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This chapter addresses the circumstances surrounding the production of monumental new statues of deities in precious materials (such as gold and ivory) in fifth- and fourth-century B.C. Greece. Most famous are the statues of Pheidias—Athena Parthenos and Zeus Olympios—but neither these, nor others (e.g., Aphaia at Aigina, Hera at Argos, Dionysos at Athens, Artemis Laphria at Kalydon) resulted from the needs of new cults. Rather they supplemented older, more venerable statues of lesser materials and/or scale that stood in adjacent temples or even, on occasion, were moved off to the side in the very same temple while the new works received prominent central placement. This chapter seeks to analyze specifically the possible motivations behind and reactions to the supplementation of numinous ancient “cult” statues that often possessed some divine pedigree—such as having fallen from the heavens or been dedicated by a legendary hero—by massive new works fashioned by renowned artists at great expense by mortal artists and explores the role of inter-state competition through the iconography of the precious.

This chapter considers the construction of individual identities and their representations in various visual media. The prevailing view has been that the 27th Dynasty was characterized by artistic poverty brought on by Achaemenid rule. A reexamination of the dating criteria used to create the corpus of Late Period sculpture demonstrates that this ‘poverty’ is a modern scholarly construct. Moreover, these criteria are more frequently used to exclude objects from the 27th Dynasty than to attribute objects to it. The examples of Egyptian art that can unequivocally be assigned to the Achaemenid period are illustrative of a wide range of approaches to and experiences with the empire. These include the statue of Darius found at Susa, the stelae erected along the Red Sea canal, funerary monuments, personal votives, and the naophorous statues of Horwedja, Ptahhotep and Udjahorresnet. Based on these example, it seems that ethnicity was not a clear predictor either of one’s relationship to the empire or of how one conceived of one’s own identity.

In the age of empire, colonial promoters sought to mark the very landscape of France with reminders of France’s empire: statues, war memorials, museum collections and buildings. With decolonization, and a period of ‘colonial amnesia’ that followed it, the fate of these memorial sites was brought into question, many left neglected or viewed with discomfort. In recent years, France has rediscovered its colonial past (and its legacy in contemporary issues) and ‘repurposed’ some of the old monuments, though the treatment of extant memorials and the erection of new sites suggests the ambivalence still felt about the colonial past. This essay discusses lieux de mémoire in Paris and the provinces, placing the material heritage of colonialism in the context of the colonial and post-colonial periods and France’s confrontation with the imperial record.

According to Rudolf Arnheim, “much sculpture lacks the essential quality of life, namely, motion.” This is why, no doubt, marble statues and plaster casts played such an important role in the works of early photographers of the late 1830s and 1840s, who had to cope with long exposure times. Given this perspective, what can be said about the relation between sculpture and film, a medium often first and foremost characterized by motion? This book deals with a wide range of magical, mystical, cultural, historical, formal, and phenomenological interactions between the two media. Apart from the contrast between stillness and movement, sculpture and film can be seen as opposites in other ways. Whereas sculpture is an artistic practice that involves not only static but also material, three-dimensional, and durable objects, the cinema produces kinetic, immaterial, two-dimensional, and volatile images.

In its earliest years of existence, cinema seems to have been fascinated by stasis and stillness. As if emphasizing its capacity to represent movement, early cinema comprises many scenes in which moving people interact with static paintings and sculptures. Moreover, films made shortly before and after 1900 often make explicit the contrast between the new medium of film and the traditional arts by means of the motif of the statue or the painting coming to life. In so doing, early film continued a form of popular entertainment that combined the art of the theater with those of painting and sculpture, namely the tableau vivant, or living picture. Focusing on the trick films of Georges Méliès and the early erotic films by the Viennese Saturn Company, this chapter reveals the importance and continuity of nineteenth-century motifs and traditions with regard to tableaux vivants as they were presented on the legitimate stage, in magic, in vaudeville, and in burlesque.

The statue is a significant motif in many key films of the European modernist cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Famous examples are Les Statues meurent aussi (Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953), Viaggio in Italia (Roberto Rossellini, 1953), L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962), Méditerranée ( Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1963), Le Mépris ( Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), Il Gattopardo (Luchino Visconti, 1963), Une Femme mariée ( Jean-Luc Godard, 1964), Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964), and Vaghe stelle dell’orsa (Luchino Visconti, 1965). Focusing on Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1953) and Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad, 1961) as cases in point, this chapter not only traces the fascination for sculpture in modernist cinema but also explains it by examining the ways in which statues are presented as tokens of death, time, history, myth, memory, the human body, and strategies of doubling – important topics for many of the leading modernist directors working in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Riot of the Statues in 387 CE was a decisive moment in the history of Antioch in Syria. After the revolt, tears and public lamentations took over, as the inhabitants awaited imperial punishment. In the course of the crisis the rhetorician Libanius and the preacher John Chrysostom each tried to negotiate a settlement of the dispute between the authorities and the city. Their speeches depict dramatic scenes of collective weeping and lamentation and thus reflect not only emotional states but also the public use of tears. In doing so, they shine light on the theatrical qualities of emotional responses in social interaction. The analysis of the purposes for which both authors exploit the themes of laughing and wailing reveals two contrasting attitudes to urban society and oratory. While both recognise the vital role of laughter and tears in managing social relationships, Libanius’ representation of emotional expressions aims to eulogise the virtues of an imperial officer and maintain the traditional order of society. Chrysostom, by contrast, teaches his audience which emotions are acceptable in a Christian society and which are not. His aim is to implement an emotion management that is oriented towards the heavenly realm.

