Art in Focus: Nike Adjusting Her Sandal, plaster cast

Good morning, or I guess good afternoon, as the bells on Fairfield's campus are ringing the 12 o'clock hour. Welcome back to our fall 2023 Art in Focus series. And we are beginning this series of events with a purely virtual event. So unusually, if you've watched any of our art history, our Art in Focus sessions before, typically I'm able to bring in some questions about our focus object that were raised by our in-person guests at 11 a.m. in the galleries downstairs. But today it is just me and you on the World Wide Web. So if you're watching and you have observations or questions, please do drop them into the chat so we can make this a conversation. Our focus object this morning, or should I say this afternoon, is one I chose in part because it is not one that would lend itself well to an in-person Art in Focus event. And I will show you why on our next slide. This is our subject installed right downstairs. So I'm in a conference room on the second floor of Bellarmine Hall at Fairfield University. And in our lower level, where the museum's Bellarmine Hall galleries are, we have our historic plaster cast collection, part of it, installed in the hallway. And you see the light there at the end is leading out into a side parking lot. Our cast is the one immediately to the left, but I'm going to virtually move us around it. And I'll come back to these images in a moment. If you might see, there's a staircase coming just down next to this cast. So it would be a little bit challenging given that the museum classroom is always in use. In fact, Dr. Katherine Schwab, our resident Greek specialist, is teaching in there at this very moment, which is why I'm not broadcasting from the museum classroom. We have our galleries, although the lights are not on at the other end of the hallway. So this is how many people are entering this space. It wouldn't really be very easy for us to put a group of people on stools in front of our plaster cast. So why not have her join us virtually only online? And I'll come back to the slide that has a quite long looking caption accompanying it. But I would wager that many people who have a passing familiarity with great monuments of Western art history have seen this image before, have recognized it from some other context, because it is one of the most enduringly popular examples of the classical ancient Greek style of art. Of course, we are looking not at a marble original, but rather at a plaster cast in the collection of Fairfield University. The title of it is either known by its more descriptive title of Nike Adjusting Her Sandal, or more commonly referred to by the nickname of the Sandalbinder. The original was made in the early 5th century BCE, and it is a plaster cast after a pentelic marble original that you can go and see today. If you are visiting Athens and you're visiting the Acropolis Museum, that's where the original is held. And if you know anything about Fairfield's historic plaster cast collection, we have more than a hundred. Only a few are on display downstairs. The others are around campus, some are in storage. Many of them arrived at Fairfield in the 1990s as long-term loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But this one, as you can see from the caption, is a relatively recent arrival. It was donated to us in 2010, coming right from the Acropolis Museum in Athens. So it's a wonderful object to have here at Fairfield. And yeah, it's just, it's also a really beautiful object. So if you have immediate questions or immediate observations about this object that we are looking at, again, I invite you to drop them into the chat. I certainly have plenty because this is an object that is just so beautiful to look at. And again, it's something we literally, in the museum, we walk back and forth in front of it every day. And in preparation for this Art in Focus, it was a pleasure to just sort of stop in the hallway and remind myself to only look at this, to only focus on what we are seeing in front of us. And the miracle of a plaster cast is that it can help us travel imaginatively 4,000 miles across an ocean to visit an original in another museum. Obviously, the modern age gives us so many ways of making that journey. I could open up the Acropolis Museum's website right now and look at an image of their marble original. But plaster casts come to us from a time when it wasn't so easy to make that voyage, when there was, starting in the early 19th century, a strong desire in museums and among collectors in Europe and in the United States and elsewhere to build collections of three-dimensional sculpture of reliefs, like this one, something that's pushing out from a flat surface, and even of architectural ornament and bits of buildings, to build a collection of things you could not possibly possess. So these great museums of the imagination, where you had a perfect replica in cast and plaster that could give you a sort of access that your other options, a black and white photograph, even a color photograph, really just couldn't mimic. So what is it that we are actually looking at? What is our subject? I'm going back to the main image here. Well, you might immediately notice that we're looking at the image of a woman. We don't have her entire body. She's missing some key pieces. She has no head. Her left arm is broken off just below the elbow. Her right arm is concealed. It is, let's see if we can go move around in the other direction. You might be able to make out, it is still there. It's concealed behind her upraised right knee, and it's going down toward her raised right foot. Her left foot is a little bit difficult to distinguish. The sculpture breaks off there at the bottom. So she is incomplete. She is very much a fragment. And in fact, from the angle that we're looking at right here, you might notice that past the edge of the figure, there's a very clear sort of contour in the plaster, and