CHAPTER I
THE RISE OF GREEK SCULPTURE AND THE
ATHLETIC SCULPTURES OF GREECE
Nowadays sculpture is not an acknowledged queen in the Tourney of the Arts. The writer who has thrust her colours into his casque and would break a lance on her behalf, struggles for some unstoried damsel about whose very existence he has been playfully twitted by the champions of the reigning beauties.
Rightly considered, art is but a form of speech—sculpture speaking through words formed from chiselled marble and moulded bronze. Such a language can only have lost its meaning if the men of to-day differ fundamentally from those of the past. But is this the case? Can any one doubt that human thought and action are ever substantially repeating themselves, since men and women are at all times actuated by substantially the same passions? The twentieth century simply requires to realise that sculpture throbs with the thought and emotion astir in itself. Though it cannot be claimed that the art is popular in the sense that music and painting are popular, our firm conviction is that its peculiar thrill only needs to be felt, for sculpture to become as widely appreciated as the sister arts. Dancing may be a lost art; we are assured sculpture is not.
Under these circumstances, honesty compels us to preface this book with a confession. It is a history of sculpture with a purpose. It seeks to entice a few men and women into the belief that sculpture is, essentially, a living art. Its one object is to marshal the evidence in favour of the proposition that the marbles and bronzes of the great sculptors are not dead things which may well be left to gather dust in national museums and unfrequented corners of public galleries.
Though marble and bronze have not lost their potency, it would be folly to regard all sculpture as equally vital. Much has only an archæological or antiquarian interest in these latter days. Consequently, though building from the bricks of the past, everything which has lost its meaning for the men of to-day will be ruthlessly excluded. Our purpose is to write a history of the art itself, to show how its various manifestations arose from social and political circumstances, to trace the emotions and thoughts which stimulated the artists to produce their greatest works and to gauge the action and interaction which created the various national styles. On the one hand is the sculptor expressing what appears to be his own thoughts and emotions. On the other, the men of his country and time providing him with the raw material of thought and feeling, and compelling the production of works which could never have seen the light had he dwelt on a column in the desert after the manner of some Alexandrian mystic. Nor is this all. In addition, there is the influence which the sculptor exerts upon those around him, and particularly upon his fellow craftsmen. Out of the reciprocal modification arises a body of sculptural production, endowed with a definite national style.
The task of estimating these actions and counteractions and their effects cannot be an easy one. It calls for heart as well as mind, both from writer and reader. It would be fatal to treat the bronzes of Polyclitus, the marbles of Phidias, Donatello, and Michael Angelo, as too many historians do the documents from which they presume to create the past. Even if political history can be profitably reduced to a dull catalogue of charters and enactments—which we deny—the history of an art cannot. That must take human passion and emotion into account, and must be written by those who are not afraid to feel or ashamed of their feelings. From any other standpoint, art becomes divorced from life. The reader is denied a glimpse of its most potent force—its mysterious power of arousing echoes in his own heart.
Fortunately, the ground to be covered is pregnant with interest. The story of the meteoric rise of the art in Greece, so sudden that a paltry half-century separated the dead work of the sixth century from the vitalised marbles of the Parthenon, will be followed by an account of the “Golden Age,” in which sculpture expressed the whole nature—physical, mental, and spiritual—of the most complete men who have ever lived. Thence to the art of the Alexandrian and Roman Empires, leading up to the great revival of sculpture in the city states of Northern Italy. Finally, a consideration of the sculpture of Monarchical, Imperial, and Republican France will lead up to the works of our own time and the final problem—how near such a sculptor as Rodin is to assimilating and expressing the strange and wonderful experiences arising from the stress of modern life.
In the nature of things all our correlations will not be equally exhaustive or correct. The philosophical method is more open to errors arising from individual prejudice than the more strictly scientific one, which is content to collect and group examples. In some cases, moreover, peculiarities of style and subject will depend upon circumstances extremely remote from present-day experience, and, therefore, peculiarly difficult to express adequately. Nevertheless, we hope to suggest a method, and to lay a foundation upon which our readers will be able to build. Though we shall base our generalisations upon a comparatively few examples, we shall seek to provide niches into which practically all the greater works of sculpture can be fitted.
THE EARLY BEGINNINGS
(1000 b.c. TO 550 b.c.)
