Week 3: Hellenistic Portraits I: The Ruler Portrait

Andrew Stewart, "Approaches" in Faces of Power (Berkeley 1993), 56-70

*Portraits of Alexander the Great were commissioned by him or others to serve as testimony of his unprecedented power;

* Portraiture was the closest thing to a mass medium in ancient society; Weber's definition of charisma (and all the conditions that should be met in order to consider a subject truly charismatic) applies well to Alexander and his monuments/portraits;

* Many of Alexander's portraits should be read in both a) a naive level, or one that understands the object as it is and b) a critical level, or one that appreciates the way in which the object was made;

* Greek Portraiture emerged as a genre during the fifth century; prior to this period, the canonical portrait differed little in principle from a kouros or an athlete (in both cases, the sculptor seeks to find the typical or general in the individual and to establish him as a paradigm of the social values with which the individual is aligned via the portrait); portraits seek to convey what society appreciated as permanent values (and to achieve this, the sculptor often ignored individual physical qualities or character traits);

* Portraits are simultaneously a) iconic (they resemble what they represent), b) indexical (they call attention to all aspects of the subject's personality) and c) symbolic (they place the subject within a social and historical context);

* Umberto Eco's comments on portraiture compels the viewer to approach the objects as culturally-coded objects with a (contextualized) past and a future;

* Like literary portraits, those cast in stone or bronze should be approached as constructs, with conventionalized associations between appearance and character;

Paul Stanwick, "A unique vantage point" in Portraits of the Ptolemies (Austin 2002), 1-5

* Ptolemies were deeply connected to the Hellenistic empires and were, at times, both enemies and allies of the Roman empire;

* Their rule led to the development of many portraits, many of a propagandistic nature;

* The most distinctive aspect of this period was the blend of Greek and Egyptian cultures;

* Alexandria quickly became the most important center of Mediterranean culture, emerging as a great metropolis;

* Friedrich W. von Bissing studied, for the first time, sculptures from this period and differentiating those with purely Egyptian features from those with Greek influences; several studies and exhibitions have attempted to address these scultptures, though the author contends that the most comprehensive studies have come from classicist scholars studying the pieces from a Greek perspective (though their perspective led to an incomplete understanding of the Egyptian nature of the material, which is strongly rooted in native conventions despite its distinctly Greek features);