New people in marble
The biggest change is in the cast. Hellenistic artists became interested in showing childhood, old age and even physical deformity, and they made large statues of fishermen, peasants and aged courtesans, figures from the edges of society. Such statues could even be religious offerings, set up in the gardens of a sanctuary.
The so-called Old Market Woman in the Metropolitan Museum is one of them. Her fine sandals and thin, elaborately draped dress do not belong to a peasant: she is probably an aged courtesan on her way to a festival of Dionysos, with an ivy wreath on her head and a basket of fruit and two chickens as offerings. The Met’s statue is a Roman copy of a Greek work of the second century BCE.
Children and gods
Gods changed with the people. Eros, the personification of love, appears as a small child, shown with striking tenderness. The bronze Eros in the Metropolitan Museum, made in the third or second century BCE and 85 centimetres long, shows the god of love as a sleeping infant. The popular image of a nude Aphrodite belongs to the same age, a sign that traditional religion was becoming more secular.
Pain made visible
Classical faces stay calm even in battle. Hellenistic sculptors let suffering show. The most famous example is the Laocoön, found on the Esquiline Hill in Rome in 1506 and at once recognised as the group Pliny the Elder had praised. Laocoön, a priest of Apollo at Troy, warned the Trojans against the wooden horse, and Athena and Poseidon, who favoured the Greeks, sent two sea serpents that killed him and his two sons. Pliny names three sculptors of Rhodes, Agesander, Polydoros and Athenodoros, and calls the group superior to any other work of painting or sculpture. The Vatican dates it to around 40-30 BCE, late in the period.
The same openness appears in bronze. The Boxer at Rest in Rome sits slumped after a fight, and his wounds are inlaid in copper, so that the bronze seems to bleed.
Real faces
Portraits widened their range too: Hellenistic sculptors portrayed the many peoples of their world, including Africans. Rulers had their own heroic type, begun by Lysippos’ portraits of Alexander and adopted by his successors: a gold coin of King Lysimachos, minted at Pella around 286-281 BCE, still carries Alexander’s head. Cities honoured their benefactors with statues too. A bronze in the Metropolitan Museum shows a citizen wrapped in his cloak, his right hand raised in a gesture of speech.
Not every statue shouts
Some of the best-known Hellenistic works are quiet. The Venus de Milo, found on the island of Melos in 1820 and in the Louvre since 1821, was carved around 150-125 BCE in Parian marble, 2.04 metres tall, in two blocks joined at the hips. Holes show that she once wore a bronze diadem and a bracelet. Her arms are lost, so her action is unknown. Her face is calm, and she is half-draped, her cloak wrapped around her legs.
Like earlier Greek statues, these were usually painted or fitted with metal, so the white marble of museums gives only part of their effect. Seen together, they show the range of Hellenistic art: drama, tenderness, daily life and royal display, sometimes in the same city.
Where to see it
The Laocoön is in the Vatican Museums, the Boxer at Rest at Palazzo Massimo in Rome, the Venus de Milo in the Louvre. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has the Old Market Woman, the sleeping Eros and the honorific bronze. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- C. Hemingway and S. Hemingway, “Art of the Hellenistic Age and the Hellenistic Tradition”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2007).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 09.39, 43.11.4, 2001.443, 52.127.4.
- Vatican Museums, “Laocoön”; Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.37, trans. J. Bostock and H. T. Riley (Perseus Digital Library).
- Musée du Louvre, Ma 399; Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo, “Pugilatore in riposo”.
