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Monica and Brian here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Greek and Roman Galleries.
We're going to talk a little bit about Hellenistic sculpture.
So Hellenistic sculptural period, after the Classical period, more like 2nd century B.C.E.?
That's right.
Here we're standing before a bronze statue of Eros sleeping.
The two things that I notice right away about this:
One, he's bronze - we don't see alot of bronze
No we don't. This is a rare surviving bronze sculpture. One of the few to survive intact from antiquity.
Bronze was often later melted down for other purposes.
So many original Greek sculptures that were made out of bronze don't survive for that reason.
So lots of reproductions in marble, workshops kind of turning these things out.
Yes, lucky for us Roman sculptors really like Greek bronzes and copied them often in marble.
Later, the original bronzes were lost.
I'm glad you said that because this is one of the statues that was very loved, we're told, in Roman gardens.
So wealthy Romans would want a copy of the Sleeping Eros.
This one I think dates from the Roman period.
So despite the fact that being a Greek Hellenistic original, it's listed on the nameplate as maybe from the Augustan period.
So the two things that strike me, the first was that it's made of bronze, and the second is that it's a child.
Yes, we don't see that very much in earlier Greek sculpture.
Classical period seems so focused on the young male, the heroic, the soldier or the athlete type.
That's right.
And we see a shift in the Hellenistic period to a kind of realism, of showing real and every day, day-to-day life.
Here in this case a sleeping child.
Yes, it's Eros. But it's a child looking very much like a child with all it's kind of plumpness.
So we might imagine Eros in the Classical period triumphing or somehow inspiring greatness.
That's right.
Here he's dozing. Yes. It's very cute.
It is. And that's not a word we would associate with Classical Greek sculpture.
No. If someone said 'I saw some Greek sculpture, it was very cute' you would think they were crazy.
That's right.
So, Hellenistic art gives us this moment of repose.
And I like compositionally too how it's very spread out.
It's not so forced in terms of it's balance or symmetry as we might expect.
Right. Again, the letting go of that idealized perfection that we see in the Classical period.
In the Hellenistic period, if we walk back in the other direction we see that not only is there a focus on the young but a focus on the old.
That's right. Again, this interest in the Hellenistic period of showing things the way they appear in real life.
Not always the perfect. Not always the ideal.
So this predates Roman concern with verism, which is focused very much on ancestors.
But these aren't really portraits of individuals.
No. And here we see this old market woman, who is not meant to represent a particular old market woman, but this type, a realistic type.
Now as cute as the Sleeping Eros is, she's uh, maybe past her beautiful years as a polite way to say it.
Yes. She's stooped over. We see her mouth open, her toothless mouth opened.
The drapery falling sort of slackly over her body.
She looks tired.
She is tired as she carrying the goods to the market to sell to make her living.
So like the Sleeping Eros, not very heroic.
That's right.
Well, I mean heroic I guess in a sense that we would say 'here is a woman doing the chores', 'here is a woman doing what enobles her in daily life'.
But not heroic in a Classical sense.
Right, and not in an ideal sense.
So part of a broader trend in the Hellenistic period to expand what it means to be human.
Old and young.
That's right. Yes. And showing all of that.
Showing even athletes, showing them stooped over and injured.
Old women, young children, the broad spectrum of humanity is of interest to Hellenistic sculptors.
Now another trend in Hellenistic art; we saw the Sleeping Eros with the reclining figure with the arm and the leg draped off.
Here, she's up on a podium but she seems like she's coming at us.
She does. There's alot of movement.
In the late Classical and Hellenistic styles the forms really break out of the envelope of space that has kind of enclosed them previously.
So we get figures reaching out, or legs hanging off, or movement in space that we don't see in that kind of composed and idealized Classical style.
It suggests to me a matter of time as well, that the timelessness of Classical art here extends into the moment.
So the idea that the posture that she has has to be resolved, right. It's a continuation of a walking that isn't at rest.
That's right.
So she's actually got a little bit of a diagonal to her as she moves into our space.
Not a posture she could endure for a long period of time. Right.
Whereas the Classical figures looked very much poised and very restrained, very at rest.
Definitely.
So in the Hellenistic period, your expansion of what it means to be human, with the old and the young.
Two statues which might challenge our ideas about Greco-Roman art are certainly jewels that nestle into this Greco-Roman courtyard.
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