Pheidias
In the great oration over the bodies of the dead Athenian soldiers which Thucydides ascribes to Pericles the statesman is made to express his ideal of Athens. She was “the instructress of Greece.” She alone, he said, followed “culture without extravagance, and philosophy without softness.” She alone combined daring with reflection. She alone welcomed strangers, and, while reverencing the gods and the laws, permitted freedom of speech and conscience to all men. He congratulated her upon the happiness of life at Athens, the public displays and sacrificial banquets which afforded daily delight to her inhabitants. He did not lay much stress upon the outward magnificence of the city, for that, in a large measure, was his own work. But it is that aspect of his policy which we can all appreciate, whether we are democrats or imperialists or neither or both.
Pericles himself set the example which Athens followed of encouraging talent from all quarters to devote its abilities to the service of Athens. Aspasia seems to have maintained a salon which was frequented by most of the men of genius of the day. She herself was of Miletus, and being an Ionian, was accustomed to a freedom of intellectual intercourse denied to the cloistered women of Attica. Pericles had separated by mutual consent from his wife, and though the laws did not allow him to marry a foreigner, he lived with Aspasia through most of his public career. She was a wit as well as a beauty. At her house you would meet Pheidias the sculptor, Damon the musician, Anaxagoras the philosopher, Alcibiades, and Socrates. There, we may presume, the plans for the beautification of Athens were freely discussed.
It was a rare opportunity for the artists. Here was an imperial city to be rebuilt, and plenty of money to build with.
Plate XL. SCULPTURES OF THE EASTERN PEDIMENT OF THE PARTHENON
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The directors of the work were Pheidias the sculptor and Ictinus the architect. Pheidias had learnt his craft under Agelâdas of Argos. Thus he stands at the very beginning of the period of fine art. Technical mastery over stone and bronze was by no means complete when he began to work. The “archaic smile” still hovered over the lips of contemporary sculptures, the eyes were too prominent, the eyelids were still cut to meet at the corners instead of overlapping, hair was still conventionally rendered by parallel grooves, or spirals, or roughly blocked out for coloration.
The body, however, thanks to athletic models, was already much more successfully delineated than the head. Perhaps the best examples of fifth-century sculpture before Pheidias are the pedimental figures from Ægina. These figures from the temple of Aphaia at Ægina were discovered by the English architect Cockerell in 1811; they were acquired by the King of Bavaria, restored by Thorwaldsen, and are now at the Glyptothek in Munich. Our illustration[48] will depict their style in all its archaic vigour. All but the face is highly successful; the naked muscular forms of the warriors follow even the poses of athletics, especially the figure in the attitude of a wrestler making his hold stooping forward to drag away the body of Patroclus. The reader should also notice how cleverly the pose is designed to fit that very difficult angle of the pediment where the roof slopes down. It taxed the ingenuity of artists to compose scenes to fit these triangular spaces. The ordinary rule is that the east pediments should depict a scene of divine peace and grandeur, that being the end at which the worshippers entered the temple. The west pediments, on the contrary, generally display a struggle. In this early Æginetan temple both ends are filled with scenes of warfare from the epic glories of Ægina, one of Ajax, and one of his father, Telamon. These Æginetan sculptures are assigned to the period between Marathon (490) and Salamis (480). The Harmodius group of which I have already spoken belongs clearly to the same phase.
If we turn from this to the Parthenon sculptures, we shall see the amazing swiftness of the blossoming of Greek art. With Pheidias, and largely no doubt owing to his genius, the plastic art has conquered its stubborn material, but it has not yet attained that fatal fluency which induces carelessness or conscious elaboration and extravagant striving for effect. This is the stage at which the arts and crafts produce their masterpieces. In our days, thanks to mechanical appliances, stone is as easy to work as clay. The sculptor produces his model, foreign underlings do the heavy chiselling, and the artist finishes it off. This is perhaps why Rodin produces such an effect of strength by leaving much of his work in the rough. We may be sure that Pheidias executed the whole process with loving care and diligence from first to last.
