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Double and Multiple Representations in Greek Art and Religious Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2015

Theodora Hadzisteliou Price
Theodora Hadzisteliou Price
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

Greek theology and its canonical iconography have not been studied nearly as much as the Byzantine, although the religious character of pagan art is no less pronounced. When it is studied it is mostly in the representations on the vases. Sculpture, however, in particular terra-cotta and ivory figurines and plaques, and votive offerings in sanctuaries, offers a wide scope for such a study. Greek piety created some standard forms of votive offerings such as the crouching child, the protome, male or female, the seated or standing woman, sometimes exactly identifiable from the attributes.

A standard type of votive offering, perhaps not as common as the single figure, is that of reliefs, statuettes and statues representing two, or sometimes more, female figures, identical or slightly differentiated, traditionally explained as Demeter and Kore or the Nymphs.

The topic has been treated variously since the early nineteenth century, in isolated examples, or regional and other groups. There is no treatment of it in its entirety in the Greek world, and not much progress has been made in the subject since the basic nineteenth-century treatises. Moreover, in the above publications, never cited in more recent works, one finds some very sound approaches and knowledge of the textual evidence. However, in these early publications the material is mostly Classical, or Hellenistic and Roman. In some of the cases of double figures discussed in them, the duplication, rather than ‘doubleness’, is more apparent than real because the attributes are repeated and are those of the unique war goddess Athena, or the equally unique Tyche or Fortuna. However, the case is not always so, especially in archaic or earlier times, and it gets even more complicated when the figures are not two but three and sometimes more, even up to nine. The repeating of figures, often under one mantle, as diad, triad, etc., could be explained as multiplication of a figure by the folk-mind (mythology), followed by the Greek artists, thus creating the Eileithyiai, Horai, Charites, Muses, etc. Modern scholars have insisted on trying to identify in all of them Demeter and Kore, the female diad par excellence.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 91 , November 1971 , pp. 48 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1971

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References

The following abbreviations have been adopted: Gerhard = E. Gerhard, Antike Bildwerke (Berlin 1828)

Guarducci = M. Guarducci, ‘Due o più donne sotto un solo manto in una serie di vasi greci arcaici’ in AM liii(1928) 52–65.

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Metzger = H. Metzger, Recherches sur l'imagerie athénienne (Paris 1965)

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66 Mylonas, pl. 1; not as late as mid fifth, as far as one can judge from the drawing; notice the early zig-zag double folds; the dress is not the peplos but still the chiton with himation hanging from one shoulder.

67 Mylonas, figs. 1–2.

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82 Exhibited in Heraklion Museum; unpublished. Most interesting for this study is a small faience statuette depicting two Goddesses seated side by side found together with a statuette of a suckling Isis, cf. discussion by T. Hadzisteliou Price in The Greek Kourotrophos, Chapter: Crete (forthcoming).

83 Rizza and Scrinari, 251 f.

84 cf. note 47.

85 This article started as an Appendix to a doctoral thesis on the Greek Kourotrophos, Oxford 1965. I am grateful to the Skillitzi Foundation in memory of Eleutherios and Helena Venizelos who supported my studies with a generous scholarship; to the Meyerstein Award, Oxford, which twice enabled me to travel to Europe; to my teachers, Professor C. M. Robertson and Mr. John Boardman; to the College Division of the University of Chicago for helping me financially with photographs and typing; for photographs and permission to publish, I am grateful to Professor N. Platon, Dr St. Alexiou, Professor Sp. Marinatos, Professor G. Bernabò-Brea, Dr F. Benoit, the National Museum of Athens, the Department of Classical Antiquities of the Louvre, the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, the Trustees of the British Museum, the Classical Department of Berlin, Staatliche Museen, the Cleveland Art Museum, the American Academy in Rome, the British School of Archaeology in Athens and the University of Chicago, Department of Classics.