J. J. Pollitt, Art & Experience in Classical Greece
Order and chaos anxiety, remedy in measurement and geometry, threat to 'group consciousness’ by ‘disparate cultures and peoples’, mood change pre-Classical to early-Classical before-after Persian wars
Jerome Jordan Pollitt wrote:
Prologue
On the meaning of 'classical'
… Since the latter part of the nineteenth century historians of Greek art have customarily referred to the art produced in Greece between the time of the Persian Wars (481-479 B.C.) and the death of Alexander the Great (323 S.C.) as 'Classical', and have distinguished this period from the 'Archaic' phase which preceded it and the 'Hellenistic' period which followed it. Those who first used 'Classical' in this way did so because they felt that the art produced in Greece between 480 and 323 B.C. was most worthy of the traditional meanings which attached to the word—it was of the first rank, it seemed to represent a standard by which other developments could be judged, and order, measure, and balance seemed to be quintessentially part of its style. In effect, they limited the historical meaning of 'classical' but maintained its qualitative and stylistic senses.
Today when Archaic art is so widely admired and Hellenistic art is beginning to receive its due, it seems uselessly contentious to insist on the superiority of one stylistic phase over another. In all periods of Greek art great works were produced; facile generalizations about ‘primitiveness’, ‘maturity’, and ‘decadence’ are almost always inadequate. I therefore propose to use 'Classical' in this book, at least at the outset, as an essentially conventional term for a particular stylistic and chronological phase of Greek art, devoid of any a priori value judgements, and to let the term define itself by demonstration. By an analysis of what characterizes the 'Classical' style, what forces produced it, and what unifies it in spite of its own considerable inner diversity, we can perhaps arrive at an appreciation of the word's significance which will be inherent in the art itself.
Chapter 1
Antecedents and first principles
Order and Chaos
A deep-seated need to discover an order in, or superimpose an order on, the flux of physical and psychological experience is a continuing feature of all Greek artistic and philosophical expression. While it is true that every conscious creature feels this need to some extent, the intensity with which the quest for order was carried on by the Greeks was exceptional. Whether as a result of some mysterious tendency in the national psyche or as a spontaneous reaction to their turbulent historical experience after the break-up of the Mycenaean world, the Greeks felt that to live with changing, undefined, unmeasured, seemingly random impressions—to live, in short, with what was expressed by the Greek word chaos—was to live in a state of constant anxiety.
An awareness of this anxiety which often haunts Greek thought and expression is of crucial importance in understanding and evaluating Greek art. Looking at Greek sculpture out of its original context or at some of the ribald scenes on Greek painted vases, or recollecting in a general way the spirit of Aristophanic comedy, it is easy to be lured into thinking of the Greeks, especially in the Archaic period, as living in an unneurotic, innocent, emotionally uncomplicated world where there were few restraints on natural impulses. Yet even in a casual survey of the extant fragments of the Archaic lyric poets, this picture of the happy springtime of western civilization quickly vanishes. The lyrics are filled with expressions of a profound anxiety provoked by the irrational uncertainty and mutability of life. Archilochos of Paros, for example, experiences an eclipse of the sun and reacts:
... gloom-filled fear has come upon mankind. From now on anything may be believed, anything expected among men. No longer should anyone marvel at what he sees, not even if the beasts of the field make an exchange with dolphins for their watery pasture, and the echoing waves of the sea become dearer than dry land to those who once found the hillside sweet.
Solon of Athens tries to reconcile the wisdom of Zeus with injustice in the world and is bewildered:
In every activity there is danger, nor does anyone know, at an enterprise's start, where he will end up. One man, striving to do what is right, but lacking foresight, falls headlong into great folly and great hardship, while to another who acts wrongly, God in all things gives pure good luck, redemption from his own thoughtlessness. … The immortals bestow rich profits upon men, but folly often appears as the result, which when Zeus sends it to punish, strikes now this man, now that one.
Semonides of Amorgos despairs at the vanity of human endeavors; Mimnermos of Kolophon shudders at the prospect of old age; and Simonides of Keos beautifully expresses the fundamental anxiety which underlies all these specific fears when he says that reversal (metastasis) of the human condition comes more quickly than the overturning of a dragonfly's wing. True, the lyric poets also give us vigorous drinking songs and love poems. The youthful vigor of Archaic Greece is not an illusion, but it finds expression as often under a cloud of worry as in a clear sky of optimism.
