Babette Babich DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK

REFLECTIONS ON GREEK BRONZE AND «THE STATUE OF HUMANITY»

HEIDEGGER'S AESTHETIC PHENOMENOLOGY AND NIETZSCHE'S AGONISTIC POLITICS

TilE STATUE OF HUMANJ7Y-.-:rHE GENIUS OF CULTURE DOES AS CELLINI DID WHEN HE CAST HIS STATUE OF PERSEUS: THE LIQUIFIED MASS SEEMED TO BE INSUFFICIENT, BUT HE WAS DETERMINED TO PRODUCE ENOUGH: SO HE THREW INTO IT KEYS AND PLATES AND WHATEVER ELSE CAME TO HAND. AND JUST SO DOES THAT GENIUS THROW IN ERRORS, VICES, HOPES, DELUSIONS AND OTHER THINGS OF BASER AS WELL AS NOBLER METAL, FOR THE STATUE OF HUMANITY MUST EMERGE AND BE COMPLET­ED; WllAT DOES IT MATTER IF HERE AND THERE INFERIOR MATERIAL IS EMPLOYED.

Friedrich NIETZSCHE, Human, All-too-Human I §258

THE BEAUTY OF THE BODY-FAR TOO SUPERFICIALLY CONCEIVED BY ARTISTS: THIS SURFACE-BEAUTY MUST FOLLOW FROM THE BEAUTY OF THE ORGANISM'S COMPLETE FUNCTIONALI'fY-.-:ro THE EXTENTTHATTHE GREATEST ARTISANS STIMULATE THE CRE· ATIONOFBEAUTIFULHUMANBEINGSTHATlSTHEPURPOSEOFART-lTRENDERSANYONE WHO FEELS HIMSELF ASHAMED BEFORE IT DISSATISFIED AND ANYONE WITH POWER ENOUGH,JOYOUSLY PRODUCTIVE. THE RESULTOF A DRAMA IS «THUS TOO WILLI BE, LIKE TIHSHERO»-EXCITATIONOFCREATIVEPOWER-INWARD-TURNED-UPON-US-OURSELVES!

Friedrich Nietzsche, KSA 10,7 [151], p. 292

THE STATUE OF APOLLO AT THE MUSEUM IN OLYMPIA WE CAN INDEED REGARD AS AN OBJECT OF NATURAL-SCIENTIFIC REPRESENTATION; WE CAN CALCULATE THE PHYSI­CAL WEIGHT OF THE MARBLE; WE CAN INVESTIGATE ITS CHEMICAL COMPOSITION. BUT THIS OBJECTIFYING THINKING AND SPEAKING DOES NOT CATCH SIGHT OF TilE APOLLO WHO SHOWS FORTH HIS BEAUTY AND SO APPEARS AS THE VISAGE OF THE GOD.

Martin HEIDEGGER, Phenomenology and Theology

I. INTRODUCTION /423 II. VERGEGENWARTIGUNG /425 III. SOCRATES' ANCESTOR /426

IV. MOVING STATUES /431 V. ENGAGING STATUES I 433

VI. GREEK BRONZE AND POLITICAL FORMATION OF THE BODY /435 VII. LOOKING AT GREEK BRONZE, CASTING GREEK BRONZES: THE MODEL OF LIFE /444

VIII. THE COLOR OF BRONZE: CASTING THE LAOCOON AND THE LIGHT OF DAY I 448 IX. THE SUBSTANCE OF BRONZE !455

X. EROTIC PAIDEA: BEAUTY AS FORMATION AND THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS /460 XI. FIRST CONCLUSION: ON THE WORK OF ART IN SCULPTURE, ARCHITECTURE,

POETRY AND THE SISTINE MADONNA /468 XII. CODA: WITH MIRRORS /470

L INTRODUCTION

1111111• .. 111 hat follows proposes a hermeneutic and phenomenological inquiry into the ethical and political role of life-sized (or roughly so) bronz­es in ancient Greece, although I will also be raising more general aesthetic and philosophical questions. In particular I call attention to the significance of the claims the ancients make regarding the

sheer number of such statues in Greek cities such as Rhodes, Athens, Olympia, etc., claims contemporary scholarship does not dispute so much as diminish. Just

HX!S1J:'NTIA vol. XVII. pp. 423-471. 2007. (j) 2007 Socielils Philosoplzia Classica. Printed in 1 fungary.

as we are often reminded that people in ancient days, or even a few hundred years ago, were much smaller than they are today, so too it is suggested that the ancient Greeks, for all their technical prowess, and so too the Romans, for all their economic savvy, had trouble counting. But, if we assume that the figures in question-such as the thousands per city the elder Pliny tells us still remained after the conquest of the same Greek cities-have any substance, the question to be posed asks why? Why so many large, life-scale bronze statues or other statues of painted stone or else of polychrome or gilded wood? To ask this question is to ask another and related question: what was it like to live among so many, so very many statues? For one would, by any count of it, be living amongst a ready-made citizenry: an already populated polis ( nol.ts ).

Given the role of life-size statues in our public spaces today, in civic centers or public squares, one might be inclined to suppose that the effect of living among so many statues in ancient Greece would have been aesthetic, however surreal or exceedingly so: a life in the midst of 'art,' like the life of a night-watchman in a museum. Related to this is the supposition that just as we surround ourselves by billboards (and on a smaller scale, by magazine images) showcasing beautiful people, the young and desirable models used for advertising and selling every­thing from soup to cars to stereos and real estate, so too the ancient Greeks surrounded themselves with bronze ideals. Modernist readings are distinguished by their tendency to find such commonalities between antiquity and modernity. This is also at work in the contemporary scholarly question of desire: perhaps the effect of so many statues was intended to be erotic, part of the same cult or fertil­ity rite that stood behind nothing less than Greek tragedy, if we remember-and we should-what Nietzsche tells us about the birth of tragedy from the spirit of the Dionysia and its rites. The role of desire seems plain enough given the politi­cal importance of Eros (E,xus) in antiquity (this contention is both well attested and well analysed). 1

1 In addition to the studies of Eva Keuls and Kenneth Dover, Jan Elsner's recent Roman Eyes takes its point of departure from this conventional conviction regarding "fantasies of (and apparently, according to our sources, even attempts at) sexual intercourse with statues so beauti­ful as to be better than the real thing." Elsner also includes a footnote referring "to the ancient literature on aya.A/Aa.w<PtALa. (making love with statues)." J. ELSNER, Roman Eyes (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2007), p. 2. See too and most importantly, Andrew STEWART, Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) as well as Karin Moser VON FILSECK, Kairos und Eros. Zwei Wege zu einem Neuverstiindnis griechischer Bildwerke (Bonn: Habelt, 1990). With respect to epw> and the city, I thank Andrew Stewart for drawing my attention to R.R. SMITH, "Pindar, Athletes, and the Early Greek Statue Habit," in Simon Hornblower and Catherine Smith (cds.), Pindar's Poetry, Patrons, and Friends (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 83-139 in addition to Tonia HoLSCHER, "Images and Political Identity: The Case of Athens," in: D. Boedeker- K. Raaflaub (eds.), Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth Century Athens (Cambridge, Mass. 1998), pp. 153-183, and, with refen.:nce to the role of ,'Ef)<D" and the hunt, see Alain ScHNAPP's Le chasseur et La cite: chusse ct erotique en Grccc anciennc (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996). See further Norman Bryson's Lacanian studies in art his­tory as well as more philosophically and much more broadly, Alexander NEHAMAS, The Promise of Happiness (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2007).

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II. VERGEGENWARTIGUNG

The following inquiry follows the tradition of phenomenological reflection on historical objects in particular. This will involve the kind of attuned or circum­spect intentionality or "deliberation" [Uberlegung] that has for Heidegger ,the existential meaning of a making present."2 If Gegenwdrtigen may be rendered as sensing or perceiving, Vergegenwdrtigung has to do with either perception, whether circumspective attention to an object as given to perception or else a recollected or imagined perception, as attuned re-presentation, or else to use Heidegger's more solicitous terms: a letting-be-involved-in an object for atten­tive inspection which can also include a past object, recalled as what was and hence not present before us or what is otherwise absent, qua ideal, etc., but in each case actively representing that object as it would be if it were present to us and as it would be if we ourselves were available for such a concernful becom­ing involved. Thus in Being and Time Heidegger speaks of Vergegenwdrtigung as a modality of making present [gegenwdrtigen ], a rendering present. In this way, Heidegger is able to attend to presentation as such, emphasizing that such ,mak­ing present [Vergegenwdrtigung] does not relate itself to 'mere representations [Vorstellungen ]'."3 Heidegger thus describes the "rendering present" [ Gegenwar­tigung] of made things or artifacts (equipment) as a kind of letting be involved in (or with) things as things as such and that is to say as self-standing presence in the world: "As the self-subsistency [Selbstand] of a self-susbistent [Selbstdndigen] the thing distinguishes itself from an ob-ject [Gegenstand]. A self-subsistent can become an object when we place it before us, whether it be in direct perception or in recollected re-presentation [Vergegenwiirtigung]."4 Invoking the example of

2 Martin HEIDEGGER, Sein und Zeit (Erstveroffentlichung: Edmund Husserls, hrsg., in Jahrbu­ch fur Philosophic und phiinomenologische Forschung 8, Halle an der Saale: Niemeyer, 1927, Einzelausgabe: Ti.ibingen: Niemeyer, 71953, 151979, Gesamtausgabe Band 2, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977); idem, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie- Edward Robin­son, (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), §69; p. 410 I SZ, p. 359. [Emphasis corrected. Hereafter cited as SZ (Einzelausgabe) I BT followed by respective page numbers.] Macquarrie and Robin­son render Vergegenwiirtigung as "envisaging" but this can cloud Heidegger's reference to making present, that is to the presentation (or presentification) variously, of the present or of presence as such. Eugen Fink has also written on Vergegenwiirti,t,:rungwith respect to imagination and memory This conception of Vergegenwiirtigung can also be heard in Eugen FINK's Vergegenwiittigung und Bild. Beitriige zur Phiinomenologie der Unwirklichkeit (1930), part of his I 929 inaugural disserta­tion at Freiburg, first published in thelahrbuchfiir Philosophie und phiinomenologische Forschung and in his Studien zur Phiinomeno/ogie 1930-1939 (Den Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966). Fink was to inspire Maurice Merleau-Ponty in aesthetics in addition to Jan Patocka and through him, Jacques Derrida. See in adition, Dieter JAHNIG, Welt-Geschichte: Kunst-Geschichte. Zum Verhiilt­nis von Vergangenheitserkenntnis und Veriindenmg (Koln: DuMont Schauberg, 1 975).

3 SZ, ~69, p. 3591 BT, p. 410. 4 Martin Heidegger, Einblick in das was ist, p. 5. See for a useful discussion of the object

character of things as things that "stand" in themselves (,Das Dingliche, das in sich stehen bleibt..."), Gunter Figal's Freiburger Antritsvorlesung, ,Die Gegensti:idlichkeit der Welt," in lnternationales Jahrbuch.fiir Hermeneutik, Band 3 (Ti.ibingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), pp. 123-136. Figal's reflective theme is reminiscent of the conclusion of Hans-Georg Gadamer's own allusion to Holderlin and to Goethe in his The Relevance of the Beautiful.

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"archaeological excavation"5 as an instance of this kind of careful deliberation or Vergegenwiirtigung, Heidegger engages a specifically art-historical reflection illus­trated by the "antiquities preserved in museums (household gear for example)." But Heidegger asks us to attend to the conceptual dissonance involved in speak­ing of antiquities as such, that is to say, he asks what makes such objects of histor­ical significance for archaeologists: what is it about these manifestly still-present objects that counts as 'past': "by what right do we call this entity 'historical' when it is not yet past?"6

The specifically "historical" character of such objects is not their fragility or ruin-like character for this friability continues in objects preserved or conserved in the museum-as the visitor is well aware with all the museum's climate controls and warning protections. Nor does this "historical" quality reside in that such objects are no longer used, for even in use they would retain this same quality, which Walter Benjamin famously named an aura and which Heidegger explores in terms of the being of (the presence of) a world in time. What is past about such objects is thus a world, a lost world "within which they belonged to a context of equipment" and within which they "were encountered as ready-to-hand and used by a concernful Dasein who was-in-the-world. That world is no longer."7 In this sense the "antiquities which are still present-at-hand have a character of 'the past' and of history by reason of the fact that they have belonged as equipment to a world that has been-the world of a Dasein that has been there-and that they have been derived from that world. This Dasein is what is primarily historical."R And this same "primary historicality" of human there-being is our theme.

III. SOCRATES' ANCESTOR

Daedalus, the inventor, is known to us from the tragic story of Icarus. Readers of Plato also know him as a sculptor of a particularly fantastic legacy inasmuch Socrates claims him as ancestor, a genealogy consistently maintained in Plato's dialogues.9 Indeed and like Daedalus, Socrates was a skilled artisan, and Euthy­phro accuses him of having the same capacity to cheat in argument as his forbear cheated his customers with his moving statues (Meno 97d-98a). Socrates coun­tered that such a power to dislodge the words of others was too fabulous to be true. Where Daedalus 'only made his own inventions to move,' Socrates-shades

5 SZ, p. 358/ Bl~ p. 409. 6 SZ, p. 380 I BT, p. 431. 7 SZ, p. 380 I BT, p. 432. 8 SZ, p. 381 I BT, p. 432. 9 Beyond Plato, Pausanias tells us that Socrates sculpted the figures of Hermes and the Grac­

es on the Acropolis. Xenophon for his part suggested that it was this technician's experience that led Socrates to urge the sculptor Kleiton to permit the inner form of the soul to shine through the outward form of the body. A further study, not concerned with sculpture, rewards attention: Indra Kagis McKEWEN, Socrates' Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).

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of Baron von Mi.inchhausen-would have the power to 'move those of other people as well' (Euth. lld).

What is interesting in the wake of this Platonic mystification is Diodorus Siculus's demystifying (very enlightened, indeed, very 'modern') analysis of the precise nature of the renowned 10 sculptor's technical skill: "Daedalus was an Athenian by birth and was known as one of the clan named Erechthids, since he was the son of Metion, the son of Eupalamus, the son of Erechtheus .... In the sculptor's art he so far excelled all other men that later generations invented the story about him that the statues of his making were quite like their living models [~-tv8oA.oyilom Jt£pt au·wv tn6tt ta KataOIC£'UU~01!£Va twv dyaA.~-tcitwv O~-tot6-~-tata tois €~-t'J.rux_ms vnciPXu]; they could see, they said, and walk and, in a word, exercised every bodily function so that his handiwork seemed to be living beings [f'~-t'\j)VX,ov ~q)ov ]" (Diod., IV 76). 11

Fig. 1. Statues of the Kouros siblings Cleobis and Biton by Polimede, ca. 590 BCE. 1.976m.

Archaeological Museum, Delphi, Greece. Photo Credit : Borromeo I Art Resource, NY.

10 'Renowned,' it is salutary to recall here, also translates mythic. Yet and as Nietzsche reminds us, it is sometimes necessary, for the sake of science, to demystify demystification.

11 Diodorus Siculus, Librmy of Histo1y, Books IV 59-VII; C. H. Oldfather, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge Massachusetts, 2000 [1939]). Apollodorus (Library, B-15.8-9) writes that 'Daidalos is the son of Eupalmos, son of Etion and Alkippe' and names him the 'best builder and the first inventor of statues.'

