II Freestanding Sculpture

Extract

In 2003, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Adolf Furtwängler was celebrated with an exhibition in his home town of Freiburg, accompanied by a memorial volume and an international symposium. His influence on Greek sculptural studies through emphasis on the search for individual craftsmen via Roman copies continues, particularly in Germany and the USA. The mystery of the ‘whodunit’ is still strong, and the cult of the creative artist is too deeply ingrained in our own thinking to be totally jettisoned for other, more impersonal considerations. There is such an innate desire to link a work of art to a name that, over the years, there has been a tendency to concentrate on the few names that have been vouchsafed to us from classical texts and the random discovery of inscriptions carrying the names of sculptors (the earliest dating from c.600 BC). Recent major exhibitions have centred round the sculptors Polykleitos, Praxiteles, and Lysippos, and there are studies that have highlighted the conjectural personalities of these and other named artists. Pollitt has declared his allegiance to this traditional approach:

Those who believe that ancient Greek art, like that of all other places and times, was the result of the insights, instincts, taste and choices of individual artists and not the product of impersonal, mechanical, evolutionary forces have good reason for wanting to carry on the tradition of Furtwängler.