it goes all the way down to the edge of the image, just skirting the edge of her foot. And that's marking where the original marble sculpture ends. In a few minutes, I'll show you an image of the marble original, but of course, we want to pay attention to the object that we have in our possession, this plaster cast. And when it was turned into a cast, they mounted it in this instance. They're not all the same. They put it in more of a rectilinear framework. So they made it much more even, easier to display, easier to transport, but that contour remains just as a hint to, here is where the original object ends. So we know she's a woman because we can very clearly see some feminine attributes showing through her clothing, which is in itself one of, I think, the things that draws people back to this sculpture, to the sandal binder. This incredible display of mastery of this classical Greek sculptor and being able to give you very clearly the sense that you are looking at a living, breathing woman's body with soft flesh underneath the drape of what appears to be very heavy, wet garments. And why do I say heavy, wet garments? Well, first of all, if you've studied art history and you've taken a class with Dr. Schwab or anyone else on Greek art, you've probably heard the term wet drapery, which art historians use to refer to what we're seeing here. Because if the fabric wasn't wet, is there any world in which we would imagine you could be fully clothed and yet your body could be completely revealed at the same time? So there's both a commitment to showing a woman clothed and yet the desire to also reveal what is underneath, implying that in some way the fabric has become diaphanous, that it has become translucent. And so wet drapery is the term that art historians use to describe this. This is not the only sculpture on which it appears. It's well-known in other classical Greek sculptures, but it is something that definitely draws the eye. And when I was discussing this sculpture with Dr. Schwab, she pointed out that because of where the sculpture, its original, came from, and I'll show you some images to get you to set the scene in your mind, it's not very far from the sea. And she said that archeologists will often joke that, oh, it's the wet sea air, the sea mist. That's what's drenching her clothes and rendering them so heavy and clinging to the body. But whatever the rationale for doing so, it's clear this sculptor wanted to demonstrate what he could do. And what he can do is, again, conjuring this ability to show a woman who's both clothed and not. And he's also depicted this individual in a very unusual pose. And again, I'm nodding to Dr. Schwab here, who said she always challenges students when they're looking at this object in class. And I'm going back to the full view. She asks them if they can take this pose themselves. So wherever you are, if you think you could balance securely, we have one foot seemingly, that is our left foot closest to us, seemingly on the ground. We see a slight bend in the knee, which we're able to see quite clearly because of the drapery clinging. But then her whole body is sort of twisted over as she's lifting the right knee and going down to her sandal. And the title of this, Nike adjusting her sandal. So she's doing something to her shoes. She's tying them. She's untying them, more likely untying them in the context of where this sculpture came from. But it's remarkable that she's not off kilter, right? She's balancing and leaning and also trying to undo the tie. I mean, there's no Velcro, right? So she's tying something with one hand. Even though her left arm is destroyed, we can see it wasn't holding onto anything. It was just in midair. And yet she does not seem in any danger of falling over. She has this incredible level of poise, even as she's caught in what could be a very ungainly situation. Even though there's no head, her head has been destroyed over time. There is the shape of sort of two of these voluminous appendages that are coming off of her back. And I wouldn't be surprised if you might not notice them at first because they literally don't stand out as much as the physical body herself. And showing you that from the side, just to get a sense, when we say relief, we're talking about something that pushes forward from a flat surface. And you can see the flat surface of the cast and then the body modeled forward in space. And at the upper corner here, you might be able to see how that shape is coming up and over her shoulder. And in fact, those are her wings. So the title of this work, Nike Adjusting Her Sandal, I know we're more used to saying that in the American pronunciation Nike, because they adopted the name of this Greek goddess of victory for a line of athletic shoes. But Nike is a victory figure and she's winged. So her wings are behind her, even though her head is lost. And she's caught, as we said, in this wonderfully dynamic position that could be unstable and yet somehow isn't. So here is the original marble sculpture of the sandal binder. When it's early fifth century, it's on view in Athens, as I said, in the Acropolis Museum. The Acropolis. I had a lot of fun looking for sort of reconstruction images of the Acropolis in Athens. Maybe some of you have visited there. Maybe some of you are hoping to visit there in the future. Yes, it doesn't look like what's on screen now today. It's in a slightly more, a greater state of disrepair. And I also laughed when I came into this conference room to set up for this Art in Focus, because I realized that above the fireplace behind me is a photograph of the Acropolis today. And the building from which our sculpture came is visible in it. And it's very, very, very small. But if you are not familiar with the structure in ancient Athens, this was the most sacred site of the city. Acropolis literally meaning the high city. So it's set on a plateau above the city and a whole group of sacred