This chapter follows on from the previous two to examine statue production. Beginning with a discussion of the buying process, the question of commissions versus stock products and how the customer and carver might have interacted, evidence from the quarries for the roughing out of statues is then considered. There is no evidence that these finds from the quarries indicate production-to-stock of statues but they do show that carving was often broken down into stages of work which could be completed in different locations. Part-finished statues were certainly moved long distances, but there is also evidence to indicate that finishes one were too, as were the raw materials from their carving. Finally, the organization of carving in a sculpture workshop context and the evidence for division of labour in statue production are discussed.

This chapter forms a case study of memory/amnesia around slavery in Glasgow and proposes that a number of high profile events in the year 2014 may prove to be a turning point in this regard. The first section peels back the overlapping layers of Atlantic, British, Scottish and Glaswegian amnesia which have prolonged the silence around slavery. The second section identifies that all twelve statues in the city’s central George Square have a connection to slavery or abolition. Borrowing from Michael Rothberg’s ‘Multi-directional Memory’ approach, it reads the statues ‘against the grain’ to demonstrate how slavery can be integrated into Glasgow’s public memory of commerce, science, militarism, politics and literature. This recovery of the memory of slavery in Glasgow comes at a dynamic period in Scotland’s history and has the potential to transform its sense of cultural history the better to forge its political future.

This chapter examines the cultural afterlife of the Scottish Enlightenment, which was laid out in more detail in chapter 2. Beginning with a study of Tobias Smollett’s cultural memory, the frame widens and the question of how well Glasgow’s Enlightenment has been remembered is considered. To do this, theories of memory studies are used to underpin readings of paintings, buildings, institutions, and statues.

This chapter looks at the image of Glasgow via the late-Georgian, or Romantic-era, infatuation with literary and military figures. Building on the seminal work of Nicola Watson (Literary Tourism) and Graham Dawson (Soldier Heroes), Glasgow is shown to have fashioned itself as a centre of the British Empire.

Returning to the topics of death, resurrection, and transfiguration with which the book begins, this final chapter explores the stage convention of ‘whiteface’ and the shared materiality of idols, corpses, spirits, and statues in relation to two conceptually and theatrically affiliated King's Men plays performed circa 1610-1611: Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and Thomas Middleton's The Second Maiden's Tragedy. As the chapter demonstrates, white stage paint creates the theatrical effects of gender, death, ghostliness, and identicality in the all-male theatre, which means that a whitened face can variously signify that the boy actor is playing the part of a virtuous woman or a whore or a corpse or a ghost or a living woman playing dead or a living woman feigning stoniness. Paint therefore collapses ‘difference’, with serious consequences for social relationships, especially intimate ones; in Shakespeare's romance and in Middleton's revenge tragedy, a woman's painted face creates an epistemological crisis that can only be resolved via a process of recognition and acknowledgment.

This chapter analyzes Woolf's “ongoing examination and disruption of social hierarchies” as revealed in her observation of London statues. It focuses on two books from the personal library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: London Revisited (1916) by E. V. Lucas and The People's Album of London Statues (1928), a collaborative effort between writer Osbert Sitwell artist Nina Hamnett. These books on London statues helped create cultural and biographical contexts for references in Virginia's writing. Against a background of reading about statues, observing them herself, and discussing aesthetic controversies with others, she devised sculptural metaphors for her characters, filtered statues through their rapidly shifting thoughts and feelings, and, in the process, explored leveling, hierarchy-disrupting complexities of the human condition.

In Chapter Four, I move to novels of the city, depicting the heart of Libya’s social and political transformations, while, like the novel of the wilderness, marked by hunger and homelessness, in emotional rather than literal terms. I focus on novels from the 2000s, conveying experiences of imprisonment, marginality and oppression within an exploration of the fragility of narrative, both literal and figurative, by authors who remained within Libya throughout Gaddafi’s regime. Manṣūr Būshnāf’s al-‘Ilka (2008; Chewing Gum, 2014) is a standout achievement of Libyan fiction in the 2000s, centred on the twin symbols of a statue and of chewing gum. Through an explicitly postmodern aesthetics, Būshnāf labels his generation of authors the ‘generations of chewing’ (ajyāl al-lawk), and, I argue, this aptly conveys the creaturely poetics that I identify in wider Libyan fiction, characterised by unstable and elusive narrative, and a perception of fundamental lack, stasis and vulnerability. These aesthetics are explored in both of the two following novels: Muḥammad al-Aṣfar’s Sharmūla (2006), which depicts everyday life in Benghazi; and Razān Na‘īm al-Maghrabī’s Nisā’ al-rīḥ (2010; Women of the Wind), which depicts the closeted lives of Tripoli women, intertwined with the experience of an illegal migrant, embarking on a Mediterranean crossing.

This essay examines the poetic forms of W. B. Yeats's “The Statues” and “News for the Delphic Oracle” as well as these poems' place in Yeats's Last Poems and Two Plays. “The Statues” is a tragic poem, whereas “News for the Delphic Oracle” may be regarded as performing the role of a satyr play in Classical Greek tragedy. The comedy of “News,” like the satyr plays, consists of poking fun at “The Statues,” thereby providing comic relief. This essay considers the shift from “stately ottava rima” and an expression of “Yeats's eugenic convictions” in “The Statues” to a modern imitation of a classical satyr play in “News.” It challenges the assumption of the latter poem's seeming disorder elsewhere in the critical literature and insists on the importance of a dialogue between the two poems.