We are in the Getty Villa, and
we're looking at a really
ancient sculpture. We're talking
more than 4,000 years ago.
This comes from the Cyclades.
These islands in the Aegean.
Usually, at this time in the
third millennium, we're thinking
about the cultures of ancient
Egypt, we might think of a
sculpture like the Seated Scribe,
or we think about ancient
Mesopotamia, perhaps the
Standard of Ur. Both of those
cultures had writing. Here we
are in these islands in the
Aegean, between Greece and
Asia Minor, and this is the
culture that didn't have a
writing and produced these
beautiful marble sculptures that
we so much want to learn more
about.
They speak to a culture that
would have had oral traditions
and stories, but we don't
actually have the records to
show it, so we only have the
objects themselves.
About 5 percent of the
sculptures that come out of this
area were male figures doing
something, but 95 percent of
what remains are female figures.
Most of the sculpture from this
period shows women with their
arms crossed. The fact that he's
male is very rare. They're all
doing some sort of active
engagement, whether it's bearing
a cup or playing instruments, or
a little bit later, we have them
wearing .
It really engages us, the way
that he seems to have his chin
lifted and is about to sing.
Some of the figures seem to be
actively playing the harp, but
this figure seems to be at a
moment of rest. We can almost
hear him or the breath that he
takes before beginning to sing.
It's hard to not think of Homer
and the oral tradition of epic
poetry, but it's not the best
line to draw because this is so
much more ancient than Homer.
We've described him as male, but
he has no obviously male
attributes.
This figure's very smooth, very
abstracted. It's the activity
that he's engaging in that
defines his gender, and also,
the fact that female figures
from the same period did have
their anatomy identified.
We think about Greek art and we
go immediately to the male nude.
There are many beautiful
examples of that here at the
Getty, but this is not in that
very naturalistic tradition.
This figure is very abstracted,
and by that, I mean that the
forms of his body are
simplified, without any
indication of musculature
of the structure of the body.
We are seeing it today with all
of its original polychromy gone,
so that even simplifies it more.
That simplicity was so exciting
to artists in the 20th century
that inspired these great works
by Picasso and other artists who
looked to antiquity and found
these forms that felt modern.
It's worth mentioning, many
Cycladic objects that you find
in museums today are not from
documented archaeological
excavations. There was systemic
looting in the 20th century, so
this is something that
archaeologists and art
historians grapple with, is
understanding their context,
give that we have lost so much
of that history. Is it a god? Is
it an actual musician? Is it the
deceased?
Whether they're deities or
whether this represented a
figure that would play the harp
for a person in the afterlife,
these figures had an important
and unifying meaning to the
people of the ancient Cyclades.
These were very specific to this
region. These island seafaring
people who found ways to craft
these beautiful marble
sculptures from local materials.
This is the Bronze Age, so this
is the beginnings of metallurgy.
The sculpture would have worked
with local minerals like
obsidian, emery, pumice to
carve this figure out of a block
of marble. Imagine how easy it
would have been to take a chisel
and accidentally cut a little
bit too much and lose that
beautiful graceful arc of the
top of the harp. This is an
incredibly skilled artisan, and
the resources of this culture
are going into making the female
figures and these male figures.
It really makes me want to know
what he's singing, and who he's
singing for.