Reimaging the lost masterpieces of antiquity

For centuries there has been a note of yearning in our feelings about ancient Greek and Roman art. We can’t help mourning for what has irretrievably vanished. In 1764 Johann Joachim Winckelmann wrote that we have ‘nothing but a shadowy outline left of the object of our wishes, but that very indistinctness awakens only a more earnest longing for what we have lost’. In the same spirit, Power and Pathos, an exhibition of Hellenistic bronze sculpture at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, begins with an empty plinth.

It is the marble base of a statue, found in Corinth, on which are written the words ‘Lysippos made [this]’. The inscription is poignant for a series of reasons. The statue that once stood on that plinth has disappeared, probably melted down more than a thousand years ago. So has every other bronze made by Lysippos, of which there were — according to Pliny the Elder — once some 1,500. And Lysippos (born around 390 BC), by the accounts of Pliny and other ancient authors, must have been one of the greatest sculptors who ever lived, an artist who — like Michelangelo and Bernini — fundamentally changed the art he practised.

That, in a way, is what Defining beauty: the body in ancient Greek art at the British Museum begins and ends by doing. It has two of the most powerful first and last rooms any exhibition of classical sculpture can ever have mustered. It starts with a juxtaposition that would have blown Winckelmann’s mind, and finishes with one that would have given Michelangelo Buonarroti food for serious thought.We are in the odd position with Lysippos, and just about every other notable figure in ancient art, of having the art criticism and history but not the art. It is as if the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Fra Angelico and all the Renaissance masters had been destroyed in toto, leaving just the writings of Vasari and Bernard Berenson (plus a scattering of more or less mediocre later copies).