Posted by Patrick Hunt
Fig. 1 Klimt, Pallas Athene, 1898, Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, Vienna
“...Her terrible eyes shining...” (Iliad I.200)
Gustav Klimt's use of Classical myth iconography is directly derivative of antiquity in his many images of Athena. Perhaps the outstanding image of this goddess since Classical antiquity, however, is his Pallas Athene of 1898 [Fig. 1] (1). She is a very different persona from his famous femmes fatales whose sexuality is overwhelming, for example his Judith (1901) and Danae (1907-8). Here it is Athena’s divinity which Klimt finds more interesting, rather than her sexuality, which is not surprising given the gender ambiguities she demonstrated in Greek antiquity. Perhaps Klimt implies that power is a catalyst to sexual instincts, as history has long suggested that power is one of the most important sexual stimuli in human behavior and that the desire for power is strongly connected to sexual desire. In any case, this somewhat asexual Greek goddess becomes Klimt's most powerful female in his art.
The Athena of myth is a paradox, an external contradiction but internally consistent: a goddess with what some women, Pomeroy and Cantarella, for example, consider masculine powers (2). The Athena of a state religion or state cult is another persona and not the subject of this study. In mythology Athena poses a curious androgynous power. Is she externally female but internally male or is it that her myth persona is ambiguous? To us, wisdom and war may seem strange mindmates of this patron goddess, impossible alloys. Here it may be merely a cross-cultural and diachronic dilemma, but Athena's compound persona is nonetheless fascinating.
What do women say about Athena? Pomeroy holds Athena to be "the archetype of a masculine woman who finds success in what is essentially a man's world by denying her own femininity and sexuality". (3) Pomeroy also highlights Athena's disguised appearance as a male in the Odyssey where her image and even her voice are those of Mentor, boyhood friend of Odysseus (Odyssey 22.205-10). Whether or not this is one of the first sex transformations in literature, it might have been expected that only Athena could succeed in the disguise were it not for the typical suspicions of Odysseus. Cantarella suggests a uniquely different role than the typical Bronze Age female in "Athena, the goddess who advises...in typically masculine matters, which are those related to power...The only woman who has a constant influence and who is recognized as a counselor and protector...a nonwoman". (4) Henle says that even in the earliest Athena appearance we have, the Protoattic amphora from Eleusis, Athena is in her favorite role of protectress, "for which the Greeks held her in affection". (5) Athena appears to be the one goddess whom men trust (especially "real men", that is, heroes), as if her seeming asexuality made her safe - some have even wondered if she was invulnerable to sexual attraction - possessing true impartial wisdom as an objective confidant.
But could this happen because she is born of a male? Pomeroy also cites Dionysus, who was, however, carried in his mother's womb for seven months before Zeus sewed him in his thigh, (6) although Dionysus is not thus extra endowed as a paragon of ultramasculinity, but rather the opposite. On the other hand, Aphrodite herself was born out of the foam ('αφρος) which Hesiod says (Theogony 180-198) was the "seed" of castrated Uranus, and this certainly does not make Aphrodite masculine in any way. It will probably be difficult to formulate a comprehensive psychology of this Athena androgyny paradox, and yet, as we shall see, Klimt's Pallas Athene of 1898 is hardly asexual, which may tell us more about Klimt than about Athena.
All the same, Athena may be a favorite not only of the heroes and would-be heroes who seek her protection but she is also a metaphor to poets and artists alike. For artists, especially in light of her role as "divine patroness of the arts", (7) Athena's parthenogenic birth may be important. It may not matter which parent conceived her as much as the fact that it was a singularity, from inspiration and the intercourse of ideas in one mind alone. Like the artist's children, who are formed in the mind, Athena is a creative product. Her power appears far more intellectual than physical, a peripety of power which could appeal to brain more than brawn. If iconography helps us identify deities and heroes, as Hanfmann affirms, (8) what visual narrative do we have for Athena and how closely does Klimt know and follow it?
