Lecture Robin Osborne, 'Exposure time: the moving body of art'

Living bodies move, constantly. It is by their movements that we recognise people and what they are doing. It is movements that give people away. What it is to be a body is to be a moving body. Movements are what catch our attention. But it isn’t as if only one part of the body moves at any one time. For most people most of the time, during their active lives, limbs, head, eyes, face are all pretty constantly mobile. What movements in others we notice depends upon the context. When talking to others we concentrate on their facial expression, note if their eyes dart elsewhere, or if they glaze over. But when watching a game of football we ignore the heads, at least until a goal is scored, and concentrate on the movement of the limbs. When we look around the library, it is different movements again that we note as we draw conclusions about how hard people are concentrating or how distracted they are.

Drawing, painting, sculpture produce only unmoving images, and traditional histories of Greek art take little interest in movement. They interest themselves in the skill with which particular features of the body are represented or with which bodily attitudes are combined. Only with regard to early classical sculpture, where the iconic Discobolus made it hard to ignore movement and Jerome Pollitt made it fashionable to talk about rhythmos, the pattern formed by the body at key moments in patterns of movement, has scholarship devoted much attention to bodily movement.

There are, I suggest, two issues here. One is how still images can convey movement at all. The other is, given that bodies are constantly on the move and that we never notice all the movements other bodies make, what are the particular movements that any image has chosen to convey? How have painters and sculptors sought to render the moving body, and what bodily movements have they chosen to render? If we take the problem of conveying the moving body to be the central problem of art, the story of art becomes a story not so much about the development of technical skills of representation but about changes in what we artists and their viewers are moved by.

Robin Osborne is Professor of Ancient History in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College and of the British Academy. For the last 40 years he has published widely on Greek history, archaeology and art history, with particular focus on drivers of change in art and on how art treats the human body. His works include Archaic and Classical Greek Art (Oxford, 1998), The History Written on the Classical Greek Body (Cambridge 2011), and The Transformation of Athens: Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece (Princeton, 2018).