If the apparent mutability of the physical world and of the human condition was a source of pain and bewilderment to the Greeks, the discovery of a permanent pattern or an unchanging substratum by which apparently chaotic experience could be measured and explained was a source of satisfaction, even joy, which had something of a religious nature.
For the recognition of order and measure in phenomena did more than simply satisfy their intellectual curiosity or gratify a desire for tidiness; it also served as the basis of a spiritual ideal. 'Measure and commensurability are everywhere identified with beauty and excellence' was Plato's way of putting it in a dialogue in which measure is identified as a primary characteristic of the ultimate good (Philebus 64E). Rational definability and spirituality were never mutually exclusive categories in Greek thought. If the quest for order and clarity was in essence the search for a kind of spiritual ideal, it was not an ideal to be perceived in rapturous emotional mysticism but rather one to be arrived at by patient analysis. When the Greek saw a mystical light, he was inclined to break it down into its component wavelengths and, to the extent that such things are possible, give it rational definition.
We see this process at work especially in Greek philosophy, which in various ways was aimed at alleviating the anxiety which is inherent in the more spontaneous expression of lyric poetry. The Milesian philosophers of the sixth century were interested above all in discovering a primary substance from which, by an orderly process of derivation, all other phenomena could be explained. Whether it was water, air in various states of condensation, or some other 'element', the Milesians used their primal substance as the basis for a cosmology (kosmos=order) in which the world was seen as a perfectly functioning machine. Neat, clear, and sublimely undisturbed by the social world of man, who took shape and dissolved within the natural order of things, it was an austere ideal, an astringent antidote to the apparent senselessness of life; but at least it made some kind of sense. The man who contemplated it deeply could feel that he was part of a great system which was impersonal but predictable, and, like Lucretius, who revived the Milesian attitude in a later age, he could derive a peculiar kind of peace from it. As time passed and Greek philosophy developed, the urge to find order in experience was shifted from physics to the realm of mathematical abstraction by the Pythagoreans, and to the world of human behavior by various thinkers of the later fifth century; and, finally, Plato and Aristotle attempted to weave all these foci of interest into comprehensive pictures of the relationship between human life and the world as a whole. But in all these epochs the basic quest—the search for a kosmos—remained the same.
These two fundamental forces in Greek thought and expression—anxiety prompted by the apparent irrationality of experience and the drive to allay this anxiety by finding an order which explains experience—had a profound effect upon Greek art and are at the root of its two most essential aesthetic principles:
(1) The analysis of forms into their component parts. This is one aspect of the process, also inherent in physical science, which brings unity to the multiplicity of things by finding common bases for all of them. The bewildering diversity of human figures and of octopuses, trees etc. ad infinitum is less bewildering if they are all seen to be combinations of a limited number of geometric forms. Hence in the first mature style of Hellenic art (as opposed to the 'Helladic' art of the Bronze Age), the Geometric style, we see an intense concentration on reducing all natural forms into a series of clearly definable geometric shapes. The Greek artist did not, like his Minoan predecessor, want to be immersed in the ebb and flow of nature, to exult in its subtle changes or to shudder at its suggestion of something ineffable. Rather he chose to stand aside from nature, to analyze what its constituent elements were, and then to reshape it according to his conception of what it should be. Over the centuries, this process became increasingly subtle, but it was never forgotten, as the great importance which was attached to such concepts as symmetria 'commensurability', and rhythmos 'pattern', in Classical art and art criticism, indicates.
(2) Representation of the specific in the light of the generic. Greek artists tended to look for the typical and essential forms which expressed the essential nature of classes of phenomena in the same way that Platonic 'forms' or 'ideas' expressed essential realities underlying the multiplicity of sense perception. A geometric statuette of a horse is an attempt to get at the 'horseness' which lies behind all particular horses. This principle helps to explain why the range of building-types in Greek architecture and the range of subjects in Greek sculpture and painting is so deliberately limited. When one is trying to define essence within multiplicity, whimsical innovations, fantasies, and vagrant moods have no place.
