The Glory That Was Greece: a survey of Hellenic culture and civilisation

by J. C. Stobart

Sculpture

Meanwhile the artist has improved enormously in the technical details of craftsmanship. It was now only a foreign potentate who could give commissions for statues in such splendid materials as were at the disposal of Pheidias. Bronze was still the ordinary material for important works, but marble, which had formerly been chiefly used for ornament in architecture, was now commonly employed for statues even by the great masters. With more serviceable tools for drilling, sawing, and pointing (where that rather mechanical process was employed), the great artists of the fourth century could play upon marble as if it were wax or clay. They could represent textures and surfaces by the degree of their finish, so that the leather of the shoe is of a surface distinct from the skin of the foot in the Hermes of Praxiteles. There is an extremely subtle contrast between the leopard-skin and the flesh of the young Satyr by the same artist in the admirable torso copy which is in the Louvre. Whereas earlier artists had tried to represent hair by grooves gouged out upon the surface of the head or by rendering each tress as a separate thread, Praxiteles discovered the marvellous impression of curls that could be produced by roughly blocking out several masses and leaving the play of light and deep shadow to indicate a surface movable and alive. New secrets of sculptural anatomy were now at command. Praxiteles discovered the value of that groove which runs vertically down the front of the body between the pectoral and abdominal muscles on each side. He discovered also the anatomical distinction between the male and female brow in that ridge of flesh, known to artists as the bar of Michelangelo, which overhangs the eyebrows. By setting the eyeballs deeper under the brow, and emphasising the long drooping curve of the upper eyelid, the fourth-century artists greatly enhanced their command of expression and emotion, transient qualities after which the fifth century had not greatly cared to strive. Scopas, indeed, carried this discovery to the verge of the legitimate, for the few incomplete fragments of his work which survive are almost theatrical in the intensity of their gaze. Marble, of course, demands methods of its own distinct from those of metal. It is due to the material, in a large measure, that various

Plate LXIX. THE DEMETER OF CNIDOS

Mansell & Co.

supports, such as tree-trunks, pillars, and urns, have to be introduced into marble statues in the round. Thus it became inevitable to make the figure lean frankly upon his support, and thus we get those graceful reclining attitudes which are often cast in the teeth of Praxiteles as symptomatic of decadence.

Pheidias and Praxiteles are as pre-eminent among the names of ancient sculptors as are Polygnotus, Zeuxis, and Apelles among the painters. Of the two, Praxiteles was the most praised, and his works had the highest value in the Roman market. This being so, it is remarkable how little we know of his personality—practically nothing except that he was an Athenian, and was the son or brother of another famous sculptor called Cephisodotus. Plausible stories are told of his relations with Phryne, who is said to have been his model for the Cnidian Aphrodite. She is said further to have cajoled him into giving her the Eros dedicated at Thespiæ, by first making him promise her the best of all his statues, and then discovering which he thought the best by raising a false report of fire at his studio. His period of activity seems to have extended from about 370 to 330 B.C.

His three masterpieces were the Cnidian Aphrodite, the young Satyr, and the Eros of Thespiæ, but we have a long list of his other works. Of the first, Pliny tells us that it was the finest statue not only of Praxiteles, but of the whole world, and that many had made the voyage to Cnidos expressly to see it. He adds a story that Praxiteles had made two figures of Venus and offered them to the people of Cos at the same price. One was draped, the other nude, and the Coans preferred the former, “thinking it austere and modest.” We must remember that naked goddesses were novelties. The other was purchased by Cnidos, and there were bitter regrets at Cos when they found how much more celebrated was the naked Aphrodite. King Nicomedes of Bithynia subsequently offered to liquidate the entire national debt of Cnidos, “which was immense,” if they would only sell him the statue, but one is glad to learn that the little island preferred to keep both its debts and its goddess. Apparently it was in her capacity as a marine goddess, a “Notre Dame de Bon Secours” (Euploia), that these islanders chose Aphrodite, the foam-born, for their patroness.

