Tanagra figure
As Tanagra figures antique be made of terracotta molded and fired female characters in a sitting or standing posture of 15 to 35 cm height from the Boeotian city Tanagra in Central Greece , respectively. The coroplasty served as grave goods and good luck charms.
history
Isolated terracotta girl figures of this kind ( Koren from ancient Greek: αἱ κόραι "the girls") were already known from excavations in other places, but hardly considered archaeologically. The interest of archeology and the art market was only aroused in 1874 and after, after a farmer plowing his field discovered a burial ground in the necropolis of Tanagra and a considerable number of these well-preserved terracotta figures were discovered. In the same year a first publication appeared about it. The miniature figures have since been named after their place of discovery Tanagra, a small ancient town in the Asopos valley in Eastern Boeotia (Greece), today a ruin 40 km north-northwest of Athens and 25 km east of Thebes . In the 4th and 3rd centuries BC The figures were very popular with the Greeks and widely distributed in the Hellenistic cultural area through export. Due to their popularity, there were also other production facilities, such as in Alexandria , Taranto and Myrina . The origins of the figures go back to at least the 5th century BC. BC back. Evidence for this is the Boeotian poet Korinna , who at this time wrote a song of praise in Boeotian language to the women of Tanagra, her hometown:
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Description, meaning and manufacture
The small terracotta figures almost without exception represent elegant women who corresponded to the ideal of beauty and the fashion of the time. The robes, some of which have splendid folds, are elegant and often wrapped tightly around the body, the hairstyle, albeit sometimes veiled, is aristocratic and elaborately coiffed. The accessories - for example valuable earrings or fans, also pointed hats - complete the impression. There were also a few figures of gods among them, such as B. Aphrodite.
It is not known today why such untypical figures were created in Tanagra so early in history, compared to the living conditions there. In the small, rather rural town, the inhabitants were certainly much more simply dressed and coiffed than the urban women of Athens or, later, Alexandria . It would shed a new light on the Boeotians' reputation for being not very art-friendly and always anti-Athenian.
Since they were originally intended as grave goods for women who died early, it is assumed that each figure functioned as an ideal or ideal of a perfect woman - beautiful, wise and gifted in the arts - and should also stand by the dead in the underworld. The possibility of a votive offering is also considered. In the Greek world, the goddess Aphrodite was the ideal of female beauty, the nine muses the standard of education for music , science, rhetoric , sculpture , painting , calligraphy and the wealthy, aristocratic Athenian women the standard of fashion for appearance, hairstyle and clothing. The living women, especially in Athens, also used the figures as talismans and good luck charms , which they always had near them. Loss and destruction were considered bad luck. They were presented to them as children and had them as companions to the grave.
The production of the Tanagra figures was done professionally and almost industrially according to the artist (old Greek κοροπλάστης - puppet maker) prefabricated wooden molds, possibly based on living models. As with large figures (compare the Chinese terracotta army ), the head was made separately and burned, later placed on the finished body and glued with clay. In some cases, arms protruding from the body were also burned individually. The gases from the fire escaped from the hollow interior of the closed figure through a mostly rectangular small opening in the back, which was supposed to prevent the work of art from cracking or tearing due to the expanding hot air. After cooling, the figures were given a white primer coat, which allowed them to be artistically painted after drying. With some figures, this primer caused large areas of paint to flake off. The pigments have survived the ages in many cases and radiation after appropriate treatment of the finds in almost its original splendor. Some large museums such as the Louvre in Paris , the British Museum in London , the Berlin Collection of Antiquities , the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg and the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria exhibit several of the figures.
reception
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke created a poetic monument to the figures by praising the beauty of the small terracottas in his poem Tanagra , written in Paris in 1906 . The term can also be found in Oscar Wilde's work. He compared the main character Mabel Chiltern in An Ideal Husband to a “ Tanagra statuette ”. The “Tanagra motif” appears several times in the late work of the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme . His life-size marble nude Tanagra was one of the sensations at the Paris Salon of 1890. The highly detailed personification of the ancient city holds a terracotta figure on the outstretched left palm; Next to the pedestal on which she sits is a pickaxe and a Tanagra statue that protrudes half out of the ground, indicating the archaeological context. In the 1890s, Gérôme presented himself in a self-portrait while working on this sculpture, two further pictures show his idea of an ancient Tanagra studio, in which the figures were painted in color and sold to customers over the counter. In general, the graceful and lively polychrome antique figures spoke to the refined taste in art of the fin de siècle , and the strongly competitive demand among museums and private collectors led to the reproduction, but also the production of forgeries. In 1891 Gustav Klimt took up the theme of the Tangra figurines as part of Greek antiquity and Egypt for the interior of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in his intercolumnium picture Mädchen von Tanagra . In 1901 Elliott Daingerfield painted the oil painting Tanagra .
Individual evidence
- ^ The gusset and intercolumned pictures in the stairwell of the KHM. Article by Hedwig Abraham on the website of the Viennatouristguide, July 2002.
literature
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Gerhard Kleiner : Tanagrafiguren. Research on Hellenistic art and history. de Gruyter, Berlin 1942 (Yearbook of the German Archaeological Institute, supplement 15)
- New ed. by Klaus Parlasca with the assistance of Andreas Linfert . de Gruyter, Berlin 1984. ISBN 3-11-008982-3 .
- Simone Besque: Catalog raisonné des figurines et reliefs en terre-cuite grecs, étrusques et romains . Vol. 3: Époques héllénistique et romaine Grèce et Asie Mineure . Édition de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris 1972.
- Gerhard Zimmer , Irmgard Kriseleit , J. Cordelia Eule: Bürgerwelten . Hellenistic clay figures and replicas in the 19th century. State museums in Berlin, Prussian cultural heritage, collection of antiquities, special exhibition 29.1. until April 30, 1994. Zabern, Mainz 1994. ISBN 3-8053-1639-9 . ISBN 3-8053-1627-5 (numerous contributions to the Tanagra figures).
- Violaine Jeammet (Ed.): Tanagra. Myth et archeology; Musée du Louvre, Paris, September 15, 2003 - January 5, 2004; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, 5 février - 9 may 2004. Ed. de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris 2003. ISBN 2-7118-4590-7 .
- Violaine Jeammet (Ed.): Tanagras. De l'objet de collection à l'objet archéologique. Actes du colloque organisé par le Musée du Louvre à la Bibliothèque Nationale de France on November 22, 2003. Picard, Paris 2007. ISBN 978-2-7084-0793-0 . ISBN 978-2-35031-096-1 .
