When you walk into the archaeological museum at Olympia, with all the anticipation of what the fame of “Olympia” means, you first come upon a large white room with a plastic reconstruction of the site. Just beyond that, in a way foreshadowing their greatness, are the world-famous pedimental sculptures of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. But when you peer from the entrance, you can’t quite see the sculptures. They are slightly hidden by two walls.
So instead, from the entrance, you look forward through a long, largely empty corridor, your excitement revved up. The first artefact you sort of see, by squinting hard, is the Statue of Nike on the other side of the museum. Perhaps a bit less impressive than its more famous counterpart in the Louvre.
This aptly reflects how the remains are displayed and explained in the Olympia museum, how the directors want you to experience and think about the remains and “art”. The manipulation of vertical and horizontal space, the focus of lighting, material, colour, boundaries — everything’s there, serving one purpose: to send a subconscious message about the remain to the viewer that influences their interpretation of it. To differing degrees, this is present at all museums. But what is interesting at the Olympia museum is slightly more sinister. In many ways, the museum focalises your gaze at very particular monuments, pinpoints very specific bits of information, while cunningly sidelining or hiding away other bits. I aim to explore how and why this is so through three case studies, then reflect on broader issues and finally propose some solutions.
For all the positive aspects of the information, display and remains in the Olympia museum, sometimes, for more inferior reasons, the museum distorts the original significance of remains, misconstrues or favours one interpretation, and, worst of all, occasionally plain-out lies.
Case Study 1: Praxiteles’ Hermes — a masterpiece: but both ancient and modern?
Museology is the study of how artefacts are displayed and explained in museums. When you walk into a museum, have you wondered how objects are displayed, why only select information is given and why that information is given? How the information is conveyed through the writing, the layout and images, the space of the artefact in the room, right down to the colour of the room? Though museums are vital to how we perceive the Classical world, their study has often been overlooked. And in some cases it needs to be improved. As will be seen in this case study, museology has a darker side, where modern scholars have misconstrued the original significance of an artefact by over-emphasising specific aspects of it and neglecting others.
The Hermes of Praxiteles. What a lot to say about it. But let’s start simple, using the museum as a guide, and through the perspective of a director. First, the information on the museum sign (Image 3) exemplifies just how often archaeologists/ directors apply their “wishful hopes” to the past and attribute an artefact to a famous artist on dubious grounds, to label it a masterpiece.
The museum sign identifies this as a “Hermes”. According to some versions of the myth, this identification seems reasonable — Hermes in his role as the messenger god protecting and delivering the infant Dionysos (Hermes’ brother) to the nymphs to take care of him, far away from the eyes of Hera (Apollodorus, Argonautica 26–29; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 4. 2. 3; in art cf. Athenian red figure lekythoi and krateroi from the 5th century BC — but in many versions, both earlier and at the time, Hermes is not included in the Birth of Dionysos). Further, as Hermes and Dionysos, this sculpture could deliver a political message: (on the simplest level) Elis, whose patron god was Hermes, is being reconciled with Arcadia, whose patron god was Dionysos, sealed by the bunch of grapes Hermes would have held in his right hand. In iconography, it looks like other Hermes.
But certain incongruous details have channeled the long debate on this identification with Hermes. Similar sculptures have been found of Silenoi in Hermes’ pose, and even some of Pan, the half-goat, half-human god, carrying the baby Dionysos (see below). This is stylistically almost a replica. To support this further, the statue’s back has been roughly chiseled away, where scholars have suggested there originally would have been a hairy goat back. Furthermore, there are two distinct circular rough patches on his hair, where Pan’s horns might have been hacked away to engender Hermes’ hair. Thus, it would seem that we have a case where an original Pan was remodelled into a Hermes. But a problem with this interpretation arises: Pan traditionally had goat hair all over his lower body- why is his back the only clearly chiseled part? If the statue was in a niche, the back would not have been seen, hence the lack of effort put in to smooth it (but the view on Hellenistic art below would reject this). Finally, this strong argument is further supported by the slight change in the position of the statue’s right foot: its orientation seems to have been changed at a later date, which supports the theory that it could have been a Pan turned later into Hermes. This fact, that it was changed in composition and identification at a later date, seriously challenges the extent to which the sculpture really is a Praxiteles. Which god did “Praxiteles” sculpt in the first place? How much has its meaning changed? If it the earlier Pan sculpture was indeed made by Praxiteles, but it has been so remodelled, are we justified in still calling it a pure “Praxiteles”? We must keep in mind that there are many other interpretations, and I am not afraid to say that there could be a better explanation. Some range from the fact that the sculpture could also simply be unfinished, to Boardman’s suggestion in La Sculpture grecque du second classicisme that the torso is so remarkably polished due to the adoration of many female visitors and priests.
