CHAPTER VI
THE HELLENISTIC SCULPTURE OF GREECE
(300 b.c. TO 50 b.c.)
“The wren can soar as high as the eagle—once lodged upon the shoulders of the king of the skies.” So men say. But the high gods only smile. They know that emotions must arise and thoughts be nourished in hearts and minds great enough to contain them, if they are to live in ethereal depths. The sculptor or the painter, with the wings of the wren, must be content to flutter nearer to the flowers.
In this truth lies the key which unlocks the mystery of the sculpture of Hellenistic Greece, one of the most elusive problems in the history of art. Before any marble of this age we feel we are face to face with the work of lesser spirits—men who cannot boast of the eagle wings of their brothers of the fourth and fifth centuries. Few can recall the name of a single Greek sculptor of the later age. There is certainly no Scopas, no Praxiteles, no Lysippus. Yet the mere enumeration of the “[Farnese Hercules],” the “[Belvedere Apollo],” the “[Venus of Milo],” and the “[Venus of Medici],” witnesses to craftsmen of the highest technical skill. What the sculpture of Hellenistic Greece lacks is the passionate enthusiasm for emotional and intellectual beauty which impressed the personality of such a man as Praxiteles upon his age, and made him not only a sculptor of note but a cosmic force. Praxiteles found sculptural expression for new loves and new hates. This is the power which creates a school. It is the absence of men possessed of this faculty, together with the absence of the new loves and hates themselves, which the historian of Hellenistic Greek sculpture must explain.
But, first of all, terms require definition. “Hellenistic Greece” connotes both a period and a locality. In point of time, it roughly includes from 300 b.c., when the immediate influence of Lysippus was removed, to, say, 50 b.c., when Rome realized her task of ruling the Western world. In point of place, the sculpture of Hellenistic Greece is to be sharply distinguished from that of Rhodes, Pergamus, and Alexandria. This is the more important, as the term Hellenistic is properly applicable to all these schools. Moreover, there are many characteristics common both to the Hellenistic sculpture of Greece itself and the art of the various States of the Alexandrian empire. Neither Rhodes nor Pergamus, for instance, gave rise to masterful spirits of the type which directed the course of Hellenic art during the fourth and fifth centuries. Both Pergamus and Rhodes, however, were centres which had never encountered the full tide of Hellenic civilisation.
It was not hard to correlate political and social circumstances which had no counterpart in fourth- and fifth-century Greece with the characteristics which distinguished the “[Dying Gaul]” and the “[Laocoon]” from the sculptures of Praxiteles and Scopas. But in Greece, during the post-Alexandrian age, the problem is far more complicated. The old methods of life and thought lingered on. The difference between “Hellenic” and “Hellenistic” is far more intangible than it is in countries where the Greek city-state system had never taken root. It is true that even in Greece the peculiar political and social conditions which gave rise to Hellenic sculpture passed away. But, once developed, the body of ideas which arose from them continued to influence the sculptor and the public to whom he appealed.
THE FARNESE HERCULES
National Museum, Naples
THE FOLLOWERS OF LYSIPPUS
Putting aside then for the moment the characteristics which distinguish the art of Hellenistic Greece from that of the earlier age, let us fix our attention upon the long series of works which owe their inspiration to the great sculptors of the fourth century. Nowhere can any affinity with the works of Phidias and the other fifth-century masters be detected. The men of Hellenistic Greece were entirely out of sympathy with the ideals of Periclean Athens. But they could realize the emotions aroused by Scopas, with his insistence upon the struggles of the individual soul. They could seek to express for themselves the feminine graces of Praxiteles. Above all they realized the value of the more strenuous ideals embodied in the sculpture of Lysippus.
The “[Farnese Hercules]” affords a striking instance of the effect of the Hellenistic outlook upon a theme which had been closely identified with a Hellenic sculptor of the first order. Lysippus had done for Hercules what Praxiteles had done for Hermes. He fixed the type. The “[Farnese Hercules],” however, is the work of the Athenian sculptor, Glycon, and dates from the first century b.c. Glycon has chosen the moment when the hero, worn out by his labours, stands with every muscle relaxed, resting. The keynote of his statue is to be found in
“The spreading shoulders, muscular and broad, The whole a mass of swelling sinews.”
