scholarly journals A New Stelè from Athens

1902 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 1-4 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. S. Murray
Keyword(s):  
British Museum ◽  
The Body ◽  
Formal Modelling ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Greek Art

Apparently there had been sculptured on the missing half of the marble stelè lately acquired by the British Museum from Athens a seated figure with hand upraised (Pl. 1.). There is a trace of the raised arm and also of a footstool. The subject had therefore been one of those scenes of parting or meeting so common on Athenian stelae. But the young man leaning on his staff is not of the usual Athenian type. In several respects he resembles a youthful Heracles on a relief from Mt. Ithome now in Athens, which figure it has been the custom to regard as Polycleitan (Fig. 1). So far as the pose of the head and the Diadumenos-like modelling of the body are concerned that opinion may be right. Only we must remember that the somewhat formal modelling of the thorax both in the Ithome relief and the new stelè is not unfrequent in Greek art, at least from the time of Lysippos onwards. A familiar instance is the Hermes on the sculptured drum of a column from Ephesus in the British Museum. It is a modification of the type of Polycleitos and may have set in much earlier than Lysippos. It may even have extended to Athens.

Lute-Players in Greek Art

1965 ◽  
Vol 85 ◽  
pp. 62-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Higgins ◽  
R. P. Winnington-Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
British Museum ◽  
String Length ◽  
Open Strings ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Greek Art

The primary purpose of this article is to publish two terracotta representations of lute-players in the British Museum. The subject is rare, but not quite so rare as might be supposed from the scarcity of literature about it. It has, therefore, seemed worth while to add a Ust of the examples known to us—a list which does not claim to be exhaustive—and to discuss briefly some of the problems which they raise. We do this in the hope that it may stimulate further investigation of a neglected theme.Between lutes and lyres there is a difference of principle which could hardly be more fundamental. The strings of the lyre are relatively numerous, but, in default of a fingerboard, fret-board, or neck, against which they could be firmly pressed (or ‘stopped’), the possibilities of obtaining more than one note from each string, in so far as they existed, must have been limited as to the number and quality of notes obtainable. The lute has few strings, but they are stretched over a solid neck, or a prolongation of the sound-box, against which they can be pressed so as to shorten the string-length and produce notes of higher pitch than those of the open strings; each string can thus provide a number of notes of approximately equal quality. Lutes and lyres were both common in Asia and in Egypt. In Greek lands the lyre predominated, and no examples of the lute are found in art before the fourth century B.C. The examples known to us are mostly terracottas.

scholarly journals A new καλός-vase

1899 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 202-204
Author(s):  
Isabel A. Dickson
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
British Museum ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Subject ◽  
As If

The vase here published is a red-figure lekythos, found at Eretria and recently acquired by the British Museum. It has the ordinary honeysuckle pattern as decoration on the shoulder. Between two rows of maeander on the body of the vase is the picture, which occupies only one side.The subject is a young woman hurrying out of a door, which she leaves open behind her. There is no indication on the vase of what, or of whom she is in pursuit, but the outstretched hands would seem to imply that the desired object is not far distant. In front of her, and almost as if issuing from her lips, is the name Ἀλκμέων, and below this the word καλός.

The Unsightly

2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 187-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Hetherington
Keyword(s):  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Visual Space ◽  
British Museum ◽  
The Body ◽  
Equal Opportunities ◽  
View Point ◽  
Current Concern ◽  
The Subject ◽  
New Form ◽  
Impaired Person

This article looks at a quite different form of mediation, a tactile book on the Parthenon Frieze for the visually impaired that has recently been produced by the British Museum. As a material expression of the current concern with equal opportunities and access within the museum sector, this book attempts to provide a form of access through an artefact to another set of artefacts (the sculptures themselves) for a group of people on the margins of the museum's visual space. Conscious of the conservational problems of allowing objects to be touched directly, the book provides an optical prosthesis that allows the hand to extend into an otherwise visual space. But as a form of mediation the book reproduces the representational codes of Enlightenment scopics, in which the view point is reduced to the optics of the subject. In contrast, Hetherington argues that the body of the visually impaired person, notably the hand, offers another and quite different form of mediation in which the body, through its haptic capacities, comes to challenge (stop) this correspondence between the optic and the scopic. Associating instead the haptic with the scopic opens up the possibility with a new form of connection with the sign's materiality and performativity.

