hellenistic echarpe ii the styles of c 200 100 bc
HellenisticsculptureII is definitely the sixth in Ridgways now almost full survey of the history of Greeksculpture, with the particular final quantity on the initial century BC awaiting achievement. Her approach follows those of her teacher, Rhys Father, whose GreekSculpture(1960) is the most demanding statement from the formalist procedure in time-honored art record. Like Carpenters work, Ridgways offers scrupulous and comprehensive visual evaluation of the tactics and doing work practices as well as the motifs which usually made up the style of the period which she is worried. Unlike Father, Ridgway has no overriding thesis concerning virtually any law-like or perhaps regular advancement of artistic style, although recognizes the interior diversity of Hellenistic Greeksculpture, as well as its regional variability and the non-linear characteristic of formal expansion.
This is the two strength plus the weakness with the book. On the other hand, it is a quite a bit more intellectually open than Rhys Father to the variety of factors materials, social, ethnic which may possess affected the development of Greeksculpture. However, her analyze lacks any clear distinctive line of systematic disagreement evaluating the relative importance of such factors in relation to the purely inner formal development of a tradition. Consequently both the goals, and at first sight the apparent accomplishment of the volume level, are rather modest, to `expose the insecurity of some classic attributions of sculptures towards the 2nd 100 years and to `confirm others (p. 12).
The approach is archaeological. A great introductory phase sets and justifies the chronological guidelines. The second and third chapters explore thesculptureof Pergamum because the prominent centre of patronage in the century, and in particular the Great Altar of Zeus as the defining batiment of the period. The following chapters explore types ofsculpture: architecturalsculpture, sculpturein the round, funerary and votive reliefs, cult statues, and copies, having a concluding part of `odds and ends. The formal analysis is normally superb: few have looked over so many ancient monuments so properly as Ridgway. She has created a very useful vocabulary for describing the characteristic motifs of various styles and periods, besides making good use of it in analysing both the innovations of second centurysculpture, and its continuities with the earlier. This produces important new insights, especially on workshop techniques: the increasingly hefty use of the drill (p. 115), the historical layering of iconography as an indicator of the `accumulation of models in carvers boutiques (p. 108), the regional continuity in sculptural practice, for example carving triglyph and metope in one piece in Paestum (p. 142).
Often , nevertheless , it is the asides, rather than the key of the analysis, which are most interesting. Having less connection between theme and deity in the architecturalsculptureof temples or wats is browse in terms of a shift by templesculptureas civic propaganda to a more simply decorative function (p. 108). Sculptural adornment in architecture expands from religious to purely seglar categories of building and is located primarily in Anatolia, not the Traditional mainland. Severe reliefs prosper above all in Asia Minimal, with a strongly cultic target, putatively related to `eastern religions and philosophies connected with the ruler conspiracy (p. 193). All this gives much meals for thought but is usually tossed out without any of the careful believed or serious analysis that Ridgway gives in her more solely stylistic diagnoses of time make of production of certain artefacts.
Almost all serious registrants of Greeksculpturewill have to readthis publication or perhaps far better to consult this: the rather list-like presentation of the materials, and the absence of any overriding argument motivating the examination, does not can make for easy reading. Students who are not experts would do better to go back to part VIII of Rhys Father, which covers much of the same earth in more vigorous and engaging style. Even though Ridgway would not, perhaps, very much advance each of our understanding of the social and cultural mechanics of stylistic developments in 2nd-centurysculpture, the lady certainly models on a much surer foundation our knowledge of the basic archaeological materials from which such a history could be constructed.