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Thus, and like the Diskobolos attributed to Myron, the Doryphoros of Poly­cleitos (Figs. 2, 3, 4, 5) is a frozen study of 'motion'. So far from actual move­ment-seeing and walking and otheiWise having the aspect of 'living beings'­Diodorus explains that Daedalus's statues 'move,' as it were, from the more rigid poses of earlier statues (e.g., Fig. 1): 'with closed eyes and hands hanging down and cleaving to their sides' (Diod., IV 76) to the inventive stylization (following the logical consequence of the argument) of statues that are now said to be 'Dae­dalian', that is to say, stylistically characterized by 'open eyes, and parted legs and outstretched arms' (ibid.). In this context it is relevant to recall Alice Donohue's caveats to art historical analyses in her discussion of the modernist assumptions haunting the ascription of evolutionary development to aniconic statues (the 'wooden', non-imagistic character of wood statues) as so many 'progressive' forms, advancing to more representational statues. 12

Fig. 2. Doryphoros (Spear Bearer).

Modern bronze reconstruction by Georg Roemer of the original ( 440 BCE by Polykleitos). 6'6" (2m). Formerly in Munich, destroyed in 1944. Photo Credit. Foto Marburg I Art Resource, NY/

12 See A.A. DoNOHUE, Xoana and the Origins of Greek Sculpture (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988). The presuppositions built into the convention of 'stylistic advance' is the subject of her recent Greek Sculpture and the Problem of Description, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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Accordingly, the standard image with which so many art historical discussions of the Greek revolution in sculpture traditionally begin invokes the archaic Kov~ as a kind of object example, illustrating the famous departure from columnar rigid­ity to the (stylized) movement and flexibility of life. (Thus art history students are taught to contrast Figs. 1 and 2.) In this same conventional or allegorical sense, the so-called 'movement' of Daedalus' statues is explained in a manner familiar now to readers for nearly two thousand years, as no more than a figure of speech. In this way, the reader understands that when the ancient Greeks write that a sculp­tor gave his statues the power of movement they did not mean (not really) that their statues moved. One has likewise assumed, given the unmistakably metallic look of modern bronze, that ancient authors were similarly figurative when they affirmed that such bronze statues appeared to have the 'look' of life. 13

Like other Greek statues (of oxen and of horses, or of winged sphinxes or gry­phons), these life-sized and life-like statues were also striking, as I have already noted, by sheer dint of their abundance. Not just in gardens and courtyards, status, especially bronze statues but also statues in wood and marble (and sometimes combinations of a variety of materials) abounded in public places as well as private domains. One could find them at the gates, on the walls, delimiting the margins of city precincts, in the market, on temple steps and within, all about, and together with reliefs, set up upon the great mystery that is the mystery of the temples themselves. 14

And the Romans famously and to repeat the standard story of art history (a story traditionally assumed to be the story of decadence, especially if we believe Nietzsche on Alexandrian Hellenicism), copied these same Greek statues, not only in bronze, but also in marble in the Roman fashion (exact copies could be made in marble), 15

13 Jean Charbonneaux recalls a directly representative tradition, such that a statue depicting 'a modest young girl ... was said to be a more or less direct portrait of a living model.' Archaic Greek Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), p. 249. Charbonneaux' quote is the point of departure for Mary Stieber's study of ancient realism, The Poetics of Appearance in the Attic Korai (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004 ). In this case one has to consider the art historical tendency to find the Romans (or else the Hellenized Greeks and at times the Egyptians) capable of realistic representation but, all the stories of Zeuxis to the contrary, not the Greeks who were, of course, inevitably inclined to idealism.

14 These temples are another issue again, as indeed are the monumental representations of the deity and other colossal statues and the basic technical questions which continue to chal­lenge us. Not only are we unable to rebuild the Parthenon with ancient techniques today but, as Manolis Korres has emphasized, even with modern machinery and techniques, it could not be built in the length of time needed for its original construction. SeeM. KORRES, The Stones of the Parthenon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

15 See Margarete BIEBER, Ancient Copies: Contributions to the History of Greek and Roman Art (New York, 1977) as well as Brunilde RIDGWAY, Roman Copies of Greek Sculpture: The Problem of the Originals (Jerome Lectures 15, Ann Arbor, 1984). Charbonneux, who draws upon an anal­ogy with Etruscan techniques (as well as European bronzesmiths of the Renaissance) to point out that the method of indirect lost wax casting ("eire perdu [casting on the negative]") allows the preservation (and re-use) of the original model also reminds us that the Greeks themselves copied bronze status in stone. See CHARBONNEUX, Greek Bronze, trans. by Katherine Watson, (New York: Viking Press, 1962), pp. 30 and 32sqq. See for a discussion of Roman copies in Bronze, Carol Mattusch, "The Bronze 'TI1rso in Florence: An Exact Copy of a Fifth-Century B. C. Greek Original," in American Journal of Archaeology 82/1 (Winter, 1978), pp. 101-104.

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arguably engendering the very pure ideal of still and noble grandeur, but also setting the color of white in our imaginations. This too, as Nietzsche would say, is still tyronism and error, but no mistake has had more durable influence. Although we have still more evidence of color, the color of white, indeed of white marble, endures as the image of Greece today. In 1870 Nietzsche warned us against the classicizing tendency "to over-Hellenize the Hellene and to conjure up for ourselves a work of art that was never at home in all the world."16

Fig. 3. Fig. 4. Fig. 5. The Doryphoros (Polycleitos) The Doryphoros Museo The Doryphoros Minneapolis

Vatican Museum, Rome Archaeologico, Naples, 212 cm17 Institute of Arts, 198 em.

The tendency to such "over-Hellenization" is hardly absent today, and although every classicist and every art historian will say that it is well-known that statues were colored, they are often hard pressed to say what they mean by that Hence Brunilde Ridgway can begin her 2004 review of the Museum catalogue for the Munich and Copenhagen and Rome exhibit entitled Bunte Gotter. Die Farbigkeit antiker Skulptur by remarking: "Not only do Museums and exhibitions fail to stress sufficiently the role of color in ancient sculpture and architecture, but apparently many archaeologists today continue to ignore or deny the reality of its import." 18

16 Friedrich NIETZSCHE, ,Das griechische Musikdrama", in Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), vol. I, p. 518 [Hereafter cited as KSA followed by the page number].

17 Polykleitos of Argos (5th BCE) Doryphoros (Spearbearer). Roman copy of Greek original (c. 440 BCE). Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, Italy. Photo Credit: Scala I Art Resource, NY.

18 See Brunilde RIDGWAY's review of Vinzenz Brinkman, Raimund Wi.insche (eds.), ,Bunte Gotter. Die Farbigeit antiker Skulptur. Eine Ausstellung der Staatlichen Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek Mi.inschen in Zusammenarbeit mit der Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Kopenhagen und den Vatikanischen Musseen, Rom (Munich: Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypto­thek, 2004)," in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2004.08.07.

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arguably engendering the very pure ideal of still and noble grandeur, but also setting the color of white in our imaginations. This too, as Nietzsche would say, is still tyronism and error, but no mistake has had more durable influence. Although we have still more evidence of color, the color of white, indeed of white marble, endures as the image of Greece today. In 1870 Nietzsche warned us against the classicizing tendency "to over-Hellenize the Hellene and to conjure up for ourselves a work of art that was never at home in all the world." 16

Fig. 3. Fig. 4. Fig. 5. The Doryphoros (Polycleitos) The Doryphoros Museo The Doryphoros Minneapolis

Vatican Museum, Rome Archaeologico, Naples, 212 cm17 Institute of Arts, 198 em.

The tendency to such "over-Hellenization" is hardly absent today, and although every classicist and every art historian will say that it is well-known that statues were colored, they are often hard pressed to say what they mean by that. Hence Brunilde Ridgway can begin her 2004 review of the Museum catalogue for the Munich and Copenhagen and Rome exhibit entitled Bunte Gotter. Die Farbigkeit antiker Skulptur by remarking: "Not only do Museums and exhibitions fail to stress sufficiently the role of color in ancient sculpture and architecture, but apparently many archaeologists today continue to ignore or deny the reality of its import."18

16 Friedrich NIETZSCHE, ,Das griechische Musikdrama", in Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), vol. I, p. 518 [Hereafter cited as KSA followed by the page number].

17 Polykleitos of Argos (5th BCE) Doryphoros (Spearbearer). Roman copy of Greek original (c. 440 BCE). Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, Italy. Photo Credit: Scala I Art Resource, NY.

18 See Brunilde RIDGWAY's review of Vinzenz Brinkman, Raimund Wunsche (eds.), ,Bunte Getter. Die Farbigeit antiker Skulptur. Eine Ausstellung der Staatlichen Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek Munschen in Zusammenarbeit mit der Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Kopenhagen und den Vatikanischen Musseen, Rom (Munich: Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypto­thek, 2004)," in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2004.08.07.

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As Ridgway herself is careful to emphasize, this point is nothing like a recent discovery and Nietzsche himself invokes it as an important-to-keep-in-mind cor­rection of a stubborn scholarly/popular prejudice, declaiming in his Basel lecture, Greek Music-Drama, "Was it not until recently seen to be an unconditional artistic axiom that all ideal plastic art had to be colorless, that ancient sculpture did not permit the application of color. Very. slowly, and only under the strongest resis­tance of these same hyper-Hellenes, did the polychrome vision of ancient statues advance according to which these were no longer naked but were to be consid­ered clothed with a colorful overlay."19 That this prejudice continues to endure is itself significant. Indeed we continue to lack the resources for a Heideggerian Vergegenwiirtigung with respect to such colors including not only the significance of these colors but also the clothing (and kind of clothing) thereby depicted.

The habit of copying Greek bronzes in stone has a long history from Greece to Rome and even to the current day, in plaster or bronze composite such that a case in point might be seen in the imposingly different aspect of the now destroyed bronze composite reconstruction (Fig. 2) of Polykleitos's much copied original bronze Doryphoros. The tradition of reflection on the canon provided by such exemplary copying is perhaps best to be seen by invoking the Doryphoros, perhaps the most iconic of canons: examples of which are to be seen in Naples (found in Pompei, Fig 4) and Rome (Fig. 3, found in Trastavere), as well as Min­neapolis (Fig. 5, found 'in the early 1930's in the sea off Italy")20 and plaster cop­ies to be seen in Lyon, G6ttingen,21 Tiibingen, and in Munich now including the new replacement of the statue that had been destroyed in 1944 (Fig. 2).

IV. MOVING STATUES

My argument here does not turn on the claim that Daedalus' statues actually moved. Still it is worth noting that Pin dar poetically attests to this possibility in his seventh Olympian Ode (alluding to 'works' lining the roads: 'like unto beings that lived and moved'). 22 In addition to Pindar, we recall Nietzsche's repeated (and

19 KSA 1, p. 518. 20 See further Hugo MEYER's discussion, "A Roman Masterpiece: The Minneapolis Dory­

pharos," in Warren G. Moon ( ed. ), Polykleitos, the Doryphoros, and Tradition (Madison: Wiscon­sin, 1995), pp. 65-115, here p. 65. Meyer includes a useful comparison of copies. Different from Bieber, Ridgway and Mattusch, Meyer's question is the question of copies "carved centuries after the original" in order to reflect on "tradition and its dissolution."

21 The University of Gottingen collection is online: http://viamus.uni-goettingen.de/fr/pages/. 22 The OdesofPindar, trans. by John Sandys (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1915), The

Olympian Odes, VI 52. Sandys, on p. 71, explains that Pindar alludes 'to the mythical T~.:J.:x;l'vc<>, the wizards of Rhodes, who worked in brass and iron and made images of the gods.' J. Douglas Bruce suggests an alternate translation: 'Works of art like unto living and moving creatures used to go about their streets.' Bruce, "Human Automata in Classical Tradition and Medieval Romance," in Modern Philology 10/4 (Apr., 1913), pp. 511-526, here p. 513, citing Wilhelm Christ in support who adverts, in his 1896 edition of Pindar, to Homer's description of 'handmaidens of gold ... the semblances of living maids' (Iliad, XVIIsqq.) as aiding Hephaistos. W. J. VERDENIUS,

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melancholy) emphasis that the Greeks were already in possession of the techni­cal know-how to match the mechanical achievements of the life-sized automata that so inspired Descartes in the 17th century.23 1f one is inclined to be amused by tales of mechanical or dancing dolls (think of Offenbach's Contes d'Hofmann) or the flight (and return!) of the wooden eagle crafted by Regiomontanus, the tech­nical prowess of the Greeks goes beyond such tales in the famous Antikythera mechanism: a complex putatively watch-work mechanism, machined gears and all, presumably designed to map the cosmic year, fashioned in bronze and very romantically retrieved from the sands of history and which in the fifties and six­ties was examined with X-Ray imaging and which now has been further explored not only with the MRI technology but also and beyond the reconstructive efforts of an earlier generation, reconstructed with newer schemata for more contempo­rary sensibilities.24

Beyond the marvelous allure of Daedalus' wandering statues and apart from the debates about Pindar's allusions to such wonders, I have invoked herme­neutic phenomenology as it is perhaps the single most appropriate method for aesthetics and in this case for questioning the role of the statue in ancient Greece. Heidegger himself gives this hermeneutic explanation of phenomenol­ogy in terms of its Greek etymology: " ... phenomenology means d.no<Pa{vc:a8m Ta <Pmvol-!c:va-to let that which shows itself from itself be seen from itself in the very way that it shows itself .... But here we are expressing nothing else than the maxim ... 'To the things themselves!"'25

Pindar's Seventh Olympian Ode. A Commentary (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Co., 1972) concurs with the notion of movement and gives us "they went their own way" and more recently M. WILLCOCK, Pindar. Victory Odes. Olympians 2, 7, & 11, Nemean 4, Isrhmians 3, 4, & 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) has given us "Figures like living and moving things went along the roads." Ten years later, Patrick O'Sullivan has exhumed the standard and deflationary translation of KEAEU8ot <j>ipov, arguing that the statues were simply "set up along the roads." O'Sullivan contends that as he stresses "the lifelike character" of the statues made by "the Rhodian craftsmen" Pindar means exactly the opposite (such argumentation is no trick at all in a reading of Pindar): "In telling us that these craftsmen produce works similar to living creatures (~wo{mv £pn;6vnam 8' OI!Ota), Pindar subtly underscores the fact that these crea­tures were not living or moving." O'Sullivan's smooth use of the disjunction is a nice touch: thus the author's argument that Pindar declares the creatures as "not living" effectively goes without saying or indeed argument. O'SULLIVAN, "Pindar and the Statues of Rhodes," in Classical Quar­terly 55.1 (2005), pp. 96-104.

23 Derek de Solla Price notes that Descartes himself had 'planned to build a dancing man, a flying pigeon [like the mechanical dove attributed to Archytas of Tarentum], and a spaniel that chased a pheasant. Legend has it that he did build a beautiful blonde automaton named Fran­cine .. .' p. 23 in PRICE, "Automata and the Origins of Mechanism and Mechanistic Philosophy," in Technology and Culture 511 (Winter, 1964 ), pp. 9-23. See too, among more recent studies, A. G. DRACHMANN's The Mechanical Technology of Greek and Roman Antiquity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963).

24 Price's early efforts were featured in an illustrated article on the device ''An Ancient Greek Computer" published in The Scientific American (June 1957), pp. 60-67. Recent articles draw upon more modern methods of detective science than Price had available to him but the new technologies of exploration leave the question of reconstructing the function of the mechanism open. Current conclusions do not depart from Price's 1957 assessment.