To the imagination of the Athenian of the age of Lysippus, this would have appeared forced. The muscularity of the hero would have struck him as excessive. Lysippus indeed satisfied the craving for a deeper naturalism, which arose from a surfeit of the sensuous idealism of Praxiteles. But his judgment would have avoided the pitfall of excessive realism which distinguishes Glycon’s conception of Hercules from that which any fourth-century Athenian would have formed.
A less significant example but in some respects an even more interesting one, is to be found in the magnificent nude, the “[Cerigotto Bronze],” recovered, near the island after which it is named, about the year 1900. This derives its importance from the fact that it is a bronze original and not the work of a Roman copyist as so many Hellenistic marbles are.
The story of its romantic recovery would alone ensure this bronze becoming historic.
“A thousand years it lay in the sea With a treasure wrecked from Thessaly. Deep it lay ’mid the coiled sea-wrack.”
The second chapter in its history opened when a party of sponge-fishers happened upon what they found to be the wreckage of an ancient vessel which had run upon the rocks to the east of the island of Cerigotto and sunk in thirty fathoms of water. The cargo had evidently been the property of a dealer in antiques, the wreck probably dating from the second century b.c. A considerable portion of the cargo was brought to the surface.
THE CERIGOTTO BRONZE
Athens
The marbles, with one exception, were unrecognizable. But the bronzes had fared better. In particular, a life-sized statue of an athlete, with right arm outstretched, proved capable of complete restoration. It now stands in the museum at Athens. The critical battle as to the date of its casting was a long one. General opinion to-day regards it as an early Hellenistic work based upon the Lysippic style. In the “[Cerigotto Bronze],” the tendency towards excessive realism noted in the “[Farnese Hercules]” has not proceeded so far. But in the body, and especially in the treatment of the abdominal muscles, a departure from the idealistic standard approved by the great masters of the fourth century can be clearly detected. Instead of being content with a suggestion of the natural form, the Hellenistic sculptor aims at realistic representation. He seeks to copy the human form, regardless of the lesson afforded by every great sculptor of Greece, that the more indirect methods of idealism are far better calculated to arouse the uplifting emotions which every true man and woman must feel before the grandest object Heaven ever made.
The classical art critics were fully aware of the snare which lay in this passion for extreme realism of detail. They clearly recognized it to be a characteristic feature of much Hellenistic sculpture. They tell, for instance, of the statue of the “Dying Jocasta” in which the Hellenistic sculptor mingled silver with the bronze, to denote the pallor of coming death. Pliny adds that the sculptor Aristonidas of Rhodes mixed iron with the metal from which he cast a statue of Athamas—that the ruddy glow might suggest the blush of remorse which a father who had hurled his son from the rocks would naturally wear. Both these instances are narrated as mere eccentricities. Their interest for ourselves lies in the fact that they illustrate precisely the same tendency which distinguishes the “[Hercules]” of Glycon from that which Lysippus had made three centuries earlier or the “[Cerigotto Bronze]” from a similar work by a fourth-century sculptor.
When analyzed, this tendency towards realism points clearly to an absence of that fine critical faculty with which every supreme artist is endowed. It argues a lack of moderation which in the end must lead to disaster. The admixture of silver to the bronze “Dying Jocasta” was no isolated case. Hellenistic Greece proved itself open to a charge of immoderate folly on many another occasion. The instance furnished by that “Wonder of the World,” the Rhodian Colossus, will occur to every one. The great statue of the Sun-god at Rhodes measured 105 ft. high. It was cast hollow, the separate pieces being set up, one upon another, around an inner structure of masonry. Pliny says of it:—
“The greatest marvel of all, however, was the colossal figure of the sun at Rhodes made by Chares of Lindus, a pupil of Lysippus. This figure was seventy cubits in height, and after standing fifty-six years was overthrown by an earthquake. But even as it lies prostrate, it is a marvel. Few men can embrace its thumb. Its fingers are larger than most statues. There are huge yawning caverns where the limbs have been broken.”
