CHAPTER XXVIII. ART OF THE PERICLEAN AGE
ARCHITECTURE
[460-430 B.C.]
Policy united with natural inclination to induce Pericles to patronise the arts, and call forth their finest productions for the admiration and delight of the Athenian people. The Athenian people were the despotic sovereign; Pericles the favourite and minister, whose business it was to indulge the sovereign’s caprices that he might direct their measures; and he had the skill often to direct even their caprices. That fine taste, which he possessed eminently, was in some degree general among the Athenians; and the gratification of that fine taste was one means by which he retained his influence. Works were undertaken, according to the expression of Plutarch, in whose time they remained still perfect, of stupendous magnitude, and in form and grace inimitable; all calculated for the accommodation or in some way for the gratification of the multitude. Phidias was superintendent of the works: under him many architects and artists were employed, whose merit entitled them to fame with posterity, and of whose labours (such is the hardness of the Attic marble, their principal material, and the mildness of the Attic atmosphere) relics, which have escaped the violence of men, still, after the lapse of more than two thousand years, exhibit all the perfection of design, and even of workmanship, which earned that fame.[c]
But the Greeks had not attained all at once to the architectural perfection which we admire on the Acropolis. They had assigned their gods the crest of the mountains or the deep forests for their first abode; they desired to have them nearer to themselves and, from the earliest times, they built them dwellings, at first rustic and clumsy, but which were gradually embellished and attracted other arts with religious pomp; the poets celebrating the gods and their native country, the philosophers raising the great problems of nature and of the soul. The temple was the centre of Hellenic life.
But the gods, like men, have to reckon with time. Before sending out the radiations of their divine majesty from the midst of the wonders of art, those destined to become the glorious dwellers on Olympus were at first obscure and indefinite personalities, inhabiting the trunk of an oak, then wretched wooden structures, and later on houses of stone and sometimes of brass, like the Athene Chalciœcus of Sparta. It was only with the progress of civilised life that their habitation grew in size and loftiness. The true temples, and the most ancient of them, those of Corinth, Samos, and Metapontum—date only from the seventh century.
The Greeks were acquainted neither with the pointed arch nor the dome. Some have thought to find that at Tiryns and Mycenæ, but if some of the bays and galleries end in a point, it is because the courses draw closer and closer together and end by meeting at the top. The method is therefore clumsy and barbarous; it was abandoned for the lintel and the pediment.
All the Greek temples resemble one another in their general plan of construction; and yet the architectural combinations might be very numerous, inasmuch as they all differ in the nature of the material employed and the ornamentation which decorates them, in the number of the columns and the size of the intercolumniations, which determine the proportions of the edifice, above all in the character peculiar to each of the three orders—the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian. A single member of the structure, the column with the portion of the entablature which it supports, determines this character.
Ruins of the Parthenon
The first temples worthy of the name were in the Doric style. The walls were large and heavy, the columns short and stunted without any base, like the stake which had been the primitive support, but with flutings, a capital, and a double pediment stretching above a wide face, like an eagle with outstretched wings—the expression is Pindar’s. The whole edifice, built of ordinary stone, was hidden, as in the case of many of the Egyptian temples, under a coat of stucco which displayed vivid colours. The remains of this are to be seen at Assus, on the coast of Asia; at Corinth, Delphi and Ægina in Greece; at Syracuse, Agrigentum and Selinus in Sicily; at Metapontum and especially at Pæstum in Italy, where the grandest ruins in the ancient Doric order are to be found. The common characteristic of these buildings, which nearly all belong to the seventh or sixth century, was their sturdy but heavy and thick-set appearance. The columns have a height of only four diameters—four and two-thirds at most; and the stucco in coming off has displayed the poverty of the material employed. Even the temple of Olympia was built of a hard and porous tufa which the stucco had concealed under a brilliant covering. That of Ægina was also of stone, not marble; there remain of it at least some beautiful ruins.
We must go to Athens to find Doric architecture in its severe elegance. Even in the temple of Ægina the column is higher: five and a third diameters; at the Theseum it is five and a half; at the Parthenon, six, and this is the proportion which is most pleasing to the eye. Of these three temples the first, in which we can still find traces of an archaic character, belongs to the sixth century; the second, which has better proportions, to the first half of the fifth; the third is the architectural triumph of the age of Pericles.
The Parthenon, built entirely of Pentelic marble, is not the most vast of the Greek temples, but its execution is more perfect and it is this which made it the masterpiece of Hellenic art. A very small detail will show the finish of the work. It is with difficulty and by the assistance of eye and hand that one succeeds in discovering the joints of the tambours forming the colonnade which surrounds the building, so skilfully have these enormous masses been adjusted. Even in her masons Athens possessed artists.