25 SZ, p. 34 I BT, p. 58.

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A phenomenological analysis concerns 'that which shows itself in itself'26 but because this is entangled in semblance and error as well as what we fail to see, phe­nomenology is fundamentally a method, indeed, the science of paying attention. In this paying attention the focus is on 'letting see,' as Heidegger says, where for the most part what is to be seen is what does not manifest itself in what is manifest but 'belongs to it so essentially as to constitute its meaning and its ground.'27

The art historian Rainer Mack has observed that it is 'a phenomenological fact that the image looks back, that it succeeds in instantiating the effect of a gaze.'28

This point is accord with the account of phenomenological aesthetics cited above, yet Heidegger also reminds us that 'phenomenology' as a formal expression 'signifies primarily a methodological conception. This expression does not char­acterize the what of the objects of philosophical research as subject-matter, but rather the how of that research'.29 This 'how' corresponds for Heidegger and for Fink to reflective questioning and a great deal is already gained once we begin to raise-or even: once we begin to see-the question of Greek Bronze as a ques­tion to be asked.

V. ENGAGING STATUES

We are told that the Greeks seemingly endowed their statues with the capacity to interact with passersby or even with the sculptor himself. This is a matter of form, and, if we are to believe myth, this is also a matter of voice (Daedalus, we are told, devised a quicksilver-driven mechanism to give his figures the capacity to speak), of movement, and most commonly, an erotic allure and it is this last aspect that has been most celebrated in the past few decades (or centuries, to recall Winckelmann's inauguration of art history and whom we discuss below).30

This capacity for interaction is also given explicit expression in inscriptions on the base (and sometimes on the surface of the statue itself): for even lacking Daedalus' Hermes-technique or gurgling mercury, the statue, precisely in an oral

26 SZ, p. 28 I BT, p. 51. 27 SZ, p. 35 I BT, p. 59. 28 Rainer MACK, "Facing Down Medusa (An Aetiology of the Gaze)," in Art History 2515

(2002), pp. 570-604, here, p. 571. Mack offers a provocatively psychological exploration of the Medusa's apotropaic force, an emphasis not irrelevant to if it is different from the approach I am taking here. See also Jean Paul VERNANT, "Death in the Eyes: Gorgo, Figure of the Other," in Froma Zeitlin ( ed. ), Mortals and Immortals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991 ), pp. 111-138.

2~ SZ, p. 27 I BT, p. 50. 30 See, for one key example, Andrew STEWART, Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). On Winckelmann, see Alex PoTTs, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckebnann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) and Simon RICHTER, Laocoon's Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann Lessing Herder Moritz Goethe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992). See, for a signal and critically different emphasis, Donohue, Greek Sculpture and the Problem of Description, op. cit., pp. 165sqq.

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culture where the skill of reading can be compared to sight-reading music and to read an inscription is inevitably to read it aloud31 would address passersby.32

There are a number of stories illustrating the interaction and relationship had (or imagined to be had) with statues. The tale of the mythic sculptor Pygmalion and Galatea is iconic as is the story of Hephaistos the craftsman god and his clay creation, Pandora, or else and more marvelously, of the bronze automaton, Talos who could heat his chest to a deadly brazier's fire and killed his enemies by clasp­ing them to his chest, an automaton who could bleed to death himself (Fig 6).33

Fig. 6. Death of Talos, with Polux and Castor. Attic volute krater. 51h BCE.

Museo Jatta, Ruvo di Puglia, Italy. Photo Credit: Scala I Art Resource, NY.

31 This complex point exceeds the bounds of this essay. See Jesper SVENBRO, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), who writes entirely in Nietzsche's spirit of what I elsewhere analyse as Nietzsche's enduring philological discovery, that "Greek writing was first and foremost a machine for producing sounds" Svenbro, Phrasikleia, op. cit., p. 2. For Nietzsche's "musical" or acoustico-phonetic "discovery," see B. BAI3ICH, Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Eros and Music in Holderlin, Nietz­sche, Heidegger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), Chapter 1. For a discussion of the techniques/technologies of reading (silently and not, spiritually/sensually and not) Ivan ILLICH, Im Weinberg des Testes (Miinchen: C.H. Beck, 1991). See for a useful discussion of the archaeological issues of the technology of writing, David GABBARD, "Sensual Literacy: Ivan Illich and the Technologies of the Text," in Interchange 26/3 (1995), pp. 297-303.

32 Thus speaking of the artful delight of a ruse (note well that Nietzsche here makes an emphatic point of the specific harmlessness of the ruse [to wit:, ... auf eine unschadliche Weise']) as one of two sources of art as such, Nietzsche refers to the case of 'Architecture as if the stone spoke (from an inhabitant of the house or temple)' KSA 9, 11 [51], p. 459.

33 Talos, the bronze man set to guard Crete by throwing stones from shore, and hence a mechanical defender or kind of robot (hence the fondness for him in the pastische mythologies of internet gaming communities) appears in the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. Said to have been a work of Hephaestos or else to have been the last of the Hesiodic race of bronze, xaAKEwv y£w)<;, Talos is also shown with wings on the coins of Phaestos. Apollonius describes Talos as a creature that moved yet had only a "kind" of life. Talos however would not be broken, as a machine might be, so much as "killed" with a wound to the ankle, like Achilles (or like Robin Hood), draining the ochre that flowed in his veins. The image of Talos dying in this way is depict­ed on several Etruscan bronze mirrors as well as here in Fig 6. See further: Martin ROBERTSON, "The Death of Talos," in The Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977), pp. 158-160.

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In myth and philosophy, the statue plays an exemplary role. To qualify this exemplary ideal for the ears of his contemporary nineteenth century audience, ears like our own, Nietzsche cites Plutarch's reflection that "no noble-born youth would himself, upon seeing Zeus in Pisa, have the desire to become himself a Phidias or else Polyclitus on seeing Hera in Argos" and goes on to point out that for "the Greeks, artistic creativity was as much to be subsumed under the undig­nified category of work as any banausic handcraft."34 Rather than aspiring to be the artist himself, one is to become a work of art in the sense of crafting oneself and one's life, as Nietzsche speaks of becoming "the poets of our lives."35 In this sense one was to be like the statue, hence agonistically matched, to the statue itself.36 Such exemplary glorification also plays in Alcibiades' alluringly elliptical comparison of Socrates to a cleverly crafted statue of a satyr, the d.ya/...Jlata found in sculptors' shops. Alcibiades' comparison of Socrates to such OLArJVOt functions as an object allegory for Socrates' hidden qualities, an emphasis needed given Socrates' constantly-celebrated lack of such excellencesY

VI. GREEK BRONZE AND POLITICAL FORMATION OF THE BODY

Although statues of a wide variety of sizes, from the very small to the very large, play a number of different roles in a long tradition in antiquity, I have here been raising a particular question about the nature and working power of so many

34 Nietzsche, Der griechische Staat, in KSA 1, p. 766. 35 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §299. 36 Epictetus takes for granted the pride and nobility of the statue as exemplifying itself (as well

as its maker) to encourage and to praise, by contrast, the wonders of the human being and its divine maker. 'Why, wert thou a statue of Phidias, an Athena or a Zeus, thou wouldst bethink thee both of thyself and thine artificer; and hadst thou any sense, thou wouldst strive to do no dishon­our to thyself or him that fashioned thee, nor appear to beholders in unbefitting guise. But now, because God is thy Maker, is that why thou carest not of what sort thou shalt show thyself to be?' Golden Sayings of Epictetus (Cambridge: Harvard Loeb Classics, 1910-1914), vol2, no. 2, p. LXI. I am grateful to Suzanne Sterne-Gillet for her kindness in reminding me that Plotinus uses the metaphor of the statue for self-cultivation: "act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue", On Beauty from The Enneads, 1. 6 [1] trans. by Stephen Mackenna (Hassocks: Penguin, 1991), p. 54. The self-culturing parallel to the sculptor recurs in Michelangelo's discussion of his craft and is applied to physical culture in Arnold Schwarzenegger's youthful analysis of bodybuilding.

37 C.D.C. Reeve has recently added to a long tradition, observing that 'a common term for statue, O::yal~-ta, is etymologically related to the verb dyci.A.A.uv, meaning to glorify or to honor something, "A Study in Violets: Alcibiades in the Symposium" in J. Lesher et a!. (eds.), Plato's Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006) and credits Ruth Blondell for the etymology. But see Gerald L. CoHEN, "Etymology of Greek agalma, agallo, agal­lomai." In Berkeley Linguistics Society: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting 2 (February 14-16, 1976): pp. 100-104, in addition to his The Semitic Origins of Greek agalma, agallo, agallom.ai (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975). See too Hans Jorg BLOESCH, Agalma. Klcinod, Wcihgcschcnk, Gotterbild. Ein Beitrag zur friihgricchischen Kultur- und Rcligionsgcschichtc (Bern: Bentelli, 1963).

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life-sized bronze sculptures and I began by referring to Pliny's account that 3000 such statues (still!) remained in his day at "Rhodes, and no smaller number are believed still to exist at Athens, Olympia and Delphi."38 This abundance (indeed other sources give a staggering 73,000)39 reflects their popularity and this same abundance should invite our reflection. At the very least, Pliny's report would mean that one could go nowhere in the Greek world without encountering statues in bronze-and it is important to add that this would be in addition to marble and wood, as similarly attested by Pausanias, a legacy that continues however fantastically in romantic illustrations of landscapes dotted with fallen statues and Hollywood recreations of antiquity, even if these last tend to be more Roman than Greek. Again we need to ask: Why so many statues? What did they look like? What would have been the effect, political and otherwise, of walking amongst so many?

The abundance of statues in the ancient Hellenic lifeworld contrasts with the absence of extant examples. One has tended to take Pliny's report of the number of such statues an exaggeration (this is a common response) or else, more matter of factly, one simply repeats the number Pliny cites without remark. Thus the question of the meaning or effect of this same abundance goes unasked, reflect­ing a typically modern and overly neutral tendency to flat objectivity (the flatter or balder the description, one seemingly supposes, the more objective ).40

I am not (how could I be?) taking physical inventory-although it is worth not­ing that archaeological evidence apparently does not contradict the high numbers Pliny lists.41 The question for me is much rather a critically scientific question, provided indeed that one understands science as a philosophically questioning science of the Feyerabendian but also Adornoesque and Nietzschean, Marxian and Kantian kind. Such a critical and philosophical reflection on science also

38 Pliny, Natural History. Books 33-35, trans. by H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard Univer­sity Press, 1999 [1952]), 34.36 [Hereafter NH]. Pliny writes that making bronzes (statuaria) "has flourished to an extent surpassing all limit and offers a subject that would occupy many volumes if one wanted to give a rather extensive account of it-as for a completely exhaustive account who could accomplish that?" (Ibid.)

39 Claude RoLLEY, Greek Bronzes, trans. by Robert Howell (London: Chesterton Publica­tions, 1989) notes that the range of huge numbers listed would be difficult to corroborate (or and indeed: to refute) just because bronze is so "easily melted down and reused." p. 31.

40 See Donohue, Greek Sculpture and the Problem of Description for David Summers herme­neutic (both Nietzsche and Heidegger make this same scholarly and reflective point) observa­tion that 'the language we are using is not neutral but rather implicitly interpretive.' Donohue, op. cit., p. 17. Donohue refers to neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger nor indeed Gadamer or Ricoeur for this hermeneutic point.

41 Following my presentation of a short version of this thesis at a meeting of the Ancient Phi­losophy Society on April 12, 2007 at Boston College, John M. Camp offered a much more cel­ebratory report of the excavations during his tenure as director of the American School of Clas­sical Studies in Athens and took a question from a student who had heard my lecture and who, to my horror, ask if the claims I had made concerning the sheer number of bronze statues could be supported on the basis of archaeological evidence. Sitting in the audience, I was relieved to hear Camp's firm reply that he had no trouble believing such a high number given the number of bases and inscriptions uncovered. I do not thereby take Camp to endorse every aspect of the argument I here propose, only that archaeology does not as such exclude Pliny's claims.

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questions the limitations posed by science and scholarship upon itself by the entrenched expedient of knowing better or knowing already and in advance of inquiry and debate.42 In the received and that is to say mainstream and dominant, academically well-respected tradition, only certain questions appear to count (in other words: only certain questions manage to be posed, only certain themes receive attention) and only certain investigators seem to be heard (only certain authors are printed). The assumption is that these are the only 'good' scholars there are, but it is an assumption that also decides that certain question are 'good' or valuable and that other questions simply do not need to be asked. It is a direct corollary that scholars and scientists so far from exploring or researching the coherence of the 'received' scientific worldview, blithely ignore whatever does not conform to a preexisting paradigm.

Nietzsche can be said to have dedicated his career to challenging the scientific tendency to ignore dissonant aspects (of antiquity but also of physics, biology, history, etc.) by the above technique of simply declaring them, in Nietzsche's words 'fundamentally irrelevant.'43 Thus Nietzsche could mock the famous clas­sical scholar, Christian August Lobeck, for his (from this distance embarrassing) contention that the '»Greeks, when they had nothing else to do, used to laugh, jump, race about, or as a human also sometimes feels a desire for this, they used to sit down and cry and moan ... «'44 The reductive (simplest) explanatory project passed in Nietzsche's nineteenth century (as it continues to pass, especially in analytic philosophy) for objectivity. In Nietzsche's effort to take the Greeks 'seri­ously', he undertook to leave such professional or scholarly diffidence behind.

To return to the civic question, consider the statues of today set up in public places. Many of these are monumental and looking at a contemporary statue, perhaps in a city square, the size alone, quite apart from the material or form, can be the imposing thing, and this can inspire patriotic pride or give the impres­sion of power for a visitor, or else one might feel invited to clamber on a giant animal-the bronze lions in London's Trafalgar Square or else in Munich offer particularly apt opportunities for such play and I am sure the reader can think of others. But let us ask here: what if we today, as in Pliny's account of Rhodes (and Athens and Olympia), walked amidst thousands of life-sized, classically human-formed statues-and I will argue that to encounter these in bronze would be something else again-set up into and about the public spaces of our cities? It

42 I explore academic politics in contemporary philosophy in several discussions of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's philosophies of science, particularly "On the Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy: Nietzsche's Lying Truth, Heidegger's Speaking Language, and Philosophy," in C. G. Prado (ed.), A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2003), pp. 63-103, most recently in B. BABICH, "Continental Phi­losophy of Science," in Constantin Boundas (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to the Twentieth Century Philosophies (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2007).

43 Nietzsche thus reports as Lobeck's judgment:" ... eigentlich habe es mit allen diesen Curio­sitaten nichts an sich." Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 'Was ich den Alten verdanke' §4, KSA 6, p. 158. In other words, for Lobeck, the ancients did what they did "just because ... "

44 Ibid. Nietzsche cites: "Lobeck,Aglaophamus I [1829], 672."

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seems clear that at a minimum we would be setting up the conditions for at least a few-double takes. This is already food for thought: one might well, at first and passing glance, take the statues to be human beings. Form alone can do this, thus duck hunters use decoys.

Fig. 7. Interior gallery, Pergammon Museum.

Berlin, September 2004; Author's photograph.

We are perhaps more like ducks than we think, at least to the extent that we may be acquainted with the postmodern urban sculptors who have managed to be commissioned to place statues, say, of a man on a bench reading a newspaper as a decorative sculpture in a park amidst public benches, or a statue of a waiting patient set amidst waiting patients in a hospital waiting room (such sculpture, just as it self-quotes, means, indeed, less to evoke any kind of classical tradition than to be taken as 'postmodern'). Opportunities to 'encounter' such statues can mean, and this is part of the point about decoys, to fail to notice them at first glance. Indeed, J. Seward Johnson's Double Check, the seated statue of a Wall Street business man checking the contents of his briefcase, only became notable (in a post-postmodern context) after it was photographed covered with dust and rubble following the attack on New York City's twin towers, only to be refur­bished post 9/11 and restored to public display (and a certain amount of inatten­tion). (Fig 8)

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New accounts of mirror neurons (popular in philosophy across both sides of the analytic-continental divide) might well support an elaboration on the project­ed echoing of sensibility inspired by human-sized statues. Yet the effect of meet­ing a statue on the street or in an airport or finding ourselves sitting beside one in some other public space, like Johnson's Double Check (Fig. 8) is not at all the same as encountering a department store or shop window dummy or manikin, nor is it the same as our experience of statues in a museum or at an exhibition. (E.g., fig. 7) For in these cases, we contemplate the object as an object for inter­ested inspection (exhibiting clothes in the case of a shop window display) or and in a different sense than Kant ever intended, with a very 'disinterested' awareness of being alongside a manifestation of 'art' (in the case of public works of art). In part we respond as we do because we know in advance how we are expected to see them-and public mimes, ala Marcel Marceau, play off such expectations on our parts.

