WORDS AND IMAGES

THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES THE rôle that words played in the construction of aesthetic experience in classical Greece. I argue that the contemporary focus of historians of classical art on parallelisms between word and image should be replaced by a consideration of words as one functionally specific component – in this particular case the mediators of a set of ‘evaluative standards’ – in material processes of aesthetic expression which have their foundations in the body, embodied social practices, and social structure.

The traditional view of classical art suggests that in the fifth and fourth centuries BC art emerged as an autonomous domain of specifically aesthetic values, ‘freed from the tutelage of religion and the state’ (Metzler 1971: 62). Artworks are interpreted as statements of aesthetic philosophy, and any art-critical terms that we can recover from ancient Greeks’ writings are privileged as explaining the ‘intrinsic meaning’ of Greek art (Pollitt 1974: 25). In recent interpretations of Polykleitan sculpture, much is made of homologies between statuary and intellectual discourse. One strand of such arguments develops the traditional view of Polykleitos as aesthetic–philosopher. Meyer (1995: 87) argues that ‘the untenable equilibrium of the Doryphoros [Figure 10.1] makes visible the cosmic harmony in which the human being (in Herakleitos’ thinking the oppositum coincidens of the gods) partakes.’ According to Pollitt (1995: 22), ‘works like the Doryphoros were vehicles through which one could contemplate, like a Pythagorean philosopher … the perfect number, to eu, of man.’ Others have drawn attention to the parallels between the art of Polykleitos and the medical writings of the Hippokratics. Leftwich (1995: 46) performs a ‘gait analysis’ on the Doryphoros, arguing that the use of binary opposition in the elaborate chiastic structure of the Dory-phoros ‘is completely consonant with the formulations of Hippokratic medicine’ (Leftwich 1995: 38), also preoccupied with such binary oppositions. The Doryphoros, like a Hippokratic treatise, is a ‘scientific and analytical’ work, which ‘visualises the underlying principles necessary to any human movement through a system of binary oppositions’.