Religion and Art in Ancient Greece

by Ernest Arthur Gardner

CHAPTER IV

ANTHROPOMORPHISM

We have already noticed the religious conceptions and impulses which led to the substitution of images in human shape for the rude stocks and stones of primitive worship. The beginning of the change seems to have taken place at an early stage in the development of Greek art. In pre-Hellenic times we find representation of gods and goddesses in human form upon gems and other small works of art, and also in statuettes that were either objects of worship or dedicated in shrines; but we have at present no evidence as to whether monumental images of the gods were made in human form, though some objects of worship, such as the double-axe, were certainly set up in regular shrines. We know too little about the religious beliefs and customs of this prehistoric age to be able to judge whether such objects were regarded merely as symbols of the deity or as having immanent in them some divine or superhuman power; but survivals, especially of an early tree and pillar cult, are probably to be traced in historic Greece, and even to the present day.

The Homeric poems, on the other hand, supply us with little or no evidence as to the existence of any sculptural representation of the gods. Although temples are frequently mentioned, we are not informed that any of them contained a sacred image, with the apparent exception of the temple of Athena at Troy. There we are told that the Trojan matrons, in a time of stress, brought a robe to offer to the goddess, and that the priestess Theano placed it "upon the knees of beauteous-haired Athene." Unless, as is possible, this is a purely metaphorical expression, it would seem to imply a seated statue; but it is to be noted that the Palladium of Troy, the sacred image of Athena which was stolen by Ulysses and Diomed, and which was preserved, according to conflicting traditions, in one or another shrine in later Greece, was a standing statue of a primitive type. The inconsistency is not of great importance, except as showing that the supposed mention of the statue of Athena in the Iliad had little, if any, influence on later tradition; and in any case it is isolated, and does not refer to a Greek, but a foreign temple. On the other hand, we find frequent mention in later writers of primitive statues of the gods which were said to have been set up or dedicated by various persons in the heroic age. An example is offered by the Trojan Palladium already mentioned; another was the statue of Artemis carried off from Tauris by Iphigenia and Orestes; rival claimants to this identification existed at Sparta and at Brauron in Attica. The legends of dedication are of no historic value; the story of the Palladium itself was unknown to Homer, though it occurred in later epics. All that can be asserted of such images is that they were of unknown antiquity, and that local patriotism claimed for them a heroic origin. Much the same may be said of Dædalus. It need not be discussed here whether an actual artist of this name ever existed. The information we have as to Dædalus is of two kinds; on the one hand, we find tales of a mythical craftsman and magician, to whose invention many of the most typical improvements in early Greek sculpture are attributed; on the other hand, we have records of many statues of the gods, extant in historical times in various shrines of Greece, which were attributed to him. Such attributions are not really of greater historical value than the traditions of dedication in the heroic age which we find elsewhere. The name of Dædalus having once become famous in this connection, it was natural that many statues of primitive style and unrecorded origin should be attributed to him. More importance may be attached to the fact that the sculptors who actually made some of the early statues of the gods in Athens and in the Peloponnesus are described as the pupils or by some as the sons or companions of Dædalus. In this way his name is associated with some of the early schools that had the greatest influence in Greece, especially on the representation of the gods in sculpture. There are other traditions of early schools of sculptors, the marble workers of Chios, the bronze founders of Samos, who devoted themselves mainly to making statues of the gods, some of which survived throughout historical times. When we turn from tradition and consider the early examples of statues of gods that may still be seen or are recorded by extant copies, we find that these fall into two classes. On the one hand, there are more or less exact repetitions of the primitive stock or stone, the cylindrical tree-trunk or the rectangular block cut from the quarry, with the rudest indication of head and arms and feet, deviating as little as possible from the original shape of the block. When images of this sort were, as was often the case, of wood, they have, of course, disappeared; but we can sometimes recognise copies of them upon reliefs or in stone. On the other hand, we find another class of images which approximate more to the attainments of Dædalus as described by rationalising writers of later date. These images are completely in human form, and, if male, are usually nude. They have their legs separated in a short stride, the left foot being usually advanced; their arms are either set close to their sides, or one or both of them is raised from the elbow; their whole shape suggests a rigid system of proportions and a more or less conventionalised form. These images have no resemblance to the modifications of the primitive stocks and stones, and could not well be directly derived from them; they are found in great numbers upon many sites of early sanctity in Greece itself and in Greek settlements around the Levant, notably in Cyprus, Rhodes, and Naucratis in Egypt. Sometimes they seem to represent the god, sometimes the dedicator; but all alike show the attempt of the early Greek craftsman to imitate the products of more advanced and finished art which he saw around him. Many of them are derived from Egyptian types; others show the influence of Mesopotamian art, or of the hybrid craftsmanship of Phoenicia. The borrowing or imitation of such foreign types may at first sight appear to show even less promise of artistic progress than variations on the old native images; but it is not in its origins, but in its development and perfection that the chief excellence of Greek art is to be found.

