The effects of Hellenism fundamentally altered the appearance of material culture throughout the world, not only in the territories directly under Greek control but farther afield. The Hellenistic style reverberated like shockwaves throughout a far broader territory than even the one shown on maps of conquest. The ancient trading hub of Qaryat Al Faw stands in ruins in modern-day Saudi Arabia, but in antiquity, it was a fixture on the trading route between the wealthy South Arabian incense kingdoms and Mesopotamia, Persia, North Arabia, and the Levant. This ancient site has yielded finds which testify to the pervasive Hellenism in the local artwork produced by this city once famous for its luxurious standard of life. Historians have also identified Qaryat Al-Faw as a site with its own bronze foundry, with a local tradition of sculpture production.Thus, the extent to which Hellenistic tastes dictated the forms of the products of this Arabian bronze workshop is considerable.
We see a considerable difference in the Arabian bronze workers’ capacity to reach the naturalistic and illusionistic heights that the best Greek artists achieved, but the forms speak volumes about the Greek influence upon art production in the Arabian Peninsula in the centuries following Alexander’s conquest of the East. The modelling is far more to the standard of Hellenistic bronze-work in the small Heracles figure excavated at Qaryat Al-Faw than the male head with an elaborately curled coiffure from the same site, but the Greek influence is apparent in both. Heracles is depicted in Classical contrapposto stance more in tune with the balanced figures of Polykleitos, for instance, than the vivid impression of motion conveyed by the Hellenistic Baroque.
Qaryat Al-Faw also yielded two bronze statuettes which present variations on a quintessentially Hellenistic theme: the figure of Harpocrates, or the Egyptian god Horus as a child. When we encounter Horus as a child in Egyptian art before the Alexandrian conquest, we find a canonically Egyptian representation, either seated, as with this 4th-century example, or sometimes standing in the striding convention.
For the Egyptians, the Child-Horus symbolized the new-born sun rising each day at dawn; ultimately, he was the benevolent life-force around which Egyptian ritual revolved. In Egyptian sculpture, the finger that the Child-Horus puts to his lips is a visual symbol for the hierogylph of his name. The Greeks didn’t quite grasp the finer points of Egyptian hieroglyphics and iconography, so after they Hellenized the Egyptian name Harpa-Khruti to Harpocrates, this figure became for Hellenistic culture a God of silence and secrecy. The representation of the young boy’s body was completely overhauled as a result of the Greek conquest of Egypt.
In some instances, we almost see the Alexandrine archetype, a vigorous youth instead of a child, assume the form of Harpocrates -remember that Alexander encouraged the assimilation of his likeness to those of the gods of his conquered territories-, in others we see the physical type of a young boy-child which perhaps we identify more easily with Cupid or putti in later styles of artwork. In both of the Qaryat Al-Faw Harpocrates bronzes, we observe a faithful adherence to Classical proportions and contrapposto.
The fourth and third centuries BCE after the conquests of Alexander the Great, brought sweeping changes in the style of artwork produced by much of global civilization at the time. In a sense, the Hellenistic style united a far greater swathe of geography than even the Macedonian’s military campaigns did. With exposure to the dramatically different Greek concept of the representation of the human figure, especially as the Hellenistic Period progressed as more and more emotionally-compelling, hyper-realistic sculptures emerged, innumerable centers of local art production across Asia Minor, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Persia, and into the Indus Vally were energized by the new style and absorbed its tell-tale markers. From the Hellenistic Period onward, much of the ancient world looked to Greece for guidance in the visual arts.
SOURCE: filsonarthistory.wordpress.com
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