Among the art-history tenets Eleanor Guralnick dutifully absorbed as a college undergraduate in the 1950s was the notion that a stylistic relationship existed between Egyptian statues and Greek kouroi, statues that depicted young Greek men. It wasn’t until years later that she realized that art historians had no proof for that claim.
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As a University of Chicago graduate student in search of a dissertation, Guralnick set out to collect evidence of an artistic connection between the two geographically separate and culturally distinct societies. A review of ancient Near Eastern literature led to her first clue. Egyptian sculptors used “canons of proportion,” a modular grid drawn on a piece of stone as a blueprint. A properly proportioned Egyptian statue of the seventh century BC–the period when Greeks began to carve statues across the Mediterranean–was 21 modules in height from the base of the feet to the tear ducts of the eyes.
A fellowship committee agreed that Guralnick’s theory was worth checking out. In the summer of 1968 she headed to Greece to systematically measure the nine Greek kouroi then known to archaeologists to have survived complete. Not that she would be the first to measure the statues, she says, for archaeologists often pulled out their tape measures during excavations. “But they didn’t measure along a straight plane. Most of the time they’d measure along angular planes, like the line from the tip of the nose to the end of the penis.” To standardize her measurements, Guralnick took along a camera and a tripod with a special attachment for taking stereometric photos, precisely separated pairs of images that allowed her to “look around” the statue.
In her spare time Guralnick lectures throughout the country for the Archaeological Institute of America. Next Saturday, March 31, she will take part in a daylong symposium on the ancient eastern Mediterranean being presented by the Chicago branch of the AIA, of which she is a past president. She will discuss the history of archaeological collections in Chicago’s museums, from the Art Institute to the Field Museum. Archaeologists from around the world will present 14 other topics, including the effects of pollution and tourism on ancient monuments, the ten-year Hittite-English dictionary project, and the discovery of 90 extraordinary glass panels, depicting everything from harbor scenes to ancient philosophers, that were inexplicably buried in crates beneath the sea in the port of Corinth for thousands of years.
