Mission Santa Cruz, 1791, Santa Cruz, CA. 



Yesterday morning Ian drove me over to his gym, about two miles from hereat the base of the foothills, on the other side of what's now central Santa Cruz. I decided it would be a good walk back and wound through that neighborhood, over a pedestrian overpass that crosses Route 1, and came out onto the bluff that overlooks downtown. At the top of that hillstands the now iconic 1891 Holy Cross Church. The steeple is one of the first signals that Highway 17 south from San Jose has reached town after the passage over of the redwood crowned Santa Cruz mountains. Calvin just told me, "When I see that church I just know I'm almost home." Anyway, after climbing and descending the spiral ramp of the footbridge, I came out onto the little park plaza with the tiered fountain in front of Holy Cross. The church dominates the south side of the park and diagonally across is a small adobe mission church that looks a lot like the one in the illustration. It was built in 1930s at one third scale and backs onto the Santa Cruz Mission State Park, a small plaza framed by adobe building, some of which date back to the eighteenth century. I still haven't been in there.

Its strange how much you miss even in towns you frequently visit. Ian's lived here in Santa Cruz for almost fifteen years and I stilled haven't visited the Mystery Sport. It's still completely mystery to me. It wasn't until three or four years ago that I visited the Villa Branciforte, the house at the center of the Spanish land grant of the Branciforte family. There are signs for the exit on every highway coming into town. But it's not there. The house-and the land grant--are long gone. Just a plaque. Such is the case with the Mission Santa Cruz. In the state park, some of the outer buildings of the Mission remain, including the loggia inside the plaza. But of the original mission church, some of the foundation is still there behind the nineteenth century church. But that's it.

The thing about adobe is it has to be constantly maintained. It's mud and clay and hay, and sometimes dung. It can be made into bricks, and in California, that was the usual method for taller buildings like church. In New Mexico, the adobe was stacked in narrower and narrower stacks to create towers. But rain eroded it, and the battered walls (outward sloping0 were indeed battered. Once the California mission churches were secularized, they were generally neglected, and mostly just melted away.

Polykleitos, Doryphoros, Roman marble copy of a 5th century bronze, Archaeological Museum of Naples

Like most of the free-standing sculptures that remain from the classical world, what we have handed down to us are Roman marble copies of Greek bronze originals.  The  Doryphorous is no exception.  Sometimes called the "Canon," in the ancient world as now, he was sometimes taken as the most authoritative expression of the human ideal from classical Athens. ("Canon" refers to an exemplary standard, as in the "canonical books of the Bible", or the "canon of English literature").

"Classical," in this and the most basic sense refers to fifth century BCE Greece. He has all the features that came to be thought of human perfection: He's, well, male. He's publicly nude, as an athlete would be at the time and uncircumcised, with an athletic and youthful (as opposed to more mature, more massive) body.  His stance is weight-shifted, what art historians and artists call, in deference to typically Italian nomenclature, "contrapposto"--counter-posture. He shifts his weight onto his right foot, rextending his left leg, which throws his body into a relaxed "S" curve (in this view a backwards "S") in a sinuous line from his slightly turned head through the midline of his torso, tipped hips, and out his left leg.

"Doryphoros" means "spear-bearer": his left hand originally held a bronze spear.  The spear, and the Greek bronze sculpture by Polykleitos, is lost; bronze was frequently seized to be melted down for weapons or vessels.  Purely utilitarian and opportunistic "re-purposing." The post bracing his wrist from his hip, and the truncated stump supporting his leg were necessary in free-standing marble sculptures as they would not have been in bronze.  When you stop to think about it, the standing human body--the represented nude human body, that is--is supported by its thinnest part in the vertical line from the head to the feet, the ankles.  The whole mass of the body tips on that narrow base.  It's not a good  engineering plan, especially for marble with its high compressive strength but low tensile (flexible) strength--the opposite of bronze.  This is of course why the small, narrow projections are frequently broken off from ancient sculpture--noses, feet, hands, penises--even heads at the neck and whole bodies at the ankles.

While he's fit, he's not "cut" in the modern sense.  His body's planes are articulated in relatively simple, continuous, horizontal lines: from his arm pits under his pectorals, from his inguinal muscles (very important to the ancient world's conception of male body structure) to his groin, and across his knees. Mostly his body is smooth rounded shapes and clear, continuous outline, except for those three horizontal divisions.