Coins of Cnidos indicate the pose of the statue with sufficient clearness for us to identify a Venus in the Vatican as a copy of the Cnidian Aphrodite.[79] Papal decency has seen fit to encase her legs, beginning just below the hips, with drapery constructed of tin. This would, if anything could, impair the aspect of perfect modesty which shows in every line of her pose and expression. She is not aware of human spectators; there is no self-conscious prudery, as in the abominable Medici Venus, which was an attempt by a later and baser generation to imitate the same type. She has left her robe to hang over the tall water-jar, and is stepping from or towards the bath, not without shrinking, and not in ignorance of her beauty. Even in this imperfect copy we recognise the qualities which made Lucian admire the statue—“the design of the scalp and forehead, the finely pencilled eyebrows, and the look of the eyes, so tender, yet so bright and joyful.” He adds elsewhere that “a proud smile plays over her lips.” A lovely girl’s head in Parian marble, now in the Glyptothek at Munich, appears to me so clearly to resemble a younger sister of the same goddess that it must bear some relation to an original by Praxiteles.[80]

The Capitoline Gallery also possesses a copy of the “Young Satyr” of Praxiteles, “called by the Greeks περιβοητός”—that is, world-famed.[81] Readers of Hawthorne will remember his eloquent description of the “Marble Faun,” and though we, better supplied with ancient originals, can recognise that this is only after (and not very near) Praxiteles, yet even as it stands the statue has a peculiar charm and fascination. The sculptor has conveyed the impression of a young creature of the woods, only half human, shy and wild as an animal, and as

Plate LXX. SCULPTURED COLUMN FROM THE TEMPLE OF ARTEMIS AT EPHESUS

Mansell & Co.

careless and happy. His smile is as lazy as his attitude. Yet we notice the reserve with which his animal characteristics are indicated merely in the shape of his pointed ear and the “unclassical” profile of his face. Not only is his weight thrown upon one leg, as in all the statues by Praxiteles, but the other foot is gracefully curled round it. This is the only complete ancient copy of the Satyr, but there is a mutilated torso in the Louvre, so fine in its finish and texture that some critics suppose it to be original.

Of the Eros which Phryne dedicated at Thespiæ we have no certain copies. But it is evident that many of the Erotes in our galleries were inspired by that masterpiece, and the prettiest is the Eros of Centocelle, a three-quarters figure of admirable design, though of rather slack execution.[82] I believe also that the bronze head of a youth at Naples might well trace its parentage to an Eros by Praxiteles, though the languishing craft of the eyes and the sensuous fullness of the lips are certainly exaggerated.[83]

But of course if we want to know the real Praxiteles we have only to take our ticket to Olympia and worship there at the shrine of Hermes. Here for the first time we have an unquestionable original work by the hand of a great master. This Hermes was found more than thirty years ago by the German excavators in the very temple of Hera where Pausanias had seen him. No copy or cast or photograph can do more than faintly shadow the incomparable beauty of the marble. From the photograph we may appreciate the delicacy of the whole design, in which dignity so marvellously blends with grace and strength with charm.[84] It is Hermes the young Arcadian shepherd’s patron deity, Hermes the musician of the tortoise-lyre, the weaver of guile, the bringer of luck, and the kindly escort of souls on their last ferrying. He is playing in careless indulgence with a baby boy, the infant god of wine, but his eyes and his gentle smile are for some one farther off—not the human spectator. It may be noted, as proving that the technical triumphs of Greek art were gained, not by inspiration, but by hard work at established types, that the child is not very successfully rendered. Greek sculptors could not even yet sufficiently detach themselves from convention to copy the round contours of a baby’s face. Critics are divided in their attempts to reconstruct the motive of the raised right shoulder. Evidently the right hand held some object charming to the infant Dionysus, a bunch of grapes, perhaps, or the serpent-wreathed wand proper to Hermes. As it stands in the photograph we can recognise the loveliest statue in existence, but we cannot see the craft with which the surfaces and textures are rendered. We do not know for certain whether Greek sculptors of the fourth century habitually worked their own statues from start to finish with their own hands. We do know that the surface-finish was regarded as a very important part of the work, and that there were various devices, such as wax-polishing, employed to get the fullest value out of the grain of the marble for flesh parts. Praxiteles is especially named as employing a colourist to tint his marble.