Fig. 8. J. Seward Johnson, Double Check, 1982, restored 2006. NYC, August 2007.

Photo Credit: Tracy B. Strong.

I have been asking what would it have been like to live amidst a standing popu­lace of bronze statues-or, and for the sake of my reflections here, this will be the same: stone or wood statues gilded or painted to seem or to look 'like' life? To pose such a question is difficult because a number of aspects simply cannot be established-how were they placed? Lining the roads, like so many free standing columns, as some renderings of Pindar suggest, or all about, as other accounts have it? Some on plinths or pedestals or bases? Low or high? Ancient authors including Pliny distinguish between statues with bases and statues standing freely on their own feet, a distinction which means that there must have been a differ-

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ence between the two, an important detail we shall see below. Did they some feature some mechanism (the Archytas of Tarentum phenomenon) for move­ment, like Swiss and German mechanical clocks? Still more fundamental is the question of their appearance as I have been her emphasizing this as a question: what did they look like? This is not a simple question, so archaeologists and clas­sicists, anthropologists and art historians will tell us, for it involves the culture as a whole. The look of a thing, how we see our world, reflects what we are. What is the color of ancient bronze? What color, what colors, were these statues as the Greeks saw them? Indeed, perhaps another question: what was the color of 'life' in ancient Greece? Would we see such bronzes as life-like?

That such statues were all about, enhanced in number if we consider the struc­tural elements of architectural design in temples and so on, adds to the complexity of such considerations. But to walk amongst such bronzes, even the very idea of it, seems to the contemporary mind (and perhaps this is the reason we have not thought much about it) a matter of aesthetic overkill. One imagines that everyone (and not just art historians) would have to have lived their lives overwhelmed by so much and such very homoerotic-we are after all, at least for the most part, talk­ing of statues of naked bronze men-' art,' as it were. Much of our image of Greek antiquity follows something like this vision of a life set amidst 'art'-classic statues and temples and their sculpted reliefs, Greek vases, Zeuxis's paintings, tragedic performances that went on for days (and had the entire populace in attendance, the very thought of which apparently sent Richard Wagner into paroxysms of envy), epic poems memorized by heart in all their length and recited, seemingly at the drop of a hat. Other art historians have corrected this classistic image by add­ing erotic details, other classical historians, here including Nietzsche, but notably Marcel Detienne, by adding sacrifice, blood and frenzy and so on.

Here, following Nietzsche (in part) and Heidegger (in part), I submit that far from a plaster image of 18th century aestheticism (this is Athens as museum) and far from an all-too-Christian-and all-too-modern-vision of 'desire,' but and given the Greek culture of contest,45 the Greek was not meant to desire (as we today, pace Stewart et al., understand 'desire')46 the statues standing about him, perhaps with upraised hands, like the Piraeus Apollo (Fig. 9) or else, and famously, carrying spears (Fig. 2), or poised like the Discobolos in the throw of a discus or cleaning themselves calmly like the Apoxyomenos of Lysistratos (Fig. 10) or else methodically cleaning perhaps a strigil (Fig. 11) and so on. Rather than desire, the tradition of agonistic measure (competitive contest, rather than conflict, as Nietzsche emphasizes) suggests that the Greek would have been liter­ally given to himself as Greek in these statues.

The Greek found himself against and in tension with such statues, his own bodily being highlighted against an imaginary exemplar, just as he might find

45 The key reference here is Nietzsche's rhetorically complex preface (one among five written for five unwritten books), "Homers Wcttkampf," KSA 1, pp. 783-792.

46 Stewart's Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece already cited above is just one example of this. See again the other references in note 2.

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himself agonistically reflected by and in an opponent. Such quasi-Lacanian imag­ery may also shed new light on Homer's recourse to the hero's 'shining limbs' (Iliad XVI 805] just as the Homeric epic celebrates agonistic tension together with all its complexities and if the tradition Havelock recounts is right (as I am inclined to suppose that it is),47 that same competitive Homeric tradition gave the Greeks nothing less essential than the mirror in which they could find them­selves, as Nietzsche recalls this tradition to us: the song sings of what Greeks do and so tells the Greek how to be Greek.

Fig 9. Apollo from Pireaus, ca. 540-545 BCE, 1.92 m.

National Archaeological Museum, Athens, Greece. Photo Credit : Scala I Art Resource, NY

Reflecting the Greek to himself (less to herself-but this would truly be another paper, so that if I here use the masculine pronoun I do so in an exclusionary sense and not because it has not dawned on me that it is not in fact inclusive) the statue itself would serve an effectively formative function: a formation (in the French

47 See here Eric HAVELOCK, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Belknap, 2005).

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sense of the word) corresponding to what the Germans call Bildung, thus the statue had an ethical and political function. In a particularly exemplary pose, and most of the statues we have are so poised, the statue exemplified the 'look' of the Greek-as athlete, as hero, as god-not only to the Greek citizen but also to aliens and visitors in Athens, Rhodes, Olympia, and so on. Lacking a 'literate' populace, as we understand the term, we may thus contend that one of the means of civic formation (in addition to Homeric song and the contest culture of tragic and athletic festival) might have been the very statues themselves. Like the epic poem then and like tragic myth, the statue told the Greeks themselves.

The abundance of statues in antiquity is certainly not unique to Greece and particularly in Assyria and Egypt, this abundance was complemented and inten­sified in painting and bas-relief. Many of these sculptures, especially in the case of Egypt, were monumental in size. Once again and to be sure, Greece also had these monumental forms: in Rhodes (famously), in Samos, as recent discoveries continue to show and, of course, as cultic statues. But my question here has not been directed to colossal statues, for all their Ozymandias-like impact, inspiring sentiments of awe and presentiments of doom or vanity. Nor have I been raising the question of small-scale statues, some very small indeed and even jewel-like. Instead I ask what it would have been like to live among an abundance of life­sized, and I am not attached to a specific measure here, because in life, among those we meet in "real" life (as we say), some are slightly or even much smaller than we are ourselves, some slightly or even much larger.

To summarize thus far: I have been raising the question of the difference it might have made for a city to have, as the Greek cities so impressed the Romans as hav­ing, so very many life-sized statues? I have suggested that the statues served the function of ethical and political formation. If I am correct in supposing that such statues served an ethico-political function, the question of how to look at the Greek statue as this has been traditionally posed is set on its head. Phenomenologically regarded, simply moving in the company of statues would not only give one the sense of being in the presence of an other being, and hence of not being alone, but this same and simple presence amongst statues can also be enough to suggest motion, the sense that the statue moves. 48 I myself have been embarrassed to find myself excusing myself when passing too close to a statue in a museum, a statue I knew perfectly well to be a statue. But I have also overheard others seemingly surprised in the same way. Such a response entails the sense of at least the possibil­ity that the statue itself might encounter the passerby. And it is this possibility that makes all the difference for the agonistic work of the statue as exemplar.

The statue would thus be (and it may be impossible to say more than this) an other to the Greek, a given or standard other, an exemplar to follow and to chal-

48 Thus although I am happy to accord with the modern demystifications of moving statues I am committed to the claim that the enlightened tendency to demystify claims of this kind does not automatically disprove them as such: these are empirical issues for which we lack adequate evidence (one way or the other) and if we mean to be scientific, at least in Nietzsche's modest sense of the word, we do better to leave the question open.

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lenge (this is the point of an agon [ dywv ]). Indeed as we assume an abundance of statues, such statues yielded a cadre of others at the height of excellence in the case at least of victory statues, and thus a society of exemplars, and this on an ideal plain that has now as much to do with the stillness of the statue as with its form and the appearance (or possibility) of motion. I have already cited Epictetus (and Plotinus) on this stoic point.

As distinguished from our all-too-modern preoccupation with 'desire' and the care of the body/self, the Greek first 'discovered' or found himself in the statue, literally as well as figuratively reflected. In this sense, the statue could give the Greek his own aspect, ideal in form, resting or balanced in itself. In this sense, one sees oneself in the statue and can dispose oneself to the same form. Thus the claim of the statue works upon the Greek-and the nakedness of athletic compe­tition, oiled bodies, gleaming like bronze, acquires still more sense (this aspect, as noted, continues to be a disputed question in the literature). A phenomenologi­cal reading tells us already that this reflective looking in was complemented by a shining surface, the statue reflects the onlooker's gaze.

Fig. 10. Fig. 11. Apoxyomenos. Lysippos, Vatican, 2.05 m. Bronze statue from Ephesos, 1. 92 m.

Photo Credit: Art Resource, NY. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

In this way, the statue holds an agonistic mirror to life, and I mean this as Nietz­sche speaks of d.yow in this context, and it seems that it does so in two ways. Gleam­ing bronze is doubly reflective in this sense and it is inherent in the substance of

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bronze (though it is essential to emphasize that this aspect is precisely what is in question) and that polished and painted marble and polychrome wooden statues as well as glazed terra cotta could perhaps also serve such a ret1ective function. 49

Yet the notion of the statue as mirror of life must also be heard in another sense. Passing them by, the Greek did not regard such statues as so much 'art'50 but instead found himself as much set against or in contest with the same gleaming aspect. This contest is a variant on what Nietzsche speaks of as a very politically keyed compe­tition. 51 As Nietzsche explains, such competition was a matter of civic :n:moda and thus to be distinguished from its contemporary meaning. For the ancients, the goal of an "agonistic education" was "the welfare of the entirety, the society of cities. Every Athenian was, e.g., to develop himself in competition as far as he might in order to lend the greatest advantage, and do the least damage, to Athens.'52

VII. LOOKING AT GREEK BRONZE, CASTING GREEK BRONZES: THE MODEL OF LIFE

Above I suggested that we can get a sense of the ethical dynamic of living along­side a great number of bronze statues yet it is essential not to minimize the elu­sive question concerning the working aspect (the 'look') of such bronzes, and this too is the point of a phenomenological ret1ection, because it is the look of such bronzes that has been and that remains incorrigibly lost to us. 53 Given the relative paucity even of such bronzes as remain, ancient texts are key to any phenomeno­logical reflection, a lesson that corresponds to Nietzsche's scientific rigor. But there are some empirical analogies that can help.

49 It is relevant to this discussion to include the claims that have been made for some time, most recently by Michael Vickers and David Gill, that ancient pottery was made to represent, and that is also to say, to give the aspect of gold (red) and silver (black) but also ivory (white). Many aspects of this question depend, of course, on knowing how the pot originally looked: unoxidized? glazed or not?, etc and include some considerations with respect to the look of ancient silver and gold and this is really difficult to research because if bronze is rare, silver and gold are more so. A number of scholars take exception to this (notably John BOARDMAN, "Silver is white," in Revue archeologique 2 (1987), pp. 279-295), but see M. VICKERS D. GILL, Artful Crafts: Ancient Greek Silverware and Pottery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994 ).

~0 Larry Shiner discusses this difference in 'The Greeks Had No Word for It,' the first chapter of his The Invention of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

51 See Christa Acampora, "Demos Agonistes Redux: Reflections on the Streit of Political Agonism," in Nietzsche-Studien 32 (2003), pp. 374-390.

52 Nietzsche, 'Homers Wettkampf,' KSA 1, p. 789 [my emphasis]. 53 This look would have for its part been dependent on many things, including chemical

composition and as Earle R. Caley emphasizes in his 'Chemical Composition of Greek and Roman Statuary Bronzes,' we know little about this. In Suzannah Doeringer, eta!., eds., Art and Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), pp. 37-49. There are also questions of taste, for it can be supposed, at least on Pltny's authority, that the look of bronze may have echoed the look of marble (or, and of course, as Pliny himself speaks from a Roman perspective, vice versa). Yet the marble in question would not have been the Winckelmannian white associated with antiquity but a polychrome statue the colour of 'life.' What colour would that be? F-or us? For the Greeks? How can we even begin to parse the question: what would the 'colour of life' look like?

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For one such analogy, Nigel Konstam, a sculptor who works in bronze, has recently advanced, together with the scholar Herbert Hoffmann, the claim that the Greeks modeled their life-size sculptures on life, that is to say: cast not from clay models (which are to be sure already so many clay statues of their subjects) but directly from 'plaster' casts of living athletes. 54 Konstam, traveling to Calabria to see the Riace bronzes tells us he 'was immediately struck by the unusually close correspondence between the bodily forms of the two figures.' 55 (Figs. 12 and 13)

Figs. 12 and 13. Bronze, early mid 5th c. BCE. Riace Warriors 'W' (2.06 m) and "B" (2.06m) Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Reggio Calabria, Italy. Photo Credit: Scala I Art Resource.

Others have noted that these figures boast the same physique, same height, and so on. 56 But for Konstam, the statues' feet were critical. 'The ball of the big toe and the two toes next to it are flattened by being pressed against the ground ... The little toe is curled under and in, exactly as in nature.'57 To explain the significance of this point-a telling elaboration on what it might mean to have 'feet of clay'-Konstam clarifies the difference between casting from a clay form and casting from life, not­ing first that 'when cast from a clay model, the bottom of a foot supporting a body

54 See Nigel KONSTAM Herbert HOFFMANN, "Casting the Riace Bronzes (2): A Sculptor's Discovery," in Oxford Journal of Archaeology 23 (November 2004), pp. 397-402. Konstam brings his own sculptor's experience to the question of reconstructing ancient technologies, see: "Cast­ing the Riace Bronzes: Modern Assumptions and Ancient Facts," in Oxford Journal of Archaeol­ogy 21 (May 2002), pp. 153-165. The technical questions remain to ask: what were these 'plaster' casts? of what were they made?

>) Konstam and Hoffmann, Casting the Riace Bronzes (2), art. cit., p. 397. 56 Carol Mattusch notes such details in her discussion of these statues in her contribution to

the catalogue, The fire of Haephaestos, "The Preferred Medium," especially pp. 28-31. 57 Konstam and Hoffmann, Casting the Riace Bronzes (2), art. cit., p. 398.

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will be open, just a rim of bronze.'58 By contrast, a figure 'employing a plaster cast taken from life' will 'have feet that are naturalistic in every detail-their tops as well as their bottoms .... [S]uch details appear on the undersides of the feet of both Riace warriors .... duplicat[ing] the footprint in the plaster mould.'59

Although Konstam and Hoffmann do not advert to this, their claim may be dated back to the very same Pliny whose Natural History makes an appearance in the writings of nearly every art historian on the subject. And Pliny tells us that Lysistratus was 'the first person who modeled a likeness in plaster of the human being from the living surface (facie) itself, and established the method of pouring wax into this plaster mould model and then making final corrections on the wax cast.' (NH 35.153) Lysistratus thus 'introduced' the practice of rendering por­traits with lifelike precision and 'the same artist also invented taking casts from statues.' (Ibid.) The word I have given here as surface, facie, is usually translated as face but facie also refers to the entire bodily surface.

