Report

Mary Beard

Classics and the Art Museum: The Shock of the Old

Part of Center 45
Close to us, six people, all nude with light skin, stand or lie intertwined with snakes on a bank of rocks in this horizonal painting. Beyond them, the deep, distant landscape has a brown horse, tiny in scale, headed for a city of stone buildings beneath a vivid blue sky filled with twisting white clouds. The people’s bodies are sinewy and elongated, and their skin is painted in tones of ivory white, warmed with peach highlights and streaked with deep gray shadows. At the center, a man with a white beard and white, curly hair lies back on the charcoal-gray rock with his knees bent and his shins splayed out. With his body angled away from us to our right, he holds the body of a long, silvery-gray snake in his left fist, on our right, down by his hip. The snake curves behind the man’s body and he grips the snake behind its head. The man has high cheekbones and sunken cheeks, and rolls his eyes up and back to look at the snake, whose wide-open mouth nearly touches his hair. To our left, a cleanshaven young man stands with his body facing us but he arches back, holding an arcing snake in his hands. The young man’s right hand, on our left, bends at the elbow so he can grasp the snake’s tail and his other arm stretches straight back, holding the snake’s body as it curls around so its fangs nearly reach the young man’s side. To our right, next to the older man, a second, dark-haired young man lies on the rocks with his head toward us. His feet are on the ground, so we look onto the tops of his thighs. He lies with one hand resting on the ground, overhead. Three people seem to float, feet dangling, alongside the right edge of the painting. The person closest to us looks onto the writhing people in profile, back to us. A second person just beyond also looks to our left. A third head turns the opposite direction and looks off to our right. In the distance, the golden-brown horse is angled away from us, one front leg raised, on a path that moves from behind the rocky outcropping to the far-off town. Nestled in a shallow valley, buildings in the town are mostly painted with rose pink and red walls and smoke-gray roofs. The land dips to a deeper, green valley to our right, lining the horizon that comes two-thirds of the way up the composition. The standing people are outlined against the sapphire-blue sky and knotted, gray and white clouds.
El Greco, Laocoön, c. 1610/1614, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1946.18.1

The discipline of (ancient) classics can be dulled by its familiarity. In a cultural world where classical form has become a marker of conservative tradition, it can be difficult to reassert the radical novelty of the classics. The Shock of the Old—to steal the title of Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New (1980)—has become harder and harder to see and explain. The revolutionary quality of such statues as Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos (reputedly the first and truly shocking full-size female nude in the ancient Greek world) is now almost completely obscured by its stereotypical classicism, and by the look-alike statues, both ancient and modern, that line the walls of art museums (including the National Gallery) by the hundred—and across the world by the thousand.

The role of the classicist in an art museum is often now reduced to a “decoder,” the explainer of the more obscure reaches of classical iconography in postclassical painting, sculpture, and decorative arts, should anyone care to know. There is still to be sure some potentially significant work to be done here. Within the National Gallery’s own collection, the Laocoön of El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos, 1541–1614) has long puzzled art historians, who have tried to pin down exactly where El Greco’s version of this scene of the death of the Trojan priest came from—so different is it from the description in Virgil’s Aeneid, or the famous sculptural group excavated in 1506, now in the Vatican, which the artist had certainly seen. For a start, the Vatican figure is upright, whereas in El Greco’s painting Laocoön sprawls on the ground.
 

From high above the earth, we look onto a dramatically lit scene with a man falling from a horse-drawn chariot in midair, surrounded by eleven women against a bank of clouds in this horizontal painting. All of the people have pale skin and are illuminated by a bright burst of sunlight streaming across the scene from the upper right corner. The man is covered only by a burgundy-red sash that wraps across his groin and around one shoulder. He careens headfirst from the U-shaped, golden chariot with his chest facing us, arms flung overhead and legs splayed, to our right of center. The tumble of bodies around him includes four horses, three ivory white and one gray, and the eleven women, who are either nude or dressed in robes of parchment white, tan, slate blue, butterscotch yellow, steel gray, or rose pink. The women all have blond or brown hair, and some have wings like butterflies, patterned with circles and stripes. They fall alongside the man or float above the wreckage, their robes and hair billowing. Some of the women hold the red reins of the horses, though some of the reins stop abruptly or are painted over so they appear as dark lines beneath the surface. The nickel-gray clouds surround and support some of the women in front of a hazy circular arch curving up the left side of the composition. Peeks of sky around the action are deep aqua blue, and vibrant orange flames lick up from the earth in the lower right.
Sir Peter Paul Rubens, The Fall of Phaeton, c. 1604/1605, probably reworked c. 1606/1608, oil on canvas, Patrons' Permanent Fund, 1990.1.1

The question of artists’ sources is usually more complicated than it is made out to be. It goes without saying that “the source” is often an amalgam of a whole range of sources (plural), residing as much in the artist’s memory as in any material form. But in the case of the National Gallery’s Laocoön, I have been able to pin down more precisely links to the (almost parodic) version of the story in Petronius’s first-century CE Roman novel, Satyricon. The National Gallery’s X-rays and infrared images show clearly that at least one of the mysterious figures on the right of the canvas was originally wearing a wreath, matching Petronius’s description of “wreathed” priests looking on. Out goes, I think, earlier suggestions that they might be Adam and Eve, or Artemis and Apollo.

Fine, but none of that grips most visitors, who still struggle to see what is startling and “new” about these classicizing works of art. The challenge for any gallery is how to make such images seem new, important, and interesting again. Can that be done? And how? One test case is the National Gallery’s Fall of Phaeton by Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640). Visitors are drawn to this scene by the splendid mash-up of a chariot wreck and some assorted heavenly bodies. They don’t get much clue that this depicts a story, which Rubens took from Ovid (43 BCE–17/18 CE) in the Metamorphoses, telling of how Phaeton, son of the god of the Sun, persuaded his father to let him drive his chariot, and would have crashed it into the earth had not Jupiter “zapped” him with a lightning bolt first. And they get no clue that Ovid’s story is almost proto-environmentalist, as he reflects on how adolescent carelessness nearly burned up the earth. (That’s why the Seasons are in such a terrible state at bottom left.) Of course, Ovid’s ideas have no direct connection with modern ideas of sustainability. How could they? But can we see that Ovid and Rubens were asking some of our own questions, if in very different ways?

This is part of a wider book project, which I have nearly completed at the Center, to refocus our ideas of “classics now” and to wonder how art museums and others can contribute to that—and to wonder if, and how, we can ever recapture The Shock of the Old.

University of Cambridge (emerita)
Kress-Beinecke Professor, 2024–2025

Mary Beard will continue her work in Cambridge, refocusing ideas about the importance of classics and completing her book on why classics (still) matters.

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