scholarly journals A Statue of the Youthful Asklepios

1883 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 46-52
Author(s):  
Warwick Wroth
Keyword(s):  
British Museum ◽  
The Body ◽  
Lower Half ◽  
Left Shoulder ◽  
Hellenic Journal ◽  
Left Hand ◽  
Marble Statue ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Right

The marble statue of a youthful male figure holding in his left hand a snake-encircled staff, which is reproduced in the accompanying plate, was found by Smith and Porcher at Cyrene, and is now in the collection of the British Museum. By its original discoverers this figure was named Aristaeus: an attribution which has been adopted, though with some hesitation, in the Museum Guide to the Graeco-Roman Sculptures. As, however, this attribution seems more than doubtful, it may be well to lay before the readers of the Hellenic Journal some additional remarks upon the subject, and to direct special attention to a statue which is not among those photographed in the History of Discoveries at Cyrene, and which has not, hitherto, been figured elsewhere.The statue now to be described is four feet five and a half inches in height, and represents a young and beardless male figure standing facing. His right hand rests upon his hip, and under his left arm is a staff round which is coiled a serpent. The lower half of the body is wrapt in a himation, the end of which falls over the left shoulder, leaving the chest and the right arm uncovered. The hair is wavy and carefully composed, but does not fall lower than the neck: around the head is a plain band, above which has been some kind of crown or upright headdress: the top of the head has been worked flat. On the feet are sandals, and at the side of the left foot is a conical object which has been called a rude representation of the omphalos, but which is, in all probability, a mere support.

scholarly journals Pyxis:—Herakles and Geryon

1884 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 176-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecil Smith
Keyword(s):  
Smooth Surface ◽  
British Museum ◽  
The Body ◽  
Light Yellow ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Yellow Clay

The vase which is the subject of the present memoir is a pyxis or small round box of a light yellow clay with a smooth surface, decorated with designs in a blackish brown, which is here and there varied with a patch of purple laid upon the black, or with a detail occasionally incised. It was acquired by the British Museum in 1865, and forms one of a set of eighteen which were ‘guaranteed’ as having been found at Phaleron near Athens.The lid is decorated with a circular frieze of animals, representing five lions or panthers; the most important representation, however, is that upon the body of the vase, which is encircled with a single frieze of figures, consisting of four lions, a bull (recognisable by the shape of its hoof and its horn), and a group which is obviously a rendering of the well-known myth of Herakles and Geryon—beside Geryon is a further group of three bulls.

scholarly journals III.—On Uronemus magnus, a New Fossil Fish from the Coal-Measures of Airdrie, Lanarkshire

1874 ◽  
Vol 1 (12) ◽  
pp. 554-555
Author(s):  
R. H. Traquair
Keyword(s):  
Anterior Part ◽  
British Museum ◽  
The Body ◽  
Dorsal Fin ◽  
Caudal Extremity ◽  
Considerable Portion ◽  
Spinous Processes ◽  
Fossil Fish ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Coal Measures

The specimen (No. 37,958 of the British Museum Collection), which forms the subject of the present notice, is from the Blackband Ironstone of Airdrie, and, I understand, from the same bed which yielded the first known specimen of Anthracosaurus Russelli. The fossil is unfortunately very imperfect, though it displays a considerable portion of the body of a large fish lying on its right side. Both the head and the caudal extremity, however, are gone, nor is the ventral margin shown; but the line of the back is pretty nearly intact, and is seen to be bordered by the long dorsal fin characteristic of Phaneropleuron and of Uronemus. What remains of the body shows a confused mass of ribs, spinous processes, and inter-spinous ossicles, compressed against a groundwork of what are apparently large and very thin rounded scales. The specimen, measuring 15½ inches in length, by 5½ inches in breadth at its broadest part, presents thus a considerable part of the abdominal, with the anterior part of the caudal region of a fish, which, when entire, must have been in all probability more than two feet long.

