Male Harp Player of the Early Spedos Type, Getty Conversations
About this video
At the Getty Villa, two art historians look at a more than 4,000-year-old marble figure of a seated harp player from the Cyclades, a culture with no writing. They explain why male figures like this are rare, how its abstract, simplified forms inspired 20th-century artists such as Picasso, and how looting has erased the context we would need to know what it meant.
You'll be able to
- explain why Cycladic figures are hard to interpret, using the lack of writing and the loss of context from looting as evidence.
- describe what makes this harp player abstract rather than naturalistic.
- explain how historians decide the figure is male even though it shows no male anatomy.
Key words
- Cyclades
- A group of islands in the Aegean Sea, between Greece and Asia Minor.
- abstracted
- Simplified into basic shapes, leaving out realistic details such as muscles.
- naturalistic
- Showing the body or world the way it really looks.
- polychromy
- Painting a sculpture or building in several colours.
- oral tradition
- Stories and knowledge passed on by speaking and singing rather than in writing.
- looting
- Digging up and taking objects illegally, destroying the record of where they were found.
Transcript
We are in the Getty Villa, and we're looking at a really ancient sculpture. We're talking more than 4,000 years ago. This comes from the Cyclades. These islands in the Aegean. Usually, at this time in the third millennium, we're thinking about the cultures of ancient Egypt, we might think of a sculpture like the Seated Scribe, or we think about ancient Mesopotamia, perhaps the Standard of Ur. Both of those cultures had writing. Here we are in these islands in the Aegean, between Greece and Asia Minor, and this is the culture that didn't have a writing and produced these beautiful marble sculptures that we so much want to learn more about.
They speak to a culture that would have had oral traditions and stories, but we don't actually have the records to show it, so we only have the objects themselves. About 5 percent of the sculptures that come out of this area were male figures doing something, but 95 percent of what remains are female figures.
Most of the sculpture from this period shows women with their arms crossed. The fact that he's male is very rare. They're all doing some sort of active engagement, whether it's bearing a cup or playing instruments, or a little bit later, we have them wearing .
It really engages us, the way that he seems to have his chin lifted and is about to sing. Some of the figures seem to be actively playing the harp, but this figure seems to be at a moment of rest. We can almost hear him or the breath that he takes before beginning to sing.
It's hard to not think of Homer and the oral tradition of epic poetry, but it's not the best line to draw because this is so much more ancient than Homer. We've described him as male, but he has no obviously male attributes. This figure's very smooth, very abstracted. It's the activity that he's engaging in that defines his gender, and also, the fact that female figures from the same period did have their anatomy identified.
We think about Greek art and we go immediately to the male nude. There are many beautiful examples of that here at the Getty, but this is not in that very naturalistic tradition. This figure is very abstracted, and by that, I mean that the forms of his body are simplified, without any indication of musculature of the structure of the body.
We are seeing it today with all of its original polychromy gone, so that even simplifies it more. That simplicity was so exciting to artists in the 20th century that inspired these great works by Picasso and other artists who looked to antiquity and found these forms that felt modern.
It's worth mentioning, many Cycladic objects that you find in museums today are not from documented archaeological excavations. There was systemic looting in the 20th century, so this is something that archaeologists and art historians grapple with, is understanding their context, give that we have lost so much of that history. Is it a god? Is it an actual musician? Is it the deceased?
Whether they're deities or whether this represented a figure that would play the harp for a person in the afterlife, these figures had an important and unifying meaning to the people of the ancient Cyclades. These were very specific to this region. These island seafaring people who found ways to craft these beautiful marble sculptures from local materials.
This is the Bronze Age, so this is the beginnings of metallurgy. The sculpture would have worked with local minerals like obsidian, emery, pumice to carve this figure out of a block of marble. Imagine how easy it would have been to take a chisel and accidentally cut a little bit too much and lose that beautiful graceful arc of the top of the harp. This is an incredibly skilled artisan, and the resources of this culture are going into making the female figures and these male figures.
It really makes me want to know what he's singing, and who he's singing for.
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