The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Just as Egyptian society idealized changelessness, so Egyptian sculptors aimed at an abstraction suggested by what was seen. They succeeded so well so early that they felt little need to “perfect” their style. And the precocity of Egyptian art was its curse. Unlike the ancient Greeks, they did not keep experimenting to make figures more human. As we have seen, they became expert at embalming, with special techniques for eviscerating the body and separately preserving its internal parts. But during ritual preparation of the body, dissection for mere knowledge seemed sacrilege. Adept with medicines—Homer called them “a race of druggists”—they also knew how to set broken bones, and were famed dentists and obstetricians. But their meager knowledge of human anatomy did not increase, nor did their created works become more true to nature.

  The higher a person’s status, the more rigid and unvaried were the portraits, and very early the Pharaoh became a stereotype. Officials of lower rank, whom the people were used to seeing in the flesh, were sometimes portrayed with distinctive face and either slender or paunchy body. For these figures, too, there were rules. Scribes were to be shown in a priestly posture, whether striding or seated, with papyrus scroll and writing material. Statues of working people, caught in characteristic attitudes, were unmistakably farming, herding cattle, fishing, building boats, playing music, performing acrobatic feats, or dancing.

  Figures transposed from three dimensions to two in sculptured relief or painting were still governed by a well-known canon, which was obstinately objective. Without regard to perspective they combined different points of view to display a body’s solid shape and dimensions. The result was a style that has been easily caricatured.

  In painting and relief the horse or the gazelle was best caught in full profile with a single undulating line. But the human trunk had to be grasped in a three-quarters or frontal view to show the body’s bulk, the shape of the shoulders and the arms. They presented the human head in profile but with a full-face eye and on a full-face bust. This cluster of disjointed points of view came to be called the paratactic style by analogy to the practice in grammar of placing phrases together without a connective. (“I came, I saw, I conquered.”) Commonly Egyptian artists in the same picture showed both a frontal view of some parts and a profile of other parts. The principles of perspective, had the Egyptians known them, would have provided a single coherent point of view. But they were not interested in mere “points of view” that changed with the viewer. To them, perspective might have seemed only a trick for concealing real shapes and sizes.

  Their concrete literal-mindedness appeared, too, when they wanted to show quantities. What clearer way to tell that a hundred prisoners and ten princes were taken in a battle than to paint just that many of them in neat rows where they could be counted? Paintings in a nobleman’s tomb, too, were inventories, a plain orderly survey of all his main possessions, his wives and children, cattle, cornfields and fruit trees, so these could be taken along to the next world. Colors, too, were prescribed—green (color of resurrection) for the body of the god Osiris, blue for the sky-god (Amon-Ra), yellow (color of gold) for other gods. Red, the color of evil, for the tales about wicked gods, sometimes in the Old Kingdom was deprived of its evil powers by a black line through every red hieroglyph. White depicted hope and pleasure.

  This hieroglyphic art flourished in the tomb and temple paintings of the Old Kingdom where we witness the herding of cattle, the harvesting of grain and grapes, girls playing the “vine” game or dancing with castanets, boys playing tug-of-war, men hunting and trapping birds. Expressionless faces and conventional postures convey unambiguous messages. Avoiding a crude straining for naturalism, the Egyptian artists reward us with the clarity and elegance of calligraphy. They were “figure writers,” undistracted by time or place. The same religion that required realism in their art saved them from trying to make their images more natural.

  What they lacked in naturalism they made up in gigantism. No other people was so obsessed by colossi, or so successful with the colossal image. Shape and form and color were prescribed in an almost alphabetic way. And if they could not make it better, they could make it bigger. Since in their tomb and temple relief the larger figures showed the more powerful people, the largest statues would be the most potent. Like messages in large type, Egyptian colossi were headline-hieroglyphs, and because they were abstractions, Egyptian statues had a boundless capacity for enlargement. A gigantic statue in naturalistic style seems bizarre or ridiculous, but an enlarged Pharaoh in conventional style is all the more impressive. Colossi were hieroglyphs of power.