The Greek iconography of Athena- along with that of Dionysus- is perhaps the most complex and well-established in all mythology, although it took centuries of conflation to be codified and complete - as seen from a distance as in our era - from the Mycenaean or Late Helladic around 1300 BCE until the late 6th c. BCE, with most of the formalization taking place in the early 6th c. BCE. The visual attributes are rarely seen all together. As Boardman notes:
"Of the goddesses, Athena is naturally the most popular. She does not appear regularly armed before the second quarter of the sixth century (a). Her helmet is of the Attic variety, often in its most summary form - a mere cap to support a high crest (b). She wears a peplos, and, especially on Panathenaic vases, a knee or calf-length over-garment...(ependytes) sometimes open at the sides. The Aegis, a scaly goat-skin given her by Zeus, is worn like a bib, its curly edges stylized like snakes, but not usually bearing the gorgoneion commonly shown later (c). Her owl seldom appears [in Athenian black figure vases]...Apart from her birth...her appearance in black figure is usually in her role as patron of heroes – of Herakles and to a lesser degree of Perseus." (9)
Fig. 2 Douris Cup, Vatican c. 470 BCE
Henle also codifies Athena’s complete visual attributes much as Boardman does, perhaps thinking of the famous Douris Cup [c. 470 BCE] in Attic red figure from Cerveteri now in the Vatican collection [Fig. 2 above] (10) where she stands before a limp and regurgitated Jason, no match for the fleece-guarding dragon who is no match for her:
"We recognize and know Athena by her arms, helmet, aegis, and spear. Sometimes she has a shield, more often the aegis, a scaly capelike covering with fringe of snakes, usually with the gorgon's head, the gorgoneion, to relieve its plainness. She may be accompanied by her owl [Bobus] or her snake...[Thus] we know her by her attributes - in later times. In early periods, the late eighth century, the seventh, and the early sixth, gods and heroes have not yet acquired the array of attributes that mark them clearly later. We know her by her role...Athena, the friend and protectress of heroes. This [Nessos Painter, Berlin 1682, c. 620 BCE] is our earliest Attic picture of Athena." (11)
Klimt appears to have followed myth iconography fairly strictly in his Pallas Athene of 1898, perhaps more completely than in his other Classical subjects, very likely because the artists of the Vienna Secession philosophically adopted Athena as their divine protectress. (12) As can be readily shown from Henle, Boardman and others, all the primary and secondary attributes are here: spear, helmet, aegis with gorgoneion, and owl. However, it is what Klimt accomplishes with these images, personally investing them with his own vision, that is unique. If Klimt was an adept copyist, he was also a highly original artist who makes many statements with his enigmatic Pallas Athene.
Klimt’s classicism is less romantic and more symbolist than Neoclassical antecedents from the 18th-19th c. On the 1890 Commission for the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, Comini notes:
"Klimt immersed himself in the study of original sources and spent hours studying the collection of antique [Classical] vases in the imperial museum...The eight spandrels and three intercolumnar panels assigned to Klimt in the Museum were to span the history of art from Egypt of the Old Kingdom to Florence of the Cinquecento. It was back to the art books and local museum collections for Klimt and his colleagues, who prided themselves on historical authenticity...Behind her [The Girl from Tanagra] is a large Attic black-figure amphora - a testimonial to Klimt's preference for Greek art and a precursor of a specific period quotation which the artist would include in the upper right half of his Pallas Athene of 1898...[Elsewhere] Klimt painted, with an archaeological slyness unremarked by contemporary viewers, a specific...site reference right into his picture." (13)
Kilinski describes Klimt’s eclectic use of classicism in an academic pursuit of both form and meaning, with museum visits to ancient collections and perusals of published artifacts from antiquity in Vienna and outside the region, with a special interest in the archaic period:
"A brief analysis of Klimt's classical eclecticism reveals a marked preference for late archaic Greek art (530-480 BCE). During the 1890's and continuing into the early 1900's, Klimt followed a nearly consistent development of a progressively esoteric nature in choosing his artistic symbols from late archaic Greece. His method of adoption evolved from a bold emulation of whole figures and objects to the incorporation of inconspicuous minutia in his subsidiary decoration." (14)
