The Cycladic Harpist

Harpist. Marble. Late 2000s BCE. Height: 8.5 in.
From the island of Amorgos in the Cyclades.
National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

The Cycladic Harpist transfixes me. It may or may not be a figure of Orpheus, but its soundless song nonetheless holds me spellbound. A sublime, ecstatic image of artistic inspiration (remember the breathy etymology of that word and look at the harpist's head, upturned to the enlightening glare of the seabright sun, inhaling the breezy Aegean air through that geometric nose (and inhaling with it the mysterious, Orphic, god-like power of artistic creation (a meaning that calls out to be hidden, like a mystical secret, inside a parenthesis within a parenthesis within a...))), the figure is rendered even more mysterious and poignant by the loss of its hands. The object becomes an image of time's dissolution and imaginative man's necessarily incomplete attempts at reconstitution, recovery. Just as the missing head of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" energizes the poet's imagination to fill the void (and Rilke promptly fills it with an image ("...sein unerhortes Haupt, / darin die Augenapfel reiften."; "his legendary head / where the eye-apples ripen.") inspired by an Arcimboldo painting hanging in another gallery of the Louvre), the harpist's timelost hands, like his unseeable harp strings, become absent images of his unheard music, negative spaces powerfully charged with potential meaning, like that masterful space between the Virgin's dramatically foreshortened hand and the Christ child's head in the London National Gallery's Virgin of the Rocks:

Leonardo da Vinci. Virgin of the Rocks. Ca. 1500.
National Gallery, London.

(This space is cluttered in the more rhetorical Paris canvas by the inclusion of the angel's unnecessarily pointing hand:

Leonardo da Vinci. Virgin of the Rocks (detail). Late 1400s.
Musee du Louvre, Paris.)

The harpist's missing hands engage the viewer's imagination in an almost Modernist way (the greatest works of art are always already Modernist: Homer is packed with Joyce-style allusions to mythologies even more ancient), permitting/allowing/forcing the viewer to complete the artwork, to hear its unimaginable music. The harpist's mystery licenses our imagination. It is an image of inspiration that inspires us. Breathe it in.