  The Great Sphinx at Giza became a symbol of the grandeur and the mystery of ancient Egypt. Cut directly from the solid rock on the site where stone was quarried for the pyramid of Cheops, the Great Sphinx rises 66 feet above the sand, is 13 feet wide at the front and stretches 240 feet from haunch to forepaw. The forelegs (projecting fifty feet from the breast) were added by masonry. When built, the Sphinx was probably plastered and painted. In the reign of Pharaoh Khafre (c.2550 B.C.), it was once part of a vast temple complex. While the lion’s body made it an effective guardian of this sacred place, the human head (originally adorned by a royal beard and headdress and a symbolic cobra) was probably intended to represent the Pharaoh. Later, in the New Kingdom, it came to represent the sun-god.

  In ancient times the Great Sphinx was so familiar a symbol of Egypt that Herodotus’ omission of it from the surviving account of his travels is taken for evidence that our text of his work is incomplete. The Great Sphinx has become increasingly cryptic with the centuries, blanketed with sand, worn by wind and storm, mutilated and pillaged. An Arab doctor from Baghdad, Abdel Latif, noted about 1200 that “its mouth bears the mark of grace and beauty.… it smiles in a gracious manner.” But medieval Muslim iconoclasts chipped away the Sphinx’s nose. Mark Twain, including the Sphinx along with the Pyramids in his hurried tour of Egypt in Innocents Abroad, told how a member of his party tried to hammer off a souvenir from the Sphinx’s face. More recently the Sphinx has suffered severely from reckless “restoration.”

  The immensity of the figure fascinated generations of artists. An English artist, William Brockedon, in 1846 noted (taking ten inches as the normal length of a man’s head) that the bulk of the Sphinx was “nearly 40,000 times greater than its original.” The Sphinx made vivid Napoleon’s invocation at Giza, “Soldiers, forty centuries look down upon you.” And he set his party to measuring it for Vivant Denon’s Description de l’Égypte. One of the miracles in the history of art is that the Great Sphinx avoided the fate of Cleopatra’s Needle and other movable objects in the millennial pillage of Egyptian antiquities. Sheer mass has kept the Sphinx and other colossi in place for us.

  Egyptian colossi therefore have played an especially conspicuous role in the afterlife of ancient Egyptian art. They have often outlived the buildings to which they were attached. The so-called Colossi of Memnon on the floodplain near the Valley of the Kings, though much damaged, still attract tourists by their gigantism and their mystery. They were seventy feet high, each cut from a single stone. Originally built for the vast mortuary temple of Amenhotep III (1411–1375 B.C.) of the Eighteenth Dynasty, they were intended to guard the gates of his temple. Ancient Greek travelers named the northern statue “Memnon” in honor of a Trojan war hero. It became famous in classical literature as “the singing Memnon” because at sunrise it would emit strange sounds. Some tourists heard human voices, others thought they heard harp strings. The skeptical Greek geographer Strabo (63 B.C.?–A.D. 24) suspected a machine installed by the temple priests. When Hadrian and his wife, Sabina, arrived in A.D. 130, the singing Memnon remained silent on their first morning. But it spoke up the next day and inspired their court poetess to compose a paean to both Memnon and the emperor. Emperor Septimius Severus in A.D. 202 was not so fortunate. When the statue repeatedly refused to speak to him, he tried to conciliate it by repairing its cracks. Never again was the statue heard to sing. The cracks have multiplie
d since, but no song has come back with them. On the Nile floodplains these two battered colossi remain, three-dimensional hieroglyphs of the grandeur of Egypt of the pharaohs.

