Hellenistic sculpture represents one of the most important expressions of Hellenistic culture, and the final stage in the evolution of Ancient Greek sculpture. The definition of its chronological duration, as well as its characteristics and meaning, have been the subject of much discussion among art historians, and it seems that a consensus is far from being reached. The Hellenistic period is usually considered to comprise the interval between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, and the conquest of Egypt by the Romans in 30 BC. Its generic characteristics are defined by eclecticism, secularism, and historicism, building on the heritage of classical Greek sculpture and assimilating Eastern influences.
Among his original contributions to the Greek tradition of sculpture were the development of new techniques, the refinement of the representation of human anatomy and emotional expression, and a change in the goals and approaches to art, abandoning the generic for the specific. This translated into the abandonment of the classical idealism of an ethical and pedagogical character in exchange for an emphasis on everyday human aspects and the directing of production toward purely aesthetic and, occasionally, propagandistic ends. The attention paid to man and his inner life, his emotions, his common problems and longings, resulted in a realist style that tended to reinforce the dramatic, the prosaic, and the moving, and with this appeared the first individualized and verisimilitude portraits in Western art. At the same time, a great expansion of the subject matter occurred, with the inclusion of depictions of old age and childhood, of minor non-Olympian deities and secondary characters from Greek mythology, and of figures of the people in their activities.
The taste for historicism and erudition that characterized the Hellenistic period was reflected in sculpture in such a way as to encourage the production of new works of a deliberately retrospective nature, and also of literal copies of ancient works, especially in view of the avid demand for famous classicist compositions by the large Roman consumer market. As a consequence, Hellenistic sculpture became a central influence in the entire history of sculpture in Ancient Rome. Through Hellenized Rome, an invaluable collection of formal models and copies of important pieces by famous Greek authors was preserved for posterity, whose originals eventually disappeared in later times, and without which our knowledge of Ancient Greek sculpture would be much poorer. On the other hand, Alexander's imperialism towards the East took Greek art to distant regions of Asia, influencing the artistic productions of several Eastern cultures, giving rise to a series of hybrid stylistic derivations and the formulation of new sculptural typologies, among which perhaps the most seminal in the East was the foundation of Buddha iconography, until then forbidden by Buddhist tradition.
For the modern West, Hellenistic sculpture was important as a strong influence on Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical production. In the 19th century Hellenistic sculpture fell into disfavor and came to be seen as a mere degeneration of the classical ideal, a prejudice that penetrated into the 20th century and only recently has begun to be put aside, through the multiplication of more comprehensive current research on this subject, and although its value is still questioned by resistant nuclei of the critics and its study is made difficult for a series of technical reasons, it seems that the full rehabilitation of Hellenistic sculpture among scholars is only a matter of time, because for the general public it has already revealed itself to be of great interest, guaranteeing the success of the exhibitions where it is shown.
Background
The sculpture of Classicism, the period immediately preceding the Hellenistic period, was built on a powerful ethical framework that had its bases in the archaic tradition of Greek society, where the ruling aristocracy had formulated for itself the ideal of arete, a set of virtues that should be cultivated for the formation of a strong morality and a socially apt, versatile and efficient character. In parallel, the concept of kalokagathia was formulated, which affirmed the identity between Virtue and Beauty. Expressing these concepts in plastic forms, a new formal canon was born, developed by Polychaetus and the Phidias group, which sought the creation of human forms that were both naturalistic and ideal, through whose perfect and balanced beauty the virtues of the spirit could be perceived.
These ideas had been reinforced by the contribution of philosophers such as Pythagoras, who said that art was an effective power, capable of influencing people for good or evil, according to whether they obeyed or violated certain principles of balance and form. He also said that art should imitate the divine order, which was based on defined numerical relationships, and expressed in the harmony, coherence, and symmetry of natural objects. He had worked his ideas out from his research with mathematics and music, but it wasn't long before they were applied to the other arts, encouraging an eminently ethical use for artistic creation and fostering collective rather than individual values, which Plato's idealistic philosophy eloquently corroborated.
Context and characteristics
The spirit of Hellenistic culture began to form with the Macedonian conquest of Greece and Alexander's military expeditions to the East, which carried classical Greek culture to the banks of the Indus River and gave rise to the establishment of several Greco-Oriental kingdoms. The culture of classical Greece, on which Macedonia was dependent, was defined within a relatively limited worldview, circumscribed to the city-state, the polis. Even though the Greeks founded a number of colonies around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and maintained contact with several other countries, their cultural reference remained the metropolis, whose society was based on the experience of defined groups living in the most important cities. According to Jerome Pollitt, "a classical Greek might travel voluntarily to seek adventure, but once the adventure was over his intention was to return to the small, safe, familiar society where his identity had been established.
With the Macedonian presence on Greek soil, and with Alexander's imperialistic spirit, this more or less static world suffers a profound shake-up and begins to experience a transformation that would make that traditional, communal life a thing of the past. Alexander founded several cities in his campaigns, encouraging important migrations of Greek populations, including thousands of artists, who went to try their luck in an entirely foreign ethnic and cultural environment, building new societies whose dominant note was insecurity and mobility, at all levels. After his death, his successors engaged in a series of power struggles, causing the collapse of the empire amidst intense turmoil and a widespread loss of the old references and expectations of Greco-Macedonian society.
