Twisted Torso of a Youth (Ilioneus), a sculpture of youth whose now-missing arms were once raised to protect his now-missing head,is a case in which the symbolism inherent in the gesture is more significant than a positive identification. According to Henri Brunn, who wrote a guide to the Glyptothek in the late 19th century, this statue was identified with Ilioneus, the youngest child of Niobe, due to a superficial resemblance to a figure on a sarcophagus in the Vatican . Niobe’s seven sons and seven daughers were killed by Leto’s children, Diana and Apollo, after Niobe claimed she was superior to Leto. In Ovid’s words,
Last of all, Ilioneus raised his arms in supplication, though it was to be of no avail. “O gods,” he cried, “I pray you, one and all, spare me!” So he prayed, not knowing that there was no need to address them all. The archer Apollo was moved to sympathy, but already his shaft had gone beyond recall: still, the wound that killed the boy was only a slight one, and the arrow was not driven deep into his heart.
                                                       
Brunn points out that this statue is different from the other representations of the Niobids (as the children of Niobe are known) by its complete absence of clothing and its base, which, instead of evincing soil, is perfectly smooth. This leaves us with the certainty only that the statue shows a young, naked man lifting his arms over his head to protect himself from a blow. The smooth marble finish depicts young skin, and the youth seems in danger of imminent decapitation or other attack; he is a subject who arouses our sympathy. On another level, like the Faun, he too may arouse feelings of an erotic nature, in those for whom violence and sadism are stimuli.
       One of the main attractions of the Glyptothek is the collection of figures from the pediments of a classical Greek temple on the island of Aegina, not far from Athens. A temple was built there around 560 BCE; after its roof burned out, a second temple was completed at the beginning of the 5th century. It is believed to have been a sanctuary to Aphaia, a goddess similar in nature to Artemis. One story has it that Britomartis, a Cretan goddess, was pursued by Minos. To escape him, she jumped off a cliff into the ocean, there to be rescued in fishermen’s nets. She fled to Aegina and was from that point on worshipped there as Aphaia. One scholar has written, “The Aegina figures are the best preserved of all such Greek temple groups, with the exception of those from the temple of Zeus at Olympia. It is the most comprehensive monument of Greek sculpture from the turn of 6th and 5th centuries, providing priceless evidence for the process of transition taking place in Greek art. The Aeginetan school of sculpture was much admired by the ancients.” The figure Dine has chosen to draw is the archer Paris, the lover whose rape of Helen led to the Trojan War, and whose arrow, penetrated the one part of Achilles’ body left vulnerable when his mother dipped him into the stream of immortality, holding him by the heel.
       In 1991, still working with classical ideas, Dine made Three Roman Heads, based on photographs of sculptures in Copenhagen's Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (named after the museum in Munich). These drawings possess a marked density of surface and palpable evidence that the artist has attacked that surface and broken through it in one case. Dine used ferric chloride and shellac to achieve a stone-like quality in the whole sheet. Watercolor drips heighten a feeling of painterliness, while a footprint on the back of the left-hand figure’s neck draws attention to the piece’s contemporary facture.
Dine returned to draw at the Munich Glyptothek in 1992, and in 1993, he made a series of 150 drawings, which, like the original set, stand as one work, entitled Some Greeks, Some Romans. Dine drew Figure with Cupid in 1994. Possibly depicting Venus with a Cupid, this drawing’s careful modeling and angelic blue stain give it a Renaissance air, which is countered by being ripped through and wetted down.
The latest two works in the exhibition with classical hints are the two owl drawings from 2000. They are actually paintings over photo-silkscreens; the classical in these comes from the traces of Dine’s Venus sculpture in the photo of his London studio (the same photoscreen is used as the ground for Twisted Torso of a Youth (Ilioneus)). In the smaller of the two, Blind Owl, one’s attention is drawn to the forest of oil paint marks, as the owl, identified with Athena, takes the place of Aphrodite/Venus. In the larger piece, Owl in Chelsea, a series of footprints on the right side becomes patterning, and it overlays the patterning of the printing of the photoscreen.  On the floor, this screen pattern pales next to the painted acrylic marks above, which make up the bird, but in the base of the sculpture the screen pattern lends the drawing a modern subjectivity.
       The Glyptothek work, in addition to being about looking at particular sculptures, is also about being in a particular space, the reaction that engenders in a particular viewer, enabling him better to feel the art on display. “I have never felt closer to the Ancient World than in the Glyptothek” Dine wrote. “In the big hall of Roman portrait heads there must be over one hundred heads. You feel like you’re in a crowd of people, but there is nothing heroic about it. It’s very much on a human scale, right at the viewer’s eye level...” The drawings also have to do with being in specific European places (Munich, Venice, London). “I sat in my studio that winter [1986-87 in Venice] and made drawings, all of a certain size, not too big. I wanted to make a portfolio, a book of my drawings. Then I started to draw antiquities from books that weren’t in the Glyptothek. In a sense, I was making my own Glyptothek. I did that over two and a half winters... [going between Venice and Munich] ...”
       These are not so much portraits of ancient sculptures, as they are, partially, attempts to re-depict what the sculptor originally attempted. In that sense, they are in a collegial competition with the nameless Greek and Roman creators of those pieces. On another level, they are part of Dine’s evolutionary project of drawing, in which the subjects can be seen again as “symbols for the self,” as were Dine’s early moonlike face paintings. As Dine puts it, “…my personal history is intertwined with this subject matter. These Greek and Roman citizens become my history. Each head is the voice of my unconscious.”
       Part of the endeavor is about looking, something Dine has been attempting for a very long time. In 1966, before he moved to London, he had an exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery there, a section of which was confiscated by the police as pornography. John Russell, reviewing the exhibition in ARTnews, pointed out that the offending works were the result of Dine’s practice of observation: “They were simply one more example of Dine’s way of isolating elements in everyday life which usually come as part of an ensemble. The ensemble in question was London itself… Dine looked at a lot of things in London… and he worked reminiscences of one or another of them into a long series of mixed-medium pictures. Among the things he looked at were the phallic drawings, which embellish those unsung galleries of folk-art for which one penny is the usual price of admission. He took these straight, as the Venetian masters took the antiquities in the Museo Archeologico…”   In one sense, Dine’s looking is the same, whether the gallery be of unsung folk-art or heralded masterpieces.
       The previous issue of ARTnews had featured a Jim Dine cover and a “Test in Art,” administered to Dine by his friend and collaborator, the poet Kenneth Koch. Finally, there is a sense in which the classical sculptures Dine drew are simply objects of a particular nature and as such have no claim on higher standing than any other objects.  At certain moments, we need to be reminded that great works of art are merely things; otherwise we cannot go on with life.  A similar attitude toward masterpieces may be gleaned from Koch’s poem, “You Were Wearing”:
We waited for a time and then joined her, only to be served tea in cups 
          painted with pictures of Herman Melville

As well as with illustrations from his book Moby Dick and from his novella,
          Benito Cereno.”