Consistency and limit are characteristics of order; diversity is more often a characteristic of chaos. These two aesthetic principles are best understood not as inflexible edicts but rather as statutes of an artistic common law, subject to reinterpretation in every period. According to changing historical circumstances, their application differed. Perhaps the single greatest difference between the Archaic and Classical periods, for example, was a new attitude in the latter toward the ‘specific in the light of the generic principle’ insofar as it concerned the representation of emotions and changing states of consciousness. Greek artists in general and Archaic artists in particular were normally reluctant to represent the more obvious expressions of emotional variability—howls of laughter, shrieks of anguish, sneers of disdain and the like. Emotions are most often expressions of reaction to the mutability and uncertainty of human circumstances. Archaic art, like contemporary Milesian philosophy, on the whole chose to transcend the overt expression of emotion and changing states of mind and to rely on purely formal qualities of design to express the orderly world which it envisioned. Even in the vase painting of Exekias, whose ability to convey dramatic tension sets him apart from most Archaic artists and links him in spirit to the Early Classical period, we do not so much see the emotional experience of the figures represented as intuit it from the subtle brilliance of the composition.
The normal approach of Archaic artists to the representation of human consciousness is perhaps best typified in the kouroi, which were produced through out the entire period and are among its most representative products. Most kouros figures seem to have been funerary or votive statues commemorating, in fact re-embodying, men who had died young and were thought to have a continuing existence beyond the grave as heroes. The key to their interpretation is provided for us by Herodotus' story of the Argive brothers Kleobis and Biton, who were honored with powerful figures of the kouros type at Delphi. …
… The mutability of life which so haunted the Archaic lyric poets—irrational reversal of fortune, the inscrutability of injustice, natural disaster, the decrepitude of old age—had no further hold on them. Their powerful, ox-like images at Delphi were undoubtedly intended to embody this blissful fate and are, in a way, images of wish-fulfillment … which transcend the imperfect world of everyday experience and are unaffected by its travails. The ‘archaic smile’ which characterizes many of the kouroi is not so much an emotion as a symbol, for they are beyond emotion in the ordinary sense of the word.
One of the distinguishing features of the art of the Classical period was that it broke away from this emotional impassivity in Archaic art. …
… The victory over the Persians in 480 B.C. played a vital role in shaping the state of mind which is inherent in Early and High Classical Greek art. It was the catalyst which transformed the groping humanism of late Archaic art into the Classical style. Alexander's conquest of the Persian Empire, on the other hand, and the consequent spreading of Greek culture over the vastness of the Orient, marked the final step in a process of social and emotional transformation which began in the wake of the Peloponnesian War and which in time nullified the principles on which the Classical style was founded. …
… Most Greek cities had a sizable population of non-voting residents and slaves. But whatever the form of government, power always rested with a group and served the interests of that group. The occasional usurpation of power by 'tyrants' in the sixth century cannot really be said to form an exception to this rule. … Perhaps the most overriding characteristic of the Greek cities was the pressure which they exerted upon the individual citizen to merge his life and interests in those of the group. …
… The pressures which the Greek polis put upon the individual to merge his interests in those of his society may account for the great emphasis put on the ideas of moderation, restraint, and avoidance of excess in Greek religious and moral thinking. All Greeks were subject to and respected the maxims of the Delphic oracle: 'know thyself' (i.e. 'know your limitations') and 'nothing in excess'. These pleas for restraint and measure, which were summed up in the virtue of sophrosyne ('discretion, temperance, self-control'), were not, it should be emphasized, a purely negative prescription. From Hesiod through Solon to the Classical dramatists and philosophers, such virtues were presented as the key to right living, to a happiness which was in keeping with man's nature and was divinely sanctioned. Men whose desires and ambitions knew no restraint, who defied the accepted measure and order, courted chaos and disaster for themselves and those around them. For the Greeks an irrational overturning of the natural order of things was always fraught with deep anxiety.
The Persian Empire, in contrast to the minuscule cities of Greece, was the most colossal state the East had ever seen, with borders stretching from the Aegean to India and from the Asiatic steppes to the upper Nile. It was the last great political order of the ancient Orient prior to the infusion of Greek and Roman culture in the Hellenistic period, and in many ways summed up three thousand years of oriental culture. …
… The state and society … shaped by the Persians was in every way antithetical to those of Greece. It encompassed disparate cultures and peoples—Persians, Medes, Egyptians, Indians, Jews, Phoenicians, and even some Greeks—and stood for a social order in which the gap between those who ruled and those who simply subsisted, was immense. The average man was ruled first by local officials, to whom he had some recourse; then by the regional governor, the satrap, whom he might occasionally see; and finally by the Great King—remote, grand, and ferocious, a man who could, within the limits of human nature, do anything. …
… The spectre of Persian … domination … sent waves of anxiety throughout the Greek cities. … When they appeared on the borders of Greece they must have been seen as an unknown and distant giant, an historical embodiment of the Greeks' ancient fear of chaos, which threatened to overturn and even annihilate a familiar, ordered life [so that the wars] helped to instill in all Greeks a new sensitivity to the characteristics which bound together their different communities and set them apart … with distinct patterns of thought and behavior.