But we must also remember that when dealing with sculpture, myths in themselves cannot count as definitive explanations for statues. What is the meaning behind the statue, what ideas does it convey? — these questions yield much more valuable discussion. “Hermes’ ” sandals provide a good conduit to answer this. While traditional iconography and myth would suggest that the sandals on the man’s feet should belong to Hermes, who was renowned for his winged-sandals, the Pan/Silenoi sculptures sometimes also wear elaborate sandals. Thus there is a blurring of the boundary between civilised and wild, god and demigod, Hermes and Pan. This sheds light on an interesting trend of Greek Hellenistic art. One defining artistic development in Hellenistic art is how it plays with the viewer’s expectations by changing the viewer’s interpretation of a sculpture as he/she/it moves around it — take for example Hermaphrodite. At first glance it looks like a serious Hermes, invoking a dignified sense of male beauty, familial piety and innocent brother-to-brother charms, but as you are prompted to move around the statue and look closer, and spot the rougher back, head and Pan-like iconography, you may start to think that it looks a lot like a Pan, a more mischievous, lustful, comic god. So when changing the identification of the statue, perhaps the Hellenistic sculptor deliberately wanted the statue to have a multiplicity of meanings, or a developing identity that varies by the viewer’s interaction. It is a complex game that is anything but a simple identification of a static Olympian god. But the identification in the museum, by restricting it simply to a “Hermes” and giving no explanation of this, the museum takes away from the meaning of the statue in its original context and tries to superimpose a different idea — the idea of an eternal, dignified masterpiece of Classical art.
What supports this last idea most significantly, is that the sign identifies the statue as Praxiteles’. Now this would be a bold claim to make, as it is one of the few sculptures of Praxiteles that survives today, and would attract many tourists and art aficionados. And it could be — the quality of the Parian marble singles it out for a masterpiece, and the smooth shininess makes it look almost ‘painted’ (but there is a lot of debate about paint on sculptures in antiquity). But as seen above, in many ways the sculpture is either incomplete or has been remodelled. There is a fierce debate about the date, but scholarship has strongly argued that the Praxitelean attribution is a big stretch, if not unlikely. The directors have dated it to 330BCE to coincide with Praxiteles; but many think it is a later 3rd century Hellenistic or Roman sculpture. Alternatively, it could have been produced during Praxiteles’ time, but by a lesser-known sculptor (who happened to make such a masterpiece that it was considered Praxiteles perhaps?). So yet again, the modern museum is trying to appropriate the meaning of the sculpture by turning it into a Classical masterpiece, instead of what it meant in antiquity.
So how was this statue viewed in antiquity? We don’t often have the context, but here we are lucky. In antiquity the sculpture of “Hermes” would have been considered some sort of masterpiece, but perhaps not to the extent it is today. It was set up in the Temple of Hera at Olympia, which was already in Pausanias’ time and probably earlier considered a sort of “museum”, because it housed some of the finest sculpture in antiquity. So the statue would have had some artistic value. What’s more, we have a unique case where the literature of a guide-book genre actually informs us about the archaeology. Pausanias mentions that in the temple is a Hermes by Praxiteles (Travels in Greece 5.17.3). But he only gives it a passing mention, squeezes it into a subordinate clause with another sculpture, and judges it as stylistically inferior to the older and more numerous Classical sculptures in the main clause. The “Hermes” sculpture was found in the temple on 8 May 1877 (another unusually precise date). But as we have see above, the identification as Hermes is not absolute, but modern archaeologists in their wishful thinking have quickly attributed it to Praxiteles according to Pausanias, without proper recourse to analysis. So was this statue even the Praxitelean Hermes in the first place? Does Pausanias mention all the statues within, or single out the best? This raises more difficult questions about travel-genre which won’t be answered here. Moreover, some scholars argue that it wouldn’t have been one of Praxiteles’ more appreciated works because no replicas have been made. But though it must have had some fame in antiquity for being in that museum and possibly being mentioned by Pausanias, did it really enjoy as much success as it does today?
