Michael Robertson

Transcription

Good afternoon. Welcome to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. My name is Dr. Michael Robertson. I'm professor and chair of Humanities at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. Today I'd like to share with you two works of funerary art from the museum's Classical collection. The first is a wonderful Hellenistic lion that dates to around 325 B.C.E. that guarded a cemetery in Athens, and a wonderful Roman sarcophagus that dates to the third century C.E. that has a wonderful depiction of the Muses and the patron of the arts who was the deceased interred in the sarcophagus. So come into the Nelson and enjoy. I'd like to share a little bit with you of this wonderful marble lion. This dates to the first quarter of the fourth century, B.C.E. This lion here would have guarded a cemetery in Athens. Again you want a cemetery to be guarded, so what better thing to have than this wonderful lion, an apotropaic symbol, fancy Greek word that means to "ward away evil." This lion, if you go to the Nelson's web page, has a wonderful video that talks about the restoration of this work of art, which is a really good teaching video for people who want to get some idea of how these works of art, when they're taken, excavated out of the ground and restored - what that process is all about. Lions as guardians date way back into antiquity especially in terms of Egyptian art. In the First Dynasty, we have an early pharaoh Menes, whose burial chamber that's placed in the ground, a couple of burial chambers in front are sacrificial animals, mostly of which are lions. So we see this tradition of lion as guardian and protector is quite early. Of course we are all familiar with the Sphinx on the Giza plateau that guards Khafre's pyramid and mortuary temple, and that of course is the seated lion that has the face of the portrait of the pharaoh Khafre there. And I want to recall that because I'm going to be coming to a similar comparison with this lion a little later. Later on during the reign of Thutmosis IV in the 17th and 18th Dynasties of Egypt, again the lion becomes very, very popular in Egyptian art, especially again using them to guard cemeteries. So they're not really indigenous to the Greek world. They really come into fashion in Greece at the time of Alexander the Great, who of course expanded Greek power to Egypt and the ancient Near East all the way to India. And of course Greek influences went east, but also Eastern and Egyptian influences come into Greece as well. So this lion here that we see in this Hellenistic period is part of that tradition. But when is a lion not a really a lion? If we go back to the Sphinx of Giza, we have to understand that the Sphinx is a hybrid creature and hybrid creatures are monsters. That is the Sphinx is half-lion and has the face of a man. So if we look at this lion here, what we find is a monster again as well as composed of various parts. If we look here at the back of the lion, the hindquarters, those are not the hindquarters of a lion, but in fact they are bovine, probably that of an ox. So here we have the hindquarters of an ox. On the back, the back is more of the spine of a goat. If we look at the ribcage, however, what we see is actually a horse. So all of a sudden we now have bovine, we have a goat and we have a horse chest, and so we're now more in the Greek world of the Chimera. The Chimera was this mythical three-bodied beast that had the body of a lion, it had the tail of a serpent, and then growing right out of his back was this head of a goat. So here we are taking the Greek tradition, importing this Egyptian tradition of lion as guardian. But if you look here at the front with the front paws here, they're really not paws, but what do you see and that is more of the posture of a dog. And again we're now back in the Greek world because in the Greek tradition, it is dogs that guard the entry into the underworld and of course we're now in the world of Cerberus. Cerberus is this three-headed dog who guards the entrance to Hades. So what we have is this wonderful mixture of this lion. Sphinx with the body of a lion and the face of a man. And if we look at this face of this lion, what we see is the face is rather human and especially if we look at the eyes. The eyes and especially around the eyes, as well, the articulation of it and what I believe we see here is a reference to Alexander the Great himself. Alexander the Great in the portraiture by his official portrait sculptor, Lysippos, had a certain iconography when dealing with Alexander the Great. One of them is again a sort of slight turning of the head. Another is Alexander had this sort of moppish hair with this particular parting or tuft that's here right at the top and we see that again with this lion as well. Most importantly I think was this element of that Lysippos created and this is a Greek word pothos, which means something like a spiritual longing. When we see the portraits of Alexander the Great, there's this sort of concerned longing that he has because Alexander the Great, when he died, ascended to heaven and he there is this guardian of humanity, which is exactly what the word "Alexander" means in Greek - the protector of humankind. So as a result we see in this wonderful lion guarding this cemetery is this wonderful fusion of Egyptian traditions of God, of lion man God protector, now articulated in a more Greek context where we've pulled in the Chimera, this Greek mythological beast, and also fused in the Egyptian tradition of the Sphinx as the guarder where we have this sort of reference to the face of Alexander the Great, who as I said would have recently deceased at about the time that this sculpture was articulated. So they're all around the basic same timeframe of the rise of Alexander the Great and then of course his death and apotheosis into heaven. So if you come to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and you come to this great space here, do spend some time with this lion. Go online and see the wonderful video that talks about how this was restored and if you have a smartphone, you can actually plug into the Nelson's website, punch in a number and you'll be able to hear a guided tour that talks about this lion as well. I would like to share with you this wonderful third century Roman sarcophagus here in the Nelson's Classical collection. This sarcophagus here is rather interesting especially if we take the word sarcophagus itself. The word means "flesh eater." Early sarcophagi were made usually out of limestone and therefore when the body was placed into the sarcophagus, the limestone was believed to help break down the flesh and thus leave the bones intact. So, thus the word sarcophagus, "flesh eater." Sarcophagi are attested to in the ancient world as far back as the Minoan period in Crete and the