L. Bernabò Brea - Maschere e Personaggi del teatro greco nelle terracotte liparesi
Roma 2001. Con la collaborazione di M. Cavalier.
This volume is devoted to an exceptional terracotta complex consisting of statuettes and masks in large part found in grave goods, but also recovered from votive deposits in the Greek necropolis of Lipari during the excavations conducted over a period of half a century.
More than a thousand finds of this kind were recovered. They are attributable to a period comprised between the late 5th and mid 3rd century BC, with a particular concentration in the 4th century, when particularly flourishing and highly accomplished pottery workshops were active in Lipari, dedicated to the production of figure-painted vases and terracottas.
This extremely interesting series of objects, reproducing actors or miniature masks, enables us to gain insights into the theatrical world of Antiquity. It throws light on stage costumes and characteristics of the Greek theatre at the time of the great tragedians associated with the New Comedy of Menander.
The theatrical mask developed in relation to the introduction into the Greek world of three types of theatrical performance, tragedy, satirical drama and comedy. It gave rise to various types, reflecting the various types of theatre; these are well exemplified in the terracottas of Lipari.
Very little is in fact known of the development of the masks used in the representation of tragedies in the time of Aeschylus and Euripides. Equally rare are contemporary artefacts illustrating stage costumes during this period. So a fragment of a statuette from Lipari dating to the last quarter of the 5th century BC is of particular interest.
We are very familiar, on the other hand, with the famous dramatis personae of the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides and those that belong to tragedies which have been lost but whose subject is known to us.
The original masks, which the models of Lipari replicate in miniature, must have reproduced the types devised by tragedians themselves; these were handed down to posterity and maintained their fundamental character unaltered through the centuries.
It is more difficult to identify the personages represented by ancient comedy, with the exception of comedies of a mythological character in which mythical heroes and deities are caricatured.
Since no text has survived of the comedy that developed between the age of Aristophanes and that of Menander, so-called ‘Middle Comedy’, a group of comic statuettes from Lipari datable to the second half of the 4th century BC is particularly precious: they mark the transition from the Aristophanic tradition to the ‘New Comedy’.
Alongside male figures in phallic costumes with big bellies and prominent backsides, figures of slaves and courtesans, less buffoon-like in character, gradually came to the fore; they dominated the later comedy.
They belong to a type of comedy we could define as middleclass (characterized by a more realistic depiction of everyday life).
Theatrical masks underwent typecasting and standardization; they were reduced to some basic types, well characterized and clearly differentiated from each other, which would remain in use till the Roman period.
The terracotta models from Lipari present some forty different types, in which it is possible to identify the various personages described in the catalogue of Pollux (2nd century AD), ranging from the benevolent old man to the vainglorious soldier, from the beautiful courtesan to the double-dealing procurer, from the irascible servant to the elderly wet nurse.
The huge repertoire of such terracotta statuettes and masks gathered during the excavations conducted from 1978 onwards was published in the volume published in 2001. These excavations further permitted a precise dating of the material thanks to the associations of funerary assemblages. On this basis it was possible to reconstruct in more detail the development of terracotta sculpture in the workshops of Lipari.
An exhibition with the title “From Aeschylus to Menander. Two centuries of Greek theatre through archaeological finds from Lipari” was held in Lipari, in the church of Santa Marina delle Grazie in August-October 1987 thanks to the Assessorato ai Beni Culturali of Sicily. Its aim was to familiarise the public with the world of Greek theatre, not through the reading of the texts of ancient Greek tragedies and comedies, but through the material testimonies offered by the rich repertoire of terracotta statuettes and masks yielded by the necropolis of the Greek classical and Hellenistic period in Lipari.
