech: the tow passages are perfectly symmetrical."
pgs. 59-60

"The formula thauma idesthai place Aphrodite in the same category as Pandora and the shield of Herakles. Like the former, she combines a dissimulating likeness with fiery radiance... A wonder can strike one dumb or blind."
pg. 60

"'But when they had put aside their desire for eating and drinking, Priam son of Dardanos gazed upon Akhilleus, wondering at his size and beauty, for he seems an outright vision of gods. Akhilleus in turn gazed upon Dardanian Priam and wondered, as he saw his brave look and and looked upon him talking.'

It is as though the two enemies are seeing each other for the first time. The recognize one another, change their way of seeing, Priam now asks Akhilleus for a place to sleep; Akjilleus promises to hold back the Akhaians so the old man has time to cremate his son. The revelation of shared humanity with an enemy is also a kind of wonder."
pg.63

"Xenophon..gives a list of everyday paradoxes, quotidian versions of Herakleito's cosmic "joints." In each case, wonder derives form the fact that a single thing can be two things at once."

"...the pseudo-Platonic Epinonis says of the essential spirit of water that 'it is at one time seen, but at another is concealed through becoming obscure, presenting a marvel in the dimness of vision [thauma kat' amudran opsin].' Here the doubleness of wonder is explicitly a matter of visibility and invisibility. Elsewhere in the same dialogue, however, it is a matter of pure synaptic joining: geometry is a thauma because it is 'a manifest likening [homoiosis] of numbers not like one another by nature.'"
pg. 63-64

"In sum, from Homer to the fourth century, the quintessential wonder is a spectacle of radiance, speed, and radical alterity. Each of these characteristics is in fact a variant on the basic quality of all thaumata, which is twofoldness, doubleness, "multifariously entangled confusion." Wonder is the perception of a synaptic joint, most notably in artworks. It renders its beholders speechless."
pg. 66

"...the formula thauma idesthai, "a wonder to behold for itself and oneself," is used exclusively to describe crafted works, like the blazing chariot of Hera or the shining armor of Rhesos. These artifacts partake of the radiance of the gods even as they are themselves no more than possessions. Hence, Prier argues, the thauma idesthai 'is balanced between the place of the gods and that of men.'"
pg. 67


conjoining temporal and spatial synapses

Radiance, opulence, refraction break with our normative sense of how form and light interact - namely reflection of light off material and immediate translation into flat fields of color.
These breakdowns in visual becomes a useful phenomenon to employ when attempting to convey invisible - but felt (visually incongruent) experiences of our material existence.

Bring what is not present present. Dead, gods, fantasy. 

Chapter 3: Notes 

"The Present chapter will track the phenomenon of showing-through--the Rilkean surface-effect--in three interconnected domains: anatomy, or the illusion of hypodermal structures like muscles, bones, and sinews; drapery, or the illusion of a body just underneath the surface of a sculpted garment; and ethos, or the illusion that a mere statue is the repository of a character, a psyche, a soul."
 pg. 127

"The difference between Kant and Schiller, in this regard,consists in the value that each assigns to drapery/ For the one [Kant) it is a supplement to essence, hence decorative; for the other [Schiller] it is a magical sign of essence, hence a version of realism. Much writing on Greek sculpture consists of a negotiation between these two positions. But neither Schiller nor Kant is really adequate to the sculptures themselves, since neither attends properly to Rilke's crucial observation: the sculpted surface is 'absolutely nothing but surface.'"
pg.129

"Drapery is a shifting, variegated, complex sort of thing. . . The complexity of Aphrodite's robe is of a piece with its brilliance: it is part of what makes the garment a wonder to behold for itself and oneself. More precisely, the description proceeds from the robe's dazzling brightness, via its adornment, to an effect of shimmering translucence and overlay..."
pg. 138















Richard Neer
Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture
University of Chicago Press.