sites. Among them, the most important to the Athenians was the Parthenon that you can see in the background, the Temple of Athena, patron saint of the city. But it's not the big Parthenon Temple that the Sandalbinder comes from. In fact, she comes from the tiniest temple that was up on the Acropolis. And it's visible just to the right of this processional staircase. You see people going up through this, it's called the Propylaia. And on sort of a promontory to the right, you see this tiny, tiny little temple. That is the reconstructed Temple of Athena Nikei today. So Athena in her guise as the goddess of victory. It is very small. It has an Ionic, a row of Ionic columns on both sides. And we're looking at it from the rear when we're walking up through that gatehouse area. But if you're wondering, okay, did this image of the Sandalbinder, did it come from the frieze, that running band of relief ornament that you might still be able to see some of on this damaged and reconstructed temple? Nope, it did not come from there. Instead, as you can see in this little reconstruction, the Sandalbinder was part of the decoration of a balustrade that went around the building. So on the right, you're seeing the temple today and there's no balustrade there, it's gone. But in the reconstruction on the left, you see sort of a three foot tall, let's say wall at the right of the image and just the hint of those stairs going down. And there are a series of depictions of the goddess Nikei or Nikei, I guess when they're pluralized. That's where our sculpture comes from. So she's associated with this very small temple, the goddess of victory, but the decoration itself didn't come from the temple. It came from something that was just to one side. And it occurred to me in preparing this art in focus that maybe it's really fitting that we have our cast of the Sandalbinder displayed next to a staircase. Even though in our case, the staircase is above her going up to the main floor of Bellarmine Hall because the original spent its life being next to a staircase. Until in the 17th century, this was demolished during the Ottoman occupation. And when they began in the early 19th century, they were doing excavations. They were beginning to restore some of the damaged buildings on the Acropolis. That is when the Sandalbinder was rediscovered. And I wonder if we could imagine today how exciting it would have been to find, I mean, it would have been exciting to find anything, everything that they were digging out in these early archeological surveys on the Acropolis. But to pull out a piece like this, that yes, she doesn't have an arm, she doesn't have a head, but the ability of this damaged piece of sculpture to communicate so readily to us about the human body, about the clothes that she's wearing, which I didn't mention before, she's wearing sort of traditional Greek women's attire. She has a long tunic, a chiton, and then she has something called a haimation. So imagine a big rectangular scarf that you could sort of throw over one shoulder. And in her case, her haimation is sliding down her left arm to the arm that's damaged. You can see a row of folds over that arm above the elbow. So not only is she overbalancing as she's trying to adjust her sandal, her drapery is kind of getting a little bit out of whack, and still it seems this remarkably balanced, incredible figure. So I can only imagine what it would have been like to be among those archeologists who find this object, but maybe just by chance of the time, it being the early 19th century, this is also when cast making is really starting to explode. And this becomes an extremely popular plaster cast that appears in places all over the world. I did want to go back for a second to the original object. You might notice in this original marble, something that is different from the one that we have in the plaster cast. And that is that it ends where it ends. If you look at the edge of the figure, it cuts off right sort of at the shoulder of one of her wings. It cuts off behind her knee. So her knee is actually silhouetted against the black background here, and then just goes straight down to what we're seeing at the bottom of this piece of marble. So the plaster casts, as I mentioned, were sort of framed in a larger piece of plaster with just that contour to remind you that here is where the original stone ends. And just for various reasons, they also didn't include the sort of lintel that's above the figure in ours, comparing. Here's ours again. It just sort of is cleanly cut off above the wings. But in fact, the original sculpture had this sort of heavier piece of stone, which makes sense if we think of it as part of decorations for a railing. Or I should say that a railing would have even superimposed on top of that balustrade level, which they know because there are holes in the tops of these recovered reliefs where the upright posts of a railing would have gone. Which, thinking about where this thing is, I mean, the Acropolis itself is very high. You have a little temple who's perched here up there in the corner. There's a staircase. You're gonna wanna keep your visitors and your worshipers very much safe as they enter the sacred precinct. And it's the sacred nature of where visitors to this temple, and indeed anything on the Acropolis, are going that has something to do with the form, and I was about to say form and function, the form of the sculpture and what it is that she's doing. I mean, why is she depicted leaning down to adjust her sandal? Why is her hymatium getting thrown off and sliding down? Why is it important to her to be doing this right now? I mentioned, too, that this is not the only sandal binder image that exists. There are depictions of men adjusting their sandals as well as women, and that is because in deference to entering the sacred precinct of the goddess, you would take off your shoes as a mark of respect. So if we're thinking about where