Bearing in mind that our only concern is with what may be termed “vital sculpture”—art with a message for the twentieth century—we may ask, where should a beginning be made?
Unfortunately, the art of sculpture, unlike history, has never been blessed with an Archbishop Ussher willing to vouch for the day and hour of its birth in some year after 4004 b.c. As a craft, of course, sculpture dates from the very earliest times. While the prehistoric painter was scratching his first rude picture in the sands about his doorway, his sculptor brother was whittling a stick into the semblance of a human figure, or roughly moulding the river clay to his fancy. The results interest the archæologist, and rightly find a place in our museums rather than in our art galleries. But they are not what we have in mind when we speak of “paintings” or “sculpture.”
How far then must we go back to find the birth of the art of sculpture? In other words, when did man first awaken to a sense of the real beauty of human form; and, under the impulse of this feeling, when did he first seek to perpetuate the fleeting beauties he saw around him, and the still more fleeting imaginations which these beauties evoked? Where must we begin if we would determine the various human influences—social, political, and religious—which have determined the course of sculpture as an art?
The man in the street answers readily enough—and he is quite right—“Fifth Century Greece.” He is satisfied that, speaking in general terms, it was not until after Marathon and Salamis that
“Human hands first mimicked, and then mocked With moulded limbs more lovely than its own, The human form, till marble grew divine.”
The average man, who has none of the yearnings of the archæologist, sees the interest of some of the plastic art of the earlier civilisations. He even grants it a certain beauty. Yet he knows that it is not what he expects to find in a gallery of sculpture. In Babylonia, the art was too closely identified with architecture to ever attain a vigorous independent growth. In Egypt, the conventionalities that resulted from the influence of an all-powerful priesthood and an extremely narrow emotional and intellectual experience, proved too strong for the native sculptor. The brilliant civilisation that existed during the second millennium in pre-Hellenic Greece and the islands and coasts of the Ægean, was too short-lived to allow of any art reaching maturity. It was only when the final defeat of the Persians permitted the Greeks to devote their great intellectual gifts to the task that the workers proved the full capabilities of stone and bronze as mediums of emotional expression, and “marble grew divine.”
But the efflorescence of the sculptor’s art in fifth-century Greece can only be realised by reference to the efforts of an earlier age. In comparison with poetry, sculpture developed late in Greece. Homer had lived and died. His epics had been chanted by the minstrels of the feudal courts for hundreds of years; but it was not until the tribal organisation became weakened, and the Greek trading and manufacturing cities arose, that men looked to marble and bronze to give material form to their fleeting imaginations. The case of Greece is, however, typical. The sculptor, like the dramatist, needs the atmosphere of a city and the vivifying effects of a city’s ever-changing influences to kindle the vital spark. Both are inspired, not by the appreciation of the few, but by the homage of the many. So long as the Greek husbandmen met by tens to honour Dionysus, the god’s feast was the occasion of a rude medley of rustic song and dance. When thousands gathered in the theatre below the Acropolis at Athens, an Æschylus showed that an art, using the same elements, could sound the depths of all hearts and imaginations. So, in the spot where a few rustics offered up their prayers and their praises for the increase of their herds, a rude wooden image was sufficient to mark the resting-place of the god. But when the Athenian populace gathered near the shrine of Athene, the goddess was symbolised by the great ivory and gold statue of Phidias.
The earliest Hellenic images were of wood hewn into the rough semblance of human figures. There was no attempt at more than vaguely indicating the limbs. The heavy blocks were, however, covered with richly embroidered dresses which served to hide some of their rudeness. When stone began to be used instead of the more perishable wood, the masons did not conceive the possibility of any great improvement. Yet these painted wooden images were not the first instances of the sculptor’s art in the Ægean peninsula. Six hundred years before, the Mycenæan civilisation in the south of the Peloponnesus and in the island of Crete, which the excavations of Dr. Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans have recently revealed, had given birth to work far nearer to nature than any produced in the eighth and ninth centuries. But during the years following the so-called Dorian invasion this was lost. Mycenæ, Tiryns, and Cnossus became vague memories—the dwelling-places of mythical kings and heroes—invaders and natives, settling down to an agricultural life in a not-too-fruitful country. The bare necessities of life were hard to come by. There was no leisured class such as alone could support an art like sculpture.
