relief sculpture
In relief sculpture the Alexander sarcophagus (above, p. 327), apparently carved for Alexander’s client king in Sidon, reveals a number of important developments of the early Hellenistic period. The representation of actual events involving living or recently dead personages (hunting scenes and episodes from Alexander’s battles) and the portrayal of precise details of national costume and armour look forward to the Pergamene Gauls and ultimately to the historical reliefs of imperial Rome; while the complexity and interlocking of the main battle relief mark a complete break from the well-spaced duels which prevailed in fifth- and fourth-century sculpture. One effect here was a diminution in importance of the background, which had always been the essential foil to reliefs of the Classical period. This development reached a climax in the sculptures of the Great Altar at Pergamum (second quarter of the second century B.C.). The larger frieze, situtuated on the exterior of the podium, depicted the time-honoured subject of the battle of gods and giants, but did so with a bravado and grandiloquence never equalled in ancient art. Almost every inch of the available surface was covered with a writhing mass of bodies, wings, drapery, coiling snakes, and animal forms, all rendered with a loving attention to texture which can distinguish, for example, between the nap and plain surfaces of the same piece of cloth. The effect was to destroy the visual function of the podium and to leave the superstructure of the altar floating, as it were, above the cosmic tumult of the sculptures. A particularly good example of the ambivalent relation between architecture and decoration was the group of giants which rested hands, knees, and snake-coils directly on the steps of the monumental entrance stairway, as if trying to crawl out of the frieze. Along with the technical brilliance went a typically Hellenistic academicism: in addition to the twelve Olympian gods, the artists had introduced about seventy-five lesser deities and personifications, all of whom, like the giants, were labelled with inscriptions for the benefit of passers-by. It is difficult to remember that all this, like most Greek sculpture in stone, must originally have been coloured. (Boardman, 1986)