There is no shortage of things that could be described as beautiful in the Museum of Cycladic Art, and indeed other sites and museums across Athens. The art of ancient Greece continues to attract many admirers. For some – including modern artists like Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Amedeo Modigliani, and Ai Weiwei – it is the striking Early Bronze Age sculpture of the Cycladic Islands, with its elegant female figurines, that appeals. For some, it is the energetic leaps of Minoan frescoes and rings, and for others the grand monuments of Classical Athens, like the Parthenon and Erechtheion, that still dominate the city.
Even within antiquity, the beauty of the earlier Greek past was admired. Classical Greek sculpture was held in great reverence, with copies commissioned by Romans. Even better than a copy was the real thing, highly desired by Roman collectors wealthy enough to buy and transport works of art in marble and bronze. One exquisite example of this collection practice and taste for the antique comes from the 2nd-century AD Roman villa of Herodes Atticus in the Peloponnese. It is a marble sculpture of a Laconian maiden, frozen in a moment of movement as she leaps in dance, her left foot leading, her right thigh emerging from her characteristic Laconian peplos with a high slit that allows for easier mobility, and her mantle flowing down behind her. Her whole body is engaged in movement, and with it her swirling clothing. The large fold of the peplos that falls around the waist is caught in mid-air, lifted by the rushing movement. On her head there is a hole thought to be for a kalathiskos, a basket-like headdress worn by dancing women in some depictions.
The dancing Lakania probably originally stood on the Acropolis in Athens, and was sculpted around 420 BC, centuries before it graced Herodes Atticus’ villa. The work is attributed to the sculptor Kallimachos, who also produced marble reliefs of dancing Maenads for an Athenian monument to Dionysos or a theatrical context. He was believed by the Roman architect Vitruvius to be the inventor of the Corinthian capital, distinguished by its ornate acanthus leaves. Kallimachos’ Maenads were copied many times and the Lakania adorned a Roman household (while the Corinthian column, whether invented by the same sculptor or not, spread far and wide), so his work clearly remained of value. Though, as is normally the case, even this treasured art was not beyond critique. For his overly refined execution, he was known as catatexitechnos, ‘he who enfeebles his art by excessive polishing’.