But this is scarcely a sufficient explanation of the extreme roughness of the early temple images of Greece before the sixth century. We still ask why a race in which the artistic instinct was so strong, and which had already inspired a great epic poem, did not produce more natural representations of the deities they had evidently clearly imaged mentally. An answer is suggested by an analogous case in early Egyptian history. Among the temple shrines of the Nile Valley, natural flints have been found that had evidently been selected on account of their rough resemblance to some animal form. Limestone figures have been found alongside these, the workmanship of which is almost as rough. These carved lumps of limestone are rather the result of improving natural forms than of actual modelling. Applying this analogy to the case of Greece, the early temple images seem to have been chosen, in the first place, on account of some fancied resemblance to a human or superhuman figure. The temptation to commit a pious fraud by adding a nostril, or an eye, or a suggestion of drapery would be very great, but it could not be carried too far. Beauty or naturalism were not aimed at or desired.
The suggestion that the extreme rudeness of the early Hellenic religious sculptures was deliberate, becomes still more probable when we turn to the history of Renaissance art, two thousand years after the age of which we speak. At a time when the artists of Italy were lavishing all their imagination and technical skill upon figures of the Madonna, the old symbolic representations of the Byzantine type were still preserved as precious relics in church and cathedral. Of the Italians of his day, for instance, no man realised the beauty of physical form and the possibility of expressing it by means of pigment and brush, more than Guido, the father of Italian painting. Yet he did not worship at the foot of one of his own pictures of the Madonna. Week by week he knelt before the little Madonna della Guardia from the East, black with age as it was. He felt instinctively that, for all the sheer beauty that he was striving to impart to his pictures of the Mother of Christ, they lacked the spiritual appeal of this old work. And so it was long after the time of Guido. Seeing that the Italian worshipper, who saw the most lovely representations of the Divine Motherhood in every church, still regarded the old conventional types with awe, we need not be surprised that the Greek peasant was content to worship the rough wood or stone image which he was told was heaven sent.
If this explanation is correct, the image would be an object of awe on account of the very artlessness which is surprising in a race so gifted as the Greeks. We escape the difficulty of believing that such a temple image as the “Hera of Samos,” in the Louvre, was the highest stage that the craftsmanship and the imagination of the Greek sculptor could then attain.
THE GROWTH OF NATURALISM
(550 b.c. TO 480 b.c.)
The Ionic Colonies in Asia Minor were the first of the Greek-speaking races to acquire material prosperity, and it was there that the sculptor first began to shake off the old conventional shackles. The Ionians were in touch with the civilisations of Babylonia and Egypt, and merchandise from the East flowed through their markets for Greece and the Grecian Colonies in the far west. Sculpture, in which the Oriental influence was strongly marked, flourished there considerably earlier than in Argos or Attica. About the middle of the seventh century b.c. these Ionian Colonies began to influence Greece strongly, and Athens in particular. This is evidenced by the manner in which the Ionic linen chiton, or sleeved tunic, gradually superseded the woollen peplos which the Athenians had worn earlier.
At this time the Greeks were becoming richer; their Colonies continued to demand ever increasing quantities of their manufactures, and to send more and more of the raw materials. The greater cities were able to replace the old shrines of brick and wood, which had contained the wooden images of their gods, by new stone structures. During the second half of the sixth century, temples were erected all over the Greek-speaking world, the ruins of those at Ægina and Selinus still remaining to show us the general type. Sculpture was the twin sister of architecture. Pediments, metopes, and friezes were all adorned with marble groups or reliefs. In Greece proper, the tyrants, who had usurped the power in many States, spent vast sums on beautifying their capitals. Such a one as Pisistratus turned to Ionia for the craftsmen he needed, and, particularly, to the school of sculpture in the island of Chios. Many Ionians skilled in the working of marble from Naxos and Paros settled in Athens, and they instructed their Athenian brethren. With the increasing facility that resulted from the greater number of workmen who could give their lives to mastering its technical difficulties, sculpture gradually lost its conventionalities.
