The Colossal: From Ancient Greece to Giacometti gathers instances of the colossal throughout history, from the obelisks of Egypt to the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Roman Colosseum to the gigantic heads of the Olmecs and the imposing stone statues of Easter Island. It sets out a vision of the colossal that encompasses both the colossal in scale and another overlooked sense of the colossal: the archaic Greek kolossos (a ritual effigy) and its modern equivalents, in which the colossal stands as a double or substitute linking the ancient world to the twentieth-century world of the European surrealists. In this original account of the colossal in culture, Mason takes a bold, multidisciplinary approach that will appeal to all those with an interest in the history and theory of the visual. The Colossal argues that the artist who understood, and directly tapped into, this alternative sense of the colossal with greatest import was Alberto Giacometti, most notably in his enigmatic work 'The Cube', which articulates themes of death and mourning in ways rarely seen since the art of Archaic Greece.
Each example of the colossal is presented in a temporal and cultural framework encompassing historical and archaeological evidence. From the monolithic sculptures of long-dead civilizations to Giacometti's imposing and unsettling heads Mason's fascinating book traces new, unexplored threads through visual history.