ABSTRACT
In a contribution to a critical anthology of modern art and modernism,Ernst Gombrich was commenting on the Cubist work of Braque and Picasso. The iconographic repertoire of artists producing figural images in Iron Age and Roman Europe includes a great deal that appears consciously to avoid material realism and, instead, to explore other realities and ways of seeing that broke the boundaries of earthly experience and the mimesis that was the cornerstone of Classical representation. Schematism, visual punning, ambiguity and irony, a feel for texture, form and spatial relationships all underpin imagery that sought to distort, manipulate, over-emphasize and minimize elements of the human or animal form. The results of such ‘somatic negotiation’ serve to present challenges, dissonances and alternative perceptions whose symbolism may make powerful statements about attitudes to pictorial representations and their subjects. By their release from the straitjacket of life-copying, artists were able to concentrate on the message within their images, to excise the unnecessary and underline what was important. By adopting alternative visualities, artists were freed from containment within rigid bodily syntax and were able to express sophisticated and multi-layered ideas, ideologies and symbolic meanings. Perhaps they were also acknowledging the essentially false premise that the gods were made in the image of humans.