Chapter 2
Consciousness and conscience
The Early Classical period, c. 480-450 B.C.
The new range of expression
The art of the Early Classical period differs from that of the Archaic in its interest in exploring emotions and changing states of mind, particularly in a dramatic context. Archaic statues tend to be iconic, that is, to be unchanging 'presences', in tune with a higher reality and unaffected by the changing conditions of the world. Early Classical statues tend to be dramatic, and to carry with them the impression that they represent one distinct stage in a series of events. …
… Outward humanization … characterizes much late Archaic sculpture. Its scale is strictly human rather than superhuman, and, although the [sculptors]… clearly employed a conventional 'canon' of proportion and composition, the individual elements within that canon more closely approximate a natural mean. …
[An example of change in mood] The fallen warrior from the east pediment … As life ebbs away and he sinks toward the earth, he tries futilely, sword (now missing) in hand, to raise himself. His eyes narrow as his consciousness fades; his mouth is slightly open as his breathing grows difficult; he stares at the earth. His enfeebled movements contrast poignantly with his massive physical frame in which, for practically the first time, the individual details of the musculature are fused and unified by a softening of the lines of division between them, and by increasingly subtle modulation of the surface from which one senses the presence of a unified physical force emanating from within the body. The sculptor who conceived the figure had obviously thought carefully about exactly what it meant. He must have asked himself what it must really be like when a powerful warrior is wounded and falls. What does he feel? How should we feel? And what meaning is there in our feeling? The warrior from the west pediment seems more like a recumbent kouros; his companion from the east pediment is a character in a drama.
Confidence and doubt
What factors were there which might be said to have brought into being this new analysis of consciousness in Early Classical art? It seems something more than a natural evolution from what had gone on in the Archaic period and should perhaps be ascribed to both a new self-confidence and a new uneasiness which arose among many thoughtful Greeks in the wake of the Persian Wars.
Confidence and optimism arose, of course, simply from the fact that the Greeks had won. Triumph in the face of such overwhelming odds suggested that perhaps Greek culture, with its restrained, group-conscious, way of life, had received divine sanction and justification. …
… The belief that the Persians had suffered punishment for their hybris also made it necessary to believe that there was some kind of order in the immediate world—arrogance was punished, moderation was rewarded. This involved a departure from the thought of the Archaic period, which, unable to discover any rational order in the world of immediate experience, had reacted by conceiving of orders which were beyond it. In the Early Classical period, this budding belief that the world as it was might 'make sense' must have provoked a new interest in the nature of its changing conditions. Changing states of consciousness could be understood as aspects of a universal moral order, and it may have been this realization which led the artists of the period to begin exploring them. …
… But if a new confidence led the Early Classical artists to begin experimenting with the representation of conscious inner life, it was another motive which led them to dwell most often on its sombre, meditative, even haunted aspects. That motive was a new uneasiness of—mind produced by the growing belief that men were responsible for their own fortunes, good or bad, and by the implications which this belief had for the course of Greek domestic politics after the Persian Wars.
Greek culture had been preserved from destruction at the hands of the Persians by the decision on the part of many of the individual poleis to sacrifice (with all the religious connotations of the word intact) a portion of their traditional self-interest and independence for the sake of unity and concerted action. The heroism of the Greek soldiers at Plataea was nothing new; but the fact that they were fighting side by side with one another, rather than against one another, was altogether unusual. After the war this unfamiliar unity vanished with astonishing speed. [the poleis fight each other] …
… Were the Greek cities and the factions within them being drawn, through their quest for power even at the expenses of principle, into the cycle of hybris, ate, and nemesis which they themselves had seen in the undoing of the Persians? In a world where Zeus punished hybris, where men reaped the fruits of their own actions, were they sowing the seeds of their own downfall? … These fears, and with them the vivid memory of what destruction actually means (particularly in Athens, which had been sacked and ruined by the Persians) must have been strong motivating forces in the creation of the serious and meditative character of so much Early Classical art.
The Source:
J. J. Pollitt*, Art and Experience in Classical Greece, Cambridge University Press 1972 [reprinted almost every year, sometimes twice in one year, this final edition is 1994]
*Social Science Files subscriber
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.