THE FOLLOWERS OF PRAXITELES
Considered as a whole the sculpture of Hellenistic Greece exhibits an intensification of the characteristics which distinguish the sculpture of Praxiteles and Lysippus from that of Phidias and Polyclitus. So far we have only traced the indebtedness of the Hellenistic sculptor to Lysippus. We have seen how one branch of the Hellenistic school continued to favour the virile subjects Lysippus had preferred, how it accentuated the natural realism which characterized his style. The second branch, which carried forward the traditions of Praxiteles, was equally potent. Though it cannot be said that these sculptors “blended with their marbles the emotions of the soul,” as had been said of Praxiteles, yet the feeling for grace of line and sensuous beauty, which were the keynotes of the Praxitelean manner, remained.
The finest work of this great division of Hellenistic art is probably the celebrated “[Belvedere Apollo]” in the Vatican collection. In these days, the “Apollo” is, perhaps, not esteemed as highly as it was a century ago, when opportunities for appreciating the true beauties of the sculpture of the age of Phidias and Pericles were wanting. But it will never entirely lose its power of attraction.
The modelling of the hair and the short cloak show that the original was a bronze. As to the motive of the statue, James Thomson, in his “Liberty,” writes:
“All conquest-flushed, from prostrate Python, came The Quivered God. In graceful act he stands, His arm extended with the slackened bow: Light flows his easy robe, and fain displays A manly-softened form. The bloom of gods Seems youthful o’er the beardless cheek to wave. His features yet heroic ardour warms; And sweet subsiding to a native smile, Mixed with the joy elating conquest gives, A scattered frown exalts his matchless air.”
For many years, however, the archæologists have been battling, proving and disproving the proposition that the god is really holding the ægis with the head of Medusa before his terror-stricken foes. The suggestion is that the original of the Belvedere was intended to be set up with a statue of Artemis—the “Artemis of Versailles,” now in the Louvre—at Delphi, in commemoration of the defeat of the Gauls in 276 b.c. It will be remembered that Macedonia was invaded by the Gauls about the year 280 b.c., the time when the barbarians from the North overran Asia Minor and founded the kingdom of Galatia after a severe defeat at the hands of Attalus of Pergamus. Sosthenes rallied the Macedonian army, but, in spite of all his efforts, the Gauls under Brennus continued to push south. Thermopylæ was garrisoned as it had been at the time of the Persian invasion. The entire Greek world sent contingents to repel the invaders. Finally, legend tells that the raid was stayed by the divine interposition of Apollo and Artemis. Angered at the daring of Brennus, Apollo called upon the forces of nature to defend the shrine at Delphi. An earthquake and a devastating storm forced Brennus to retire.
THE APOLLO BELVEDERE
Vatican, Rome
THE VENUS OF MEDICI
Uffizi, Florence
Until recently it was generally believed that the association between the “Apollo” and the defeat of the Gaulish invaders was supported by the evidence of a bronze statuette belonging to Count Sargei Stroganoff. The bronze is undoubtedly a copy of the Belvedere statue, and the object in the god’s hand is not a bow and might well represent the ægis with the head of Medusa. Archæological opinion has, however, now veered round, and since Professor Fürtwangler has pronounced the Stroganoff bronze a modern forgery, it must be admitted that no trustworthy evidence remains for connecting the [Apollo Belvedere] with one of the few political crises which galvanized Hellenistic Greece into vigorous action.
The coincidence that the crisis was the very Gaulish invasion which created Pergamene art would certainly have afforded a valuable analogy. The great products of the school of sculpture at Pergamus were the direct outcome of the passions and fears aroused in a country where every man and woman stood face to face with death or a slavery worse than death. In Hellenistic Greece the same dread—the selfsame chance of death or slavery—only stirred the individual.
There can be little doubt that this is why almost all Hellenistic sculpture strikes us as wanting some material element. The very refinement of the modelling of the “[Belvedere Apollo],” compared with the strenuous naturalism of the Pergamene artists, argues an absence of vital feeling. There is almost a feminine note in the smooth-limbed Apollo, when the sentiment of the Hellenistic statue is contrasted with the vigorous manhood of the “[Hermes]” of Praxiteles, the product of an age which really knew what manhood was worth. In a phrase, the “[Apollo Belvedere]” belongs to a time when individual Greek sculptors were producing great bronzes and marbles but when Greece itself had ceased to do so. Seeing that the emotions of an individual can never have the driving force which is given to the feelings and thoughts astir in nations, the absence of this national stress stamps the “[Apollo Belvedere]” as Hellenistic—the product of a civilization which had lost that sense of communal fellowship which was peculiarly Hellenic.