By this time the art had made immense strides beyond the rude wooden images of the earlier age, as can be seen from the well-known archaistic “[Diana],” in the National Museum, Naples. This particular work was executed in Roman times under the influence of a strong tendency to reproduce the prominent characteristics of the archaic style. But though it dates from a time when sculpture was once more falling into lifeless conventionalism, it gives a good idea of the results of the first earnest efforts after truthful representation. The sculptor is not yet master of his material. Note the strange expression known as “the archaic smile,” a direct consequence of the craftsman’s inability to represent correctly the human eye in profile.
DEDICATORY STATUE (ARCHAIC)
Acropolis Museum, Athens
DIANA (ARCHAISTIC)
National Museum, Naples
A number of painted archaic sculptures have been unearthed in recent years on the Athenian Acropolis, which show the originals upon which the archaistic style of the “[Diana]” at Naples was formed. They were buried during the improvements consequent upon the rebuilding after the Persian Wars. Many of these were dedicatory offerings. The increasing custom of substituting such statues for the tripods and craters dedicated in earlier days, did much to provide artists at the end of the sixth, and the beginning of the fifth century, with opportunities for experiment. In such work the artist had only to satisfy the donor. Private individuals were less insistent upon conventional forms than the temple priests. Under these influences the drapery gradually became less angular, and the set smile of the older statues gave place to a dignified repose. The illusion of form became more and more complete, and there was less and less insistence upon the reproduction of the detail in every fold of the elaborate Ionic drapery. In other words, the artist was no longer a slave to his material. He was learning how to make the marble express what he had in mind. The numerous discoveries of these archaic statues illustrate the gradual change and, particularly, the growing beauty after which the Athenian artists were striving. Incidentally, they afford interesting evidence of the practice of painting marble which was general in Greece. From the remains of the actual pigments used, it can be seen that the hair was coloured, and the brow, lashes, pupil and iris of the eye indicated. The borders of the dress too were strongly marked, so that one garment could be readily distinguished from another.
With the growing naturalism even portrait statues became possible. For instance, after the dismissal of the sons of Pisistratus, a group in honour of Harmodius and Aristogiton, who had headed an insurrection against the tyrant, was erected in the Agora by their democratic admirers. When this was carried off by Xerxes, it was replaced by a group, the work of Critius and Nesiotes, a marble copy of which can be seen in the National Museum at Naples. We have chosen the statue of “[Harmodius]” as an illustration of the earliest Greek iconic statuary. It will be seen that it entirely lacks the ideality of treatment which was to be the leading characteristic of the art fifty years later.
THE ATHLETIC SCULPTURES
(480 b.c. TO 400 b.c.)
The magnificent full length “[Charioteer],” reins in hand, excavated by the French Expedition at Delphi, is not only the finest pre-Phidian bronze in existence, but marks the “border line between dying archaism and the vigorous life of free naturalism.” The statue may have formed part of a chariot group set up as a dedicatory offering by Polyzalus, the brother of Hieron of Syracuse, in honour of a victory in the games at Delphi. The entire work portrayed a high-born youth, waiting in a chariot at the starting-post. A companion was at his side, grooms, no doubt, standing at the horses’ heads. The driver’s chiton is gathered across the shoulders by a curious arrangement of threads, run through the stuff in order to prevent the loose garment fluttering in the wind. It dates from about 470 b.c. The bronze is representative of the highest achievements of Greek art before the advent of the three great sculptors of the fifth century. Traces of archaic workmanship are most noticeable in the face and drapery. The arms and the feet, however, are beautifully natural.
THE CHARIOTEER (BRONZE)
Delphi Museum
HARMODIUS
National Museum, Naples
Still the stiffness and conventionality of the archaic period died hard. Even in the works of Myron, whose reputation was established by the middle of the fifth century, there are still traces of archaic treatment, as in the hair. But in such a statue as his “[Discobolus],” with its truthfulness to nature, its rhythmic grace of design and its triumphant mastery over all technical difficulties, we can realise how far the sculpture of his age was ahead of the best work possible fifty years earlier.
The mention of Myron, the earliest artist to benefit by the freeing of the plastic arts from the shackles of conventionalism, brings us upon one of the prime problems of Greek sculpture. Practically, the history of Greek sculpture depends upon the connections which can be established between the art and three leading ideals. The difficulty of really understanding it depends upon the distance we moderns have progressed—pardon us the term—from those three dominating ideas.