In addition to the Hermes, we have direct literary evidence as to a great group of Artemis and Apollo, the work of Praxiteles, at Mantinea. We are told also the subject of certain reliefs on the architectural base of it, and reliefs of very fine workmanship corresponding in subject have been excavated at Mantinea. There is thus a very fair presumption that these panels were designed, if not executed, by the master who made the group. One slab, here illustrated,[85] shows the contest between Apollo the harper and Marsyas the semi-bestial player of that barbarous instrument the flute. Marsyas had challenged Apollo to a contest, and being quite inevitably defeated was flayed alive as a punishment for his presumption. The penalty is delicately indicated by the Phrygian slave who holds the knife in the centre. The fourth-century artists seldom missed a psychological point, and Praxiteles has emphasised the contrast between the dignified god in his majestic harper’s robes

Plate LXXI. FIGURE OF A YOUTH: FROM CERIGO

English Photo Co., Athens

and the naked, violent Satyr distending his cheeks as flute-playing barbarians were not ashamed to do. It is evident that the Marsyas is a quotation by Praxiteles of the celebrated figure by Myron. We note, as a technical point in the history of relief sculpture, the effect produced by the wide spacing of the figures. On the other slabs are beautiful though mutilated figures of the Muses, who acted as umpires in the contest.

We have copies also of another Praxitelean original, Apollo Sauroctonos (the Lizard-slayer),[86] but the copyist has evidently exaggerated almost to caricature the elegant slimness of the young god. But on the basis of our knowledge of the Hermes I think we can reconstruct in imagination an exquisite statue even out of the effeminate Vatican copy. The true Apollo would not lean all his weight upon the tree; consequently the tilt of his hips would be less violent. His face would be much more carefully modelled, with less of that womanish smoothness of contour. But the copyist has noted and tried to express the lovely brow which Praxiteles gave to all his heads. The careless grace, the impression of youth and playful strength belong to the original, and are highly characteristic of the artist. The motive of the statue seems to have been a new and rather bold invention; we know of no cult of a lizard-slaying Apollo. It is true that Apollo was the deity commonly invoked in cases of natural plagues, such as invasions of field-mice or locusts, but it seems more probable that Praxiteles, desiring to represent Apollo in a new guise, deliberately chose to portray him as a boy at play. It is clear that Praxiteles was a strongly original and inventive genius, who was not afraid to give his own impression of established types. He was the first who dared to portray Aphrodite naked; out of the gross and bestial Satyr he made a delightful elf of the woods, and he turned the vigorous athlete Apollo into a slender stripling.

Of Scopas the Parian, the second great sculptor of the fourth century, we have no important remains. Two mutilated heads found on the site of the temple at Tegea, where he made his great pedimental scene of the Calydonian boar-hunt, indicate the new note of pathos and emotion which he introduced into the carving of the human head. We know that Scopas was engaged on the Mausoleum and on one of the thirty-six sculptured columns of the great temple at Ephesus, but nothing that remains from either of those buildings can be ascribed to him with certainty. Perhaps his most famous work was the Palatine Apollo at Rome. We may get the best notion of his style by studying the head, not the body, of a beautiful statue of Meleager[87] at Rome, which is considered by the most competent archæologists to be a copy of the work of Scopas.

