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The Dating of the Aegina Pediments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

R. M. Cook
R. M. Cook
Affiliation:
Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge
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Extract

The sculpture of the East pediment of the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina is usually dated between 490 and 480 B.C. This seems to me too late, to judge by the torsion of the fallen soldier of the left corner and of the stooping youth from the middle of the right side (Plate XVIb-c). In the youth there is a small turning at the waist and this is managed competently by an organic twist. In the fallen soldier, where the torsion is much greater, the change of direction is made not by a twist but by an abrupt swivel; and though the waist was partly masked by the right arm, generally the sculptors who carved this pediment did not neglect those parts of their figures which could not be seen. From this it should follow that at that time they were acquainted only partially with the revolutionary innovation of organically twisting anatomy.

In vase painting the organic twisting of the torso was mastered during the last ten or fifteen years of the sixth century. So too in relief sculpture, notably in the Ball-players relief. In free-standing sculpture symmetrically frontal poses still remained normal, but that does not mean that it was simply retarded; and pedimental figures, though in the round, generally followed the rules for reliefs, anyhow before the Parthenon.

Type
Notes
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 94 , November 1974 , pp. 171
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1974

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References

1 These photographs, for which I am grateful to Mr E. E. Jones and Dr A. F. Stewart, are of casts respectively in the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. I have not recently had the opportunity of studying the other relevant figures of this pediment, either in the original or through casts, but to judge by published photos most of them are presented without torsion (Furtwängler, A., Aegina, pl. 95Google Scholar; B. S. Ridgway, The Severe Style, fig. 8).

2 Athens, N.M.3476: G. Lippold, Griechische Plastik, pl. 28.2.

3 Athens, Acr. 145: Lippold, op. cit., 79, pl. 22.2; Payne, H. and Young, G. M., Archaic Marble Sculpture, 44, pls. 105–6Google Scholar; Schrader, H., Die Archaischen Marmorbildwerke 281–2, pls. 155–7Google Scholar.

4 Athens, N.M. 1605: Neugebauer, K., AA 1915, 274–8, figs. 1–2Google Scholar; Buschor, E. and Hamann, R., Die Skulpturen des Zeustempels, 10 and 28, fig. 8Google Scholar. (My illustration, for which I am indebted to Mr E. E. Jones, is of a cast in the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge.) Buschor's date for this fragment was 500–480 B.C.; Payne considered it rather later than the Theseus, but still in the Archaic period, i.e. 510–480 B.C. (op. cit., 44); Lippold chose the 470's, to make it later than the Aegina East pediment which he put in the 480's (op. cit., 109 and 99). The Daphni figure may well be pedimental too: Neugebauer's objection is hardly valid, that its style is too Aeginetan to be from an Attic pediment.

5 Exceptionally Neugebauer asserted that the Daphni figure was earlier in style than the figures of the East pediment, though later than those of the West (op. cit., 277).

6 Cos: Clara Rhodos ix, 73–80, figs. 46–8, pl. 6; Karusos, C., AM lxxvii, 121–9, Beil. 35Google Scholar.