| Head of Zeus, on Coin of Elis | Head of Zeus, on Coin of Philip II. of Macedon |
Here, alas! it must be confessed that we have not a single work which we can ascribe with certainty to the hand of the master himself. His great masterpieces, the Zeus of Olympia and the Parthenos of the Parthenon, were of ivory and gold. Of course they have perished utterly. We have to content ourselves with descriptions—and the ancient art critic was singularly inept even for an art critic—and casual attempts at copying on coins or statuettes. The coins of Elis do indeed give us a Zeus of considerable dignity which may impart some faint notion of the glorious original, but of the Athena Parthenos we have not even this relic. I decline to follow the text-books on Greek architecture by presenting the woolly-headed “Jove of Otricoli” or the well-groomed but fatuous old senator known as the “Dresden Zeus” for the work of Pheidias. Nor will I insult him by depicting the Parthenos by means of the stumpy “Varvakeion” or the inchoate “Lenormant” statuettes. Such
Plate XLI. PORTIONS OF THE EAST FRIEZE OF THE PARTHENON
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caricatures only disturb our judgment. For these statues we had better trust our imaginations, working upon what Pliny tells us: “The beauty of the Olympian Zeus seems to have added something to the received religion, so thoroughly does the majesty of the work suit the deity.”
But can you, after all, imagine the splendour of these two statues made by the greatest sculptor who has ever lived? The flesh parts were of ivory, the clothing of solid gold on a core of wood or stone. Zeus was of colossal size, forty feet high. On his head was a green garland of branched olive; in his right hand he bore a Victory of ivory and gold, in his left a sceptre inlaid with every kind of metal. On the golden robe figures and lilies were chased. The throne was adorned with gold and precious stones and ebony and ivory, with figures painted and sculptured upon it. Even the legs and bars of the throne were adorned with reliefs. Round it were low screens, blue enamel in front, and paintings by the sculptor’s brother, Panainos, at the back and sides. The stool on which the god’s feet were resting was adorned with figures in gold; the base, on which the throne rested, likewise. We must not picture ancient Greek art as cold and colourless like the marble statues by which it is represented in our museums. The Greeks loved colour, and used it everywhere. We have grown so accustomed to plain white statues that some of us are offended by the idea of colour in statuary and architecture. In this matter we may safely trust the good taste of the artists who could design and carve so wonderfully. The two favourite Greek marbles, the Parian and the Pentelic, are both of themselves very beautiful fabrics, far more lovely, with their glistening coarse grain and the intermixture of iron which gives them a warm yellowish glow, than the favourite modern marble of Carrara, which is so coldly white and so fine of texture as to dazzle and fatigue the eye and to blur all the delicate outlines. But the Greeks of that day looked upon even their lovely marbles as we do upon brick, good enough for building temples, but not worthy of the high gods. Ivory and gold for the gods, if the worshippers could afford it, otherwise bronze.
Regretfully, therefore, we must seek the genius of Pheidias in works which were probably constructed according to his designs, minor works, mere decorative reliefs applied to architecture, much defaced by accident and time, but still bearing the stamp of grandeur and dignity. It seems from the latest evidence that the execution of the Parthenon sculptures did not begin until after the banishment of Pheidias. But we may well believe that they had been designed by the master. In any case they are originals of the great period, and thus far better guides than any copies, however skilfully executed. Plutarch tells us that as the buildings of Periclean Athens rose “majestic in size and inimitable in symmetry and grace, the workmen rivalled one another in the artistic beauty of their workmanship. Especially wonderful was their speed. Pheidias was the overseer.” The surviving relics of the Parthenon sculptures fall into three groups, according to their place on the temple—the Pediments, the Metopes, and the Frieze.
