After having been inspired by a journey to Greece, I delved into the history of statues, reliefs and marginally images, art. This post will summarize and conclude about the thoughts and take-aways I concluded from this. Statues and reliefs were an integral part of the ancient world. Together with images, they constituted a part of sedentiary societies until the invention of photography which changed everything. What we know of, what we experience when we visit museums and other places with statues is far from the experiences of ancient societies. We see the statues colorless, fragmentary, partly destroyed, utterly decontextualized and delocalized, and aggravatingly on the one hand our own scarce public statues here in Europe are mostly colorless and depict real people influencing our natural initial retro-inspired approach towards ancient statues, on the other those statues survival is heavily biased towards harder materials and less focussed places. All of this requires an effort of the mind if one is to understand the true place of statues and reliefs (maybe art or one function of it) as a whole. After study, I believe it is all antropologically connected, as a biological being one of our successes as a species was or is the capacity to care for our children long, maybe longer than needed, maybe much longer than other species, at least in theory and maybe as a group not only as individuals. Surely the human brain is so big that babies must be born early. This may have imposed a natural limit onto our brain sizes in the evolutionary moment that our brains still grew. 12 to 13 years until fertility is long, parenting doesn’t stop here, it is long even in the animal kingdom, there are some species with longer times until fertility, but as for parental care, humans are those animals at the top of the pyramid. It is one of our evolutionary characteristics, one which helped us rule and nowadays heavily destroy the world. And statues are a symptom for me. Now, connecting these two things may not be easy or obvious, but here is my thought. Parental care involves theory of mind. We need to put ourselves into the shoes of our offspring and for that matter of our partner if we want to win her or at least evaluate our actions and evaluate things in a way as if they would. When gathering food, we need to think about our offspring, gather that food, they can eat. Nowadays we gather food in a supermarket, but still we wouldnt buy chillis and beer, so the line of thought is basically still valid. We need to think about our offspring when they are not present and for sure other animals can. But maybe for us this ability is stronger, more in focus. When we choose what to wear for ourselves, we may think „what would XY think, or what status would it confer me, or attractivity, or would children like it,…“ Those kinds of thoughts may not only be offspring-related but also group-related, social animals interact. Comparatively in the animal kingdom, maybe this imagining the other-ability with many purposes is more sophisticated than in other species, I dont know. Maybe it is unique or unusual that we can develop a mechanism of thinking about others and detach this ability from concrete single individuals.
Maybe even develop into a sense of community, of being watched by someone, by the community mediated maybe through some fantastic entity such as a god or gods. Here, individual selection and group selection may come in, but this is not the focus of this article, it is just to say that whatever psychological ability to imagine someone watching one or evaluating ones actions, somehow also a consciousness [Gewissen] is a phenomenon which connects all of us, be they religious or not. This ability may be stronger than in other animals and it may be unusual to imagine non-existent beings. Although even this could well be present in animals. Marauding apes invading enemy territory may imagine the enemy group without knowing the individuals.
The ability however is, I believe a heavily characteristic one for our species comparing us to other animals and it is my belief that art and especially the production of statues is intricately connected with this ability. Watching a statue, maybe with exaggerated features such as size or impeccable skin is impressive. Statues do not occur in nature. We can see trolls in the stones of Iceland and animals in clouds, but seeing (statues of) actual people and other entities are a uniquely human experience and thus also one way in which we shape the world to become a place with evolutionary influences on ourselves which have never been seen. Statues have been such an influence and I would argue one, which interacted with this human ability to imagine the other partly at least to the benefit of our children. Because of the physical dominance being on average taller and stronger and the resulting political and societal dominance of the male gender, especially for statues, which require strength in order to produce them and financial resources, art history should be biased towards males intentions and male production, maybe more so than painting. Why then don’t we see only nude female statues. First, they are there and in the stone age almost all of those portable smaller statues are exclusively nude females. Second, it would not enhance the male mating success to display nude females probably and societal acceptance of statues is also rather dependent on both genders. In any case, there are many nude or partly nude female statues in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome. Rather putting a little pressure on woman as towards beauty ideals could work better but I do not suspect conscious or direct intent at all in statue carving. Goethes Pygmalion is also an interesting story about the undesired effects such statues could have. Many statues seem to be at least slightly idealized, which will have many reasons but also an effect. Like portraits in the late middle ages, kings and queens may have wanted to be depicted more ideal. And ugly features may also be harder to carve anyway, a bend nose is harder to carve than a straight one.