“How we jabber about the Greeks! What do we understand of their art, the soul of which is the passion for naked male beauty?” So says Nietzsche. And he proceeds to point out that for this very reason the Greeks had a perspective altogether different from our own. Nothing can be truer; nor can anything be more certain than that this truth must be realised absolutely by all who would penetrate beyond the outer courts of the temple of Hellenic sculpture. But though we cannot look at a Greek statue with the understanding of a Hellene, though classic sculpture is, as it were, written in an alien tongue, the historian can readily enumerate the influences by which the art was fostered, and the ideals which it sought to embody.
The first was a civic pride so intense that no Greek of the best period hesitated to sacrifice all individual considerations for the sake of the common weal. To the true Hellene, life was life in the Greek city-state.
The second was a realisation of the extent and limit of human powers so complete that it left little room for the idea of the extra-mundane God which Christian nations have found so satisfying. The immediate consequence was a religious tolerance so complete that we Christians, who are apt to estimate religious fervour by proselytising energy, too often regard it as proceeding from a mere poetical philosophy.
The third was a love, amounting to worship, for the human physical frame—for the actual bone, flesh and muscle, which make the man.
Every Greek statue owes its greatness to the intensity of the artist’s attachment to one or other of these dominating beliefs. The Panathenaic frieze on the Parthenon was, primarily, the result of the first; the great temple statues of Zeus, Hera, Athena and Asclepius represent the fruits of the second; the glorious series of athletic statues by Hellenic sculptors of every period witness to the potency of the third.
Like most ultimate problems, the puzzle goes back to a question of morality. To-day, virtue is personal, morality is practically a bargain between man and man and between the individual creature and his Creator. We cannot easily realise the position of the fifth-century Hellene, whose moral sense did not depend upon the promptings of an individual conscience, but upon the influence of an unwritten, but unbending, civil code. There was not one such code in Greece, but a hundred and fifty. Each city-state had its own fixed ideals. Greatly as these differed, all agreed that the interests of the individual were as nothing compared with those of the city. And to this all added as the second great commandment, “Thou shalt love thy body as thyself.” To-day, we appoint Degeneration Commissions. In Greece they went to the root of the matter and made a well-proportioned and strong body a prime condition of citizenship. In Sparta every child was submitted to the inspection of the heads of the tribe, whose task it was to decide if any bodily weakness or deformity was present or seemed likely to develop. If so, the verdict was death. At seven the Spartan boy left home and entered the state schools, his life, until he reached manhood at thirty, being a continual round of exercises, athletic and military. And so it was with the fairer sex. The one end of the education and training of a Spartan woman was to give birth to perfectly-proportioned sons. Each girl attended the public gymnasium. Nor were these customs peculiar to Sparta. The maidens of the Greek world had their athletic festivals, under the guardianship of the goddess Hera. A typical example, the Heræa of Elis, was celebrated once in every Olympiad, and was presided over by the sixteen matrons who had woven the sacred peplos of the goddess. The principal solemnity was the race of the maidens in the Olympic stadium. The course, however, was much shorter than that of the Olympian games, in fact a sixth part. The girls were divided into three classes according to age, their prize being the garland of wild olive awarded at Olympia. The victors were allowed to set up statues of honour, and a marble copy of one of these bronzes, often called “[The Spartan Girl],” has come down to us. The forearms have been wrongly restored, but the statue evidently represents a maiden of about sixteen years of age at the starting-point, waiting for the signal. She is clad in the short linen chiton, reaching to the knees.
But to return to the main thread of our argument. The Spartan system was not singular but typical. It is true that no other Greek state called upon its parents to expose their halt, maimed, and blind weaklings on the wild slopes of Mount Taygetus. So drastic a method was only necessary where military considerations were paramount. But every Greek city relied upon the physical fitness of its citizens, and any Greek commander might confidently have followed the example of the officer who stripped the rich robes and jewels from his Persian captives and exposed their unmanly limbs to his company. “Such plunder as this,” he cried, “and such bodies as those!”
The Hellenic belief in the prime importance of physical fitness and the worship of bodily beauty to which it gave rise explain why the school of “Athletic” sculptors, who first shook off the chains which had hampered the progress of the plastic arts, made such an immediate impression. These men appealed to more than the sense of physical beauty. They touched a chord in the Greek heart which was in a very true sense “religious.” An Athenian of the time of Pericles must have inspired Mr. Arthur Balfour when in answer to the query “What do you mean by a beautiful soul?” he replied, “Well, to tell you the truth, my dear lady, I mean a beautiful body.”
