a classical education

10 VISUAL ARTS
public
works
Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Handstand, 2003.
Samstag Collection, University of South Australia
Art Collection. Gift of the artist. On display, level
five, Jeffrey Smart Building, University of South
Australia, Adelaide.
Bronwyn Watson
Type C digital print on paper;
50cm x 50cm
skirt has fallen over her face, leaving her
underwear on show as her legs point to the sky.
The quirky humour comes from the bizarre
and discordant juxtapositions.
Hobbs says Handstand is from her Physics
series, which explored motion, or the lack of,
within pictorial space. It was taken at the nearest beach to CalArts, Channel Islands Beach,
and the girl was a fellow student who was
studying dance at the same time.
Gillian Brown, the curator of the Anne &
Gordon Samstag Museum of Art at UniSA,
says Handstand is imbued with deadpan wit
and droll humour. The photograph captures a
seemingly fleeting moment, its carefully planned nature revealed by the perfectly framed
background and the perfect horizon line, with
the figure perfectly centred.
“In Handstand there is no sign of vulnerability despite the woman’s exposure,” Brown
says. “She holds her balance, and our gaze.”
LUISA RICCIARINI/LEEMAGE/AFP
WITH her quirky photographs, Rebecca Ann
Hobbs first came to public attention in 2002
with a series of self-portraits with animals such
as a snail, a spider, a squid, a stuffed fox and a
very large dog. That celebrated series, Suck
Roar, was conceived just before she won a prestigious Samstag scholarship to study at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.
Hobbs was born in Townsville in 1976. Before studying Los Angeles, she completed an
honours degree in photography at Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts.
She describes her experience at CalArts as
“fantastic”. “I learned a lot about contemporary fine art practices and I met and became
friends with very smart creatives whom I am
still in touch with and continue to work with,”
she says. “I still maintain a practice that reflects
the experience of CalArts.”
Hobbs now lives and works in Auckland and
in appreciation of her Samstag scholarship she
donated Handstand to the Samstag collection
at Adelaide’s University of South Australia.
Handstand is an eye-catching image. A
woman is seen performing a handstand on the
beach. As the waves roll in, her long, scarlet
One of two Riace
Warrior bronzes, on
display in Reggio di
Calabria, Italy
A CLASSICAL
EDUCATION
Christopher Allen
Gods, Myths & Mortals: Greek Treasures
Across the Millennia
Hellenic Museum, Melbourne
Riace Warriors
Archaeological Museum, Reggio di Calabria, Italy
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October 18-19, 2014
T
HERE are a few places in the world
— and many of them are in Italy —
that are worth visiting for one or two
buildings, sculptures or paintings.
The most extreme case is perhaps
the little Tuscan village of Monterchi, notable
only for having a masterpiece by Piero della
Francesca, the Madonna del Parto. You get off a
bus in the middle of nowhere and walk for a
half-hour along country roads, but it’s well
worth the effort.
The city of Messina, destroyed in the earthquake of 1908, then badly bombed during
World War II, is the gateway to Sicily when
crossing from the mainland, but otherwise is
mainly of interest for a regional museum that
holds two late paintings by Caravaggio: the
beautiful Adoration of the Shepherds and one of
the artist’s greatest works, The Raising of
Lazarus, in which among other things he
recalls the Christ of The Calling of St Matthew
in Rome.
Across the strait is a city that has even less to
recommend it than Messina: Reggio di Calabria, once the Greek Rhegion, ally of Athens
during the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, but
today a testimony to unplanned and too often
unfinished urban development.
Yet Reggio has a single artistic attraction
that makes it more than worth the visit: the socalled Riace Warriors.
These two bronze statues were discovered
by chance by an amateur diver in 1972 and are
now newly exhibited after a long restoration.
We are still not sure where they were made or
installed, why they were moved or where they
were going — although the chances are that
they were on their way from Greece or southern Italy to Rome or perhaps from Rome to
Constantinople — but it seems that the ship
went down in a storm and they lay undisturbed
on the seabed for the next 15 to 20 centuries.
The significance of the discovery is hard to
exaggerate. Most of the great freestanding statues of the classical period, unlike the Archaic
kouroi and temple reliefs that continued to be
executed in marble, were cast in bronze.
In due course a great many of these were acquired by the Romans and moved to Italy.
After the fall of Rome, the barbarians saw in
these masterpieces merely a source of a valuable alloy, and almost all were melted down.
Today, only a handful of large bronze statues of
the classical period survive.
Fortunately, the popularity of these great
works ensured that marble copies were made
in the Roman period, and in most cases these
are what we have to rely on today. Such copies
are naturally variable in their skill and sensitivity: some are full of life and feeling, others
leaden and inert. But even in the best cases, it is
like reading poetry in translation. One gets the
general idea and some sense of the imagery
and themes, but subtlety of verbal music and
the micro-thoughts that arise from the precise
choice of words and syntactic order are necessarily lost.
The contrast between these two figures and
the Doryphoros in the Archaeological Museum at Naples is telling, especially as the latter
represents, if not an advance in any simplistic
sense, at least a more mature and complete expression of the classical ideal of the figure. For
while in each of the Riace figures the weight is
dropped on to one leg, thus achieving the formal unity of a single centre of gravity and a single serpentine line from head to foot, the
sculptors who made them hesitated to embrace
the consequences of this formal innovation.