Thus, since, and I apologize if for some those views seem overly traditional, there is reason for believing in this, since females tend to care more for children whilst men tend to care more for females, statues of children are rarer than they would be maybe, had females had more say in the production of (ancient) statues. And still I believe that the effect of statues on man is connected with parental care even though children’s statues are a subordinate object in this art. It is also clear that caring for the statue of a child would be somehow counterproductive. However, seeing a statue with superhuman features may activate the feeling of being watched, not always pleasant – especially the deadness, coldness of the statues give it a creepy element at some point, which can be eased by a smile or other features or which may well intentionally be used, maybe especially to instill fear and respect of the ruler. If you were surrounded by stories of ancient gods all the more. You might see a huge Zeus statue and the next time you hear a story of that guy remember his face as that of the statue you saw and by this token he is animated in your thoughts more than he might be without. This kind of interaction would be the one I imagine of statues in the ancient worlds connecting them with the general human ability of imagining non existent people and ultimately parental care.
We produced statues because we could, then with them in place, a new evolutionary token, we kept learning by doing, we accommodated this new evolutionary token, we experimented with it and this is precisely what the ancient world did. They first produced many of these statues and thus enabled their evolutionary influence and interaction with our minds and foremost the ability of imagination of the other, of the community, of the patrons. A patron who is more present in the minds is more powerful. In almost all ancient societies where stories were still the mode of knowledge transmission, statues targets often belonged to some story canon, an imaginary world beyond the true world and many of the entities statues depicted belonged to such an imaginary world, be it a world above the sky or the imagined afterlife. So the ability to imagine a real other enhanced towards the ability to imagine maybe a deceased other and then independently some imaginary other and in a side-plot so to speak imaginary worlds. Statues promoted an obsession with such worlds and indeed interacted with them also by the way of rituals. The human experimentation with this new evolutionary influence included many reactions, from the complete rejection of idolatry in some book religions to different configurations of worship rituals of statues in various forms, political will by the ruling classes for it is them who influence the new technologies and evolutionary tokens most.
Romans used statues and reliefs under more for propaganda and documentation of historical events, viewed from the winners perspective. Egyptians were obsessed with the afterlife which was in a way their equivalent to the Greeks mythical component of the world. Both canons of stories of an imaginary world which intersected with the real world through statues. These imaginary worlds, too, may be connected with parenting, but less so, than statues effects. They served more and also other educational and knowledge preservational purposes, which statues would not be able to fulfil. Yet the imagination of non-existent or non present/extant beings is something which art enhances, maybe enables and there it necessarily intimately is connected with such story canons as is theatre and religious ritual. Maybe modern art is a symptom of emancipation away from such connections and towards an art which is nothing but art. The non-existenciality of those entities which is a thing that is unreal, doesnt this augment the capacity of thinking about the other in the real world, because it augments the time, when we think about others be they imaginary or not? In the end, evolution will answer this question and those things even if invented, introduced and experimented upon by humans themselves, those things which are ineffective, will disappear or take a more marginal position. The long evolution of statues was interrupted by the invention of photography, then film and now with image generators such as Midjourney or Dall-E man has again reshuffled the niche negotiating process of new technology. Statues had come to be aesthetic enhancers in Renaissance Europe, a nice to have, a nice to see, no religious worship apart from the many Marys and Jesusses, yet less obsessively used than in antiquity, it seems to me. Leaders statues have still been used as a means of propaganda and political enhancement and in the Buddhist world statues are still places of worship and the manifestation of the otherworld, similar in Hinduism.
For me thus, statues are enhancers of the ability to imagine others and ultimately of parental care because for parental care we need to imagine the other, parental care also may begin with courtship before the baby is even born. In the ancient worlds the encounter with statues must have been much more frequent and no museum allows to date, I think, a glimps of the effect of such frequent encounters which must have been a part of life in antiquity. Encounters with impeccable, almost humans, larger or smaller, chimera, animal-human hybrids, colorful, from precious materials such as gold and ivory, not only with a dead guy on a cross which often doesn’t even look at you. If we lost them so much, could also mean, we do not need them so much. But, why dont we recreate such an old temple or area with many such statues, … and another thing is that toys always include and from antiquity included human figurines, they still do. What are those but statues, small statues, dont we already learn the ability of parenting as children with statues, so maybe they have not disappeared entirely and are tokens of evolution having become a stable part of our early-childhood education and play. No ape, no elephant baby I have seen play with twigs configured to represent their kind, but maybe that would also be too high an expectation, for for studying and comprehending some evolutionary processes, we cannot turn to our animal kin, because we are the only ones having them, but this doesnt mean we are not animals or any more and it doesnt mean imaginary worlds exist apart from in their effects on us.
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