The mythological religion of Greece had retarded, as we have seen, the progress of the sculptor. In its early stages the art, of course, owed much to its position as a handmaiden of religion. The first artists found the priests, and still more those making dedicatory offerings at the shrines of the great gods, their chief patrons. When, however, the craftsmen proved the possibility of not only a truthful but even an ideal representation of nature, and were ready to discard the meaningless conventionalities of the earlier stage, these religious influences proved a bar rather than an aid to progress. When a city desired to erect a new statue in its chief temple, it offered the commission, not to the daring innovator, but to one of the old school, or at least to an artist who was willing to confine his experiments to other classes of subjects.
“THE SPARTAN GIRL”
Vatican, Rome
THE DORYPHORUS OF POLYCLITUS
National Museum, Naples
In this plight the sculptor, consciously or unconsciously, sealed an alliance with the worshipper at the shrine of bodily beauty. The results were immediate. After the middle of the sixth century it became customary to erect statues in honour of victors in the national games. They were frequently set up by the victor’s colony or state in the sacred grove of Zeus at Olympia, in honour of their subject’s success. An iconic statue was the peculiar privilege of one who had proved the winner on at least three occasions, but others were erected of a more general character. These portrayed the pick of the youth of the Grecian world in all the varied attitudes of the different sports. No subjects could have offered better opportunities to an artist appealing to a race with the characteristics we have sketched.
Moreover, the circumstances under which his work was given to the world were ideal. Compare the sculpture-rooms at Burlington House with the sacred grove of Zeus at Olympia, compare the average private-view “crowd” with the gathering of Greeks every four years for the Olympian festival, and one can see why men speak of sculpture as “a lost art.”
THE OLYMPIAN GAMES
When the Olympian games started they were confined to the south of Greece, and grew up under the patronage of Sparta. As early as 776 b.c. the meetings determined the chronological system of Greece. A few years later the festival had established itself so firmly in the Hellenic social system that it became the occasion of a national assembly of the Greek-speaking world. At all other times the distinction between Athenian and Spartan, between Argive and Theban, was absolute. During the Olympian games the Greek escaped from the grinding effort to preserve his civic individuality—the price he paid for citizenship in such a state as Athens or Sparta. Under the shadow of Mount Cronus, at the time of the second full moon after Midsummer Day, the competitors and spectators came together from Italy, Sicily, Asia Minor, and the islands of the Ægean. A sacred armistice had been proclaimed by the Olympian heralds in all the states of Greece. The deputies from every part vied with one another in the splendour of their equipment and the value of their offerings to the state of which they were the guests.
Remembering that we are endeavouring to account for the rise of one of the great arts of all time, let us call to mind the scene on the plain between the Alpheus and the Cladeus on one of the five days during which the festival lasted. With one exception—the Priestess of Demeter—there is no woman in the vast assembly. It is the fourth day of the games. The judges can be seen, clad in the purple robes of their office. Near by, in the brilliant sunshine, his naked form standing out in clear outline, is one of the competitors in the Pentathlon. This comprises leaping, running, wrestling, and hurling the spear and discus. All who enter must excel in each. Victory is not certain until three of the five events have been won. The most famous Pentathli are light men—not bulky wrestlers. Of all the competitions, this needs the finest physique and is most calculated to develop that elasticity and harmonious balance which the Greek prizes in his youth. Well might Aristotle call the Pentathli “the most handsome of all athletes.” The youthful figure, on a space raised slightly above the ground, is of pure Hellenic blood. He rests on his right foot, his knee bent and his body leaning forward. In his hand is the stone discus, ten or twelve inches in diameter, which reaches half way up his forearm. In front, in the distance, stands a friend ready to mark the spot where the stone falls. The eyes of Greece are upon the discobolus. His only reward is the right to lay the crown of leaves in the shrine of the god of his native town. Can it be wondered that the artists of Greece were inspired to their grandest achievements by such sights? It would have been strange indeed if their finest works had not included the representations of the winners of the garland of wild olive.
