Ancient Greek Art: The Pediment from the Temple of Artemis at Corcyra

So I wanted to start working on the architectural sculpture videos and the very first one is of course the Temple of Artemis at Corsaira and because it's the earliest one there's going to be quite a lot of problems associated with trying to fill the pediment successfully but it's going to provide a baseline that we can chart all of the progress from now on in and I thought it's just worth pointing out a reminder of how difficult it is to fill a pediment space. For a start you've got to think about proportions especially as you get into those tiny little corners and also you've got to think about trying to put across a coherent story and unfortunately this example from Corsaira from 580 BC doesn't quite hit the mark. So for a start in terms of the story we've actually got a variety of different stories in this particular pediment so at the apex which is the term we use to refer to the centre of the pediment we've got Medusa clearly recognisable the snakes coming from her hair the wings behind her as well and next to her are her two children so we can see Pegasus on her left and Chrysaor golden man or golden boy to her right so that's all one story in the centre clearly there's a narrative problem because her head is present and yet her children are there and in mythology they were famously born from the bloodied stump of a neck after she'd had her head removed by Perseus but there are a few reasons for that one it makes her apotropaic looking out at the viewer from the temple which is very very popular in this particular time period but also it allows a nod to Corinth at the same time because Corsaira is actually a Corinthian colony and Pegasus was meant to have been born in Corinth he actually appears on the coins there and so doing this having this narrative that doesn't actually logically work allows them to fulfill both functions at once being apotropaic warding off evil but also honouring the original city state that this colony is linked with so that's our narrative in the centre either side scary animals again very typical of this early period the archaic period they kind of scholars disagree over what they might be but there tends to be a lean towards giant panthers and then we've got separate scenes again in each of the corners so i'm going to come to the actual photographs of the pediment itself now just so we can have a look at it in even more detail so on the right hand side the right hand corner we've got Zeus and we can tell it Zeus because he's got his thunderbolt in his hand fighting a giant and the giant is identifiable by his proportions whereas on the left hand side we've got a individual who appears to be sat down which has led scholars to believe that we're looking at king priam sat on the altar in which case he's probably being killed by neoptolemus the son of achilles completely different stories though to what else is going on in the rest of the pediment so no correlation to medusa and her children at the apex or zeus fighting the giant on the other side of the pediment and you can also see from this angle what went into the very far corners so we've got a giant lying down and there would have been one on the other side as well so to summarize this pediment this very early attempt at pedimental design has a number of problems with it there's no one coherent story there's an issue with proportions you know medusa is very large at the apex much larger than zeus in fact our chief god who's in that right hand corner and the same with the creatures either side so they've really struggled to get those proportions correct there's also a lot of very typically archaic features so for example you can see the very rigid pose from medusa there in fact we call this the running kneeling pose where she gives the appearance of movement but is actually rather rather stationary the bulgy eyes obviously fit with the fact that she is grotesque and apotropaic but as seen on other figures as well and we're not quite yet moving into the the kind of naturalistic style that we shall see when we get onto the with the east pediment there