Munich

Dying warrior on west pediment.
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Tuesday. We’re all friends in this blog, so I trust that readers will indulge me today as I give my Classics lecture. We spent the morning at the Glyptothek, the museum of ancient sculpture and the major reason Munich has been on my list of cities to visit. London may have the Elgin Marbles stolen from the Parthenon, but Munich has the pedimental sculptures stolen from the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina.

These sculptures are not only exceptionally beautiful, they are particularly interesting because of the ten-year interruption between the time the west and east pedimental sculptures were built. During that ten years, Persia invaded Greece and Greek art made its transition from the archaic to the classical period. All you need to know about Greek art is in the contrasting portraits of the two dying warriors on this page.

Looking at Sculpture

Dying warrior on east pediment.
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The young man pulling the arrow out of his chest was built for the west pediment around 500 B.C. Even in death, he is the picture of ornament and grace, like a young Apollo resting after an athletic event. The bearded man on the east pediment, by contrast, is a hero, but a suffering hero. (Close-ups of their faces are in additional photos.)

I wish I could explain how the Persian wars seemed to transform Greek art. These events seem to have been part of a general coming together of a new way of looking at the world, as Athens developed its radical democracy and Aeschylus founded Greek tragedy as we know it.

West pediment detail.
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Two other photos on the photo page show the Trojan hero Paris as well as a reconstruction of how the original statue, with its paint intact, might have looked. How much our image of the Greeks is based on imperfect knowledge and our romantic notions about ruins!

After the museum, we went to the Viktualienmarkt--the farmer’s market--for lunch. There I was struck (besides by the very odd combination of melon balls and a hard-boiled egg in my soup) by several bronze statues of women. One is pictured with a bucket and mop, the other is identified as a folk singer. How often do we see statues of women in public places?

East pediment detail.
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We rented bicycles after lunch and explored the rest of the city, including the banks of the Isar River, the English Garden (Munich’s version of Central Park and, indeed, the largest urban garden in Germany), the Olympic Village from the 1972 Olympics, the Royal Palace at Schloss Nymphenburg, and the Oktoberfest grounds.

Weather has been great so far. We’re off to Mittenwald tomorrow, where there may be some rain awaiting us.