  The hypnotic colossal style survives spectacularly in the works of the energetic Rameses II, who reigned for sixty-seven years (1292–1225 B.C.), had his image reproduced all over Egypt, and carved his name on every available monument. Of his many vast building projects, at Karnak, Luxor, Thebes, Memphis, and elsewhere, the most distinctive was his grotto temple at Abu Simbel. Determined to erase the memory of Akhenaton and other hated predecessors, he had his men dismantle their monuments as quarries for his own. But the great temple at Abu Simbel needed no imported materials because it extended two hundred feet into a sandstone monolith. The temple façade faces the rising sun. At the entrance are four gigantic statues of the seated sun-god Rameses II. The entering rays magically illuminate a frieze of sacred baboons and eight thirty-two-foot-high statues of the Pharaoh as the god Osiris. The entrance statues of the enthroned Rameses, carved from the pink sandstone cliff, are almost as big as the Colossi of Memnon. Each is sixty-seven feet high and weighs twelve hundred tons. At the feet of the Pharaoh, reaching halfway up to his knees, are figures of his favorite wife, the beautiful Nefertari, his mother and several sons and daughter. The Pharaoh’s lips alone are three feet wide. Centuries ago, one of the heads was broken off. The faces of the remaining three are barely distinguishable from one another. All are impassive, with a divine dignity, all wearing the double crown of the “two Egypts,” the royal headdress and beard.

  After the Aswan High Dam was built in the 1960s the rising waters threatened to submerge both this main temple and a smaller one nearby. For an unprecedented feat of preservation, UNESCO funds were collected from fifty countries. International crews of engineers supervised cutting the façade into blocks by handsaw, to avoid the machine vibrations that might have cracked the brittle sandstone. From 1964 to 1966 the whole structure was dug away, and then reconstructed two hundred feet above the river, with a new cliff-cave to accommodate the interior. The visitor to Abu Simbel now witnesses something more than the dignity and grandeur of the Egypt of the pharaohs, a spectacle that would have surprised and delighted the ambitious Rameses. The awe of the whole world three thousand years later, his colossi have found a new dimension of the afterlife.

  19

  The Athletic Ideal

  INSPIRED by models from Egypt, the ancient Greeks imagined that all civilization had originated there. And in mid-seventh century B.C., they began visiting the country. An ambitious regent of the conquering Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (663), Psamtik I (664–610 B.C.; reigned 663–609 B.C.) enlisted Greek mercenaries in his successful Egyptian rebellion and founded a new dynasty. Then he allowed the Greeks to settle in the Nile Delta, where they flourished in trade and shipping. In Egypt they were awed by the stone temples and colossal statues. Though their homeland was rich in marble, only after sea traffic began to flow between Egypt and Greece did the Greeks make their first life-size marble statues. These seventh-century kouroi (youth), which became the prototype of the classic male nude, are almost indistinguishable in stance and posture from the work of the Egyptians. The figures stand rigid, arms stretched down against the body, fists clenched, head faced forward, left leg slightly advanced. Designed to be viewed frontally, they were symmetric, each half of head and trunk the mirror image of the other. The figures that had survived almost unchanged for Egyptian millennia would become the starting point of a dynamic Greek art that would delight the following millennia.

  The dynamism of Greek sculpture sprang from the Greek way of life, especially from their life in the open air. They celebrated the undraped active body in the lively competitive spirit of the city-state. The Greeks have been called the only truly athletic people of antiquity. To see how classical Greek sculpture came to be created, we must try to understand the meaning of athletics to them in the three centuries when they were making the models for Western visual arts (c.700-c.400 B.C.).

  We inherit our very different attitude toward athletics from the Roman Empire when athletic activities had become “games,” ludi, entertainments (from ludere, to play) to gratify the Roman crowd. The Colosseum (Flavian Amphitheater, dedicated A.D. 80) itself bore witness that Roman athletics had become spectator sports. Technology has brought our Colosseum into our living rooms, and for us, too, athletics have become “sports” (from “disport,” to divert or amuse).

  For the ancient Greeks athletics had another meaning. Their word for athlete came from a root meaning a “contest.” The adjective from it meant “struggling” and later came to mean “miserable” or “wretched.” An athlete, Pindar said, was one “who delights in the toil and the cost.” “Deeds of no risk are honorless whether done among men or among hollow ships.” Beginning as each city’s “national” festival, then as a ritual of peaceful competition among cities, athletic contests flourished with the city-states. The intensity of athletic competition was a barometer of civic loyalties. The first Olympic festival-contests between the communities were held in 776 B.C. and then every four years until A.D. 393.