The technique of modeling from life, as Konstam corroborates Pliny's account from his own perspective (albeit without reference to Pliny), allows us both to understand Pliny's descriptions as well as the very rubric of 'portrait statues'60

for three-time Olympian victors. Further philologico-hermeneutic support for the notion of casts taken from life is given in the report that the renowned Lysippus shifted his own profession from a very banausic foundry worker-Pliny is fond of such emphatic reminders of origins-to become a less base artisan or sculptor after hearing the artist Eupompus name the master he had imitated. Replying with a gesture toward a crowd of men, the artist declared 'nature herself and no artistry was the true model' [naturam ipsam imitandam esse, non artificem] (NH 34.61 ).

This passage is famous beyond its context-art is to imitate life-and can be interpreted as supporting the standard story of the Greek departure from a more regimented tradition as we noted in our first account of Diodorus above, but Pliny's context together with the kind of incidentally relevant point concerning Lysippus' more subordinately banausic beginnings permits the alternative reading that has life itself, the living human form, serve as the model for the artwork, all the more plausible if we recall the related technical inventiveness of his brother, Lysistratus in modeling facial and bodily surfaces of both humans and indeed statues.

For Pliny, the aesthetic achievement of Praxiteles' sculpture was in 'modeling' the resulting casts (NH 35.158), and Lysippus likewise was said to have contrib­uted greatly to the art of bronze statuary by 'representing the details of the hair' (34.65) and in general by working the forms after casting them: in such supple­mentary metalworking details, Pliny writes, lay the artistry. Adding Pliny's con­tention that Lysippus made some 1,500 large-scale bronzes, it is at least plausible that he was casting from life just because such a mechanical advantage would indeed facilitate a sizable output (even if we were to assume he made less than the round number Pliny attests).

"8 Ibid.

59 Ibid. 60 "ex membris ipsorum similitudine expressa, quas iconicas vacant." Pliny, NH 34.9.

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Beyond such textual evidence, art-historical studies of medicine in ancient rep­resentations of the body highlight such empirical detail that they too lend support to the possibility of casting from living models.61 There is a further debate con~ cerning ancient techniques for the casting of bronze statues,62 and a related tradi~ tion that emphasizes this casting as effectively mechanical reproduction, including Margarete Bieber, Carol Mattusch, Brunilde S. Ridgeway, among others, studies which, once again, go back to ancient authors like Pliny and like Pausanias.63

Setting aside the ordinary, all-too-modern preoccupation with desire and the body Gust where it is likely that a great deal of our attention to the erotic in antiq­uity is tied to our own Western conventions as can be seen from a comparative review of contemporary literature with the literature, say, of Wilamowitz's day: for if the details differ, the obsession is the same),64 the Nietzschean agonistic argu­ment suggested above accords with (if it also goes beyond) Deborah Tarn Steiner's account in her Images in Mind to say that the Greek would have first found himself politically or civically in agonistic and active terms by 'looking in' (and, so I here contend, looking back to himself) in the statue.65 This same effectively reflective 'looking in' corresponds to the playing aspect of the shining surface of bronze.66

61 See, for instance, Guy ME:TRAux's important, Sculptors and Physicians in Fifth-Century Greece (Montreal: McGill Queens, 1995) in addition to Gregory V. LEFIWICH's essay, "Polykleitos and Hippokratic Medicine," in Moon (ed.), Polykleitos, the Doryphoros, and Tradition, pp. 38-51.

62 See, BIEBER,Ancient Copies as well as RIDGWAY,Ronum CopiesofGreekSculpture and her Hel­lenistic Sculpture, Volume One: The Styles of ca. 331-200 (Madison: U niv. of Wisconsin Press, 1990). For an overview of the question, see chapter five, 1\ Greek Bronze Original?' MAITUSCH, Classical Bronzes: The Art and Craft of Greek and Roman Statuary (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996), pp. 141-190.

63 See, again, MEYER's discussion, 1\ Roman Masterpiece' in Moon (ed.), Polykleitos, The Doryphoros, and the Tradition. Mattusch's reflection by contrast centers on the absence of a canonic original.

64 See, for example, STEWART, Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece. Stewart notes that the ideal of the Doryphoros 'as the epitome of Measure {to 1-uhpov) or the Mean {to 1-doov)' is anecdotally (we may modify this, after Lacan, as metonymically apparent in Stewart's account of seeing'[the Doryphoros] used as a model in Muscle and Fitness, as a Berkeley tailor's dummy, and as a gay icon.' Stewart duly includes a photo by Jim French (French produces gay erotica for calendars and cards) STEWART, 'Notes on the Reception of Polykeitian Style: Diomedes to Alexander,' in: Moon {ed.), Polykleitos, The Doryphoros, and Tradition, pp. 246-261, here p. 247.

65 See Deborah Tarn STEINER, Images in Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Litera­ture and Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

66 Stewart articulates this for contemporary erotic sensibilities when he writes that the 'oiled gleam of an athlete's body, dark tanned in the sun, was well served by the tense reflectivity of bur­nished bronze.' STEWART, Greek Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 39. I have already noted that this shining surface could also have been polished and painted marble or indeed gilded and painted wood. Some of this reflecting 'gleam' was doubtless but also manifestly for dif­ferent reason and to different effect also at work in the chryselephantine statues to which P.dusanias devotes special attention. The word can mystify some scholars, derived from xpuom, gold, and D .. ~:~cis, ivory: these would be ivory statues inlaid or entirely covered with gold. See for a discussion, Kenneth LAPATIN, Chryselephantine Statuary in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). We would need to reprise the terms of the current inquiry to ask what a grand scale chryselephantine statue of a god would have looked like? Thus to ask this question is not answered by what a reconstruction might tell us. Brunilde Ridway however does invoke one such reconstruction of Athena made by A Lequire for the Parthenon in Nashville in her work in several places, including her review of Bunte Gotter [see citation in footnote note 12 above].

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VIII. THE COLOR OF BRONZE: CASTING THE LAOCOON AND THE LIGHT OF DAY

The excellence of bronze in addition to the modeling capacities of ancient bronze­casting techniques, about which we continue to learn more,67 is that it ret1ects the body not only figuratively (as modeling the form or colour or details of the body) but quite literally as a mirror. Beyond the shining qualities of bronze (we will have cause below to refer to the specific material of bronze mirrors), it is impor­tant to consider the difference made by colour with respect to the claims that ancient bronze could appear to have the aspect of living human flesh. We have noted the tendency to pass over this assertion but there is a difference between today's bronze statues and the 'bronzed' flesh of even a well-muscled youth with a perfect-Mediterranean or Aegean-tan. To get the look of a bronze statue today, if one were doing a commercial photo shoot, one would need rather more than oil: one might add powdered metal to the makeup applied to living models. The point is that we take the look of metal less to resemble flesh than we take it to 'gild' (or 'bronze') flesh.

Fig. 14. Bronze Cast. Pergammon Museum, Berlin.

September 2004, author's photograph.

67 See, again, Rolley but also Jean CHARBONNEAUX, Greek Bronzes, trans. by Katherine Watson (New York: Viking Press, 1962) and others, some cited below and including the con­tributions to Carol Mattusch ( ed. ), The Fire of Hephaistos: Large Classical Bronzes from North American Collections (Cambridge: Harvard University Art Museums, 1996 ).

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Ancient tradition emphasizes that bronze could, depending on the alloy, be made in a variety of colours.68 Thus Pliny details a wide array of bronze types (NH 34.94-100), pointing to the difference between Roman and Greek bronzes, as well as Etruscan and other bronzes. More significantly here, he also details some of the compositional differences and in particular the proportions of 'what is called [a blend for making molds] of bronze of a very delicate consistency, because a tenth part of black lead is added and a twentieth of silver-lead; and this is the best way to give it the colour called Gnecanic' (NH 34.98). The prob­lem, were we inclined to an empirical check, notwithstanding the limitations of modern metallurgical analysis, is that Pliny lists no main ingredient in this case: unlikely to have been copper alone, what was it?

Colour differences would have been produced through the use of relevant additives. Like our own sculptors today, the ancients worked with patinas. Pliny mentions salts and verdigris and even organic materials (egg white in particu­lar) but also alloys in the composition of the bronze as the first volume of Kurt Kluge's study of casting techniques in ancient large-scale bronzes argues as a claim routine in his day, some eighty years ago.69 Where Kluge's sources detailed the significance of additions like tin, zinc, and nickel, in addition to lead, iron, silver, gold, and even mercury, today's more refined methods detect antinomy, arsenic, bismuth, cobalt and manganese. 70 To this complex question of composi­tion, add the presence (or absence) of gilding (Vitruvius speaks of Etruscan gilded bronze), amalgamations of other metals and stone inlays but also like pol­ish and indeed like wax and oil, not just as an artifact of the copying process but also to protect against corrosion and oxidation or else to add colour.

68 Modern reconstructive thought has disputed this claim on the basis of modern rather than ancient techniques of casting. Carol Mattusch summarizes metallurgical analyses which attest to a degree of sophistication casting individual alloys in one piece in Mattusch, Greek Bronze Statuary, op. cit., pp. 70-71, and nevertheless, and although in her introduction to her edited catalogue, The Fire of Hephaistos, she cites Pliny's testimony that different alloys give different colours, arguing that contemporary experience with bronze alloys does not confirm this. See, in particular, pp. 26-7. See too Brunilde RIDGWAY, Hellenistic Sculpture Ill: The Styles of ca. 100-31 BC (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2002) for her discussions of colored inlays in bronze as well the Laocoon. Denys Haynes argues for an inlay and overlay method, pointing out that 'copper-rich alloys' were 'cast separately' such as the 'nipples of male statues.' HAYNES, The Technique of Bronze Statuary (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1992), p. 110. We have yet to begin to parse Pliny's meaning on a plainly philo­logical level as we shall see below in a discussion of Bernard ANDREAE's attention to Pliny's Latin in l1is Laokoon und die Griindung Roms (Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 1988).

6~ Kurt KLUGE, Die Antike Grossbronzen Vol. 1: Die Antikeerzgestaltung (Berlin- Leipzig: Walther de Gruyter, 1927), p. 45-47. This first volume of Kluge's folio-sized, three volume study also details the characteristics of silver-copper alloys, pointing out that silver mixed with more than one third copper retains its light silvery colour, becoming red only after 40%. See p. 32. In a recent survey, Kluge's study and supporting sources dating from the 1900's and before are not cited. See Henry Lie and Carol C. Mattusch, "Introduction to the Catalogue Entries and Technical Observations," in Mattusch ( ed. ), The Fire of Hephaistos, op. cit., pp. 162-179, here, p. 171. For a reading that takes account of Kluge and earlier work, see Charbonneaux, Greek Bronzes, op. cit., esp. pp. 19-32.

70 Lie and Mattusch in their Introduction to the Catalogue, op. cit., p. 173 in Mattusch's The Fire of Hephaistos, emphasize the advantages of modern metallurgical (such as plasma mass spectrometry and electron microprobe) analysis.

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To address the question of bronze and in the process to raise the question not only of the status of Roman copies but to go beyond such considerations of origi­nals and copies (this is not the theme of the present paper), we may consider, if only because of its familiarity, the Laocoon Group celebrated by Pliny, who tells us that he saw it in the house of the Emperor Titus. (NH 36.37-38)71 The Laocoon's reception echoes throughout the Renaissance and the Romantic era complete with erotic fascination (and contemporary accounts hasten to qualify this fascination as 'homoerotic,' an appellation supposed because one is also sup­posed, as reader or viewer, to be male ).72 Significant for me here will be Bernard Andreae's important claim (already cited and to be further discussed below), that the statue to which Pliny refers was originally cast in bronze,73 rather than being carved by three sculptors from a single block of marble, an origination which and to be sure does not preclude any number of marble or indeed bronze copies.

Fig.l5. The Laocoon group as Winckelmann would have seen it.

Roman copy after Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydorus of Rhodes. 1st c. CE. Marble, 2.1 m. Vatican Museums, Vatican State. Photo Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

71 Scholars note that the location of the statue found does not fit Pliny's account. And the discussion on the issue of fixing the original cite is far from closed. I thank Bruni! de Ridgway for informing me that a new discussion of this theme is the subject of a recent catalogue by Chrystina Hauber put out by the Vatican Museums to commemorate the discovery of the famous sculpture and dedicated to the Pope.

72 The nature of this homoerotic fascination is the focus of Potts, Flesh and the Ideal and Richter, Laocoon's Body and the Aesthetics of Pain. See Donohue, Greek Sculpture and the Problem of Description, op. cit., pp. 165sqq. for a differently weighted reading of Winckelmann's aesthetic influence with respect to sculpted or veiled outline or contour.

73 See ANDREAE, Laokoon und die Griindung Roms (Mainz a. Rh.: Philipp von Zabern, 1988).

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Laocoon, a priest of Troy, had profaned Apollo's altar by having sexual con­gress with his wife in its vicinity and the statue depicts the destiny of blasphemy. Apollo himself is at work with all the violence characterizing Marcel Detienne's descriptions of him.74 As a punishment for the priest's impiety, two serpents surge up from the sea, engulfing and crushing him along with his sons, an event confirming for the onlooking Trojans the sacred character of the wooden horse Laocoon had just warned them against and who consequently sought to appease divine anger by dedicating the gift to the deity, and went on to breach their own walls to bring the statue inside their city.

The Laocoon group, said to follow an original made by sculptors of Rhodes, can seem to show one boy escaping (which accords with Arktinos's version), depicting Laocoon and one son head on in their struggle (and it is worth recall­ing the convention that a sculpted figure so depicted does not survive) whereas the other son turns his face to his father and brother in profile (the side-angle is characteristic of the living), and we see him stepping out of the snake's coil much as one might step out of a very cumbersome pair of trousers, with one hand firmly on the coil of the snake that had him entangled, watchful that both snakes remained occupied with the other victims, his father and brother.

Fig 16. Marco Dente, Laocoon detail. Eching, 1520.

The emotions and gestures said to be depicted by the statue has always depend­ed on how the interpreter likes to read tragedy. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's famous study, Laokoon oder Uber die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766)15

gives an overview of these disparate readings but ultimately laying the ground­work to oppose Joachim J. Winckelmann's depiction of 'quiet grandeur and noble simplicity.' For Winckelmann, Laocoon's anguish is silent, as is evident in Marco Dente's 1520 etching. (Fig 16) However, as Lessing, and following Lessing on this, as Nietzsche will emphasize, the Greek felt yet more passionately, still more sensitively than we do today. Instead of a silent gasp of Stoic or Christian agony, one hears the keening scream of suffering from the parted lips of the dying

74 See DETIENNE,Apollon le couteau ala main. Une approache experimentale au polytheism grec (Paris: Gallimard, 1998).

75 Gotthold Ephraim LESSING, Laokoon oder Uber die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (Stutt­gart: Reclam, 1964). There are no shortages of analyses of Lessing's Laocoon, but see for one such, David WELLBERY, Lessing's Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cam­bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

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priest. This reading is manifest in the current reconstruction of the statue with the right arm bent back in horror or desperation rather than raised in defiance.

Among a number of recent studies, Simon Richter has traced the Renaissance passion for preservation essential for the ecstatic effect of the Laocoon group.76This passion indirectly affected Winckelmann's interpretation of the statue-and not at all incidentally the fortunes of art history in the process. Yet the Renaissance concern for conservation (not all that different from our own) would mean that the statues were enclosed in wooden boxes for more than two centuries (1565 to 1770), a period that lasted through the entirety of Winckelman's life-he died in 1768, a short two years before they would have been brought out of their enclosures. Phenomenologi­cally this is key for both Winckelmann and his times. The Renaissance experience of this statue and others echoed in effect the moment of encounter, first found in dark­ness, underground, in caves or catacombs or excavated from the earth, the flickering torches repeat the moment of discovery, as an encounter of revelation.