Kilinski has shown the upper background zone of Pallas Athene to be from an archaic Attic black figure hydria now in Toledo (Painter of Vatican G43) with Herakles wrestling with Triton (or Achelous?). Klimt has faithfully copied it and placed Athena in front of it. Kilinski hypothesizes that Klimt knew it from Eduard Gerhard's 1843 German edition (vol. 2, pl. 111). (15) Additionally, Kilinski shows a Corinthian model for Pallas Athene's helmet [inventory # VI 1671] is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. (16)
Fliedl also implies transformations of time in which Klimt merged past and present into one synthesis: "...[Some of Klimt's] paintings...are an attempt to turn the past into the present...Klimt established a different concept of time and a different relationship between past and present.” (17) This is ironic because Klimt would hereby archaize even Greek art away from more typical Classical models to an earlier mythos even the Greeks might be inclined to venerate, as they did with coin production in the 5th c. BCE, rendering Athena not in current conventions but in archaic styles from a century earlier - archaic smile, almond eyes, ridged eyebrows - as if to say how venerable and stable was their polis. Deliberate archaizing is also a philosophical statement about the greater value of the older icon than the current icon, which could be an idea Klimt expressed here by harking back to an earlier, heavier model when the goddess was herself more truly worshipped than in later, more skeptical periods. Such genuine doubt in Athens begins to seriously undermine conviction just as in Klimt’s own lifetime. Veyne suggested a parallel to what Klimt might have intended here:
“Earlier the subject of naive credulity, hesitant skepticism and daring speculations, myth is now treated with a thousand precautions, But these precautions are very calculated.” (18)
So much for belief systems in Athens and Vienna in any parallel of fin-de-siecle attitudes. What about Klimt’s images themselves and their sources? If visual iconographic models sources can be readily identified, as Kilinski demonstrates, could the same be said for the more personal Klimtian touches? Could literary tradition have also influenced Klimt? Homer's descriptions of Athena in the Iliad, seem likewise to inspire Klimt:
"Achilleus in amazement turned about, and straightway
knew Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining...
Then in answer the goddess grey-eyed Athene spoke to him..."
(Iliad I.199-200, 206)
This Athene, "child of Zeus of the Aegis" (Iliad I.202), the "grim goddess" (Iliad VI.380, 385), offers Klimt a Homeric trope which he follows well in the iconography of Pallas Athene (1898) beyond any of his other pale and passive Athenas. Although she hafts a huge spear (Iliad VIII.389-90, 422), here it is not her physical strength but audacious character which both Homer and Klimt depict. It would seem from this painting that Klimt knew Homer. Whether γλαυκωπις (glaukopis) (Iliad I.206) is "grey-eyed" or a reinforcement of 'οι 'οσσε φαανθεν (hoi osse phaanthen) (Iliad I.200) "terrible eyes shining," Klimt appears to accommodate both in his Athene. According to Walter Leaf in 1886, Homer's use of γλαυκωπις (glaukopis) can be rendered "bright-eyed" but also that this word
"is not inconsistent with the possibility of the word having originally meant "owl-faced,"
Athene having been no doubt identified with an owl deity or totem..." (19)
It may not be important that Hesiod used "grey-eyed (Theogony 13, 573; Works and Days 73, etc.) as an epithet of Athena apparently before Homer adds further detail of a nature which Klimt readily uses.
On other elements in his Pallas Athene of 1898, it is possible that Klimt deliberately chose a particular period Corinthian helmet for Athene. (20) Kilinski further notes this Corinthian helmet as what we should expect for Athena Promachos rather than Franz Stuck's "parade dress" helmet of Athena Parthenos. (21) This helmet again heightens the predatory metaphor of γλαυκωπις which Athene shares with her owl, making her look even somewhat hawklike as another Homeric image might impart (Iliad XIX.350-51). The helmet itself seems an extension of her head where the parting of her coppery hair follows from the bronze as if it were activated solely by divine mental prowess.
What more does Klimt offer in his multiple representations of Athena? His own reputed voyeuristic interests seem subdued in his range of Athenas, although he was known for interpreting the femme fatale in a kind of sexual fantasy and transforming females by his vision of powerful women, as can be seen in his `Hygeia' from Medicine (1897-98), Nuda Veritas (1899) and others. As mentioned above, Athena's power needs no blatant eroticism. Thus Klimt does not portray Athena as a lover but as power personified.
