DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.42779#0237
FOR WORKS IN HARD AND SOFT STONE 171
difficult to say which is intended for his right arm and which
for his left! In the hand seen on the spectator’s right is what
is, without doubt, a carpenter’s square. That it was one of
the sculptor’s tools is clear from the fact that in his other
hand is a trimming-hammer, pointed at one end and flat
at the other. In short he is holding the two instruments
which were the first to be used by a sculptor. The square
helped him to get his planes of side and front correctly laid,
the trimming-hammer blocked out the surfaces of those
planes. The whole relief together with the shallow steps
which serve as a moulding below are cut in the non-crystalline
blue limestone of the lower levels of Hymettus and the
cutting is entirely done with hammer and pointed punches.
Elsewhere in the cave is a seated figure of a kore-type,
standing free and in the round except for its back, which
remains in the living rock. This kore (whose head is missing)
is in the tradition of sixth-century seated korai, so that
Archedemos may be considered as an old sculptor who,
perhaps through unemployment, had retired to this cave,
whose guardian he made himself—to judge by some of his
entertaining inscriptions1—where he practised his art in
the manner of a preceding generation to his heart’s content.
What other tools he used we do not know, and none were
in fact found in the excavations carried out in the cave in
1902. But the tools he shows us were those of the first
processes only. He must subsequently have used mallet and
punch, but perhaps no other tools at all. Certainly he em-
ployed no abrasives for a final surface treatment, probably
because he could not get them or afford them, for he must
be looked on as a poor hermit, an artistic monk, self-con-
secrated to the Nymphs and Pan, an alien in Attica and
Dorian by race, for he calls himself Archedamos more often
than Archedemos, and is a Theran.
2. The Trimming-Hammer. This, the first tool to be used in
1 ’ApxESanos ho Gepcaos kcxttov vu|i<poas ecpuTeuaev or ’ApxeSripos 6 ©Tipalog 6
vuncpoAriTrTos 9paScuai vuptpov T&VTpov ££r|pya£aTO. His dialect varies.
difficult to say which is intended for his right arm and which
for his left! In the hand seen on the spectator’s right is what
is, without doubt, a carpenter’s square. That it was one of
the sculptor’s tools is clear from the fact that in his other
hand is a trimming-hammer, pointed at one end and flat
at the other. In short he is holding the two instruments
which were the first to be used by a sculptor. The square
helped him to get his planes of side and front correctly laid,
the trimming-hammer blocked out the surfaces of those
planes. The whole relief together with the shallow steps
which serve as a moulding below are cut in the non-crystalline
blue limestone of the lower levels of Hymettus and the
cutting is entirely done with hammer and pointed punches.
Elsewhere in the cave is a seated figure of a kore-type,
standing free and in the round except for its back, which
remains in the living rock. This kore (whose head is missing)
is in the tradition of sixth-century seated korai, so that
Archedemos may be considered as an old sculptor who,
perhaps through unemployment, had retired to this cave,
whose guardian he made himself—to judge by some of his
entertaining inscriptions1—where he practised his art in
the manner of a preceding generation to his heart’s content.
What other tools he used we do not know, and none were
in fact found in the excavations carried out in the cave in
1902. But the tools he shows us were those of the first
processes only. He must subsequently have used mallet and
punch, but perhaps no other tools at all. Certainly he em-
ployed no abrasives for a final surface treatment, probably
because he could not get them or afford them, for he must
be looked on as a poor hermit, an artistic monk, self-con-
secrated to the Nymphs and Pan, an alien in Attica and
Dorian by race, for he calls himself Archedamos more often
than Archedemos, and is a Theran.
2. The Trimming-Hammer. This, the first tool to be used in
1 ’ApxESanos ho Gepcaos kcxttov vu|i<poas ecpuTeuaev or ’ApxeSripos 6 ©Tipalog 6
vuncpoAriTrTos 9paScuai vuptpov T&VTpov ££r|pya£aTO. His dialect varies.