By including Marco Dente's etching above, I suggest that the same passion for preservation would be one for illustration in sketches, etchings, and engravings. For the scholars and enthusiasts of the day, this folio constitution amounted to a "Musee sans murs," a "museum without walls" to appropriate Andre Malraux's language in Les Voix du Silence.17 The catalogue itself was a paper model for the museum.78 For Winckelmann, and the cover of his own book illuminates this ideal (Fig. 17), such images gave scholars and collectors visual access to things they had never seen in person.79

A "paper" museum, a collection of the mind, codified in the print or the etching, such as Dente's (Fig. 16), or as illustrations in the expert's catalogue (Fig. 17), can­not but make a difference for our encounter with the work of art. Do we discover what we have seen before? More importantly still, can we see beyond it?80 Engrav-

76 See, again, Richter, Laocoon's Body and the Aesthetics of Pain, op. cit. 77 Apart from the specifics of the current context, this point profits from a review of Maurice

Merleau-Ponty's discussion of Andre MALRAUX in "Le language indirect et le voix du silence's in Merleau-Ponty," in Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).

78 Donohue raises this question from an informed and critical perspective specifically with regard to Winckelmann in her "Winckelmann's History of Art and Polyclitys" in Moon (ed.), Polykleitos, The Doryphoros, and the Tradition, op. cit., p. 320.

79 Indeed, Winckelmann would also publish his own collection of such prints, commissioned from Battista Casanova, whom he named the "finest draughtsman in Rome." Johann Joachim WINCKELMANN, Monumenti Antichi Inediti Spiegati ed Illustrata (Rome: Autopublication, 1767). And it is further relevant for Winckelman's account of the Laocoon that Marco Dente made an etching dating back to the early 1500's, and drawings of the group appeared almost immediately after it was unearthed on 14 January 1508.

80 The physician social-historian of science, Ludwik Fleck offers the illuminating example of textbooks of anatomy that featured "long chapters describing and enumerating the so-called ossa sesamoidiae which are disposed of in a few sentences in today's textbooks." It's not that they are not there, it is rather that they are now utterly insignificant, where once they were of crucial importance because of certain ancient myths according to which from one of such bones there will develop 'sicut planta ex semine' the complete body to appear at the last judgment." FLECK, "Scientific Observa­tion and Perception" in Robert S. Cohen and Thomas SCHNELLE, Cognition and Fact: Materials on Ludwik Fleck (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986 [1935]), pp. 59-78, here p. 76 [translation modified].

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ings or illustrations, it might be said, give us more detail, indeed more sculptural detail than photographs and almost all of Winckelmann's sculptural encounters were adumbrated in advance and preserved-this commemoration is perhaps even more noteworthy in retrospect-by such engravings.

Fig 17. Titlepage, Johann Joachim Winckelmann,

Gedanken iiber die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauer-Kunst, 1755.

At the same time, the debates about the location of the Laocoon as indeed of the provenance of the statue, whether a Hellenic copy or a Renaissance fabrica­tion copy, point to our tendency to focus only on such objects as a preexisting textual account allows us to identify.81 This indeed and by definition makes such

81 There is great merit to this, and this paper is just such an instanciation. See too Andrew STEWART, "Nuggets: Mining the Texts Again," in American Journal of Archaeology 102/2 (Apr., 1998, pp. 271-282.

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studies historical ones but it presumes that all the texts we have and all that we are able to read and understand are all that we need. Here too we need Nietzsche's reminder that in the matter of the texts themselves, for example, Greek lyric: 'we stand in a field of shards.'82 Just as we bring what we know to our perception of things as Nietzsche has reminded us and as Heidegger emphasizes with regard to the work of art, we likewise import our prejudices in our visits to the ancient work of art both in situ and in museums. 83

I would further argue, though this will not be the main point I wish to make, that knowing what one sees, knowing that an object is what it is (and what it means) cir­cumscribes what one can see as much as the more obvious physical conditions of observation, as today's psychologists (especially criminal psychologists) but also as our philosophies of perception make all too clear. Like translation for Heidegger, seeing is interpretation, which is why Nietzsche urges that we need to learn to see precisely against our assumption that seeing is simply a matter of taking a look.

Fig. 18. Bronze Statue. Pergammon Museum, exterior. Berlin, September 2004; author's photograph.

82 ,Wir stehen auf einem Trummerfeld; sparliche Reste," in Griechische Lyriker, §8, KGW II/2, p. 393

83 I have elsewhere explored this point with regard to Heidegger's discussion of the work of art, as it may be extended to the conservation of antiquity and its contemporary geographies. See B. BABICH, ,Die Wahrheit des Kunstwerkes: Gadamers Hermeneutik zwischen Martin Heidegger and Meyer Schapiro," in lntemationales Jahrbuch fUr Hermeneutik 3 (Tiibingen: Mohr and Sie­beck, 2004), pp. 55-80, et idem, "From Van Gogh's Museum to the Temple at Bassae: Heidegger's Truth of Art and Schapiro's Art History," in Culture, Theory and Critique 4/2 (2003), pp. 151-169.

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Although it is essential to consider the historical, textual, and engraver's framework that constitutes as much as it accompanies Winckelmann's path­breaking discoveries of the history of art, a chance to have seen a famous statue in the full light of day would have been shattering for him. This is not a matter of the fascination of marble statues shielded in the darkness of Renaissance sensuality but rather the possibilities of a phenomenologically oriented aesthet­ics of art. If it is significant that Winckelmann, never saw his statue by the light of day but only in darkness lit by torchlight (Fig. 15), our own limitation is dif­ferent. We have no statues today as they might have been seen in their original aspect just because an essential characteristic of bronze, precisely as a metal, entails that even the statues that have survived the passage of time or that are retrieved, as they continue to be, from the sea, can never give us the "look" of ancient bronze.

Nevertheless, it will have to make all the difference in the case of the 'look' of Greek bronzes to encounter them under the open sky (Fig. 18), met in the living light of an experience we can at best imagine at an approximate remove. Thus if Heidegger will emphasize appearance as the shining forth of what shows itself from itself (both substantiality of metal or of stone or of flesh and form),84 we are sobered by the recognition that ancient bronzes simply cannot be brought to-much less 'allowed'-to show themselves (from themselves) in this way. Like Heidegger's absent tool, or like Sartre's protractedly failed cafe rendezvous with his missing friend, Pierre, the irremediable lack of an original aspect turns out to highlight the importance of that very aspect as it 'would have' looked-and we cannot even begin to catalogue all the other assumptions we cannot know as these would have to be found in a world lost to us despite our passion for claim­ing it as 'our' past.

IX. THE SUBSTANCE OF BRONZE

In his discussion of the Laocoon and the founding of Rome, Bernard Andreae reviews what he argues to be the erroneous parsing of the generic term, sculpture for statuaria ars.85 Continuing the now-long-standing habit of challenging Giu­liano de Sangallo's immediate recognition cum identification of the group of stat­ues as they were unearthed,86 Andreae argues that in Pliny's Latin, statuaria ars

84 This shining through presents the substance of and from which the work is made: "metals come to glitter and shimmer, colors to glow, tones to sing, the word to say." Martin HEIDEGGER, On the Origin of the Work of Art, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1970), pp. 17-82, here p. 42.

85 ANDREAE, Laokoon und die Grundung Roms (Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 1988), pp. 146-147.

86 The architect Giuliano da Sangallo brings Michelangelo along to the excavation, adding support to the array of largely financial arguments (among others) that Lynn Catterson has assembled to support the claim that Michelangelo himself forged the Laocoon. See CATIERSON, "Michelangelo's Laocoon?" inArtibus et Historiae 52 (2005), pp. 29-56.

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refers to 'bronze.'87 Andreae's interpretation has the great advantage of clarifying Pliny's identification, often glossed over or elided in citations, of three different sculptors working from a common plan-if, and this remains a considerable obstacle, it does not quite resolve the question of Pliny's key, but stock, claim that the statue was made from one stone: ex uno lapide, although, and of course, the Laocoon as we have it was not.88 If we are indeed talking not of a single block of marble but rather of a large scale bronze, newer discussions of the casting of such bronzes, like Konstam and Hoffmann's, also serve to make more sense of this plurality (three sculptors, one plan).89 Here and following Andreae: if the statue of Pliny's description was in fact bronze (or, and this too, to be sure, only displaces the question: if the original was a bronze), the question still remains for us: what did it look like as such a bronze? If we know that copies of the Laocoon rendered in bronze are extant (as Carolyn Mattusch tells us, detailing indeed the colors to be had), modern casts of this sort do not answer this very aesthetic question.

Fig. 19. Replica of Croatian

Apoxyomenos, Photo Credit: HILS Gilding Zagreb

Fig. 20. Head of Croatian

Apoxyomenos, recovered 1999, 192 em.

Fig. 21. Statue on Seabed.

Photo Credit: Croatian Conservation Institute, Zagreb.

I have not here been arguing that all we have are so many copies of romanti­cally missing originals and Mattusch has summarized the arguments attesting to the meaninglessness of such terms in the absence of a correspondingly singular original, a point I underscore (while also emphasizing her own point concerning

87 Brunilde Sismondo RIDGWAY's 2003 address to the American Philosophical Society "The Study of Greek Sculpture in the Twentieth Century," in Proceedings of the American Philosophi­cal Society 45/1 (March 2005) adverts to the debate between identifying the statue as a "late Republican original or copy of a Hellenistic bronze" (p. 67), as a current issue (although, to be sure, Ridgway's lecture concerns dating as such).

88 The claim that the statue is of one block of stone remains problematic in several senses (it is in fact said to be carved from five blocks) but so too is the comparison Pliny makes to 'any bronze.' (ibid.)

89 Konstam and Hoffman offer a technical criticism of the standard interpretation based on the Berlin foundry cup in their "Casting the Riace Bronzes," as cited above.

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the plural character, amounting almost to a mass manufacture of such copies)90

nor am I claiming that we have no such bronzes today. This point does not oppose the very notion of an 'original' as in today's rather commercial sensibility for 'original works of art' -one artist, one masterpiece, a handy ideal especially for today's conception of creative copyright and intellectual property-as if that were ever true of art, even today, much less in antiquity. Much rather I have been arguing that we are hard pressed even to reconstruct the objects we discuss and we are hardly better off than our nineteenth century counterparts even if our own efforts seem more measured. Thus we might consider the difference made by restorative reconstructions of the recently recovered Croatian Athlete or Apoxyomenos (quite apart from the sand-encrusted statue on the sea-bed [Figs. 19-21]).9 1 The so-called 'original' looks more 'authentic' but this is because, as any art historian worth his or her salt will chide us: we love the patina of age: heirs of late-modernity we are still, like Byron, in love with ruins.92 Yet and as little as the corroded first find, the 'restored' statue cannot give us the look of the bronze as it was first made.

We cannot know the 'look' of such works of art because we do not have access to the work when it was first made, first set up, or first dedicated, just as these inceptions correspond to different events in the life-history of a Greek statue. Nor can we reconstitute the bronze, a point that is important for any possible reconstruction today, as such efforts are sometimes made to different ends in the history of science.93 Analyses, to be sure, of the metallurgical composition of ancient artifacts have been made, as noted above, yet what such analysis cannot tell us is how the Greeks constituted their bronze (and there were, as already indicated above, any number of kinds of Greek bronze). What we know of their methods is 'fairytale,' to repeat Konstam's words with respect to the question of the technique of casting (and although a technician himself, even Konstam does not raise the question of composition). We cannot recreate the bronzes of antiquity.

I have not discovered the recipes for the varieties of Greek bronze, nor have I the secret of the cement or gum Robert Boyle called 'diachylon'). Like the

90 See Mattusch, The Fire of Hephaistos, op. cit. 91 For an account of such restorations in the case of the Apoxyomenos brought up in 1999

from the waters of the Adriatic between the islands of Losinj and Orjule off the coast of Croatia, see catalogue to the exhibition in the Florence Medici Palace, Sept 2006 through January 2007. Maurizio Michelucci (ed.), Apoxyomenos: The Athlete of Croatia (Giunti: Florence, 2006). The Croatian athlete compares to the Ephesus athlete in Vienna: in both cases, the heads are cast separately, consistent with a cast from life.

92 See for an interesting discussion of such ruins, albeit in the context of a non-Benjaminian but Palladian reflection on the auratic power of space, Giuseppina MONETA, "Profile," in B. Babich ( ed. ), From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire: Essays in Honor of William J. Richardson, S.J. (Kluwer: Dordrecht, 1995), pp. 205-207.

93 See, for example, Steven SHAPIN and Simon SCHAFFER's Leviathan and Air Pump. Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) and Lawrence PRINCIPE, The Aspiring Adept (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

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latter, the details of the ingredients may have been less a secret than all-too­commonplace at the time,94 among all kinds of other complexities. Instead, I have emphasized the difference such differences from contemporary experience with contemporary bronze might have made to the Greek encountering their own variously styled and variously coloured bronze statues.

To take an additional example here, our knowledge of Greek bronze and the limitations thereof has informed the traditional reading (and supposed prejudic­es of) none other than Aristotle, with respect to women and their effects on the world around them. These disputes, on either side of the debate, arguably ascribe an all-too modern misogyny to him which he may not in fact have shared with his contemporary commentators (this difference would not make him a feminist). Regarding the eye, Aristotle observes that

[T]he organ of sight is not only affected by, but also acts upon, its object. For in extremely clean mirrors, when women look into them during their menstrual period, the mirror surface takes on a sort of blood-red cloud. In fact, if the mirror is a new one, it is not easy to get the stain out, although it is easier with an old one.95

Aristotle is typically mocked for this judgment (we know more today) but com­mentators fail to attend to the relevant and contextual issue of materiality.

Fig. 22. Argive mirror with a support in the form of a draped woman.

Mid-5th c. B.C. E. Bronze, 40.41 em. Bequest of Walter C. Baker, 1971, Photo Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

94 Like the bronze we have been discussing, details of the composition of the gum in question go without saying. See Shapin and Schaffer's discussion of Boyle's 'special cement called dia­chylon, a mixture 'which ... would, by reason of the exquisite commixtion of its small parts, and closeness of its texture, deny all access to the external air.' ... Boyle did not provide the recipe for diachylon, but it was probably a mixture of olive oil and other vegetable juices boiled together with lead oxide. He [also] described how the stopcock was affixed and made good so that it did not leak, using a mixture of 'melted pitch, rosin, and wood ashes." Leviathan and Air Pump, op. cit., p. 29.

95 Aristotle, Parva naturalia II 459b23-460a23. D. Gallop (ed.),Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams (Ontario: Broadview, 1990), pp. 89-91.

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Thus (and this is remarkable in an empirically minded era such as our own) absolutely nothing is made of the historically specific matter of fact that Greek mirrors were commonly made of metal (Fig. 22) (as were Etruscan and Roman mirrors although the Romans also used glass backed with gold). Made of bronze alloy (they could also be made of silver alloy), ancient Greek mirrors began to oxidize (as metals do) from the moment they were first fashioned. (For this rea­son, Kluge emphasizes the relevance of taking a polish and of scratch-resistance in his analysis of the composition of so-called mirror-bronze. )96 Hence it is rel­evant indeed that Aristotle specifically mentions brand-new mirrors in addition to adducing the protection against subsequent oxidation provided by a preexisting tarnish. But, and to my knowledge, what no scholar has done is to undertake an empirical check of Aristotle's claim.