During the fifth century b.c., and, in a great measure, throughout the fourth century, the individual Greek had sacrificed everything to his membership in the city-state. He cared nothing for individual pleasures and aspirations. But when the civilization which had been Hellenic became Hellenistic, the relationship between the citizen and the state, between the citizen and his fellows, changed entirely. The rise of a new political power—the country-state—led to the abandonment of the intimate interest with which each member had followed every change in the political and social life around him.
Roughly, the new political situation in Greece after the death of Alexander amounted to this. A city-state continued free and independent as long as it was content to remain poor. But any accumulation of this world’s goods was the signal for the descent of a Macedonian garrison and a peremptory demand for a subsidy. If the city-state determined to resist the Macedonian demands, two courses were open. Allies could be purchased or a federation of neighbouring cities could be formed. The federation of neighbouring cities constituted the country-state, which played so large a part in the history of Hellenistic Greece. A typical league is the Achæan. Its early beginnings dated from 281 b.c., but it was thirty years later before a man of genius arose to make the dead arrangement a living force. When Aratus persuaded Sicyon to join the League, a really powerful body was created. Corinth joined in 243 and finally Argos and the rest of the states of North Peloponnesus. The Achæan League was by this time the chief political power in Southern Greece. Its counterpart in the North was the Ætolian League, whose allies met periodically at Thermus, where the booty won in their piratical expeditions was stored.
Nominally, every citizen in the federation over the age of thirty could exercise his suffrage. Practically, the distance from the seat of government caused the Common Assembly to become more and more a constitutional fiction. The real power passed into the hands of the few who held positions upon the executive. Patriotism naturally lost much of its old force. Certainly it was no longer the one goad to artistic production as had been the case in the age of Pericles.
Nor was this all. With the decay of the virile life in the city, the exquisite sense of form and the power of imaginative generalization which sculpture had derived from continual discussion in the market-place and the law courts, began to weaken. The changed social and political circumstances necessitated an art with fresh methods and fresh ideals.
Passing in review the numberless sculptures of Greece produced after 300 b.c., with a view to finding the intellectual and emotional atmosphere which shaped them, we continually meet with a certain romantic subjectivity which is essentially modern. It is this fact which makes much Hellenistic sculpture peculiarly akin to the art of our own day. Hellenic sculpture implied a type of character and a body of ideas of which the twentieth-century man can have no first-hand experience. The Western European of to-day is a member of a community numbering between forty million and eighty million people. He pays his rates and taxes—under protest. There, unless a system of universal military service prevails, his civic duties end. Any very active sympathy with the member of a microscopic city-state is impossible. The typical modern cannot be expected to realize clearly how a political or social event struck one whose chief joy was that he, as an individual, played a very real part in every national action. During the Hellenistic age, however, all this was changed. An essentially twentieth-century individualism prevailed—an individualism which rejected the narrowing limits set by the love of a single city.
With the broadening of the individual sympathies, a certain subjectivity replaced the marked objectivity of fourth- and fifth-century Greek thought. With it went much of the earlier depth of passion, much of the old artistic initiative, precisely as it has gone from the “universe-loving” art of to-day. In the new philosophy the individual played a far larger rôle. His own thoughts and feelings, as opposed to the thoughts and feelings of his fellow citizens, became predominant. Private life and the interests arising from the family began to suggest a great majority of the themes of the sculpture by which the Hellenistic Greek expressed himself.
This can be beautifully illustrated by a brief survey of the Hellenistic Greek’s treatment of woman as a theme for his sculptural art. In dealing with Praxiteles we dwelt upon the position which the women of Greece occupied in fourth-century Athens compared with her sister in the fifth century. In the course of the next hundred years the position was reversed. During the Hellenistic period the social necessity for the sacrifice of the Athenian woman vanished completely. She was permitted to share the life of her husband and her sons to the full. The whole of her womanly nature was developed. Nor were her energies confined to the larger sphere offered by the changed circumstances in the Greek home. Woman in Hellenistic times began to play a rôle upon the world’s stage which would have struck the old-fashioned Greek of the Periclean age as grotesque and immoral. Towns named after such women as Laodicea, Berenice, and Arsinoe, testify to the immense influence of a long line of princesses of the type of Cleopatra of Egypt in national and international politics.
