A New Analysis of Major Greek Sculptures in the Metropolitan Museum: Petrological and Stylistic

Abstract

Interest in the provenance of ancient marbles used in Greek and Roman sculpture is long-standing, going back to the very foundation of the study of ancient art, Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity, published in 1764. In Part 1 of this seminal text, the German scholar addresses the materials selected by Greek sculptors in two important passages. In the introductory chapter, which discusses the origin of art and the reasons for its diversity among peoples, Winckelmann proposes a line of development for ancient sculptors’ materials that begins with clay and gradually progresses to wood and ivory, and finally to stone and metal. In Chapter 4, on the art of the Greeks, section 4, devoted to the “Mechanical Part of Greek Sculpture,” he addresses first the materials in which Greek sculptors worked and then the manner of their workmanship. In the passage, Winckelmann begins — in keeping with the taste of his time — with marble, and he not only presents the relevant literary sources but also discusses the qualities of different kinds of marble, including texture, consistency, and color. He focuses on marble from the island of Paros but also mentions Thasian, Pentelic, and Carrara marble. He explores the correlation between the qualities of these marbles and their different workabilities and appearances, thus proposing a strong connection between the material and the aesthetic quality of ancient sculpture.1 After such a start, it would seem inevitable that the identification of the marbles used in antiquity would have been a constant concern of both historians of ancient art and archaeologists. However, it was not until more than one hundred years after Winckelmann that the German geologist Richard Lepsius developed the first scientifically correct approach, one that can unreservedly be defined as archaeometric in the strict sense of the term.2 Archaeometry is a rather new science, officially dating to the end of the 1950s when the University of Oxford’s Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art began publishing a bulletin for the purpose of “fostering the close integration between the physical sciences, archaeology, and art history.”3 The bulletin soon became Archaeome try, an international journal now published six times a year that reports on the applications of scientific disciplines, such as biology, chemistry, physics, geology, and informatics, to archaeology, architecture, and art. Among other topics, its contributors discuss methods for determining the age and authenticity of all kinds of artifacts, the nature of their materials, and their sources and manufacturing techniques. One important application of archaeometry concerns marbles.4 Technically, marbles are pure carbonatic (calcitic or dolomitic) rocks with a carbonatic content that is usually well in excess of 95 percent. These rocks are crystalline; they may be white or gray, more rarely black, red, or green; and they will have been produced by contact or regional metamorphism. Marbles are quite common throughout the Mediterranean area. We know when some of them were first used by builders and sculptors, and we have information from various sources that enables us to reconstruct at least a partial picture of their distribution and the ways they were traded and transported. In most cases, however, we know very little, mostly because of the fundamental difficulty of reliably identifying marbles when they are found in use as structural or decorative members of ancient buildings, or as sculptures, or when they have been reused in medieval or Renaissance monuments. A New Analysis of Major Greek Sculptures in the Metropolitan Museum: Petrological and Stylistic