Of these the Pediments are the most important for their size and prominence in the building. For example, they are the only external sculptures noticed by the traveller Pausanias. Moreover, each figure is a separate statue carved in the round, and perfectly finished back and front alike, though by no possibility could they be visible except from the front. Ruskin would inform us that this is evidence of the moral excellence of the artist. But the Greeks were a practical people who disliked waste in any form, and Professor Ernest Gardner is probably right in suggesting that the sculptor finished his statues in order that he might be sure they were rightly made. Such fidelity to his religious duty is evidence, after all, of moral excellence. Time has wrought cruel havoc with the sculptures. The central figures had gone even before Carrey made his drawings for the Marquis de Nointel in 1674. In 1687 a great explosion occurred, when a Venetian gunner (with the good old Venetian name of Schwartz) dropped a bomb into the
PLATE XLII. PORTIONS OF THE WEST FRIEZE OF THE PARTHENON
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Turkish powder magazine stored in the temple, and wrought further havoc. Then the victorious General Morosini tried to remove some of the figures, and broke them in the effort. In 1801 Lord Elgin, armed with a firman authorising him to remove a few blocks of stone, carried off the greater part of the surviving sculptures. From him they were purchased by the British Government for the British Museum. Whatever the morality of this capture, it was a blessing in effect, for the Parthenon suffered further damage during the War of Liberation, and those stones which remain in situ have deteriorated far more than those which were removed. Besides, the Greeks have still plenty of ancient marble to write their names on. Forlorn as they stand in the Elgin Room, battered and bruised as they are, all headless but one, and he much defaced, they still convey an impression of unsurpassed beauty and perfection of art.
The subject of the front or eastern pediment[49] was the birth of Athena. The central scene had gone when Carrey sketched it. It is probable that the armed figure of the goddess rising from the head of Zeus would fill the apex. Close by would stand the goddess of childbirth (Eilithuia), and Hephæstus, who set Athena free with a blow of his hammer, would be near the centre. In the angles the figures have been better preserved, and are mostly among the Elgin Marbles. Various interpretations of their motive have been suggested, but the only one that deserves consideration is Brunn’s theory that they are scenic impersonations rather than mythological characters. It is difficult, as Furtwängler has argued, to find any other example of this sort of personification in the art or literature of the fifth century. But some of the attributions are too plausible to be avoided. At one angle the Sun is just rising in his chariot, of which the horses’ heads are visible above the cornice; at the other the Moon is just sinking in hers. That depicts the time of the great event. Next to these are figures to indicate locality. Facing Helios, with his back to the central scene, is that glorious reclining youth who used to be called “Theseus” in our Museum. According to Brunn he is really Mount Olympus. A mountain he may well be, but would not Pheidias have meant him for the Athenian Mount Hymettus? At the other side artists have sighed over the perfection of those three seated female figures, headless, alas! but wonderful in the perfection of craft which renders the elaborate folds of the soft Ionic draperies without impairing the massive grandeur of the bodies beneath. We used to call them “The Three Fates.” But it is probable that they are not a group of three; one reclines in the lap of her sister, the third sits alone. If the geographical interpretation is to hold good, we cannot improve Professor Waldstein’s suggestion that the sisterly pair is Thalassa (Sea) in the lap of Gaia (Earth). That, however, leaves us without a clue to the third. Would not the moon set beyond land and sea over the island of Salamis? Of the remaining figures the swiftly moving goddess with the windswept draperies can be none other than Iris, the messenger of the gods.
The back or west pediment denotes a contest always, but here, as befits Athena, a contest moral rather than physical, the strife between Athena and Poseidon for the tutelage of Athens. The high angle in the centre would be filled with the olive-tree, and the two contestant deities may be seen in Carrey’s drawing. Poseidon is starting back in affright at the sight of Athena’s gift, and she is advancing triumphantly; a winged Victory would be at hand to place the crown upon her head. The only considerable relic of this gable is another nude male form in the British Museum, reclining like the “Theseus,” but headless and armless, the “Ilissus.”
Not only the execution of the figures, but the composition of the two scenes, with their subtle correspondences and distinctions, their intricate rhythm (notice in detail the arrangement of the drapery folds on “The Three Fates”), and yet their simple, broad dignity, is typical of what the fifth century was
FIG. 1. THE “STRANGFORD” SHIELD
FIG 2. THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE ACROPOLIS
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Plate XLIII
striving for. We might at first glance take the almost severe simplicity of fifth-century art, as we see it, for example, in the dramas of Sophocles or the history of Thucydides or the lines of Doric architecture, for the result of immaturity. But the more we study these things the more we find to study. The apparent simplicity has been produced with infinite labour and loving care.