Unfortunately, the Greek woman sacrificed a good deal to gain the new liberty. The mysterious respect with which she had been regarded in the fifth century became a thing of the past. It had depended upon the fact that women lived in a world apart from men. This social convention commenced to wane during the fourth century. It vanished almost entirely during Hellenistic times.
What was the effect of all this upon sculpture? We can trace it most surely in the sculptor’s treatment of the incarnation of true womanhood—Aphrodite or Venus.
The fifth-century sculptor always depicted Aphrodite clad in the full robe of every-day life. In all fifth-century statues of women the girdle was placed low on the figure. The idea was to emphasize the qualities of modesty and reserve which were the cardinal feminine virtues in such a city as Athens at that time. But in the following century, under the influence of the more individualistic age of Praxiteles, the sculptor began to dwell upon the frankly physical attributes of womanhood. The girdle was set well above the level of the natural waist. We have also seen how Praxiteles dared to lay aside drapery altogether when he carved his Aphrodite for the islanders of Cnidus. But even the artistic courage of Praxiteles dared not omit a plausible excuse for the change. The robe in the hands of Aphrodite gave the necessary suggestion to the Greek imagination, that womanhood had not put off all womanly reserve when it discarded its drapery.
The Hellenistic sculptor, however, not only in Greece but throughout the post-Alexandrian Empire, made no effort to restrain the tendency to insist upon the merely sensuous beauties of womanhood. In the well-known slab from the altar frieze of the Pergamene Acropolis, the girdle of the goddess Athena is placed just beneath the breasts. In the “[Venus of Medici]”—the typical embodiment of the womanhood of the Hellenistic age—drapery is laid aside altogether. In the sculptor’s view, he owes the world no explanation of the situation in which the goddess finds herself. He is content to offer those external charms of youthful beauty which fascinate the senses but do not satisfy the human heart. Accepting his standpoint, the “[Venus of Medici]” is one of the most perfect statues in the world. But the Aphrodite of Praxiteles and such a work as “[The Three Fates]” of Phidias, remind us that the grace of form in the Medicean Venus is, after all, rather humanly human than humanly divine. We feel that the suggestion of reserve to which the earlier sculptors clung only deepened the sensuous emotion which every sculptor seeks to arouse when he sets forth the physical charms of the Goddess of Love.
THE VENUS OF MILO
Louvre, Paris
From time to time during the Hellenistic age there was doubtless a return to the older ideals. The magnificent “[Venus of Milo],” now in the collection at the Louvre, is a proof of this. Since its excavation in the island of Melos during the nineteenth century, the right of this magnificent marble to rank among the sculptural masterpieces of the world has never been challenged. The motive of the design has always furnished the critics with occasion for controversy. It may be that an exact restoration would give a further specimen of the type exhibited in the “Venus of Capua,” which depicts Aphrodite with the shield of Ares, the goddess using the shield as a mirror. The date of the production of the “[Venus of Milo]” is as problematical as the subject. At first it is difficult to believe that this statue is rightly assigned to so late a date as 150 b.c. There have always been, and doubtless the critical conflict will continue, differences of opinion as to the time of its production. Some have traced it back to the Aphrodite of Scopas. There is, however, little reason to doubt the opinion generally held, that it is really a work of Hellenistic times. Assuming this to be the case, the statue certainly exhibits a point of view which is in striking contrast to that offered by the “[Venus of Medici].” The lofty sentiment of the “[Venus of Milo]” marks it as essentially un-Hellenistic. The sculptor throughout subordinates the physical beauties of the human form to the deeper sense of beauty which springs from the realization of the idea of the divinity of womanhood. For this reason, the statue stands in glorious solitude apart from the rest of the sculpture of its time.
