The Winged Victory of Samothrace, aka Nike - Essay Example

“The Winged Victory of Samothrace“, or the Nike, represents the aesthetics of the ancients while engaging the artistic sensibilities of the modern man. One of the ways that the statue, The Winged Victory of Samothrace, reflects the aesthetics of the culture from which it came is through the androgyny of the figure. While the figure is decidedly female, it has a thick body and firm stance that is often associated with androgynous figural sculpture of Ancient Greece. The figure is actively engaged, its dynamic stance showing action and intensity as it also reflects victory through its sense of triumph.

The pose is captured, as if the figure that it represents as stopped still in a moment, its thrust forward coming to an abrupt, but meaningful stop as it expresses the theme of triumph. The sculpture has an emotional context that evokes passions within the viewer. Even without its full form, it is a powerful piece of work, its smallish, but well constructed wings suggesting the heights of victory as it is coupled with the dynamism. The Greeks were partially to the flowing fabrics, the beauty of the details creating the feminine side of the androgynous ideal.

Often the faces were the primary defining element to the androgyny, but because the face is missing, the masculine is someone less apparent in the duality of gender. Macleod writes “If the androgynous male youth is characterized by openness, the moment of perfect beauty in the realm of female deities is not that of a free-floating adolescence but rather the static self-sufficiency, the containment of mature Juno” (51). The female tilt of the androgynous balance is found to have beauty when the determination of self-sufficiency can be observed in the stance of the figure.

Even though the face is not available to provide deeper clues to context, the emotions of the piece and the way in which the duality is expressed is clearly available to the viewer through the details of the expressive nature of the body. The work does not near appear the way that it was seen by the public that it was intended to engage. The piece is fractured, the arms and the head missing, although there is some evidence that the Romans have duplicated the head on some of their work as they copied the Greeks.

The work was painted, originally, an aspect that a modern audience would more than likely find garish. The sculptures of the period were painted with a waxy type of paint that was rubbed onto the marble (Langley 23). The statue more than likely did not show the beauty of the stone that currently is visible in looking at the work. The balance of how the piece was represented in to its audience in comparison to the way in which modern audiences see the piece is startlingly different. A modern audience sees only the emotions of the body, where the ancient audience would have had the expression of the face from which to first understand the meaning of the work.

The nature of Greek and Roman art is that in the modern context it is seen as representative of artistic expressions, but for those in the Ancient world, they were forms of public communication, representing some cultural aspect that needed to be within the social discourse. The pieces that modern man treasure most were definitions of public issues for religion or politics. Through the visual imagery