In fact, when we drop our weight on to one
leg, the pelvic girdle tends to turn away towards the non-weight-bearing leg. But the
upper part of the torso tends to turn back, in
compensation, to face in the same direction as
the weight-bearing leg, thus creating the gentle
twist — the offsetting of the axes of pelvic and
shoulder girdles — known as contrapposto.
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VISUAL ARTS
The sculptor or sculptors of the Riace figures,
while consciously evoking the powerful serpentine movement through the whole body, were
clearly not comfortable with this twisting motion, and they cancelled it by bringing forward
the non-weight-bearing leg, thus making the
whole torso flat and frontal. This is what gives
these works, for all their mastery of anatomy, a
subtle but pronounced stiffness, like a vestige of
archaic rigidity.
Again, it would be misleading to think of this
quality in narrowly progressivist terms because
in fact it is fully integrated into the aesthetic expression of the works and seems particularly appropriate to the kind of warlike alertness of the
figures, perhaps a commemoration of the battle
of Marathon, or in another hypothesis Eteocles
and Polynices about to confront each other for
the throne of Thebes. It would be easier to explain the similarity of their attitudes if they were
intended to face each other.
The more relaxed posture of the Doryphoros
would not suit these figures, who are not athletes but warriors: not evocations of the youthful maturity known as hebe, but of the acme of
life, close to the ages of 35 to 45. But what is
above all striking in the comparison is that
while the Doryphoros is a great masterpiece
and a reference work in the history of art, we
know it only in translation. The Riace figures
are original works, incomparably vivid, alive in
every astonishing anatomical detail and deeply
moving in the calm, powerful features that
speak to us with disturbing and enigmatic immediacy of a time 2½ millennia past.
The continuity of Greek history, from remote past to modern times, despite many interruptions and especially centuries of stifling
Turkish domination, is the theme of the Benaki
Museum in Athens.
Thanks to a generous 10-year loan agreement, a selection of works from the Benaki col-
Far left, pair of 19th-century
pistols and, left, the gold kylix
of dubious authenticity, both
from Melbourne’s Gods, Myths
& Mortals exhibition
lection has opened at the Hellenic Museum in
Melbourne, an institution that is well-known
within the city’s Greek community but perhaps
not, until now, to a broader public.
The collection is designed above all to offer
samples of art and culture in Greece at different
points in a long history that extends back to periods much earlier than the arrival of the first
Greek-speaking people in the area. Thus there
is a crouching steatopygic fertility figure with a
phallic head, uniting fertility symbols of both
sexes, such as one encounters in Neolithic cultures around the Mediterranean.
This work is from 5800 to 4500BC, while an
elegant Cycladic figure of about 2700 to
2300BC belongs to a more sophisticated stage
of early civilisation, one contemporary with important developments in Mesopotamia and
Egypt. It is still a fertility figure, but here the
sexual attributes are much less conspicuous,
and it is the deep cut between the legs that functions as a vulval image.
From the Minoans, the pre-Greek Cretans,
there is a clay figurine of the goddess, arms extended in her incarnation as Mistress of Beasts;
and also a small bronze votive model of a double
axe, an object of special cultural significance, no
doubt connected to sacrifice, in Minoan culture.
The Mycenaeans, the first Greeks, who were
influenced by and then dominated Minoan
Crete, are represented by a number of objects,
but none more important and at the same time
puzzling as a gold kylix with a repousse motif of
running hounds. This was a significant and expensive acquisition in 1939 and one to which the
museum’s founder, Antonis Benaki, was particularly attached; there is an often-reproduced
contemporary photograph of him admiring the
cup on display in a glass case.
Unfortunately, there have long been doubts
about the cup’s authenticity. This object, which
if genuine is extremely rare and valuable, was
acquired without provenance from a dealer
about whom we know nothing. It also presents a
number of problems, including the fact the body
and foot are soldered to the stem, which is not
the usual procedure for works of this scale at the
time.
The arguments for and against the authenticity of the cup have been reviewed in detail by
Irini Papageorgiou of the Benaki Museum itself
(2008) and it appears that they cannot be decis-
ively settled at this point. In itself, the cup is an
attractive object and the motif of the running
hounds is an engaging one. But, on a closer inspection, the animals lack the vitality so evident
in bulls and human figures in the famous Vaphio cups.
This could be a matter of skill — after all, we
can’t expect all craftsmen of any period to be
equally able — but the skill of the Vaphio cups is
underpinned by an acute and intuitive feel for
the experience of animals that is hard to simulate in the modern world.
There are countless other objects of metal
and ceramics that could be discussed at length,
but the focus is decisively on the work of the
craftsman and artefacts of small scale, and this
in turn reflects a focus on social history, and on
a concern for how modern Greece came about.
Those interested in ancient Greece as the fountainhead of modern civilisation tend to ignore
what happened to the Greek homeland itself in
the Byzantine age and especially under Turkish
domination. To a Greek, of course, these more
recent periods are of great significance.
All would have to agree, though, that Greek
civilisation declined drastically over this time:
the home of free speech, philosophy, inimitable
literature and dynamic, democratic political life
was gradually reduced to a folk culture dominated by the Orthodox Church.
But the Greek spirit was not completely extinguished, and it reappears in the wars of independence that went on throughout much of the
19th century, from the Greek mainland to Crete,
and are represented here by weapons, costumes
and historical prints.
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October 18-19, 2014