Material and intellectual consequences of esteem for Cycladic figurines

Gill and Chippindale follow what rising esteem for Cycladic figures as works of art has done to the figures themselves and to what can be known about them. They start from the distinction between connoisseurship, which values the object itself, and archaeology, which uses objects and their contexts to reconstruct past societies. From there they trace the history of collecting and the market, assess the known corpus and its provenance, and set out the material consequences for context and chronology. The intellectual consequences come last: attributions to named "Masters", proportional canons, and modern ways of displaying and describing the figures.

The evidence

Figures from excavated graves and settlements are set against those that surfaced through the art market. Table 1 collates cemetery excavations on Paros, Antiparos, Naxos, Amorgos and Syros with finds from Ayia Irini on Keos and Phylakopi, and these are contrasted with the many figures whose published histories give only an asserted or unknown provenance (pp. 609–613).

Tables 2–6 compare stated provenance and acquisition histories across exhibitions, collections and museums. The Keros deposit, claims of forgery, methods of examining marble surfaces and examples whose findspots shifted between catalogues all go into the assessment of how much about the corpus can be established (pp. 611–622).

For the attributions, the authors examine published typologies and Getz-Preziosi's groups of "Masters", and compare proposed proportional schemes with measured figures. Display position and traces of blue and red paint serve as evidence for the gap between ancient objects and modern presentation (pp. 636–647, 655–657).

The argument

Demand, they argue, has encouraged looting, uncertain or changing provenances and the appearance of possible forgeries. The resulting loss of context weakens the evidence for chronology, function and regional variation, and modern aesthetic ideas can shape accounts of prehistoric society (pp. 611–613, 629–630).

Only a small part of the known corpus has a secure archaeological context. From the ratios of graves to figures in excavated cemeteries, Gill and Chippindale estimate that the loss of unrecorded graves may have been extensive, while stressing that the calculation rests on uncertain totals and on assumptions about objects from Keros and possible fakes. Missing contexts, they conclude, prevent reliable tests of many proposed sequences, uses and regional patterns (pp. 624–629).

They question whether the evidence supports naming individual sculptors or a fixed system of canonical proportions. Few secure provenances exist against which to test the attributions, the independent evidence for them is lacking, and the suggested proportional rules are flexible enough that broad similarities in form establish neither an individual hand nor a deliberate mathematical scheme (pp. 636–647).

Gill and Chippindale describe upright display and the preference for whitened marble as modern conventions that can obscure other possibilities for how the figures appeared or were used (pp. 655–659).

Dating

Early Cycladic I, II and III phases appear in the discussion of figures and provenances. The sequence from Abstract through Hybrid, Precanonical and Canonical to Postcanonical is presented by Gill and Chippindale as a scheme that depends heavily on the limited number of figures from secure contexts, and the authors question whether stylistic progressions can fix chronology without stronger contextual evidence (pp. 627–629).