this original was intended to go, you're ascending a staircase up to the Temple of Athena Nike, and as you turn to your right, a whole slew of depictions of the goddess Nike are reminding you that this is a sacred place. Here we take off our shoes, and you're seeing that modeled for you by this depiction of the goddess. Now, I would hazard to guess that many residents of 15th century Greece were not taking off their shoes in exactly the same way. I bet they did it a bit more like what we do, right? Kneel down, maybe one at a time, but she's a goddess, so she can make the impossible happen. But I think it's just so fascinating to think about the distinction between how we might approach this object without any context at all. I think you can derive an extraordinary amount of enjoyment just from, you can stand there in front of it and follow the hills and valleys of her drapery all day. And in fact, since I work in the museum that owns this object, I know those little hills and valleys love to collect little bits of dust. So periodically, we have to very delicately dust her with a squirrel hairbrush to make sure she's staying in her best possible condition. Probably not something the original marble would have needed since it was outside, but there it would be exposed to the elements. So different environmental dangers posed. And clearly, since this was part of a structure that was damaged, that was buried and had to be excavated and restored, the original sculpture has lived a life, something that the plaster cast can tell us. But as I said, even without thinking about where it comes from, its original physical surroundings, even what it's for in terms of modeling this appropriate behavior in the religious sanctuary, it's just incredible to look at. It's incredible how old it is and how real it seems to us. And I'm always marveling too at the ability of plaster. I mean, how many of us have felt something like plaster of Paris before? The ability of it to fill a precise mold taken from this object and give us practically every delicate chisel mark, something that's only faintly visible in the image on the right. Her chitin has little buttons going up and down the arm. I mean, it's just an incredible level of detail and plaster can be very faithful. And then plaster can also be tinted so that it more appropriately resembles the surface appearance of the original marble. There are all sorts of layers that you can follow when you're looking at plaster casts that too often in more recent decades, well, I would say I think plaster casts are being appreciated more now, but in past decades, there was a sense of, well, it's just a cast, it's not original. And while we, as art historians, we are about original things, we all want to go see the original thing in a museum, but these objects too have their history. Coming out of a time when it was not so easy to open up a computer and see a high resolution image or even to get on a plane if you have the ability and travel to Athens to see the original. If you were separated by time and space to have a three-dimensional replica of a famous work of art in your museum, in your community, like that was, what a gift that was. And it's still a gift for Fairfield today because I think most of our students have not yet had the opportunity to travel to Europe to see something like this in person, but when they're down the hall listening to Dr. Schwab give a lecture on classical Greek art and the wet drapery effect, when they go out into the hallway with their backpacks, what do they get to walk by? One of the most iconic examples of that. And then they go up the stairs and on and about their day. And since I mentioned, this became one of a very popular plaster cast collected. And so every time I go to plaster cast collections, I am almost certain to see a sandal binder. And I always keep an eye out for plaster casts that we have in our collection. And when I encounter them in other iterations. And this one, my last slide here, this one I encountered in Rome last March. My husband who was a high school teacher had accompanied a group of students on a trip through Italy. And in the hotel they were staying in near the train station in Rome in their sort of little garden area. I look up and there's a plaster cast of the sandal binder. You'll note that it's a little bit darker tinge than ours, perhaps could use a little bit of dusting or treatment, but there it is in a different country. And you'll find more in plaster cast collections when you go visit them. And when you do, I hope you stop and take a look. Even if she's not the one in the Acropolis Museum, each one is its own incredible work of art and a testament to the ability of those sculptures to speak to us across time. I don't know if anyone has any questions or any observations or has tumbled over in their home as they've attempted the sandal binder pose. But if you have, feel free to drop them into the chat. I'm just gonna go back to the... I just love looking at these recreations and then looking at the existing temple as it is now. And I didn't mention, when you look at one of these restored buildings, obviously it is restored with as much of the original stone as is possible, but it's not always possible. So you see many places where there's a very pure white stone that is showing you a more modern stone that was used to fill it in. And it's nice, it's done purposely. There's not a sense of wanting to pretend that it's always looked exactly like this, but to show like, here's what we have done to restore something of the grandeur that was lost. And for those of you who are in the area, I'll remind you that our Art in Focus in-person will begin again next month. So you can visit fairfield.edu slash museums and check out all of our programs. And we will of course be returning to continue the quick live online, and we will look forward to seeing you at the next one next month. I hope you have a great day.