Such an empirical test would be difficult given that we cannot reproduce (as argued above) the particular kind of mirror-bronze to which Aristotle refers, and there were, as Pliny recounts, many kinds. The same limitations of our under­standing of ancient metallurgy should suggest restraint. For what Aristotle speci­fies presupposes just such details. What is in question is how such mirrors would have looked in pristine circumstances and how oxidation rates correspond to ambient factors, such as the person using the metal mirror, but that means hold­ing it in hand and breathing on and around it.97 An empirical speculation (inves­tigation is out of the question for all the reasons already noted) on the scope of Aristotle's claim seems to lend at least a grain of support. And while enlightened scholars doubt the ancients' claim that experts would be able to tell the differ­ence between ores by smell,98 new research into the supposed qualities of metal coins (the 'smell of money', 'filthy lucre') has confirmed a very physical and very olfactory basis for just this phenomenon. The oil and sweat on our hands instantly reacts with metallic coins.99 Menstruating women living in close proximity to (but without interacting with) one another, e.g., in college dorms, tend to synchronize their periods. 100 Most explanations advert to physical influences such as the envi-

96 Kluge offers an analysis of the properties and composition of mirror-bronze. See Kluge, Die Antike Grossbronzen, op. cit., pp. 46-47.

97 A<> further corroboration, the caves of Lascaux have been closed to visitors since 1963 owing to such factors as acidity and humidity, etc. Scientific efforts to preserve the cave paintings have been counter-productive in part for these reasons.

98 D. Emanuel suggests that when 'Martial and Petronius suggest that some of their contempo­raries thought they could recognize genuine Corinthian bronze by its smell' the reference at best might refer to salts crystallized in the patina but argues that 'more likely Martial (9.59, consuluit nares an olerent area Corinthon) and Petronius (Sat. 50, ego malo mihi vitrea, certe non olunt) meant to satirize the notion of olfactory authentication.' :A.es Corinthium: Fact, Fiction, and Fake' in Phoenix 43/4 (1989): pp. 347-58; here, p. 354. I note that the satire in question could well be on the pretender to a talent. Not every one can taste wine or tell the scent of fine oil from a counterfeit.

99 We would thus be, and in Pliny's sense of the term, our own 'touchstones.' See D. GLINDE­MANN, A. DIETRICH, H.-J. STAERK and P. KuscHK, "The Two Smells of Touched or Pickled lron­(Skin) Carbonyl-Hydrocarbons and Organophosphincs," in Angewandte Chemie International Edition 45/42 (October 27, 2006), pp. 7006-7009.

100 The classic study here is Martha McCLINTOCK, "Menstrual Synchrony and Suppression," in Nature 229 (22 January, 1971), pp. 244-245.

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ronmental milieu that is also part of our bodily being in the world including hor­monal changes in perspiration and the acidity of respiration and the microscopic abundance of bodily debris that all of us (male and female) constantly shed from the whole of our very human (and very animal) bodies everywhere we go. 101

We assume that Aristotle is voicing his own prejudices not solely because he often does so but not less because this conviction happens to accord with our equally enlightened perspective on ourselves, a perspective which has thus far managed to do without sacrificing the seductive ideal that it is to be created imago dei. That we believe this ideal of ourselves is clear for we imagine ourselves as hermetically sealed, discrete subject-perceivers contemplating a comparably discrete, objective world. The modern advance consists in including women (and I am not denying that this is a very great advance indeed) together with men as sharing the same potential for 'immaculate perception'-or observation or inter­action.

The very idea of the neutral observer in science as in legal and political affairs, a 'transcendent' observer who has no inf1uence or effect upon the observed, is derived from this capacity for non-contaminating or purely 'objective' percep­tion. It is to counter this presumption that we can understand not only the mar­velous convention of 'immaculate knowledge' which I have just now borrowed from Nietzsche's discussion of the same in Thus Spoke Zarathustra but the point of Nietzsche's teasing remonstration, urging us to catch ourselves in our own vanity when like Harry Potter fantasies or like the Disney cartoon imagery sur­rounding Snow White, we imagine that we hear Nietzsche's bird twittering to us '"You are more! Your are higher! You are of another origin!"'l02

X. EROTIC PAIDEA: BEAUTY AS FORMATION AND THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS

We have been exploring the political difference that an abundance of statues would have made in ancient Greece as this is Nietzsche's question as we find it in his The Birth of Tragedy where he invokes not only Memnon's column-or statue-but Apollo, as the sculptor god, and indeed and precisely as civilizing form. (Fig. 23) What would it have been like to be surrounded by forms of excellence and to find oneself in them? To hold oneself in tension, as Nietzsche argued, with those same figures, arched against a literally iconic exemplar, is distant to us today. What shall we make of the Pindaric imperative to become the one you are and what of the ideal of measure? And what of the ideal of the ideal, the ideal of beauty?

101 I discuss this further in B. BABICH, "From Fleck's Denlo'lil to Kuhn's Paradigm: Conceptual Schemes and Incommensurability," in International Studies in the Philosophy of Science Till (2003 ), pp. 75-92, csp. pp. X3-X4. For an important discussion of the organism's constitution of its environment, sec Richard LEWOI'iTIN, Biology as ldeolo,cy: The Doctrine of DNA (New York: Harper, 1991 ).

1112 BGE *230.

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Like the painting that 'spoke' for Heidegger, 103 we have seen that the statue has the capacity to 'stand' and so to hold us, to keep us in its 'hesitant stay' to use the language Hans-Georg Gadamer borrows from Holderlin to conclude his essay The Relevance of the Beautiful-a Holderlinian echo Gadamer always heard through on the terms of Plato's Phaedrns. 104 It is this uncannily metaphysical 'hesitant tarrying' that justifies Gadamer's recollection of Rilke's expression of the sculpture's imperative: '«There is no place, there that does not see you. You must change your life.» '105 (Fig. 24 ). In such a bodily encounter, one is as much regarded by the sculpture as one is also the one who sees. Gadamer's reading of Rilke's poem only works on a phenomenological level: you have to 'do', as this is said, phenomenology to confirm (or, indeed, to refute) his interpretation. Before a marble torso, one sees, one feels, as the poet muses, that the sculpture needs no head to see you or claim your response.

Fig. 23. Apollo from the pediment of the Temple of Zeus, Olympia, 5th c. BCE. Archaeological Museum, Olympia, Greece. Vanni/ Art Resource, NY.

103 Heidcgger, Holzwege, op. cit., p. 20/24. 104 Hans-Georg GADAMER, The Relevance of the Beautiful and other Essays, trans. by Nicholas

Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 53. 105 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, op. cit., p. 34.

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If we have no opportunity today to encounter Greek bronzes in their original aspect (even without the important difference the culture that we do not share would have to make for such an encounter), 106 I have been asking throughout the above considerations of the nature and quality of Greek bronze, how we might use a hermeneutic phenomenology for the sake of learning, as Nietzsche would say in just this context, to see (to feel, to hear)? How in particular can we deliberately own or explicitly appropriate our 'position of looking,' especially if we bring in Heide­gger's reflections on beauty for Nietzsche's Greeks and indeed for Nietzsche's own very physiological, that is to say, specifically carnal thinking of the beauti­ful? As we recall, for Heidegger reading Nietzsche on art, such bodily thinking is expressed precisely as a matter of feeling and in terms of enhancement and pleni­tude, intoxication and enjoyment, corresponding to the Stendahlian 'promise of happiness.' In his account, Heidegger follows Nietzsche as Nietzsche takes himself to stand against Kant's 'disinterested interest.' But Heidegger's phenomenological point here turns on the insight that 'every bodily state involves some way in which the things around us and the people with us claim us or do not do so.' 107

Fig. 24. Marble torso. Pergammon Museum. Berlin,

September 2004; au tor's photograph.

106 I discuss the relevance of the absence of the Greek cult for Heidegger in B. BABICH, "From Van Gogh's Museum to the Temple at Bassae: Heidegger's Truth of Art and Schapiro's Art His­tory," in Culture, 1heory & Critique 44/2 (2003), pp. 151-169.

107 Martin HEIDEGGER, Nietzsche. Volume 1: The Will to Power as Art, trans. by David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1979), p. 99 [translation altered; my emphasis].

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Thus Heidegger interprets Nietzsche's discussion of the life-enriching or life­intensifying effect of the beautiful. 'What pleases one, what speaks to one, depends on who that one is whom it is to cor-respond with and speak-to.' 108

Heidegger's further expression of this affective affinity echoes the beginning of Rilke's Duino Elegies ' ... we call "beautiful" whatever corresponds to what we demand of ourselves. Furthermore, such demanding is measured by what we take ourselves to be, what we trust we are capable of, and what we dare as perhaps the most extreme challenge, one we may barely withstand.' 109

It is in this sense that Heidegger quotes Nietzsche's very erotic and very Greek, very agonistic, Nachlaf3 note: "'To pick up the scent of what would nearly finish us off if it were to confront us in the flesh, as danger, as problem, temptation-this determines even our aesthetic "yes."'110 Thus Nietzsche takes himself to refute Kant's disinterested interest as characteristic of the aesthetic judgment. So far from such a judgment, for Nietzsche, the declaration '"That is beautiful" is an affirmation'111 , that is, indeed, an excitement, an intoxication, the promises, as Alexander Nehamas very delicately reprises Stendahl, of happiness. 112 As Heidegger sets Nietzsche's reflection in connection with Rilke's differently aes­thetic (but similarly) erotic reflections on the beautiful, Heidegger argues that for Nietzsche, the beautiful "the beautiful is what determines us, our behaviour and our capability, just to the extent that we are claimed supremely in our essence, to the extent that we ascend beyond ourselves."113

But for this to work on us one must to be in the presence of the work, images and stories will not do, this text will not do, because much more is involved: the matter changes the form, working backwards on the form as informed substrate. Bringing himself before the 'archaic torso of Apollo', the poet felt this claim as Gadamer repeats the same claim for us in his own hermeneutic reflections on the work of art. But what Gadamer says is not enough, one must find oneself before the work, as one must catch oneself up in the world-but even then, so Nietzsche reminds us114 no amount of beauty can touch us unless we ourselves are attuned to it.

Just as the method of phenomenology can teach us to 'see,' as for Nietzsche we need to learn to see, so too in the case of Greek bronzes, one needs the physical presence of the work to feel the full weight and shining smoothness of the metal form, the gleam of bronze-and this is also true of the white curve of marble or the polished lustre of wood (to list Brancusi's well-known material variations on a single form). For the phenomenologically haptic point is that sculpture involves more than seeing but feeling. Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology always takes care to

108 Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volume 1, p. 11 L Translation altered; emphasis added. 109 Ibid., p. 112; Heidegger explicitly refers to the first line of Rilke's Duino Elegies later on

p. 116. Ilo KSA 12, 10 [168], p. 556. Ill Ibid. 11 2 Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness, op. cit. 113 Ibid., p. 113. 114 GS, p. 339.

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emphasize (a touch contra Jacques Taminiaux's reading):115 that matter, earth (and this was always Michel Haar's emphasis) 116 alters form, working backwards on the form as informed substrate. In bronze, chrome, stone, the working power of the work of art changes as it works on us and this backwards and forwards working of the work-that is also the setting up of a world-is the evipycta. of the artwork.

What does this mean for us in raising the question of sculpture, if we can take over some of the hints of the past that remain for us using the example of human­scale Greek bronzes? Surely such sculptures may be called beautiful, uncannily so, as exemplified in the Croatian Apoxyomenos until recently on display in Flor­ence, or else in the balanced form of the Delphic charioteer or the Piraeus Apollo (Fig. 9) or as exemplified by the Doryphoros of Polykleitos (Figs. 3-5), the same sculptor, according to Pliny, who also made a statue called the 'Canon,' (which Pliny emphatically distinguishes from the Doryphoros as such [NH, 34.55]), as a standard for bronze art. 117 But is this no more than fetishism? We are taught that the Greeks are canonic even before we turn to art history. Does not this deter­mine what we find 'classically' beautiful?

This is an old problem and one might argue that I risk perpetuating an old prejudice: Greek sculpture's the thing, one only need substitute the warmth of bronze for the cool of marble, Nietzschean color (Dionysus!) in place of Wink­kelmannian white (Apollo!). By contrast, I have sought to show that Nietzsche's reading, like Heidegger's and like Holderlin's reminds us that the old familiar image of Greece is otherwise than we have assumed. This claim cannot be taken for granted even as we continually slip back into its old convictions. And a great part of the point is acknowledging the foreignness of the past as something that cannot be recalled to life however we long for it precisely because we only seek to recall a vision less of antiquity than of ourselves dressed up in its image. Nietzsche repeats this frustrated ambition as he quotes Holderlin in his early notes: '~nd I, with my doing and thinking, with complete good will, I only grope my way about in the world, in what I attempt and in what I say, as I reach for these rare humans beings (the Greeks), and I am often merely still more uncouth and unrhymed, standing like a splay-footed goose in modern water, powerlessly plying my wings in the aspiration of Greek skies." 11 B

The point here has not been to pretend to recreate the experience of antiquity, a world, as Heidegger already in Sein und Zeit, tells us is 'lost' to us, but to suggest that we can come to our own experience of our own world, if we take the time to consider the statue, in the form of Greek bronzes as these remain, but also, in

115 Jacques TAMINIAUX offers a useful discussion of Heidegger's aesthetic phenomenology in "The Platonic Roots of Heidegger's Political Thought," in European Journal of Political17;eory 6/1 (2007), pp. 11-29.

116 See Michel HAAR, Lc Chant de La Terre. Heideggcr ct les Assises de L'lfistoire de L'Etre (Paris: l:Herne, 19S5).

117 See Herbert Becket al., eds., Polvklet. Dcr Bildhauer der griechischen Kfassik (Frankfurt arn Main: Liebighaus, Musueum alter Plastik, 1990), especially Hanna Philipp, ,Zu Polyklets Schrift »Kanon<' pp. 135-156 and Moon's collection, Polykleitos, The DOtyphoros, and the 1/mlition.

I!R KSA 7, p. 681.

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the spirit of phenomenology, if we are able to encounter the statue, even a copy, be it bronze but also in stone, and I will add this here-because I can only think world in a stubbornly physical manner as ¢um~ far beyond the closed human worlds of contemporary culture and changing fashion-this also means the 'real' world, the outside world under an open sky. The experience of earth and world in Heidegger's sense is hardly limited to sculpture and we can add the shaping that Wallace Stevens expressed using nothing more "classically" formed than a jar set upon, set into a hillside,

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was grey and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace STEVENS, Anecdote of the Jar

If the poet's fanciful jar set up in our mind's eye into the raw, un-cultivated nature of a vision of an old Tennessee none today can have seen is able to do this for us, what would a statue do in the Greece we likewise and to be sure have never encountered? What would hundreds and thousands of them do? On the reading I have proposed above, the Greek would be set against, would find himself arched in opposition to the measure of the precisely visualized bronze statues cast in abundance (and so argued above), sometimes even cast from life, but in any case set against statues erected as so many mirrors of life. Serving the purpose neither of contemplation nor indeed of evoking desire, the work of the statue would invite the Greek to become, as it were, what he was. 119 It is in this same sense that the dynamic of the statue invited the Greek to imagine himself 'as a statue.' 120 Nietzsche adds a complicated tension with chaos and change, so that the statue is exemplary precisely in its standing in itself, its self-possession, its stillness. The statue stamps the image of being on becoming.121

119 Thus Nietzsche and his friends dedicated a small statue they named 'Nirwana' as they concluded their studies, exemplifying in this practice the same imperative claim: become lhe one you are. For references and further discussion, see Babich, Words in Blood, Like Flowers, op. cit., pp. 81-82.