Probably not to the extent that it is today because 1) today it is attributed to Praxiteles (even though it may not have been, and the Greeks knew many more sculptors that we generally know today, so they may well have been as enthusiastic about other sculptors as Praxiteles), 2) because it is the main full surviving sculpture from the Temple of Hera, and most importantly 3) because it has its own room today. Now I specifically included a bad image of the statue but that clearly shows the room, to demonstrate just how many techniques in the layout of the statue have been used to justify the statue as a “masterpiece.” The statue has a whole room to itself — something only the pedimental sculpture of the Temple of Zeus and the Nike can match. The statue is blocked off from the visitor’s sight by a wall right until you are just about to come to it, thus increasing the sense of in-your-face, suprise and holiness — it is so special that it needs to be shielded and protected, and we have to be visually prepared for such a masterpiece. At the same time the suddenness of the sculpture also makes the visitor instinctively and solely admire the intrinsic beauty of the sculpture without being caught up in information about it — a typical technique for masterpieces. The sculpture is so special that you cannot simply approach it immediately. You need to walk up a long corridor, while all the way your gaze is directed upwards towards the sculpture, raised on an modern pedestal, in a position of assumed dominance. While you gaze at it, you may just miss the information panel on the left wall of the corridor. There is only the bare essentials on it; the font is big and paragraphs are concise — you are expected to recognise that this is a masterpiece and needs little explaining — you should focus on how it evokes a purely human reaction. Its mastery lies in that it reaches out to all races with the same sense of awe and beauty. There is no information within the actual room — that space is too holy and solely for viewing. As you enter the room, the idea of the statue’s preciousness and the awe that it requires from you is stunningly reinstated by separating you from it by four boundaries: first a short metal fence, then a slightly raised floor, then a sort of ditch in the floor which creates an island for the sculpture, and finally stands the sculpture on a raised pedestal (was the sculpture actually found on a pedestal?). The sculpture is given yet more room by the quadrilateral dome which crowns the sculpture, letting natural light complement with the artificial. This idea of separation and distance between you and the masterpiece, of segregating the profane viewer from the sacred imagination space, is very effective. It mixes simplicity and yet complex, implicit forces of superiority of the sculpture. This greatness of the sculpture is visually enhanced by the 10 lights beaming down on the sculpture that bring out the glossy effect of the shiny marble, making it whiter and so more pure and precious in our eyes. The monochrome, warm red colour on the background focuses our attention solely on the statue and gives it a delicious flavour, while the white side walls complement the bright white of the sculpture. Most importantly, the space invites you to move around (while keeping your distance from this example of perfection) and admire the sculpture from its infinite angles — so something is preserved from the Hellenistic age. Perhaps even the two black CCTV cameras against the white wall, also placed symmetrically so as not to disturb the holy balance of the sculpture.
It truly is portrayed as a masterpiece, definitely in layout and possibly in its composition, moreso than it was in the ancient world.
Thus, the Hermes of Praxiteles demonstrates how modern directors and archaeologists often appropriate the context and meaning of ancient sculpture through their display in museums. In observing how the directors have materialised their interpretation to a whole new level — in how they have displayed it as a masterpiece — we can see straight in the headlights the degree to which museums influence our own interpretations of remains and, subconsciously and consciously, lead us to misleading conclusions.
But what about when things get a bit more spicy, a bit more risky and dubious, and archaeologists start to meddle more with the nature and scholarship of the past? What do a Roman politician who masterly shifts his cultural identity whenever it requires him, a mysterious fountain, two headless statues and a beautiful bronze Artemis all have in common (sneak peak!)? What if the directors of the museum favour one reconstruction of a remain over others, give no indication that other, more valid interpretations exist, and worst of all do not provide up-to-date explanations? Now that would be very, very naughty. A step closer to lying. And a very interesting read! To find out and read the next section on the museology at the Olympia Museum, its problems and solutions, tune in again on Thursday solely on Ostraka.
Do you have a suggestion for a future topic? Do you have an idea to share with your friends? Send us a message and follow the Durham University Classics Society on Twitter (@DUClassSoc) and Facebook (@DUClassics Society) to keep up with this blog and our other adventures!
