February 27th, 2004 Pendrawing Boy, this is really an old picture! Back in my first year in college, which seems ages ago, I was following a course on ancient iconography. Iconography is a term used for the meaning a picture or a symbol can have in art. It's a rather vague and incomplete description of the term, but I'm not sure how else to put it. For instance, if you see a dog depicted in old medieval or classical art, it can stand for loyalty. So the dog's iconographic meaning in that piece of art is 'loyalty'. It doesn't always have to be that abstract though. For instance, if you look at the Venus de Milo, it's a statue of the classical goddess of love: Venus. That's its iconographic meaning, so a person's identity can be iconographic too. Anyway, this course was about classical iconography and we got an assignment for it. We got a picture of an ancient statue and were told nothing else about it. In a few weeks time, we had to track that statue down, find out in which museum it was located, figure out everything there was to know about the sculpture and, most importantly, determine its iconographic meaning... This... is a very dounting task in the eyes of a first-year. So basically we each received a random picture of the statue we had to track down. But it wasn't just any kind of picture. It was a poorly drawn picture, made by some guy in the 18th century, who had written some sort of tourist guide for Rome, and who couldn't draw! Seriously! Anyway, my sculpture was a centaur with some sort of cupid on his back. So after a lot of Googling (which, by the way is not a very scholarly approach, but hey... I was a first-year, so give me a break) I finally found this horrible photograph of the sculpture. Turns out that the drawing I was using so far, was actually inverted. It was the mirror image of the actual sculpture. This actually makes sense in a way, because back then they used prints, which of course would become inverted once you put them on the press. So I managed to figure out where the darn thing was (the Louvre) and what was known about it. Turns out that it was a Roman copy made in marble, probably after a Greek bronze original. If you are wondering why there is a palmtree stuck to the centaur's belly, it's because the sculpture would collapse without the palm's additional support. Marble is much heavier than bronze, which can be made hollow, so marble sculptures need to be designed to handle the weight properly. In Roman marble copies of bronzes, you often see that the marble statues need extra support in the form of extra pillars and such. That's because the original designs were intended for bronze, not marble. So the centaur's skinny legs are not intended for heavy bronze. So when I figured all this out, it was time to think about the sculpture's iconography. It was a centaur with a cupid on his back. So I Googled this and eventually figured out that in ancient mythology there was a wise centaur called Chiron. He was one of the very few centaurs who did NOT spend his time hunting wild animals, getting drunk and raping abducted women. Chiron was so wise that he was often asked by kings and gods alike to tutor their children. So Chiron was the mentor of heroes like Jason, Achilles and even Hercules, but also of the god of love, Cupid. He thought them various skills, such as hunting, archery and combatskills, but also music and good conduct. In art he is often identified by the harp he carries around, but also by Cupid, who's riding on his back. So this seemed rather clear. The centaur was probably Chiron and the Cupid was... well, Cupid, his student. But then I looked at the statue a little closer and noticed that Chiron's arms were tied up. Also, the museum's catalogue did not call the statue 'Chiron and Cupid', or something like that, but 'Le Centaure chevauché par l’Amour'. This roughly means something like: 'The centaur, ridden by Love'. I was rather flabberghasted and couldn't believe it at first. In fact, I didn't want to believe it! Not after all the work I put into proving that it was Chiron! Now some dumb museum catalogue was telling me it was a random, nameless centaur?! NO WAY!! It had to be wrong!! But... It did seem weird that a student would tie his respectable old teacher up like that, and then ride him like a pony... And... This centaur didn't look very old either... And he didn't have a harp... ......... Eventually I realized that I had been wrong in identifying the centaur as Chiron. Turns out that the ancient Greeks thought every non-Greek was a barbarian. Ancient cultures seem to make a habit out of calling foreigners barbarians. In their legends, the Greeks often recall their battles with foreign nations, as battles with barbarian species. They are beasts, not humans. This is where the centaur (and also the amazone) finds its origin. Centaurs were thought of as brutish beasts. However, love, in the form of Cupid in this case, could bind them and harnass their power. I think that's how the folks at the Louvre saw this statue, and eventually I managed to accept that idea. It made a lot more sense anyway, and I was just glad I figured it out before I handed in my report on my quest for the sculpture's identity. And I also drew a picture of it. In my own way. Now, three, almost four years later, I happen to know that there are other marble copies of this statue in many different museums all over the world. So if I hadn't found the one in the Louvre, I probably could have found another one in stead. I feel a little tricked, but I guess it would have been a bit too much to ask of a first-year anyway. Bah...

Copyright © 2006-2012 Blue Uncia - Charlotte Dikken. I do NOT own the rights to Pokémon or any other trademark. I DO own the copyrights to all my drawings, paintings and other creative products, including the storyline and the characters of my webcomic, Stuff of Legend. Please, do not copy any of this site's content without my explicit written permission and please do not hotlink. Art found in the 'Guest art' section belongs to their individual creators, and was posted on this website with their permission. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.