The third is Lysippus of Sicyon, an extraordinarily prolific artist, of whose style we may form a very clear conception, although we have no originals. Athletic types were his favourite work, and his favourite technique was bronze-casting. His discovery was the added grace and beauty which could result from decreasing the proportion of the head to the body. Wherever we find small curly heads very lightly poised upon a strong, vigorous body we may trace the influence of Lysippus. His most famous statue was the young athlete scraping off the oil from his arm with the strigil. The emperor Tiberius fell in love with this “Apoxyomenus,” as it is called, and removed it from the front of the baths of Agrippa to his own bed-chamber, but the people of Rome raised such an outcry that he had to restore it. Modern critics have shown that our “Apoxyomenus”[88] is not a faithful copy of this statue. On the other hand, the “Agias” recently discovered at Delphi[89] is a contemporary marble copy of a bronze by Lysippus, and gives us a very fine example of his style. Lysippus was also the sculptor-in-ordinary to Alexander the Great, and we may trace to Lysippean originals all the numerous portraits of the Macedonian conqueror. Lysippus was a theorist as well as a practical sculptor, and, like Polycleitus, produced his own theoretical “Canon” of sculptural proportions. He was (with

Plate LXXII. THE “LUDOVISI” ARES

Anderson

the possible exception of the Devil) the first professed impressionist, for Pliny records a saying of his: “Other sculptors had represented men as they were, while he portrayed them as they appeared to be.”

We have many fine works of the fourth century of unknown authorship. Foremost of all—surely one of the six greatest statues in the world[90]—is the Demeter of Cnidos, in the British Museum, a statue so instinct with the spirit of Greek tragedy that but for certain technical points it ought to belong to the fifth century.[91] This is Mother Earth, Our Lady of Sorrows, mourning with sad eyes, but not in despair, for her daughter Persephone. The influence of Praxiteles may be traced in her brow and lips. The workmanship of this statue, as being, with the exception of temple reliefs, the finest Greek original in our Museum, deserves careful study. Very beautiful also is that sculptured drum from one of the thirty-six columns of the great temple of “Diana of the Ephesians,” another of the treasures of our Museum.[92] It is scarcely probable that time should have spared the one column which Scopas himself designed, but we may trace some of his influence in the emotional character of the faces, and much of Praxiteles in the grace of the attitudes and the poetry of the concept. The application of relief to a rounded surface is in itself a work of great difficulty, and we have seen how boldly it had been attempted in the same temple by artists of a much earlier day. This is a funeral scene such as might be represented on an Attic tombstone. In the centre is a matronly figure, headless, alas! fastening her mantle on her shoulder preparatory to the journey; on her left is Hermes, very young and boyish, extending his caduceus as if pointing downwards, but looking upwards to a point above the woman’s head. On her right is another figure, whom from his long wings and boyish form we should take, perhaps, for Love, were it not that his sad eyes and heavy sword mark him out as Death—a beautiful conception found also on the new Ludovisi relief and on some of the Athenian lecythi. Some think that the woman is Alcestis, and it is scarcely likely that any but a heroine, at the least, would occupy such a place in such a building. To make both these emissaries of death so young and charming is an idea typical of the fourth century, and especially of Praxiteles.

In many of the bronzes of our museums we can trace very clearly the new influence of Lysippus. A fine example is provided by the figure of a youth[93] recently dredged up under romantic circumstances off the island of Cythera (Cerigo), which lies at the extreme southerly point of Laconia, This was part of a cargo of spoils from Greece looted by the Roman general Sulla and shipwrecked off Cape Matapan. No satisfactory guess has yet been made as to the name of the statue or the motive of its attitude. In my opinion the upstretched arm in readiness to grasp seems to indicate an athlete playing a game of “catch.” “The Praying Boy,” one of the treasures of Berlin, is a singularly perfect bronze, full of grace, probably the work of Boethos, a famous sculptor of the early part of the third century.[94] The Ludovisi Ares[95] is a marble copy of an original which shows unmistakable influence of Lysippus, and the restful attitude of the handsome war-god, so free from any trace of ferocity, is characteristic of the manner in which the fourth century civilised and humanised all its topics. So is the Rondanini Medusa,[96] a Gorgon’s head translated into terms of decorative beauty—it might be a design for a door-knocker. The snakes are there, and the chilly glance, but there is nothing terrible in the face. The lovely winged head, which originally belonged to a full-length statue of Hypnos (Sleep), is one of the most striking bronzes in the British Museum.[97] It is clearly related to the period which produced that figure of Death, “the brother of Sleep,” on the Ephesian column. This example has been covered by exposure to the air with a beautiful green patina,