The types borrowed by sculpture from foreign art are almost exclusively of human form. The monstrous mixed forms in which the deities of Egypt or Mesopotamia often found the expression of their superhuman and mysterious powers do not seem to have appealed to the imagination of the Greeks. Such mixed forms were, indeed, frequently borrowed by early decorative art, and on "Orientalising" vases we constantly find human-headed and bird-headed quadrupeds, usually winged, and human-headed birds. The delight in winged figures generally, which was mainly decorative in early times, also finds its origin in Oriental woven stuffs. Greek sculpture adopted and translated into stone or bronze some of these mixed types—notably the human-headed bird and the human-headed winged lion; these it identified as the Siren and the Sphinx of Greek myth, and associated them with the mysteries of the tomb. To some other forms, that of the Centaur and the Satyr and the Triton, it also gave considerable scope. But all these, if not human, are hardly to be regarded as divine; they are mostly noxious, and, even if benignant, do not attain the rank of gods. Perhaps a nearer approach to divine character is to be found in the river-gods, who are often represented as bulls with human heads or as human with bull's horns; but here, too, we have only to deal with minor deities. No sculptor represented Dionysus in this way, even though he was called "bull-shaped" by poets; nor is the horse-god Posidon even represented as a Centaur. The horse-headed Demeter of Phigalia remains the strange and solitary exception, however we may explain her existence.

The process by which the early human types were gradually improved and made more life-like, by a continuous struggle with technical difficulties, by constant and direct observation of nature, and by the building up of an artistic tradition in different schools and families, is a question that concerns the history of art rather than our present study. But it is impossible to distinguish rigidly between the two, because these types, whether of the nude standing male figure, of the draped female, or of the seated figure, are all of them used alike to represent human and divine personages; and, apart from inscriptions of dedication or conditions of discovery or distinctive attributes, it would often be impossible to tell whether any particular statue was meant to represent, for example, the image of a god or a conventional portrait of a man. These nude male statues, commonly known by the name of "Apollo," were certainly, some of them, made to commemorate athletes, whose images were set up either in the place where they won their victories or in their native town; others were placed over graves as memorials of the dead; and even in a sacred precinct it is sometimes uncertain whether the god himself is represented or the worshipper who dedicates this record of his devotion.