An Anglo-Saxon Cruet

1938 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 377-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. D. Kendrick
Keyword(s):  
British Museum ◽  
The Body ◽  
Striking Feature ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Bronze Casting

The small metal cruet (pl. LXXI) that is the subject of this communication was acquired by the British Museum as part of the collection of Sir Wollaston Franks, and all that is otherwise known of its history is that it had previously been in the collection of Lord Londesborough and is engraved in Fairholt's Miscellanea Graphica of 1857. It is a cire-perdue bronze casting in one piece, afterwards covered with a wash of copper and a coat of gilding, and it stands 7·2 cm. high without its lid, which is missing. It is a remarkable piece, chiefly because of the most unusual ornament on the body of the vessel which consists of two rows of identical symmetrical decorative units in relief in the form of a pair of birds in a foliate spray. It will be noticed that these birds are, so to speak, ‘locked’ into the foliage by their wings, and it will also be noticed that they are biting upwards at the leaves with a curiously emphatic gesture of the back-thrown head and gaping bill. The units of decoration are quite distinct; but they are set close enough together to give the effect of a rich and crowded surface-ornament; and it will be seen that the spaces between their tapering upper portions are filled by small lion-masks. Over the spout there is a variation in the character of the ornament, for here we have a single downward-biting bird standing on a thin foliate branch; so we see that the designer was able to adapt and modify the stereotyped pattern that so much attracted him; and there is no doubt that he was a craftsman of considerable humour and skill. He has turned the spout itself into a lion's head, not by modelling but by the use of incised lines, and he has cunningly employed spiral curves to suggest the shoulders of the beast. The simple scroll on the foot does not call for comment; but the handle should be noticed. It is in the form of a serpent issuing from an animal-mouth on the hinge of the cruet, and its quaint curly end is a most striking feature that adds considerably to the ragged, lumpy prettiness of this charming little vessel.

scholarly journals Imperial Cuirass-Ornamentation, and a Torso of Hadrian in the British Museum

1886 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 126-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warwick Wroth
Keyword(s):  
British Museum ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Subject

In the last volume of the Journal of Hellenic Studies (vi. pp. 378–380) Prof. Newton has commented at length on some remarks made by me in the same volume (vi. pp. 199—201) on the torso of an imperial statue found at Cyrene and now in the British Museum. Before considering Mr. Newton's paper in detail I may be permitted to say a few words on the subject of cuirass-ornamentation in general.In his Winckelmanns-fest-program for 1868, Dr. Hübner referred to the want of a classified list of ornamented cuirasses of emperors. No one has, at present, attempted to compile such a list, which would, practically, have to take the form of a complete monograph on statuae thoracatae, in which the restorations, style, material, pose, and attribution of each figure would have to be carefully studied. To carry out this work it would be necessary to make a personal examination of a large number of statues which have not hitherto been critically described, and which have suffered greatly at the hands of restorers. A difficulty which specially complicates the study of this class of monuments would also have to be borne in mind— namely, that in many cases the body of imperial statues appears to have been originally made apart from the head.

scholarly journals II. Description of some remains of a gigantic land-lizard ( Megalania prisca , Ow.) from Australia

1859 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 273-273
Keyword(s):  
British Museum ◽  
The Body ◽  
Neural Spine ◽  
Fossil Remains ◽  
Neural Canal ◽  
The Subject

The subject of this communication forms part of a collection of fossil remains from Australia, recently acquired by the British Museum, and demonstrates the former existence in that continent of a land-lizard considerably surpassing in bulk the largest species now known. The characters are chiefly derived from vertebrae, partially fossilized, equalling in size those of the largest existing Crocodiles; they are of the ‘procœlian’ type, but present lacertian modifications, and closely agree with those in the great existing ‘Lacelizard' of Australia ( Hydrosaurus giganteus , Gray), of which individuals upwards of six feet long have been taken. A generic or subgeneric distinction is indicated by the comparatively contracted area of the neural canal, and by the inferior development of the neural spine, of the fossil vertebræ, which have belonged to an individual not less than twenty feet in length, calculated from the vertebræ and proportions of the body of the existing Hydrosauri . For this, probably extinct lizard, the name of Megalania prisca is proposed. The results of an extended series of comparisons of its vertebræ with those of recent and extinct Sauria are given; and the paper is illustrated by drawings of the vertebræ of Megalania and those of Hydrosaurus .

Diaghilev and British Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.

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