A Caryatid Speaks (Part Two)

Arms turn into fins, and a woman floats above it all ...

There is an image from a museum built the early nineteenth century. A central rotunda, struck through with light. A colonnade with ionic capitals supports the dome. Between every column, a statue depicting a deity.

One of these is of a robed woman with a thin fabric covering her upper body. This fabric is delicately wrought so that it appears almost transparent. But it is made of marble. Body and fabric, hewn from the same substance. An achievement made ever more pronounced by the face that the statue appears to levitate. She is Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, and she is unmoored, floating, as if alive.

A Caryatid Speaks ...

We find many beginnings, each sprouting from a single story of an inanimate substance coming to life. But there is one particular branch that resonates for me in my own personal history. It is a tale of transformation, a change of state from human to animal, from inanimate to animate, or travels from the realms of the dead to that of the living. Behold Iacchus, sometimes a minor deity, other times a manifestation of Dionysus, the Greek god of drinking, ecstasy, and theatrical performance. Artists celebrated Iacchus, made his likeness from great stone massifs. Layers of stone sloughed off with each hammerfall. I shudder at the histories carried away with each strike. Take off a bit, and there goes a record of a drought, a memory once committed to stone, now forgotten. And yet stone has other purposes as well. Praxiteles sculpted a likeness of Iacchus, a statue so celebrated that it was made part of the cultic revelries in the temple city of Eleusis. The statue and its Eleusinian festivals are also parodied in Aristophanes’ The Frogs. And yet in Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses we get something of a backstory, something that tells us why we should care about the so-called “minor” deity. There is Iacchus, captured at sea by a band of Tyrrhenian pirates. He may be in a dire situation, but he is a fighter. And clever, too. About to be overrun, he closes his eyes and utters a brief prayer. When he opens his eyes, the Tyrrhenians have become scaly-skinned sea monsters. Some writhe in convulsions, not knowing what had just transpired. Others knew something was indeed transpiring. Something unusual.

Here is Lybis, a steersman. He may have lacked the words to describe what was happening, and thanks to Ovid’s verse, we have a vivid portrait of Lybis watching as his arm turns into a fin and then back into an arm … IN SPATIUM RESILIRE MANUS BREVE VIDIT … Such ferocious intensity! Plates, friezes, mosaics, and wall paintings all show Iacchus struggling, encircled by pirates in seas that range from calm to tempestuous. Yet the most dynamic and enthralling versions of these images begin to appear in printed books during the late 16th and early 17th century. In 1606, the Italian painter Antonio Tempesta engraved scenes from the poem for the publication of the Metamorphoseom Ovidianarum. A livewire of  energy otherwise untrammeled runs through Tempesta’s engraved lines. We see, for example, the Tyrrhenians caught in a mid-convulsive thrall just before making the final transition from human to animal. And pay special attention to the end result of this transformation, as some of the pirates have become snakes, and more importantly, dolphins. 

I see Lybis there, his fin has just turned back into an arm. And speaking of arms, ARMA VIRUMQUE CANO ... I sing of arms and the man ... so begins Virgil’s Aeneid with a capsule summary of sorts, a reminder that what you are about to read or listen to is epic entertainment, literally, spun whole cloth from the wildest tales and itineraries, some even conjured from histories communicated mouth to mouth, ear to ear. There are legendary battles and epic confrontations, palace intrigues roiling the house of the Roman Gods, all culminating in one of the most heartbreaking betrayals ever sung. The epic’s namesake, Aeneas, commits to his destiny to be the founder of Rome, and while doing so betrays Dido, the headstrong and just Queen of Carthage. Inconsolable and defiant, Dido lashes out at Aeneas before falling upon the sword she gave him as a gift. The Gods are also wracked by sorrow. Even wrathful and calculating Juno, who wanted to protect Aeneas by making Dido fall in love with him, is forlorn. She sends her messenger, Iris to hasten Dido’s passage into the underworld. Juno, in all her power, and filled with pity, sends Dido to her oblivion. Iris appears as a rainbow spilling light from heaven to earth. Hers is an act of mercy. But it is more than symbolic. It is as physical as a poke or a prod. It is a gesture meant to end Dido’s death throes, described by Virgil as arms flailing uncontrollably. Imagine the hesitation, the sorrowful gathering of the strands of Dido’s hair, the scene of emotional devastation brought quickly to an end by the slashing of a dagger that brings the whirling arms to their final stillness.