120 See Steiner's helpful discussion in her bnages in Mind, chapter four. 121 Cf. Heidegger's discussion of this phrase from Nietzsche's Wille zur Macht,,» Dem Werden

den Charakter des Seins aufzupriigen - das ist der hachste Wille zur Macht.«" in Nietzsche E'rster

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And in the same way, if very literally, if Nietzsche always attended to the stoni­ness of statues-a versteinerte stillness he compared to the Stoic imperative (we have already cited Epictetus' praise of the statue), and which Nietzsche identified with the Apollonian, he heard this stoniness as a matter of contest, especially in difficult times: 'Petrification as a corrective contra suffering and all the high names of the divinity of virtue henceforth attached to the Statue'122

• In this con­text of stress and tension: "Greek virtue became an affair of the dywv: each was jealous of each other. Immovability as ideal: in a time where one had already become too sensitive and sufferings and reversals too great (age of Thucydides) to become a statue: whereas the tragedians made allowed the statue (of the god or the hero) to come human.' 123

• But the ideal of stillness and impassivity was at the same time a matter of beauty from the start and Nietzsche never separates the Apollonian and the Dionysian despite the common conviction that he aban­dons the Apollonian, as mistaken a viewpoint as the belief that he abandons the project of his first book on tragedy. Hence in a notebook fragment from 1884 entitled On the means of Beautification, he writes ,the greek philosophers did not seek "happiness" otherwise than to find themselves beautiful, thus to make of themselves the statue, the look of which did one good (inspiring neither fear nor disgust)' 124

•

Fig. 25. Athens, Temple of Hephaistos, Peristyle,

June 1998; author's photograph.

What we have lost in our day is not the sense of beauty, that we still have, even if we almost never permit ourselves the time for it. We have rather lost both the depth and

Band, op. cit., p. 466. 122 KSA 9, 15 [54], p. 652. 123 KSA 9, 7 [101 ], p. 338; cf. KSA 7, 25 [1 ]. 124 KSA 11, 25 [101], p. 36.

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I

the tension that brought that beauty into being as well as the meaning or significant form of these ancient statues or temple structures. Nothing of what is left speaks to us, with or without Daedalus's art, and not indeed because the spirit has flown, because the gods have abandoned us, but and much more because the language of such tem­ples, for example 'is displaced from us'l25 as Dieter Jahnig writes of the 'temple of Apollo at Bassae, the most "lonely of all Greek temples,"'l26 so distant are we from them. 'It is neither a protective nor indeed a gathering space. It is no more than 'the house of the godhead'. But this 'indwells' 'in it' (in the cella), so that it is interior to the course of the columns, throughout the array of the foundation, columns, and pedi­ment, emerging in the play of the built-work and the image-work"l27 We are so dis­tant from this architectural articulation that we do not mark it as a distance. Indeed, for Jahnig, we do not 'feel this distance even when we emphasize the art and art-historical distance."l28 Nietzsche points to the same notion of a language that can no longer be heard when writes in an early aphorism on the petrification of past architecture, 'Stone is more stone than it once was', and very like the lost music of speech, we seem to have outgrown 'the symbolism oflines and figures, just as we have weaned ourselves from the sound-effects of rhetoric, and no longer imbibe this kind of cultural mother's milk from the first moment of our lives. Everything in a Greek or Christian building originally signified something and indeed something of a higher order of things: this feeling of inexhaustible significance lay about the building as a magical veil. Beauty entered this system only incidentally, without essentially encroaching upon the fun­damental sense of the uncanny-exalted, of consecration by magic and the proximity of the divine; at most beauty softened the dread-but this dread was everywhere the presupposition.' 129

To reflect historically on the 'built life' or world of the ancient Greeks as the mod­eling of upright form and rectitude (in both ethical and political senses), we return to Nietzsche's columns. This as we have noted is not only the sculptural figure of the statue Nietzsche identifies as Memnon's 'column', echoing his early study of the intermingling of the metaphors for light and sound130-but also the columns that frame the conclusion of his first book on tragedy, where he sets up an architectural parallel to the music of harmonious voices and rhythmic gesture: "Walking under lofty Ionic colonnades, looking up toward a horizon cut off by pure and noble lines, finding reflections of his transfigured shape in the shining marble at his sides, and all around him solemnly striding or delicately moving

125 Dieter JA.HNIG, ,Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes' und die Moderne Kunst, in Walter Biemel and Friedrich-Wilhem von Hermann (eds.), Kunst und Technik. Gediichtnisschrift zum 100. Gebwtstag von Martin Heidegger (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1989), pp. 219-254, here p. 231.

126 Jahnig, ,Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes' und die Moderne Kunst, op. cit., p. 230. I discuss the contemporary fate of this temple in Babich, Die Wahrheit des Kunstwerkes, op. cit., pp. 76-80.

127 Jahnig, ,Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes' und die Moderne Kunst, op. cit., p. 231. 128 Ibid. 129 HH 1, §218. 130 See Babich, "Songs of the Sun: Holderlin in Venice," in Worm in Blood, Like Flowers, op.

cit., pp. 117sqq.

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human beings."131 A 'horizon' sketched by 'pure and noble lines' is an explicitly architectural frame of existence, a wholly sculpted world. These same 'tenderly moving humans' in Nietzsche's allusive conclusion might well have been so many bronze statues: upright and exemplary, and these statues in turn would have been themselves so many mirrors of sculptured columns, and the space of the volumes between them. 132

XI. FIRST CONCLUSION: ON THE WORK OF ART IN SCULPTURE, ARCHITECTURE, POETRY

AND THE SISTINE MADONNA

In Heidegger's discussions of the work of art it seems not to matter, and com­mentators usually take this badly, whether the instantiations for his reflections correspond to a poem dedicated to a dancing fountain, a lamp, or indeed a poem to memory or to beauty in the persons of Socrates and Alcibiades, or if he invokes the temple at Paestum or else the cathedral in Bamberg, or speaks of the marvelous architecture that is the time-space intersection of life and death built into a traditional mountain hut, or if, turning from poetry and sculpture and the architecture of dwelling, to painting, if we consider the mysterium of Christian­ity expressed in Raphael's depiction not of the Transfiguration Nietzsche invokes in his Die Geburt der Tragodie but Raphael's calling forth of the mystery of the incarnation, the Madonna and child, as Heidegger writes about it in his 'On the Sistine Madonna.' In each case, Heidegger's claim is always a crucially, critically local claim, a claim of place, of the world-historical playing together of time and space (Zeit-Spiel-Raumes).

Heidegger found himself writing a restrained critique contra Theodore Hetzer, whom he tells us was an admired schoolmate, who for his part meant to praise the timeless a-locality of Raphael's Sistine Madonna by claiming that the Sistine Madonna 'was not bound to a church',133 and hence did not require a specific installation. Heidegger however could only emphasize the importance of place or locality as a matter of history but, and as in the case of his more well-known analysis of the world of a Greek temple for the Greeks who lived their lives around that temple, set up on earth, in stone and under the sky, also as a matter of cultural formation. 134

The Greek temple depends on the Greeks who dedicate it and live their lives in accordance with that dedication. We cannot know that world apart from that. In this same sense, a painting, in particular, Raphael's painting, can only be seen by one for whom the painting can matter as a painting and this is a question of

131 BT §25. m See, again, Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column, op. cit.

m Martin HEIDEGGER, Ober die Sixtina [1955], inAus die Erfahrungdes Denkens [1910-1976] (GA 13, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983), pp. 119-121, here p. 119.

134 See Babich, From Van Gogh's Museum to the Temple at Bassae, op. cit.

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formation, of what the Germans call Bildung, but it is above all a matter of pres­ence and the possibility of presence. Thus and contra museum curators and their art-historical consultants, Heidegger writes ,The Sistine Madonna belong in the church of Piacenza, not in a historico-antiquarian sense, but with respect to its pictorial essence. In accord with this, the picture will always long to be there.'135

The painting for Heidegger needs the church, as the church is called forth, brought to its presence as the place of mystery and sacred ritual in the painting: ,The picture is the shining of time-play-space as the place in which the sacrifice of the mass is celebrated.'1

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If Eva Judith Gyuro, who translated Heidegger's essay into English, chose to render both Hetzer's ,Kirche" and Heidegger's use of ,Kirche" with the word 'temple,' her option can be regarded as underscoring important resonances with Heidegger's invocation of the temple and its place and its history in his essay on the work of art. 137 But Kirche means church, indeed and in this case, a Catholic church. Hence Heidegger emphasis in this essay is the claim he makes when he speaks of the sacrifice of the mass and the difference this sacrifice makes to the possibility an experience of, an encounter with what is given through Raphael's Sistine Madonna. "Maria brings the Christ-Child thus, that she is first brought to him in her advent, which is in itself always brings forth the hidden saving of its origins."138

Indeed, Gyuro emphasizes Heidegger's religious orientation throughout her commentary, "The Secret of the Sistine Madonna,' highlighting the explicit lan­guage of the mass in an alternate translation: '«the transformation» enowns itself as the most authentic in the holy mass."139 Thus she quotes Tom Sheehan's linguis­tic contention, a point that turns exactly on the question of translation, that the "basic lines of Heidegger's doctrine of temporality (Zeitlichkeit) issued not from his reading of the Greek but from his interpretation of early Christianity. "140

To understand this requires the religious culture of the sacrifice of the mass. The locality of the painting is accordingly of the essence for Heidegger: "The place is ever an altar of a church. This belongs in the picture and the other way around. "141

135 Heidegger, Uber die Sixtina, op. cit., p. 70: ,Die Sixtina geh6rt in die eine Kirche zu Piacenza, nicht in einem historisch-antiquarischen Sinne, sondern ihrem Bildwesen nach. Ihn gemal3 wird das Bild stets dorthin verlangen."

06 Heidegger, Uber die Sixtina, op. cit., pp. 119-121, here p. 120. 137 Martin HEIDEGGER, "On the Sistine Madonna I Uber die Sixtina," translated into English

with a postscript by Eva Judith Gyuro, Existentia XVI/5-6 (2006), pp. 322-325. 138 Heidegger, Uber die Sixtina, op. cit., p. 120: ,Maria bringt den Jesusknaben so, daB sie

erst durch ihn gebracht wird in ihre Ankunft, die in sich jeweils das verborgen Bergende ihre Herkunft mit-er-bringt."

139 Gyuro, "The Secret of the Sistine Madonna," art. cit., pp. 326-340, here p. 337. 140 Th. SHEEHAN, "«Heidegger's Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion» 1920-21,"

in The Personalist 60 ( 1979), pp. 312-324, cited on p. 336 in Gyuro. 141 Heidegger, Ober die Sixtina, op. cit., p. 120: ,Der Ort ist je ein Altar einer Kirche. Diese

gehort in das Bild und umgekehrt."

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As we saw at the outset of this paper, Heidegger invokes 'the statue of Apollo at the museum in Olympia' in his 1927 essay, 'Phenomenology and Theology.' In this early text, Heidegger was concerned with manifestation, but writing on the Sistine Madonna a good generation later in 1955, he also invokes the mystery of religion as what comes to presence, as what comes before us in the picture: "The bringing, in which Mary and the Christ-Child hold sway, culminates as an event in that winking gaze."142 One can look at the life Jesus in the same way as one can consider the statue of Apollo, or indeed the work of art, as such, as 'an object of natural-scientific representation' or else as a museum object. But Heidegger's conclusion remains the same: "this objectifying thinking and speaking does not catch sight of the Apollo who shows forth his beauty and so appears as the visage of the god.'' 143

For what is shown in such a manifest presence, be it before Raphael's painting or before the statue of Apollo, we have to be present ourselves, exposed to pres­ence. Such an exposure is also what Nietzsche meant once by the agon and we have only to be present, but this only means to say, to vary Heidegger's language in his Introduction to Metaphysics, that we have really to be present.

XII. CODA: WITH MIRRORS

For another conclusion, consider what an applied phenomenology might 'look' like, in ordinary modern practice, far from the bodily mirroring of a bronze statue? Take yourself down an urban street lined with windows, such as one can find anywhere, perhaps in mid-afternoon, or any time when reflective conditions are right. Or remember such an experience as you may have been taken by sur­prise on occasion. To 'do' this experiment: watch yourself the next time you catch sight of yourself in this way whether accidentally or accidentally-on purpose: i.e., phenomenologically. Consciousness, we recall, is always consciousness of something, and it is worth reflecting on the question of what it is that takes us by surprise in such incidental mirroring encounters. For thus we can catch sight of and so almost 'meet' the aspect of ourselves as we might be bringing-forth our own appearance, our 'look' as we are in the world, as we show ourselves forth and are given to another's gaze. The incidental sight of ourselves can 'catch us up,' bringing us as we-appear-in-the-world to ourselves and that also means, though exactly this is not evident, as we might be seen by others.

What catches us up in the sight of ourselves in a mirror is not that we recognize ourselves as ourselves in the mirror: for the mirror gives us no more than the 'look' of our own recollected reflected image of ourselves. Thus we can, by the

142 Ibid., p. 71: ,Das Bringen, worin Maria und der Jesusknabe wesen, versammelt eine Geschehen in das blickende Schau en ... "

143 Martin HEIDEGGER, Phenomenology and Theology, in Pathmarks, trans. by James C. Hart and John C. Maraldo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 58.

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same token, be surprised past any first recognition, like Paul Feyerabend's wry recollection of a motley figure he first noticed as odd, then contemplated with some contempt in the library stacks at the University of California at Berkeley, only to realize that he was himself the same disheveled figure. Caught up to our­selves, to our look in the world, we rectify our posture, adjust clothing, touch up hair, despair of ourselves in disgust, as Feyerabend tells us that he did, or feel a rush of pride, and so on. The mirror glance shows us ourselves neither as we appear to ourselves-our forgotten memories of images past-or to others­their perspective never takes the same angle or even its reversal-but as we reveal aspects of ourselves we cannot master.

The early Heidegger writes, "This material thing in space which offers itself to possible sensations from different directions always shows itself as being-there only from a certain side and indeed in such a way that the aspect seen from one side flows over in a continuous manner into other aspects sketched out in advance in the spatial gestalt of the thing ... "144 This tells us, as the above and everyday example of a phenomenological reflection on reflection also illustrates, when it comes to our own angles of appearance, that we are always aware of the relevance of points of view, especially as such perspectives are always already cascading to angles unseen but in sight, even at first glance.

And that is, but only in part, what Rilke meant when he said with uncanny and beautiful precision: ,denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht'-'there is no place there, that does not see you.'

You, but that means: I, but that means: we-all of us, we, have to change. 145

144 Martin HEIDEGGER, Ontology: The Henneneutics of Facticity, trans. by John van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999 [c. 1923]), p. 68.

145 I draw for parts of this essay from the lecture presented in Maynooth in November of 2006, a version of which appears in The Yearbook of The Irish Philosophical Society (2006), pp. 1-30. I am most grateful to Brunilde Ridgway as well as to Andrew Stewart, Guy Metraux, and John Cleary for helpful comments and corrections.

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Babich — Greek Bronze

George Blackall Simmonds (1843-1929), Falconer, Bronze, with The Gates, Central Park, New YorkCity, February 22, 2005; author’s photograph taken level with the roughly 6-7 foot tall statue (11feet with outstretched arm and falcon). Taking the photograph from this perspective requiredminor rock scaling (the statue is set on a pediment, and the whole is elevated some fifteen feetabove the roadway). Simmonds’ rather larger than life-sized Falconer was cast in a single piece in1870 (using the classic lost wax process) by Dr. Clement Papi, the Italian scholar and bronzefounder. As Simmonds was himself a passionate falconer, the statue is arguably a self-portrait.Commissioned for Trieste in 1875, a copy was made from the plaster mold and dedicated in NewYork in the same year. The current statue has been restored over the years and the falcon isentirely new.