In the opposite direction, Rome began its bellicose and predatory expansion, and self-confidence, idealism and the old social and religious collective values declined, generating a withdrawal and disenchantment in individuals in face of the moral poverty, political cynicism and violence of the times, aspects that were masked by the search for mere pleasure and formalized artistically through a realism sometimes full of drama. The diverse origins of the colonists and the notorious Greco-Macedonian xenophobia made lasting and reliable social alliances difficult in the conquered lands, and for the artists, patronage was subject to personal whims and frequent oscillations in the taste of the ruling elite as the political leanings changed. No wonder then that Pliny, a classicist, said that the 3rd century BC was a time when the arts disappeared. For some, these times may have had an exciting appeal, but the philosophers of the time point to an acute awareness that the phase was one of great instability, with even a veiled sense of guilt for the collapse of the old moral values in the face of the new worldly and corrupt urban landscape, which would be the source of a very long tradition of seeking a return to the simple life, primitive and authentic peasant life, even if this return could never be realized in fact except symbolically, in the periodic classicist revivalisms - the first of which would occur at the end of the Hellenistic period - and within the dreams of poetic pastoralism that populate the history of art from those times to the present day.
The philosophy of the Hellenistic period carried forward the debate on aesthetics that had been inaugurated by Socrates and Plato in previous years. Plato's ethics preached that art at best was only an imperfect simulacrum of abstract truths, and therefore lacked deep value and credibility, and should in all cases serve a moral and pedagogical cause. Socrates before him had suggested that art could express individual pathos, and Aristotle, taking this motto and opposing the general lines of Platonic idealistic thought on aesthetics, approached the issue empirically, trying to discover other uses and meanings for artists' creations. He developed the concept of catharsis, supposing that art could educate the spirit by simulating the human emotional weaknesses themselves, he widened the way for individual emotionalism and visions to be cultivated, and with this he relativized the function and reading of art and gave prestige to individual creativity. At the same time, it favored the secularization of its character, making room for the use of sculpture as a form of political and personal propaganda.
Once primarily devoted to the sacred function and the public commemoration of heroes and athletes, whose rationale was primarily ethical, didactic, and idealistic, the elite now desired works that were primarily personalistically motivated and whose character was primarily decorative. Even statues of gods came to be seen more as "works of art" than as symbolic instruments of communication with the invisible worlds. With this, private taste - which was not always the most refined and cultured - began to prevail over collective conventions, favoring a purely aesthetic practice that widely opened its thematic range to include the picturesque, the trivial, the painful, the comic, the terrifying, the sensual, the shapeless, and the grotesque. Accompanying these changes appears for the first time in Western art a definite inclination to read works allegorically. A decline in the credibility of the ancient myths causes moral principles to be personified in other ways, and whereas in earlier art the gods embodied a series of immaterial attributes, now conversely the abstractions themselves, such as courage, forgiveness, wisdom, combativeness, take on human form and are individually deified.
Formally the general characteristics of Hellenistic sculpture derive mainly from the work of three great artists, Scopas, Praxiteles and Lysippos, who lead the transition from Classicism to the Hellenistic tradition in the mid 4th century BC. In terms of expressiveness and narrative character their production has much more to do with Hellenistic than with the High Classicism that preceded it, although on the ground of style itself their classical origin remains evident. They begin the process of abandoning idealization in order to bring representation down to the human level, even when it comes to the image of deities. Not without a hint of irony Jerome Pollitt comments on a work attributed to Praxitheles, the Apollo Sauroctonos, and sees in it a burlesque image of the decay of status from a virile dragon-killing god to an effeminate effete who can barely scare away a common lizard, in a period when the ancient myths were beginning to lose their divine aura and their real power of inspiration, and were beginning to be discredited in a society that was strongly profane and urban, but which could therefore turn its attention more intensely to the portrait of man, his specific problems and successes, and his inner universe.
On the other hand, Alexander the Great himself is attributed an important influence on the introduction of new modes of sculptural representation. In the portrait of rulers, young, athletic, unshaven figures were preferred, when this genre was previously typified by mature, bearded figures. The various portraits of the general also became models for the representation of the gods Apollo and Helios, and of the river deities, including his gaze turned upwards and his dense, long, and loose hair, typical traits of those portraits. With a centralizing personality, Alexander's charisma promoted a reorganization in the scenes of battles and hunts, starting to highlight the figure of a leader, when before it was usual to treat all the characters with the same visual importance in compositions without a main focus. Finally, the fame of his horse Bucephalus produced a tendency to magnify the size of the representations of these animals in relation to previous periods.
The description of Hellenistic sculpture, a subject of great complexity which is still the source of much controversy and uncertainty, can only be made, in a summary such as this, generically. The multiplicity of production centers, the great mobility of sculptors among them, and the prevailing stylistic freedom have created a multifaceted and multifocal panorama, where various tendencies coexist and intersect, but the mentality of the Hellenists, and its repercussions on the art of sculpture, can be more or less defined through five dominant lines:
I. An obsessive preoccupation with fate and its unpredictable and changeable character, visible in the proliferation of philosophical writings and iconography on Tyche, the goddess who embodied Luck or Fortune - conceived in an interpretation associated with destiny - and in the portraiture of Alexander, a personality who always considered himself protected by Fortune, for even when bad luck seemed to threaten him, he was able to reverse the situation in his favor. Likewise, mirroring this interest was the depiction of events when individual fortunes changed dramatically, as in moments of great success or great failure.
II. A sense of the theatricality of life, reflected in the taste for the spectacular, for the great public manifestations of regal pomp, for the dramatic and vehement pronouncements of orators, for profane and religious festivals sumptuous and stimulating to the senses, and for sculptures where the sense of drama, of exaltation, of movement, of tumult, of rapture, of the extraordinary was intentionally sought in a style whose tenor was narrative and rhetorical. There was even a technical terminology borrowed from literary rhetoric to describe the formal elements favored in Hellenistic sculpture: auxesis (amplification), makrology (expansion), dilogia (repetition), pallilogia (recapitulation), megaloprepeia (grandeur), deinosis (intensity), ekplexis (shock), enargeia (vivacity), anthitesis (contrast), and pathos (emotional drama).