It is as if everything that needed to be done in terms of the sculpture of the human form was achieved by 300BC.īut every now and again the strangeness of Greek bodies is brought home to us. Like the taste of water, the sound of elevator music or the smell of air, they have become part of the landscape, lithic wallpaper, garden furniture, C major.
Ancient statues are looked at and not seen. Tapestries and reliquaries are simply not looked at. Greece, 720-700BCĪncient sculptures only seem happy when they have an entire institution to themselves, as in the Glyptothek in Munich, one of my favourite museums, which has in its collection the early classical sculptures of the temple of Aphaia in Aegina and the Barberini Faun, possibly the sexiest marble statue in the world.Īncient statues have suffered a precipitous decline in cultural value over the last 200 years, one only exceeded by that of tapestries and reliquaries. It can be impossible to move in the Egyptian sculpture rooms of the British Museum, but I have often found myself alone with the sculptures that once decorated the mausoleum of Mausolus of Halicarnassus.īronze statuette showing the suicide of Ajax. Even when antique statuary does not have to compete with modern painting, it can find it hard to divert attention from the artefacts of more exotic cultures. The Uffizi in Florence was once most famous for its collection of classical sculptures, but who now spends much time looking at them as they barge past to the Botticellis? If you find the crowds around the Hieronymus Bosches too much in the Prado, seek out the cul-de-sac where they have put the wonderful San Ildefonso statue group for some peace and quiet.
At times it can seem overly familiar, a bit tacky or tawdry or maybe just banal, evoking the withdrawing room of an aesthete of the 1890s, a gay sauna in the 1970s or the yard at the back of a modern garden centre alongside the blue-glazed planters and bird baths. A male nude, a Greek statue, has become very familiar over the past 2,500 years: it is what we expect of ancient statuary, that it show off its muscles. T he oddity of ancient sculpture often escapes us.
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