  The Greeks did not go in for team sports. Only individuals competed and all honor went to the victor, whose reward at the Olympic competition was a crown of wild olive. The special virtue of the athlete, according to Pindar, was aidos—respect for the gods and fellowmen. The proper athlete was no bully, but neither was he “a good sport” or “a good loser.” A defeated athlete never congratulated the victor. Since it was a disgrace to be defeated, the Spartans, it was said, forbade their citizens to engage in intercity boxing or the risky pankration, where they were unlikely to win. Losers, Pindar tells us, returned to their mothers in shame, “by back ways they slink away, sore smitten by misfortune.”

  Athletic contests arose in ritual. Homer devotes the twenty-third book of the Iliad to the funeral games for Patroclus. At such games the deceased was commemorated by mementos given as prizes. The Olympic games, Pindar tells us, began in the ritual celebrating Hercules’ victory over Augeas when he cleansed the stables by deflecting the river Alpheus. At Olympia, a sacred place, the games honored Olympian Zeus. The games began as only a one-day ceremony, then in 472 B.C. extended to five days, ending with sacrifices and a banquet honoring the victors. The tie to religion helps explain the remarkable continuity of Greek athletics. The later Olympic games follow the rules described by Homer. Finally the Christian emperor Theodosius I abolished them in A.D. 393 because they were pagan relics.

  Even before there was a Greek nation, the Olympic festival brought Greeks together in a Panhellenic celebration. Only freeborn Greeks could compete. Numerous other festivals grew up—at Delphi, Delos, Corinth, and Nemea—modeled on the Olympic, but with local embellishments. At Nemea the wild-olive-wreath prize was displaced by a crown of parsley.

  Music and poetry celebrated the gods and the winners. The first national festival at Delphi was a musical contest. Pindar (518–438 B.C.), one of the greatest Greek lyric poets, wrote his famous cycles of odes to athletic victors. He praised the winner in 476 B.C. of the boys’ boxing competition:

  Know now, son of Archestratos,

  Hagesidamos, because of your boxing

  I shall sing a sweet song

  To be a jewel in your crown of golden olive …

  Festival games were symbols of peace, but Greece was seldom at peace. War in those days was not weapon against weapon, but man against man, and a citizen had to be prepared to defend his city. “No citizen has any right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training,” urged Socrates, as Xenophon recalled. “It is part of his profession as a citizen to keep himself in good condition, ready to serve his state at a moment’s notice. The instinct of self-preservation demands it likewise: for how helpless is the state of the ill-trained youth in war or in danger! Finally, what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and the strength of which his body is capable!”

  Every a
thlete was in training for defense. Since the ravines that split the Greek countryside demanded long jumps for the chase, the long jump became a regular athletic event. But there was no high jump. The Greek athletic long jumper had to hold weights, from four to eight pounds, testing his ability to carry a weapon. The race in armor was another regular event. It was sometimes called the hoplite race after the class of citizens who could not afford horses but still could equip themselves with full personal armor. After the eighth century B.C. the rise of hoplite warfare—the massed phalanx of armed citizens in close formation—made the strength of each citizen crucial to holding the line. At first each contestant wore a helmet and carried a shield, but later had only a shield.

  The discus throw may have begun as a test of ability to throw stones in battle. In the Iliad, when Ajax and Hector had thrown their spears, they picked up stones and fought on. Some ancient critics objected that, instead of the discus throw, it would be better to train men to throw “stones that fill the hand.” In the javelin throw, as on the battlefield, to add distance and accuracy a thong was looped around a finger to give the javelin a spinning motion. The pankration made unarmed combat into a game. Eight of Pindar’s Odes celebrate victors in this most dangerous and most popular of their regular athletic events. It combined wrestling and boxing, allowed kicking and strangling, but biting and gouging were forbidden. One popular opening was to break your opponent’s finger. It was common to twist feet out of sockets and not unknown to kill an opponent by strangling. The umpires sometimes placed the olive crown on the dead body of a valiant loser.