Bronze Age in two forms, one that looks like a bathtub and another one that is roughly a square but it would have a top on it and it was basically to imitate a house. And so therefore the deceased was sort of housed for all eternity. In Greece sarcophagi were not all that common as grave markers. If you've been to a museum, you often see those kouroi, those statues of youths, they would be placed on the grave markers. And then aboveground, grave stones more like we tend to have here in the United States. The Romans, actually the Etruscans before the Romans, had sarcophagus for their burials, but they weren't inhumation burials. That is they didn't put the body in there. They're basically chests into which they would place the cremated remains in urns and very often the tops of those would be decorated with scenes of the deceased and perhaps his wife reclining together banqueting. And very often they would be made out of terra cotta. We really don't get to sarcophagi in Rome until the reign of Trajan in the first century. But really they become very, very popular later on in the reign of Hadrian and his love of Greece, and so as a result many of the scenes that we see in those Hadrianic sculptures are scenes from plays and drama and sometimes banquets and stories of Dionysus. Later on in the Antonine period and the end of the second century, Rome is very, very turbulent and the figures are a bit more contorted, more compressed, and the scenes are more tragic of death and just sort of mirroring the times of the day. And this continued into the third century and as a result there's sort of a reaction towards all of that chaos, and sarcophagi of this period tend to return to a more classical ordering and this is what we see here in this wonderful third century sarcophagus here. And if you look at the figures, the proportions are a little less classical. Actually what we see are the facial proportions and the proportions of the body that we're going to see pretty soon in late antiquity and early Christian art. Here we have a scene of the nine Muses from Greek mythology and here in the center, we see the patron, who is a woman and she is wearing a toga. So here she clearly is a very wealthy and powerful woman of the third century, and as a patron of the arts she wanted to immortalize herself just as this building here immortalizes William Rockhill Nelson and also Mary Atkins as well. Here in Kansas City when we think of the Halls and the Helzbergs and people like that who are very much - and the Kauffmans - involved in the arts, this is exactly the same idea that we see here in antiquity. And she's standing here in the center next to Minerva, who is the Roman counterpart of Athena, who is the patron of the arts. On each side are the nine Muses, the nine deities who personified all the various arts of the ancient world. You can't tell one from another from the facial expressions, as is very typical of Greek artists especially and of Classical art as well. So the way they're identified is by what they are holding in their hands. So if we start over here at the left here at the very beginning, we see them use Polyhymnia, the Muse of sacred music. And she would normally have a scroll in her hand as we see here, and because she is dealing with sacred music she would usually have her head covered in a veil. And you can see here her garment, she's got her shoulders covered and it's pulled all the way up. She's not fully veiled and I think this is more of a stylistic element just simply to have all the Muses' faces exposed, but she is all the way up to her hands. So basically everything is covered except her hands and her feet and her face, and she's in a sort of gesture listening to perhaps Euterpe, who is right next to her, who is the Muse of lyric poetry. And she has this very wonderful flute in her hand here that she would have played. Next to her is Thalia, the Muse of comedy. Thalia means something like the "boisterous" or the "booming, loud-voiced" one. And she has a shepherd's crook here and the comic mask in her hand, so we're able to identify her as well. And since tragedy and comedy are closely linked together, we have next to her Melpomene, who has this tragic mask in her hand. But mostly we can tell that she's the Muse of tragedy is because she’s standing on these large platform shoes here. This is a dramatic convention that we see also in Japanese theatre, kabuki theatre as well, where since tragedy deals with stories of heroes and especially of gods, they basically stand on these platform shoes here so that they're elevated and they're not touching the ground. It gives them a more godlike stature. And then next to her is Erato, the Muse of erotic love poetry, and we can really tell that she is Erato because, look here, she's got her shoulder exposed in this kind of little sexy thing going here. And she has her foot here on a box, a cosmetic box that would have held not only her musical pluck that she has the lyre here, but perhaps also her cosmetics as well. And as I mentioned here, we have the Roman woman, who is unknown, and of course Minerva here in the center. Then we have Clio here who is the Muse of history. The Greeks thought of history writing as again one of the great arts as well. She's very wonderfully tapping on the shoulder of Terpsichore, she who delights in the dance, and perhaps a little bit of movement here that we see in her knee, giving an idea that she's in the element of movement and she also holds this lyre as well. Then we have Urania and she is the Muse of astronomy and astrology and she holds in her hand a globe symbolizing the heavens. And then finally at the end, we have Calliope, she of the beautiful voice, and she is the Muse of epic poetry of the type that we have of Homer and for the Romans Virgil's Aeneid, and here is her box that she would have her writing tablet and her stylus that she has in her hand as she's composing her heroic verses. So it's a very wonderful work of third century Roman sculpture. And again a good example of a sarcophagus that we have from Rome and we can lastly tell that it is a Roman sarcophagus and not a Greek sarcophagus mostly because it was excavated in Rome, but also in the fact that it's very frontal. Roman sarcophagi, like Roman temples, are frontal. You enter them from the front and you can't go behind them, whereas in the Greek world, the Greek sarcophagi were very, very large and monumental, and they were sculpted on all four sides and meant to be for kings and pharaohs and things of that nature. So they were very ostentatious public works of sculpture, so this is here very, very frontal. There are winged Griffins on either side, these are winged lions and they are apotropaic, a fancy Greek word for warding evil. Well thank you for your attention and come to the Nelson and visit this wonderful room of Classical antiquities.