Focus on that image. Think it over. Think of memories of centuries past coming to life. We give these memories names, names of gods and goddesses, their families, heralds, and consorts—godly lives that are not extraordinary, but fallible and so recognizably human. We know their faces, their arms, their legs, their bodies through statues and stories, through images and words. They live not as physical beings, but rather as representations of life. They become alive with every retelling and rereading of a myth or epic, each recalling Galatea, the statue coming to life at the hands of Pygmalion. This too is covered by Ovid, in his Metamorphoses Pygmalion’s skill is remarkable, so much that it is not recognized. He even forgets that he has created something unreal. The statue is nameless until 1762, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes Pygmalion, a play based on Ovid’s tale. In the stage directions, Pygmalion appears more like a true sculptor and gives his act of creation a more laborious resonance. Pygmalion is torn between his adoration for the statue and his love for the art. Unlike Ovid’s Pygmalion, Rousseau’s is an artist fully aware of the implications of his work. And this is why he seems so troubled and hesitant to complete his act.

Dido’s death throes, Lybis’ fins, Lopez de Ayala’s alabaster hand: these are all stories that involve arms. Arms that throw. Arms that touch. Arms that strike. Arms with which Pygmalion and Galatea embrace each other, so when the initial lines of the Aeneid announce a song of arms and the man, they do so by announcing something that we all experience.

We speak as objects universally acknowledged as being mute—which is to say that we are understood as vehicles for the voice of the artist. So these stories and songs of arms are our bread and butter. This is how we reach out to the other side. We long for that moment where we can shed the burden of being an object to only move, to reach across, to touch. And thinking more on Galatea, some background is in order. Polyphemus, a cyclops, is jealous of Galatea’s lover, Acis, and strikes his head with a stone. Galatea transforms his blood into a river, and sensing her boundless grief, the gods transform her into a water deity.

I recall a painting of Raphael’s that shows Galatea as a water nymph. She levitates, hovering in a palpable tension between mortality and immortality. But take a closer look. Triumphant Galatea plies the glassy seas astride a paddled conch shell led by a pair of dolphins. The animals appear fierce, unrelenting. They are unbridled, biting into a set of leathery reins that seem to force their mouths open to reveal fearsome teeth. One of them gathers a font of sea foam in its mouth as if it were its quarry. And yet Galatea appears almost at ease, as if this scene were the most natural thing imaginable. Her hands betray a kind of poise that is as defiant as it is delicate: she holds on to the shuddering animals with the gentlest grip, as if the leathery reins were but wisps of hair. Her arms also appear to float ahead of her. Likewise, in Nicolas Poussin’s The Birth of Venus from 1636, Galatea also rides a chariot, and here she holds the reins with a remarkable lightness even if the dolphins are just as fierce. The difference lies not just in the orientation, but in the degree of thrall. Raphael’s Galatea is in the middle of an act of surrender. To what, we are not so sure. There are several rules of thumb from classical antiquity when it comes to dolphins. In some instances, they reflect a love of the sea. And depending on how many and on their orientation, they could mean other things. A pair of dolphins facing in the same direction, as in Raphael’s painting, are meant to suggest symmetry and beauty. This is not the case with Poussin’s dolphins, which appear coiled and submerged in the darkening waters, a scene that echoes Tempesta’s engravings depicting the fate of Lybis. In both of these, the dolphins are emblems for chaos.

Raphael’s dolphins, however toothy and fierce that may be, are almost flying over the water. Galatea appears to take in the scene with ease and levity … literally. Above the waves, Galatea floats. She floats. Look how she floats!