If the viewer accepts that Klimt has placed multiple sets of eyes in the painting, there might be a scale of "sightedness" going something like this where Klimt has prioritized importance by the eyes as well as other features like dimensionality. First, on the left, the human female in the flat two-dimensional black-figure background hardly has any visible eyes in her blank face, being only a mortal being. Second, at the next level, in the right background, Herakles and Triton-Achelous whom he wrestles have visible eyes but are otherwise limited to flat two-dimensionality. Because heroic Herakles is after all only apotheosized to Olympus by her assistance, how can he compare to a such a goddess? If Herakles overpowers a deity in Triton-Achelous, he is nonetheless less powerful than Athena. Third, Medusa the Gorgon monster whose look could turn turn mortals to stone, is herself reduced to a bronze aegis "ornament" on Athena's breast, apotropaic to ward off evil, and has merely the slight relief eyes of a "blind" sculpture, since she was once human though transformed and now overpowered as a dead monster. Fourth, on the other hand, Bobus the owl, the very zoomorph totem of Athena has very clear nocturnal eyes that belong to a living being animated by the goddess of wisdom herself, eyes that penetrate darkness. Finally, the eyes of the goddess are the most alive and intensely powerful, as befits her immortal persona and full three-dimensionalty as a goddess.
Ultimately, this Athena is certainly more frightening than the idiocy to which the Medusa Gorgon is reduced by comparison. What is more dreadful, the monster or the goddess? Klimt seems to deliberately frame both faces with the same coppery hair to draw the comparison in the viewers’ eyes: the monster is only semi-divine whereas Athena’s power is fully divine. This is not a goddess to oppose in mind or in weapon, as Klimt’s Pallas Athene is the epitome of apotropaism: not just a mask to ward away evil but the real thing. Thereby any would-be besieger - or friend or even worshipper - of all that is Athens by her strength of wisdom and arms should be completely intimidated. Klimt has made her eyes alone tell one how sensible it is to lay down any weapons of futile resistance. These eyes bore right through mortals.
Notes:
(1) This article was first presented as a paper at the Stanford University Classics Colloquium, November 10, 1993
(2) S. Pomeroy. Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves. New York: Schocken Books, 1975; E. Cantarella. Pandora's Daughters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
(3) Pomeroy, pp. 4-5
(4) Cantarella, p. 28.
(5) J. Henle. Greek Myths: A Vase Painter's Notebook. Indiana, 1973, p. 5
(6) Pomeroy, pp. 4-5.
(7) K. Kilinski. "Classical Klimtomania: An Update." Arts Magazine. March, 1982, pp. 106-07.
(8) G.M.A. Hanfmann. "Narration in Greek Art," American Journal of Archaeology 61, 1957, p. 72.
(9) J. Boardman. Athenian Black Figure Vases, Oxford, 1974:218-9. (a) spear only on [Boardman Pl. 94] the `Neck amphora of Group E: Herakles fights the lions' and in [Boardman Pl. 38] `the Tripod kothon by the C Painter: Judgment of Paris';
(b) see helmet on [Boardman Pl. 135] `Belly amphora by the Berlin Painter 1686: Sacrifice to Athena'; (c) see gorgoneion on [Boardman Pl. 227] `Calyx crater by the Roycroft Painter: Achilles and Ajax play'
(10) Vatican Museum, Rome, inv. 16545. Publ. in J. Beazley. Attic Red-figure Vase- Painters, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963, # 437.116.
(11) Henle, pp. 4-5.
(12) Whitford, 1990, p. 81.
(13) A. Comini. Gustav Klimt. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975, pp. 10-1, 23.
(14) Kilinski, 1979, p. 96.
(15) Kilinski, 1982, pp. 106-7.
(16) Kilinski, 1979, pp. 98, 99
(17) G. Fliedl, Gustav Klimt, Cologne: Taschen, 1989, pp. 48-49. Fliedl continues: “Even the sensuous menacing power of Pallas Athene, with her maternal yet punitive power, rather disturbs the thought of a calmly retrospective ideal of academic education. Historicist symbols such as Pallas Athena - a monumental statue outside Vienna's Parliament - were literally imbued with life...His recourse to ancient myths and his method of enlivening them in the form of images give the erotic element a kind of borrowed innocence and natural originality."
(18) P. Veyne. Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? T.R. Wissing, tr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 54.
(19) W. Leaf, tr. Homer’s ΙΛΙΑΔΟΣ, 1886, p. 13 note 206.
(20) A.M. Snodgrass. Early Greek Armour and Weapons. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964; A.M. Snodgrass. Arms and Armour of the Greeks. New York: Cornell University Press, 1967, pp. 51-2, pls. 20, 37, 42; C. Weiss, Caroline. "An Unusual Corinthian Helmet." California Studies in Classical Antiquity 10, 1978, pp. 195-208.
(21) Kilinski, 1982, p. 98.
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