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An alleged Archaic Group
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
Extract
‘The critics who have brought forward such arguments will, it is to be hoped, soon come to realise that once the sculptures can be openly submitted to the judgment of science, ill will it go with a scholar's reputation if his doubts of their genuineness are known.’ With such quasi-papal thunder does a certain professor conclude his six-hundred-word panegyric of the group recently published by Studniczka (Fig. 1). True, that at the time he wrote he had not seen the group. But since he goes on to declare that ‘in dealing with works of this quality the judgment of style made possible by good photographs is even more important than the observation of technical details on the marble itself,’ I do not hesitate to put forward a study based on such observation. For although judgment on aesthetic grounds is important, it has no ulterior sanction; and if I say—as I think—that the piece of sculpture is ugly and not of ancient style, this opinion may have as much or as little validity as the professor's, that the sculptor was a late archaic Greek and one who could hold his own with the best of his period.
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- Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1930
References
1 ‘Hoffentlich kommen auch die Fachgenossen, die solche Gruende vorgebracht haben, bald zur Einsicht, denn wenn die Sculpturen einmal dem Urteil der Wissenschaft oeffentlich unterbreitet werden koennen, wird es fuer den Ruf eines Gelehrten nicht guenstig sein, wenn bekannt wird, dass er die Echtheit angezweifelt hat.’
2 Jahrbuch, 43 (1928), pp. 140 ff. The present owner of the group, with characteristic generosity, has given his consent to this publication, though knowing it to be hostile.
3 ‘Bei Arbeiten dieser Qualitaet ist die Beurteilung des Stils, die durch gute Aufnahmen ermoeglicht wird, auch wichtiger als die Beobachtung technischer Einzelheiten am Marmor selbst.’
4 ‘Jedenfalls konnte er mit den Besten seiner Zeit aufnehmen.’
5 What remains is a channel with a series of partly abraded holes within it. These were made by the point of the drill, and were not quite smoothed away by the sculptor in finishing. The edges of the drapery of the central figure of Plate (f) show the same process, but here some of the walls dividing the drill-holes still remain. The process is that normally employed in the frieze of the Parthenon.