At this early period, therefore, Mr. Ruskin's strictures as to the impossibility of distinguishing the individuality of the different gods must be admitted, and even supplemented by an admission of the impossibility of distinguishing gods and goddesses from human beings. The explanation is obvious enough. During this age of early progress the constant aim of the sculptor is to attain to complete mastery over the material and to perfection of bodily form. In religious art, what corresponds to this is the struggle towards anthropomorphism—first to represent the gods in human form, and then to make that form the most perfect that human art can devise. During this stage of artistic and religious development the type and the ideal cannot be distinguished. It was only when a type or a varying series of types had been brought to perfection in the fifth century, so as to satisfy the demand for a harmonious system of bodily proportions, for beauty of outline and dignity of countenance, that these types could be used as a means of expression for the religious ideals of the nation. In developing the type the accidental has to be discarded, and with it much of the feeling of individuality; works of early archaic art, for all their defects, often show more sign of individual character than the more perfect works of the earlier part of the fifth century. The attainment of the type is followed by an infusion of character and individuality, drawn from the artist's trained memory and observation with clear artistic intention, not from the mere caprice of an accidental recollection or a casual peculiarity of a model. The character and individuality thus expressed must be considered in subsequent chapters; it is only necessary here to distinguish it from the suggestion of an individual, almost of a caricature, which we find sometimes in archaic art, and which is certainly to be seen occasionally in works of Florentine sculpture. During the period of the rise of Greek sculpture the various schools were advancing each in its own way towards what has been called naturalism in art, as opposed to realism on the one side and idealism on the other. That is to say, they were striving by constant study of the athletic form, of proportions and muscles, of drapery and hair, to attain to a series of types both in harmony with themselves and in accordance with nature; and they were too much absorbed in this attempt to go far beyond their predecessors in rendering the character of the gods according to the form consecrated by tradition. Even in the expression of the face the same process is to be traced. In early works we find sometimes no expression at all, or an apparent stolidity which is really the absence of expression; in the archaic smile we see an attempt to enliven the face, and possibly also, as we have noticed, to express and even to induce the benignity of the deity. But this attempt, made with inadequate artistic resources, tends to result in a mere grimace; and as we approach the transitional age before the greatest period of sculpture, we often find a reaction against any such exaggeration of expression in a severity and dignity that may have a certain grace of their own, but that are in some sense a retrograde movement so far as the expression of character is concerned.

It follows that the statues of the gods dating from this early period, however interesting they might be for the history of sculpture, would not, even if we possessed many more of them than we do possess, throw very much light upon the development of the ideas of the Greeks concerning their deities. They would probably conform to a limited number of clearly defined types. The most familiar of all, the standing nude male figure, would, if beardless, usually represent Apollo, with a bow or a branch of bay, or sometimes other attributes. A similar type, bearded, would stand for Zeus or Posidon or Hermes, if provided with thunderbolt or eagle, with trident or fish, or with a caduceus. Similar figures might also be draped, and still represent gods; or, if female, would serve for Hera, Artemis, Aphrodite, and sometimes for Athena, if she was represented without her arms and ægis. Then, too, there was the seated type, usually enveloped in full drapery, which might readily be adapted to a statue of any of the chief gods. In all of these there is no question of distinguishing the gods from one another in character and individuality; apart from attributes, there is hardly any attempt to distinguish gods from men.

Perhaps the earliest class of statues in which we find any attempt to give artistic expression to superhuman power is that in which we see the god in vigorous action, often striking with his characteristic weapon: Zeus with his thunderbolt in his raised right hand, Posidon with his trident, or Athena advancing rapidly with brandished spear and shield advanced. But even these figures, apart from their divine attributes, show no essential distinction from human combatants. It is a significant fact that it is still a matter of dispute6 whether one of the most famous statues of the early fifth century, "the Choiseul-Gouffier Apollo," represents a god or an athlete. This is neither because the Greeks at this time idealised their athletes nor because they humanised their gods, but because they typified them both; that is to say, they represented them by a type which was the most perfect rendering within their power either of man or of an anthropomorphic deity. Here we have the material form provided by means of which the ideals of the succeeding period were to find their artistic expression—such a typical or normal human form is, in fact, the logical expression of anthropomorphism in its most literal sense—the making of gods after man's image. But those who believed rather that man was made after God's image would look to find in the prototype something more and higher than can be seen in its earthly copy. This notion, even if not formulated by philosophy until a later age, certainly underlies the idealistic art of the fifth century.

6 Even if this dispute be regarded as now settled by weight of evidence, the fact that such a dispute is possible retains its significance.