House Guests catalogue, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge.
An interview followed by a personal response to a cast of an Archaic Stele lent to Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, as part of the House Guests exhibition. Published in the exhibition catalogue.
Interview with Professor Robin Osborne, Curator of The Museum of Classical Archaeology.
Can you tell us what you have selected to lend Kettle’s Yard?
This is a rather unusual cast of a stele from Sparta, dating from the sixth century BC and perhaps best described as a sort of truncated pyramid with sides of different breadths. There is relief carving on all four sides: the two short sides having snakes, the broader two faces each showing a woman facing a man.
What is a stele?
Stele is a Greek term used by scholars of inscriptions and sculptures to refer to a slab of stone that is broader than it is thick. Normally stelai are slabs of more or less consistent thickness and width, like a bar of Kendal mint cake. However sometimes, as in this case, they are wider at the bottom than at the top. Usually they are one-sided – they have writing or relief sculpture (or both) on just one face. Occasionally they are inscribed on front and back. And sometimes on front and one or more of their narrow sides. This piece isn’t normal stele shape at all, but no one has thought of a better name for it.
Could you describe the stele’s four reliefs?
The narrow sides are easy to identify – they simply show snakes – but the significance of the snakes is uncertain. Snakes were often associated with the underworld and scholars tend to refer to them as ‘chthonic’, that is, to do with the earth (chthon in Greek) and so with the dead.
The broader faces are notable because on one side the man appears to be about to plunge a short sword into the woman, while on the other the woman holds what it likely to be a wreath, a sign of festivity, perhaps of marriage. So we have contrasting scenes. Do they concern the same characters – a story that starts with love and ends with murder or starts with war and ends with marriage? Or do they concern different couples whose opposing fates are here juxtaposed? The figures on the two sides are not presented identically – is that significant, or not?
Scholars have been tempted to think of stories involving mythical characters linked to Sparta – characters like Menelaus, king of Sparta, and his wife Helen, who was seduced away by the Trojan Paris and won back in the Trojan war (some versions have Menelaus at Troy intending to run Helen through with a sword when he captured her, only to be smitten by desire and drop his sword when he set eyes on her again).
The original stele is made of a bluish marble. Is it likely that it would have been painted? And if so, why is the cast not also painted in such a manner?
It is becoming increasingly apparent that much Greek sculpture was painted in some way or another – though much of it with translucent wash rather than with block colour. However, it is rare that even the most technically sophisticated investigations can find traces of use of colour. In this case there do not appear to be any traces on the original, and so there is no clue as to exactly how colour might have been used. The museum has used colour both where there are some traces on the original piece, which act as guidance, and where the museum has two copies of a piece so that the state ‘as found’ can be displayed alongside the state ‘as restored’. This piece meets neither criterion.
Where does it fit in amongst the Museum of Classical Archaeology’s collection?
The collection consists of some casts given to the Fitzwilliam Museum before it was even opened but mostly of those collected between about 1870 and 1920. The collection’s history tells the story of the discovery of classical art:
-The oldest casts are of sculptures found in Italy – sculptures that were either copied after Greek originals or were Greek originals taken to Rome. One example is the Farnese Hercules, a copy by Glykon (an artist working in the Roman Empire in the first or second century AD) of a fourth-century BC sculpture by Lysippos. The Laocoön would be another. Such pieces mainly dated from the Hellenistic period.
- The sculptures acquired by the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Sidney Colvin, in the 1870s and 1880s reflected excavations then going on in Greece – particular at Olympia. These revealed the wealth of fifth-century Greek art, filling out the picture first revealed in London when the Parthenon sculptures were brought back by Elgin.
- In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the collection increasingly acquired casts of the archaic Greek sculptures that were being excavated on the Athenian acropolis, in Delphi, on Samos and elsewhere.
The stele from Sparta fits into this latter group. The catalogue of the collection in the museum at Sparta, where the original stele resides, was written in 1906 by M.N. Tod and A.J.B. Wace. The latter went on to become the Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge, so this piece, which was No.1 in the sculpture catalogue, has a particular Cambridge connection.
Why did you select this particular cast for Kettle’s Yard?
Kettle’s Yard is in many ways an ‘anti-classical’ collection, dominated by works that explore alternatives to classical aesthetics. So the question was whether to put something alien in the midst of this collection – a classical torso, the epitome of what people have come to imagine classical sculpture to be, perhaps? Or to show that within Greek art there is a wide range of expression besides the archetypically ‘classical’.
In some ways the decision was made by the need to find a small piece. Classical art operates on a near or over life-size scale. This piece, relegated to the museum store, caught my eye and seemed to offer a nice example that contrasts with popular expectations and offers plenty of interest. I am sure, for instance, that many visitors will think this closer to near-eastern sculpture than what they think of as Greek – a useful reminder that the ancient Greek world looks back and east as well as forward and west.
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Cast of Archaic Stele
As suggested above, the stele cast is not an object of ‘classical’ beauty. It does not have the sensuousness of the Torso of Aphrodite with its gentle curves. Nor does it demonstrate majesty like the life-sized head and torso of Leonidas, king of Sparta, with his strong nose and muscular chest. The archaic stele cast is a somewhat dull-toned, concrete coloured piece. The figures on it are anatomically incorrect and their identities uncertain. The reliefs have worn away. The serpents on the narrow sides have been partially decapitated. At some point in its life the original piece was bored through and the top was broken off. It is difficult to fall in love with.
And of course it is not even an original. Unlike the other House Guests the stele is a copy. It is a copy, a plaster cast, of a stele made of blue marble that is housed at the Museum of Sparta in Greece. If we think of it in terms of Plato’s idea that all objects have an ideal form that does not exist in our material world – and therefore all objects are imperfect copies of this ideal – then the stele becomes a copy of a copy. And the photograph accompanying this text is a copy of a copy of a copy…
The obsession with originality is a particular affliction of the arts (one that dates from the eighteenth century) and continues to be a contemporary concern. The act of copying, of mimicry, evokes ideas of plagiarism, piracy, even downright theft. Yet almost all learning is achieved through copying. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries plaster casts of ancient sculptures became popular as aides to the study of Classical art history and many collections were built up during this period. The copying of classical sculpture goes as far back as antiquity itself: many classical sculptures that we have today are marble Roman copies of Greek originals.
The original marble stele is over twenty times the age of its plaster twin. Yet the cast has taken on its own unique history. As methods of study changed during the twentieth century, casts fell out of favour and many collections were destroyed. The stele cast in question has become an object of historical importance even though it is a copy. Some of the most treasured objects in Kettle’s Yard are copies: Gaudier-Brzeska’s Torpedo Fish (Toy) and Brancusi’s Golden Fish are both posthumous casts made over four decades after the ‘originals’. For Jim Ede it did not matter that later casts stood in for earlier pieces. The sculpture ‘copies’ at Kettle’s Yard have begun to forge their own histories as part of the collection.
Similarly, the stele cast – with its chipped corner exposing white plaster, the number 20 scrawled in chalk and black biro on its base, and the accidental specs of red paint adding a certain macabre colour to the events unfolding on its reliefs – has not only created its own history, but also embodies the quirks and uncertainties of historical study before we even begin to contemplate the form that it mimics so well.