There can be little doubt that, as a rule, the Hellenistic age could not stand the intensity of emotion aroused by such a work as the “[Venus of Milo].” The “golden age” of Greece had passed away when every Greek knew that it was good to be alive. During Hellenistic times Greek citizenship became a doubtful blessing. It chiefly served to remind its possessors of the lost glories of an earlier age. Can we be surprised that men looked to art to redress the balance, and called for the works which would wean them for a few moments from the dreary truths of existence?
No single formula will explain all the facts, but some connection between the degree of strenuousness in the political and social life of a state and the degree of strenuousness reached in its art, is certain. Consider the case of Homer—the direct outcome of the victorious struggle which the Greeks waged with the barbarians upon the shores of the Eastern Ægean. In the Athenian artists, Phidias, Polygnotus and Sophocles, we find the alliance of restful calm with the deepest thought and emotion which we should expect during a period of relative peace and prosperity, following an intense though victorious struggle. But how, it may be asked, did the long fight with Sparta during the Peloponnesian war affect Athenian art? The old emotional depth became unbearable. Comedy arose. In sculpture, Praxiteles replaced Phidias. Coming to our own artistic history, we find an English audience answering to the deep emotional appeal of Macbeth or Lear in the years which followed the glorious victory over the Armada. The period after the severe self-repression of the puritanical era naturally enough produced such a comedy as Congreve’s Way of the World.
But this antipathy to too strenuous an art is not the only factor which led to a great increase in the range of subjects open to the Greek sculptor, and presented a host of lighter themes to his chisel. The “Rape of the Lock” was the outcome of the boudoir experience upon which the fancy of Pope was nourished. The eighteenth century could not furnish the mental and emotional stimulus needful for the production of Othello. But it could and did suggest a perfectly charming poem to the “unwhipt, unblanketed, unkicked, unslain carcase” we call Alexander Pope. May this not have been the case in Hellenistic Greece? Previously “Greek life had been too full to put frills on its thoughts,” as De Quincey once said. But the Hellenistic age revelled in the very “frills” which the men of the fourth and fifth centuries had rejected. Allegory replaced natural symbolism. Instead of Aphrodite—Cupid. For Aphrodite, the goddess of Love, and Eros, the personification of the desire which makes powerless the limbs of men—Cupid, the smiling embodiment of the love which flits from fancy to fancy.
BOY STRANGLING A GOOSE
Louvre, Paris
CHILD WITH LANTERN
Terme Museum, Rome
It is not easy to illustrate this phase of Hellenistic sculpture. But there can be few finer examples than the large bronze statuette, “The Winged Cupid,” belonging to Mr. Pierpont Morgan, long lodged in the South Kensington Museum. It once decorated a Roman villa on the slopes of Vesuvius, and was excavated at Boscoreale, a village near Naples at the foot of the volcano. The bronze is much beautified by the wonderful bluish-green patina with which time has endowed it. The perfectly poised figure, springing forward with the burning torch of desire, stands for an entirely new note in Greek sculpture. Its frolicsome roguishness can be compared with nothing which the Hellenic mind expressed in sculptural form.
A further instance of the same tendency is furnished by the well-known “[Boy strangling a Goose],” by Boethus of Chalcedon. This delightful work, one of the few sculptural jokes, is an obvious parody upon one of the adventures of the hero Hercules. Lastly, we may point to the charming “[Child with Lantern],” recently taken from the Tiber, and now standing in the rose-decked cloisters of the Terme Museum.
These three unpretentious little works, all remarkable for their easy and graceful humour, happily complete our survey. Greek sculpture had learnt to smile. It ended with the coming of the Romans. When the Roman imperial rule finally extended over Asia Minor and Egypt, as well as over Hellas itself, Greek art began to lose its individuality, and a Græco-Roman style was evolved which was finally merged into the distinctive sculpture of Rome itself. In 146 b.c. Greece was conquered by Mummius and became a Roman province. In 133 b.c. Attalus III. willed Pergamus to Rome. In 64 b.c. Pompey put an end to the Seleucid rule in Syria. Some thirty years later, the sea fight at Actium ended the Ptolemaic rule in Egypt, and the last Hellenistic stronghold fell. An art impulse which had been predominant for five hundred years was at an end.