FIG. 1. THE “RONDANINI” MEDUSA

FIG. 2. RELIEF FROM THE MAUSOLEUM

Plate LXXIII

often imitated with the application of acids by modern bronze-workers. But the Herculaneum bronzes, which had been preserved for eighteen centuries in an airproof casing of lava, are to-day in much the same condition as when they left the studio. Though they were made, no doubt, in Roman times, Lysippus is again the artist whose influence is most clearly visible, as, for example, in the vivid Pair of Wrestlers, or the Seated Hermes.

I have already said that the old cities of Greece were mostly too impoverished to undertake great architectural works in this period. Ephesus, however, had her great temple of Artemis burned down by an enterprising individual with the very modern ambition of getting his name before the public. For fear of increasing his success I will not repeat it here, but when Alexander the Great offered to rebuild the temple out of his own pocket the Ephesians declined, possibly on the ground that their temple had already advertised a malefactor and they did not desire it to be a further advertisement for a benefactor. So they rebuilt it themselves with such splendour that it became one of the Seven Wonders of the world.

Advertisement, you see, was in the air. The almost extreme self-repression of the individual was passing, and in the same spirit a wealthy ruler of Caria who in Greek eyes was a tyrant and in Persian eyes a satrap determined to raise a tomb for himself and his wife which should also be a wonder of the world. His name was Mausolus, and the Mausoleum he built consisted of a columned shrine raised upon a lofty pedestal and surmounted with a pyramidal structure of ever-narrowing square courses of masonry, the whole crowned by a colossal portrait statue of Mausolus and his wife Artemisia in a chariot. Considerable remains were found by Sir Charles Newton at Halicarnassus, and are now in the British Museum. We know that Scopas and other famous artists were employed upon the work. The most important relic is the colossal statue of Mausolus, which, considering its situation, is in remarkably fine preservation.[98] Here we have perhaps for the first time in all the history of art a realistic portrait. The face of the prince is not in the least conventional, has, in fact, a distinctly barbarian profile, yet preserves a dignity and worth of its own, and visibly suggests a foreign plutocrat. The reliefs[99] which adorned the pedestal are also distinctive and interesting. We observe, as on the Mantinean basis, that the figures are widely spaced. Their poses are visibly contrived for decorative effect on a system of correspondences much less subtle, and therefore much less effective, than on the Parthenon frieze. The designer, who may have been Scopas himself, has not shrunk from portraying violent action in the battle of Amazons, which is his subject. Yet there is beauty in every figure, and remarkable technical skill.

Another famous work of decorative sculpture belonging to this period is the colossal group of the Niobids. It was brought to Rome from somewhere in Asia Minor, probably Cilicia, and apparently copied by several Græco-Roman artists of very various powers. The original dates, no doubt, from the fourth century. It seems to have formed a group of detached statues set up on a pedestal either in the open air or in a colonnade. The general arrangement of the figures resembles that of a pedimental composition, for the whole group would be pyramidal, with Niobe herself as the apex figure. Niobe’s tragedy is an example of divine jealousy aroused by excessive human felicity and pride, for Niobe was so proud of the beauty of her large family that she exulted over Leto, who had but two children, Apollo and Artemis. Accordingly she and all her brood were shot down by the painless arrows of the two gods. The “plot” of the group is a study in psychology, typical of the fourth century, showing how the various members of the doomed family met their deaths. Here again the technique is wonderful; every figure is designed in a broad architectural spirit. The actual figures, as we have them, mostly at Florence, are of varying merit. Probably the best is the most recently discovered, which is here illustrated.[100] But all are of rather frigid perfection in workmanship.

Plate LXXIV. STATUE OF MAUSOLUS, FROM THE MAUSOLEUM

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