But the truth goes deeper than this. Without such inspirations Greek sculpture would never have risen to the heights it did attain. And without the achievements of the Hellene, can we be sure that Michael Angelo would have ever been more than a struggler? He might have painted the Sistine ceiling, but would he have modelled the [David] or carved the monuments in the Medici Chapel? The festival at Olympia and the gymnasia in every Greek city were surely necessary if the art which depends upon “the passion for naked male beauty” was to come to its own. In no other way could “every limb present”—we are quoting from Schopenhauer—“its plastic significance to criticism and to comparison with the ideal which lay undeveloped” in the imaginations of men. Under circumstances less strenuous the dull anticipation of bodily beauty would never have been raised “to such distinct consciousness that men would have become capable of objectifying it in works of art.”
We have seen that the initiation of the Olympian games was due to Sparta and its Peloponnesian allies. Moreover, the custom of laying aside all clothing for the various sports was first adopted by the Peloponnesians, and only spread slowly through the other Greek city-states. These facts, together with the location of Olympia in the centre of the Peloponnese, suggest why the “Dorian” sculptors devoted particular attention to such subjects as the Olympian festivals offered. In the fifth century Argos was second only to Athens as an artistic centre, and Polyclitus of Argos, who headed “the Dorian School,” was considered the equal of Phidias himself.
The ideal for which Polyclitus worked was the portrayal of the healthy human form in its most complete and harmonious development, and, particularly, the preservation of a due proportion between the various parts of the body. His success may be judged from the fact that his statue, the “[Doryphorus]”—spear-bearer—was adopted by his artistic successors as the standard of perfection of the youthful male figure, and was known as “The Canon.”
The bronze originals of the “[Doryphorus]” and its companion, the “Diadumenus,” which depicts a youth binding the diadem of victory about his brow, have perished. We are therefore compelled to gauge the genius of Polyclitus by the marble copies. There is a famous copy of the “[Doryphorus]” in the National Museum at Naples.
Photo.Holliday, Oxford
MYRON’S DISCOBOLUS
The Ashmolean, Oxford
The chief point of interest in the Dorian school, however, arises from a comparison of the works produced under its direct influence with the better-known examples of the Attic school. Early in the fifth century the school of sculpture located around Argos seems to have been one of the most influential in Greece. The Argive Ageladas, under whom Polyclitus was a student, is credited with having instructed the two other early masters—Myron and Phidias. However this may be, the Argive influence was not all-powerful amongst the Athenian sculptors. The variation between the two schools is more noticeable than the resemblance. And this is of vital interest, depending as it does upon the entirely different mental and emotional atmosphere in the two city-states.
If the two well-known statues of discoboli are compared with the “[Doryphorus]” of Polyclitus, the characteristic differences between the Athenian and Dorian schools are clear.
The standing “[Discobolus]” may well be a copy of the “Pentathlon Winner” of Alcamenes, a co-worker with Phidias, who reached his prime about 420 b.c. It shows the athlete holding the discus in his left hand. He is measuring the ground with his eye, testing the elasticity of his limbs and the sureness of his footing as he does so.
The “[Discobolus]” of Myron represents the Pentathlete in the act of throwing the discus. Lucian speaks of “the discus-thrower, bending into position for the cast: turning towards the hand holding the discus, and all but kneeling on one knee, he seems as if he would straighten himself up at the throw.” The statue is a consummate proof of Myron’s skill in the rendering of vigorous movement. The copies in the Vatican and the British Museum are in marble. In the original bronze the discus-thrower looked back, not at the ground, as in the restoration. The correct attitude can be seen in the recently discovered replica, now in the possession of the Italian Government, or, still better, in the fine bronze cast in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, which dispenses with the disfiguring support necessary in a marble copy.
Both these statues of discoboli are distinguished above all for the rhythm of their composition—a rhythm which is the expression in bronze of the beautifully balanced and magnificently full lives of the Athenians of the Periclean age. Polyclitus invested his figures with a natural vigour and dignity which won for him the suffrages of his Peloponnesian countrymen. But even allowing for the fact that we judge the Argive from late copies, while such originals as the Parthenon frieze remain to witness to the achievements of the rival school, it cannot be doubted that the Athenian ideal was the nobler and its attainment worthier of praise. Nor can we attribute the difference to anything else than the more vitalising atmosphere in which Athenian art was nourished—a fact which will be clear when we have estimated the circumstances which led to the erection of the Parthenon.