Unmasking Helen
Abstract
Various works of art of all times have tried to represent the absolute and perfect beauty of Helen. We can imagine ourselves a woman with long blond hair (wavy or not), with blue eyes (or green, or gray, or chestnut), with a more or less long and stylized nose, thin or thick lips, round face or elongated ... The ancient Greeks could, of course, imagine Helen in all these ways, but those who attended the original staging of the homonymous tragedy of Euripides projected their particular notion of absolute beauty over an austere mask with a wig that covered the head of an actor, which looked towards the audience through two holes in the place of the eyes and spoke to him through an unmoving mouth. In this short study entitled «Unmasking Helen», I set out to demonstrate how Euripides achieves the maximum potential for Helen’s characterization through a convention (i.e., the mask) solidly rooted in the Greek dramaturgy, but alien to the modern naturalistic theater.
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