Epilogue

The glory of comparative conversation is the way that it exposes our most deeply-held assumptions. All of us, prior to the conversations that resulted in this volume, had surely used the term “figurine,” unquestioned and unproblematized, in our teaching and writing. And equally surely, other specialists in our respective geographic and chronological subfields knew exactly what we meant. But in speaking to each other across the boundaries of time and place, it became clear that we did not mean the same thing at all, and that for each of us, the boundaries around the category of the figurine were much more porous than we had imagined....

Shifting Scales at La Venta

This chapter explores figurines in a variety of media from the Olmec sacred site at La Venta. It examines the scaled relationships within a series of figurines: all are by definition small, but they are not equally small, something that can be hard to keep in mind when we usually see figurines in relative isolation or as disembodied images on page or screen, abstracted from all scaled referents. Crucial is that Mesoamerican figurines are almost universally scaled to the human body, so that they can be grasped with a single hand. Many bear patterns of wear corresponding to sites of repeated touch. Touch was fundamental to the making of figurines, and also to their subsequent use: many cannot stand independently, and instead require a kind of affective caretaking. These issues have fundamental significance for the play of scales at La Venta, where many monumental art forms, from pyramids to stelae, also engaged with matters of scale.

The Death of the Figurine: Reflections on an Abrahamic Abstention

This chapter explores an evidential absence, arising from a striking archaeological fact. In all the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean, including Egypt and north Africa, of the near East at least as far as India, both prehistoric and historic, from the earliest Palaeolithic to the end of pre-Abrahamic pagan polytheism in the western half of this vast geography spanning the Mediterranean and Asia, the figurine is a prime and ubiquitous product of material culture, with huge attestation in the archaeological record; with the rise to hegemony of Christianity and then Islam, this phenomenon ends and we witness the near-universal death of the figurine in the archaeological archive across the vast geography that came to be dominated by the Abrahamic religions. Why? The chapter examines the ideological transformations that came to effect such fundamental change on the archaeological archive.

Small Wonders Figurines, Puppets, and the Aesthetics of Scale in Archaic and Classical Greece

This chapter addresses the aesthetics of smallness with regard to material from Archaic and Classical Greece (roughly, from the late eighth to the late fourth centuries BCE). It sketches a range of historical possibilities to relate ancient Greek concepts of scale and likeness to the research protocols of art history and archaeology. It explores the ancient concepts and corpora, with two propositions: 1. that smallness in Archaic and Classical Greece could be wonderful, in that it could make a work of craft what the Greeks called a thauma idesthai, “a wonder to behold for itself and oneself”; 2. to show that the comparativist method to accommodate ancient categories in a modern disciplinary infrastructure requires an eclectic and egalitarian approach to evidence that combines archaeological taxonomy with the reading habits of philology and art history, corpus scholarship with close looking.

Thinking Through Scale: The First Emperor’s Sculptural Enterprise

This chapter confronts the problems of the terminology of “figurine” and that of “yong,” the ancient Chinese word always used to translate “figurine.” Yong does not imply miniature size necessarily and is defined by funerary functions. The issues are exemplified through discussion of the sculptural projects of the First Emperor, including his larger-than-life golden statues in bronze and the famous terracotta army and other sculptures of his mausoleum, including scaled miniatures. The chapter simultaneously confronts the issue of the figurine in the specific context of the third century BCE and explores the problems in using this European concept for the study of non-European art.

Introduction

This book has three purposes. First, it is an attempt to put on the table the category of the figurine as a key conceptual and material problematic in the art history of antiquity. It does so through comparative juxtaposition of close-focused papers drawn from deep art-historical engagement with specific ancient cultures, all but the last from the first millennium BCE; the cultures addressed being ancient Greek, ancient Chinese, Mesoamerican before the arrival of Europeans, and Roman in late antiquity. Second, in doing so, and alongside other books in this series by the same authors, it makes a claim for comparative conversation across the disciplines that constitute the art history of the ancient world, through finding categories and models of discourse that may offer fertile ground for comparison and antithesis....