The metopes of the Parthenon, originally ninety-two in number, consist of separate panels, almost square, adorned with figures in the highest possible relief, often quite free from the back wall. Each one represents a single combat, Gods against Giants, Lapithæ against Centaurs, Greeks against Amazons, Greeks against Trojans, on the various sides. These subjects, with the contests of Theseus and the labours of Heracles, are the regular themes of sculpture on Greek temples. They all represented to the Greek mind the everlasting moral contest between Hellenism and Barbarism, or between culture and savagery. Heracles destroying monsters like the Hydra snake, Theseus slaying robbers and oppressors of mankind, are symbolical of the conflict between light and darkness. They also, no doubt, bear historical reference to the Persian wars. The best of these metope sculptures are high upon the walls of the Elgin Room. They were the work of subordinate artists, and they vary greatly in excellence. In some we can see the handiwork of old sculptors trained in the archaic school of athletic sculpture, still making their drapery stiff and mechanical. In the best there is great vigour and fine drawing. All are remarkable for the ingenuity of the composition. It was no easy matter to fill ninety-two square panels with struggling figures without monotony or iteration. Nevertheless, I do not think that the Greek artists ever took much pleasure in their metope work.
Lastly, we come to the frieze. To judge it rightly, the spectator must remember its position on the temple, for its character is entirely changed when it is seen at the level of the eyes on the walls of our Museum. It ran round the top of the cella wall, 39 feet above the floor, inside the colonnade of the Parthenon. It could be examined by mounting the stylobate and craning your neck uncomfortably, but in an ordinary case you would merely catch glimpses of it between the columns as you passed along outside. Moreover, it was in the shadow of the roof, lighted, as Professor Gardner reminds us, from below by reflection from the white marble pavement. This the artist has foreseen and provided for by making the relief of the upper part deeper than below, so that the heads lean forward from the panels. Where deep shadows are required below they are often secured by cutting into the background. Here is another proof of the advantage Art gains when her ministers are practical craftsmen rather than luxurious gentlemen who spend their time between the studio and the drawing-room. The designer of this frieze—and surely the designer was no less than the master himself—had a free hand here, with no laws of tradition to bind him, for such a frieze is without previous example. He had to cover an uninterrupted space of 524 feet with ornament. He chose for his subject the great procession representing the people of Athens which went up every year at the Panathenaic festival to offer a new saffron robe to the goddess. Observe how he has conceived it. Over the front[50] he placed the immortal gods and goddesses, not in the awful majesty of Olympus, but down on earth in their beloved city of Athens. He depicted them at ease; only their added dignity of countenance and their greater stature (their heads reach the cornice, though they are seated) indicates their divinity. They are not overladen with attributive emblems. They are at home in Athens. They sit, they almost lounge, in comfortable attitudes. Dionysus leans on the shoulder of young Hermes. Ares, the dreadful Thracian warrior, has left his armour at home; he rests pleasantly with his right knee clasped in his hands. Hera unveils her head, turning to say a word to her royal husband, who sits a little apart in his simple dignity. Athena, the heroine of the hour, is marked by no pomp; she is
Plate 44.—The Lemnian Athena.
Tamme.
conversing in friendly fashion with Hephæstus. Apollo turns his beautiful head to say a word to the grave Poseidon. Eros is a naked human boy leaning at the knee of Aphrodite; she is fully draped, and even veiled, as becomes the deity of Heavenly Love. It is a warm, peaceful day: the gods have flung back their tunics from their shoulders, the goddesses are clad in soft Ionic robes. The sculptor has not chosen to represent the ceremony at its crisis. The procession is on its way, the music can be heard in the streets below. Close by Athena, separated by no extra space, a priest is handing a folded garment, the old peplos, no doubt, to a lad. It cannot be the offering of the new one, for Athena has her back to the scene. Groups of grave elders converse together, leaning on their staves. Attendant maidens stand near with baskets on their heads. This eastern end shows us the peace and happiness of a heaven not far removed from earth at its best.
Turning the corners, we have on each side the approaching procession, advancing towards the front at a slow pace. As the passing visitor glances up between the columns the procession actually moves. First come the young men leading the sacrificial beasts, oxen and sheep, with attendants bearing the trays and water-jars. The flute-players and harpers follow at the head of the warriors, the war-chariots, men with branches of victory, and the hoplites with shield and spear. And then, most brilliant of all, the young knights,[51] scions of the best families of Athens, sitting their fiery horses barebacked with charming ease and grace, some wearing the broad hat and short chlamys, some in chitons, some with mantles flying in the wind, some in armour. Here and there you see the marshals ordering the procession. Farther back it is just forming; the young knights are mounting their horses and attendants are holding them ready. We must supply to the frieze a coloured background and bronze fittings such as spears and bridles.
