CYCLADIC ART – marble mysteries
December 10, 2016 2 Comments
He plays the lyre. He has been doing that for almost five thousand years. He played so well then that he inspired someone to hew marble from stone and make a figure of him. I saw pictures of him before I walked up to the glass case in the Archaeology Museum in Athens where he was. But he was not the only one from that time and that place. I soon discovered that the lyre-player himself was atypical, but his head, ecstatically back as he plays, was what impressed me. Other figurines gazed at me across the millennia.
The Cycladic Islands are east of the Mycenean peninsula in Greece. This Aegean culture is said to have flourished from 3,300 to 1,100 years B.C. and art-wise, they stand entirely apart from Crete, Egypt, the Middle East and Greece. For this reason they have wielded fascination since archaeologists began finding them. Made from marble, the figurines range in size from 10 cms in length to almost human size. In style, they are always distinctively Cycladian.
The speculations around what role they played in the culture are many. Some maintain that the figurines were images of goddesses and were used in rituals. Some believe they were toys. Others think that, as votive figurines, they had fertility or funerary functions.
What strikes me about them is how contemporary they feel. The stark simplicity and geometric formality could very well have been done by modernist artists early in the 20th-century. In fact, Constantin Brancusi, considered as the father of modern sculpture by some, produced work akin to the Cycladic spirit. An aspect of modernism (roughly 1890 – 1930) was to abandon traditional form and seek out the primitive.
Another thought is the total contrast between the feminine figures of the Cycladics to the prehistoric feminine figures who are broad, heavy and thundering. The Venus of Willendorf is one example. It is almost as if the Cycladics were heralding a changing world.
They haunt me, these figurines. They are enigmatic in their facelessness. The majority are feminine, elegant and pure in form. It is hard to think that they came from gross stone. The speculations about them heighten the mystery. They are poised, indifferent to our attempts to understand them; their power is ethereal. If they had to be represented by music it would be with a single, soft, unbroken note. They are other-worldly.
© Will van der Walt
www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com
Les Semboules, Antibes
December, 2016
Source
Wikipedia
Images
Ecstatic player of lyre – sasgreekart.pbworks.com
Cycladic collection – source lost
Cycladic figurine – source lost
Head of Idol – Modigliani-drawings.com
Brancusi form – getty images
Venus of Willendorf – commons.wikipedia.org
Cycladic woman – source lost