12/14/2023 0 Comments Helios statue naturalA terrible earthquake was the element that the Colossus could not withstand. It was nearly as tall as the Statue of Liberty – but in its times it was twice as tall as any statue that had ever been built. A monument of super-human proportions, the Colossus was celebrated as the Seventh Wonder of the Ancient world. A great statue of Helios rose above the city. Rhodes was one of the most glorious towns in antiquity. Helios was revered as omnipotent Zeus himself, for he was the witness of everything that happened in the heavens and in the world. He was riding a golden chariot through the skies, pulled by four fiery horses. When ancient Greeks thought of Helios, they imagined a strikingly handsome deity, with his hair flowing in the wind. Helios, the God of the Sun is the patron of the Island Rhodes, appointed as such by the supreme deity Zeus when he was distributing the land among the Greek divinities. Why, it is the miraculous land whose subtropical climate guarantees the absolute golden tan. Hence, I will make clear that the sculpture was a pivotal element in rendering the Parthenon a canonical monument.Kalimera, dear tourists – this is how the Greeks say “good day to you.” Welcome to the city on the Island of Rhodes also familiar as the City of Knights. As the unique quality of the Parthenon's architecture was not known and published prior to 1838 and not introduced to a British audience before 1851, the Parthenon could only have gained its importance and fame because of the physical presence of the Elgin Marbles. It argues that the monument was reintegrated into the Western art canon by replicating its sculpture through plaster casts and by substituting historic facts for fiction. It introduces new evidence as to how and why, after the Napoleonic Wars, the British epitomized the Periclean monument as the pinnacle of human accomplishment. The article focuses on the British reception of the Parthenon in the early nineteenth century. No other monument from the ancient world could, at the time, have offered a more suitable basis for such approbation. Putting themselves on the same level as Pericles, Pheidias, Iktinos and Kallikrates, they could argue for their own cultural superiority while hoping for kleos aphthiton-fame and glory that outlast death. By linking their own present with an alien, even fictitious, past, they wished to associate themselves with an aura of greatness that would suggest their own heroic power. While it is well known that the high esteem held for the Parthenon after the defeat of Bonaparte was predicated by a change in taste and by associating this monument with the defeat of the Persians by the Greeks in 479 bc, another crucial issue has as yet been overlooked: the self-interest of those attempting to recreate the Parthenon. The arrival of the Elgin Marbles in Britain and several ambitious attempts to reconstruct the Parthenon in London, Cambridge and elsewhere fostered its general reputation as ‘a building from which derived all that is good’. To support this interpretation of the productive tension between the detail and the scale, the article discusses a series of examples (starting with the early daguerreotypes) and appeals to a broad range of studies, from Herder through Aloïs Riegl and Ronald Barthes to the most recent debates. However, as the article makes clear, this event, whereby a detail expands mentally and independently on any measurable size, cannot occur without the underlying relief-like or tactile qualities of the photographs themselves. The more personal nature of this address makes it possible to connect the scale, rather than the detail in its more usual iconographic sense, to Roland Barthes’ notion of the punctum as, first and foremost, a mental event. While being a more abstract agent than the more directly tactile detail, scale has its own mode of addressing the viewer by making her suddenly aware of her own situation. Different from measurable size, scale enters our perception of the photographed sculpture as something irreducible to the detail understood as the matter’s signature. At the same time, a close attention is paid to the role of scale in the photography of sculpture and to the connection between the impact of the detail and the play of scale, which makes us aware of the uncertain borderline between image and mental image. Starting from the logic of supplementarity, whereby a photograph reveals something that we do not notice while meeting the sculpture itself, the article focuses on the photographic detail and its inherent tactility as the materiality’s own surprising touch. In the wake of the recent surge of interest in the relation between sculpture and photography, the article revisits the photography’s capacity to convey the haptic qualities of sculpted matter.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |