LIKE UNTO LIFE: BRONZE STATUES, ART HISTORY, AND HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

I have to begin with Pliny because no one less than Friedrich Nietzsche’s teacher, Otto Jahn, also began with Pliny, and did so in specific connection with aesthetic judgment and the hermeneutics of antiquity.  

I begin with the same Pliny who tells us that thousands upon thousands of life-sized bronze statues were still standing in Rhodes, Athens, Olympia even after the sack and burning of Greek cities in the wake of the imperial incursions of Rome (NH 34.36). 

Beyond “Natural History,” statues as Plato uses the image throughout his dialogues, have a long association with philosophy and Epictetus and Plotinus likewise have recourse to the same model-ideal.

We are told that these statues were so lifelike that one could well mistake such statues for living, breathing, human beings. The rhetorical force of being “like a statue” would have inherently reflexive, a point that invites a retrieve of Nietzsche’s reflections on the importance of the agon in antiquity as well as an inquiry into the political implications of living in a city pre-populated, as it were, by a standing citizenry of statues. 

How are we to understand the number Pliny and others give for us? Is this no more than an absurd exaggeration (some scholars would say that the ancients were fond of exaggeration)? But there is also some material evidence suggesting that such high numbers may be justified. And there is room for concession here, perhaps there were not exactly however many Pliny suggests. 

But still, contemporary archaeological evidence, in addition to Pliny’s and other reports, makes it plain that statues were in any case more numerous than we like to imagine. Well then: why so many?  

Furthermore and perhaps more importantly, what would it have been like to live among so many statues? Maybe a life among so many bronzes was exactly classical in the quintessentially 19th century sense, surreal and languid, a life in the midst of ‘art’.  

Or maybe and in addition if also more radically (I favor this option myself), the statues served other political ends including defense. 

Or maybe and just as we surround ourselves by billboards (and on a smaller scale, by magazine images) showcasing beautiful people, the ancient Greeks surrounded themselves with bronze ideals of their idea of the true, the beautiful, and the good.  Perhaps as scholars have long argued (starting indeed with Winckelmann) the effect of so many statues might have had to do with desire, whether to soothe or calm it or else as a calculatedly erotic stimulus as Nietzsche was fond of arguing contra both Schophenhauer and Kant.

In addition to the studies of Eva Keuls and Kenneth Dover, Jan Elsner’s recent Roman Eyes takes its point of departure from this conventional conviction regarding „fantasies of (and apparently, according to our sources, even attempts at) sexual intercourse with statues so beautiful as to be better than the real thing.“  Elsner also includes a footnote referring „to the ancient literature on agalmatophilia (making love with statues).“ Elsner, Roman Eyes (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2007), p. 2. See too and most importantly, Andrew Stewart, Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) as well as Karin Moser von Filseck: Kairos und Eros. Zwei Wege zu einem Neuverständnis griechischer Bildwerke (Bonn: Habelt, 1990).  With respect to eros and the city, I thank Andrew Stewart for drawing my attention to R.R.R. Smith, „Pindar, Athletes, and the Early Greek Statue Habit,“ in Simon Hornblower and Catherine Smith, eds., Pindar’s Poetry, Patrons, and Friends (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 83-139 in addition to Tonio Hölscher, “Images and Political Identity: The Case of Athens” in: D. Boedeker & K. Raaflaub eds., Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth Century Athens (Cambridge, Mass. 1998), pp. 153-183, and, with reference to the role of Eros and the hunt, see Alain Schnapp’s Le chasseur et la cité: chasse et érotique en Gréce ancienne (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996).  See further Norman Bryson’s Lacanian studies in art history as well as more philosophically and much more broadly, Alexander Nehamas, The Promise of Happiness (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2007).