Seeing them is as exciting as it must have been in 1817, when Lord Elgin brought them to London. Freed from expectation, put in a variety of new contexts – Parthenon masterpieces are threaded through the exhibition – these sculptures can be discovered as if for the first time. But their liberation is more subtle than that. Liberated from the ugly neoclassical hauteur of the museum’s Duveen Gallery – in which art dealer Lord Duveen imprisoned them in the 1930s, when it was thought that the best way to display stone was against more stone – these masterpieces look, well, much less grey. To see the British Museum’s most controversial sculptures here, in the lofty shadows of the museum’s new exhibition space, is to see them afresh. Lely’s Venus, a second-century AD Roman copy of a Greek original. Yet this truly authoritative array of ancient art, which has been brought across seas and continents, all goes to show one thing: the best surviving Greek images of the human body or anything else are right here in London. The show, Defining Beauty, boasts magnificent and sometimes colossal objects lent by the likes of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Glyptothek in Copenhagen. This is one of the Elgin Marbles – or, as the British Museum would rather we said, sculptures from the Parthenon. Where did they borrow this from? Actually, they did not have to go far. It is the real thing: not just an original Greek sculpture, but one carved at the height of the classical age, in fifth century BC Athens, by a gifted artist working from designs by the renowned Pheidias. Marble metope from the Parthenon, by Pheidias Photograph: PRĮven he can’t compare, however, with the broken yet astounding marble statue that reclines with such massive human force at the heart of this group. Works like the life-sized bronze athlete surface from the sea every so often, giving glimpses of the sensuality of authentic Greek sculpture: this youth even has copper highlights on his lips and nipples. Only a few full-sized original Greek statues exist. The discus-thrower? A Roman version – from the Emperor Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli – of a vanished fifth-century BC statue. The crouching Aphrodite showing her bum? A Roman copy of a lost Greek original. The statues in the opening display reveal the vast range of second hand versions through which most of us know it.
Yet, precisely because it has been so admired for so long, Greek art has been bastardised, caricatured and reduced to a cliche. They show how Greek art helped Buddism invent its own classical figurative tradition in the third century AD, the classical physical perfection of the Greek gods fusing with the grace of the Buddha.
Fascinatingly, this exhibition includes images of Hercules and the Buddha from the ancient kingdom of Gandhara (in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan). Yet the influence of Greece goes way beyond Europe.
The entire Renaissance was an attempt to revive it, and Picasso often drew on Greek myths. A young river god, headless and with shattered limbs, reclines – for all his injuries – in exquisite flowing grace, carved so fluently he seems a living, breathing creature.Īncient Greek art has been revered, copied, imitated and rebelled against for 2,500 years. The Discobolus of Myron strikes his eternal throwing pose. A faintly fascist German 1920 reconstruction of the lost Canon by Polykleites displays a mathematically perfect human body, while Aphrodite teasingly shows her bottom. A bronze youth wipes himself after a sweaty athletics tournament, his lithe powerful body recently rediscovered in the sea off Croatia. I half-expect Gilliam’s scissors to appear from above and snip off the discus-thrower’s head. It’s like looking at a collage cut from a giant encyclopedia. Some of the greatest classical sculptures in the world have been brought together in the opening section of the British Museum’s epic and captivating survey of Greek sculpture. T his is like entering a dream or a Terry Gilliam animation.