But why in the world has he left out the sacred robe itself? Well, he might have chosen to put Athena on her throne in full panoply, and to have made the whole scene far more devotional and impressive to the religious sense. Instead, he has slackened the tension everywhere. The soldiers might have marched in disciplined ranks of Doric precision. The animals might have walked in two by two, as well-behaved beasts going to sacrifice should. The whole thing might have been formal and grand. Pheidias preferred to make it charm by its simplicity and grace. His procession glows with youth and beauty, modest but unembarrassed. The young knight lacing up his military boot is quite unconscious that you and I are looking at him. It would not have done for the solemn pediments, it would have been out of place on the violent metopes, but here, just to glance at between the pillars, as a piece of light, supererogatory ornament, the artist felt at liberty to express the joy of living.
If you needed to look upon divinity in its awful grandeur, you had only to enter the shrine and worship before the temple statue. This was the chryselephantine Athena Parthenos, 39 feet high, with £150,000 worth of refined gold upon her raiment, with her triple-crested helmet, her shield and Victory, her ægis and her serpent. Like the Olympian Zeus, she was to be as splendid as art could make her; there was colour and ornament everywhere. I do not suppose that even here she was very terribly militant. Loose tresses of her hair escaped to mitigate the ferocity of the helmet, with its fierce sphinx and monsters. Her pet owl was perched somewhere on her helmet. The “Strangford Shield” in the British Museum[52] is of great interest, because it seems to copy the design of the original shield with some fidelity, and it belongs to an interesting anecdote told about the sculptor. In 432, when Pericles was being attacked through his friends, they charged Pheidias with embezzling some of the gold entrusted to him for this statue, and with blasphemous impropriety in putting his own portrait, together with the portrait of Pericles, on the goddess’s
Plate 45.—Head of the Lemnian Athena.
Alinari.
shield. The first charge he could answer, because Pericles had warned him to make all the gold detachable so that it could be weighed. The latter bears a family resemblance to the whole class of sacristan’s tales which attach to every artistic monument in Europe. There was, and there is, on the shield an old man’s head which looks so realistic that it might be a portrait. Near him there is a warrior with his arm across his face, and that is said to have been the artist’s device for concealing from common view a speaking likeness of Pericles. Nevertheless Pheidias was condemned by the angry people, as Aristophanes, his contemporary, tells us:
“Pheidias began the mischief, he was first to come to grief.”
Few other details of the sculptor’s life are worth repeating. Many are given, but their contradictions involve us in hopeless difficulties. Neither portraits nor biographies belong to the fifth century, so wholly was the individual merged in the community. Later centuries had to provide them, and invent them.
The number of works credibly assigned to Pheidias amounts to twenty-four. He was specially famed for his divine statues. He was able to practise for his chryselephantine work on what is termed an acrolithic image—that is, of gilt wood and marble—for little Platæa. He worked also in bronze. At Olympia he made a statue of the boy victor Pantarkes, whom he loved. For the Athenian Acropolis he made two other statues of Athena, one the colossal bronze figure which faced the visitor as he passed through the Propylæa on to the sacred citadel. Her spear was visible above the roofs to the sailors at sea, and it is so represented on the coins of the city. It was a work of his early years, executed for Kimon. It was removed to Constantinople, and the historian Nicetas tells us of its destruction by a drunken mob in A.D. 1203. There was also the Lemnian Athena,[53] dedicated by the colonists of that island about 450 B.C. Here she was represented in a peaceful aspect without her helmet, “with a blush upon her cheek instead of a helmet to veil her beauty.” The beautiful statue which Furtwängler has compiled by setting a head from Bologna[54] upon a body at Dresden forms a brilliant and to my mind triumphant reproduction of this statue. Of course it is only a copy. If it be true that Pheidias made dedicatory offerings for the Athenians at Delphi immediately after the Persian wars he must have had an artistic career of fifty years. In that time he had brought the art of sculpture from infancy to the prime of manhood.