The interior of the Parthenon contained two halls: the smaller at the back, the opisthodomus, enclosed the public treasure; the larger, or cella, contained the statue of the goddess born without mother from the thought of the master of the gods, and who was as the soul of which the Parthenon was the material casing. Figures in high relief, about twice life size, adorned the two pediments of the temple. The frieze, which ran round the cella and opisthodomus at a height of thirteen metres (42 ft., 8 ins.), and to a length of more than one hundred and sixty metres (525 ft.), represented the procession of the great Panathenæa.
The work was finished in 435 B.C. It is neither the centuries nor the barbarians that have mutilated it. The Parthenon was still almost intact in 1687, when on the 27th of September Morosini bombarded the citadel. One of the projectiles, setting fire to the barrels of powder stored in the temple, blew up a part of it; then the Venetian desired that the statues should be taken down from the pediment and he broke them. Lord Elgin, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, tore down the bas-reliefs of the frieze and the metopes: this was another disaster. The Ilissus or Cephisus, the Hercules or Theseus, the Charities, “vernal goddesses”—called by some the Three Fates, by others Demeter, Core, and Iris—are still, though somewhat mutilated, the most precious of our relics of antiquity. In 1812 some other Englishmen carried off the frieze of the temple of Phigalia (Bassæ), built by Ictinus. All these fragments of masterpieces were sold for hard cash, and it is under the damp and gloomy sky of England that we are reduced to admiring the remains of that which was the imperial mantle which Pericles wrapped about Pallas Athene. Thus to understand the incomparable magnificence of the Parthenon, we must render back to it in imagination what men have taken away, then place it on its lofty rock, one hundred and fifty-six metres (512 ft.) high, whence a magic panorama is unrolled before the eyes, and surround it with the buildings of the Acropolis; the Erechtheum, which exhibited all the graces of art, beside the severe grandeur of the principal temple; the bronze statue of Athene Promachus, “she who fought in the front rank,” to which the artist gave a colossal height, so that the sailors arriving from the high sea steered by the plume on her helmet and the gold tip of her lance, maris stella; and lower down, at the only place by which the rock was accessible, the wonderful vestibule of the Propylæa and the temple of Victory which formed one of its wings; but, above all, it must be seen wrapped in the blazing light of the eastern sky, compared to which our clearest day is but a twilight.
One thing has been observed in the Parthenon which proves the profound artistic sense the Greeks possessed and how well they understood how to correct geometry by taste. In all the Parthenon there is no surface which is absolutely flat. As the columns owe their full beauty only to the fact that they exhibit towards their centre a slight outward curve, of which the eye is not aware, so the entire building, colonnades and walls, is inclined slightly inwards towards an invisible point which would be lost in the region of the clouds, and all the horizontal lines are convex. But all with such delicacy that it is sufficient to allow the eye and the light to wander gently over the surfaces and to give the monument at once the grace of art and the solidity of strength; but not enough for it to assume the compressed and heavy aspect of a truncated pyramid like the Egyptian temples. On the southern façade the rise of the curve is only one hundred and twenty-three millimetres (about 4½ inches).
The Propylæa, the masterpiece of civil and military architecture, belonged, like the Parthenon, to the Doric order, and stood at the only accessible point of the Acropolis. The architect Mnesicles disposed its various parts in such a manner as to give an aspect of grandeur to the entrance to the Holy of Holies of pagan Athens and also to secure its defence. Epaminondas would have transported it to Thebes to adorn the Cadmea: six centuries after, Pausanias admired it more than the Parthenon, and Plutarch said: “These works have preserved a freshness, a virginity which time cannot wither; they appear still bright with youth as if a breath would animate them and as if they had an immortal soul.”
Athens had other monuments which were erected at very diverse epochs: the Anaceum, the temple of Castor and Pollux, where the sale of slaves took place; the Pantheon or temple of all the gods, the work of the emperor Hadrian; the octagonal Tower of the Winds, an indifferent work built about the first century before Christ. On each of its eight sides, corresponding to the quarters of the principal winds, was sculptured the figure of one of them. This tower still exists, as well as the choragic monument erected by the choregus Lysicrates, in 334 B.C., on the occasion of the victory of the Acamantid tribe in a chorus. The remains of the theatre of Bacchus are still to be seen on the south-eastern slope of the citadel, some of the marble seats bearing very beautiful sculptures. But the Stadium beyond the Ilissus, according to Pausanias one of the wonders of Athens, has disappeared and the excavations made there produced nothing remarkable.
Like its capital, Attica too had monuments of victory, of patriotic pride, and pious gratitude to the gods: and all these monuments were constructed in the severe style whose principal models we have just studied. In the sacred city of Eleusis, in sight of Salamis, a vast religious edifice was built, capable of containing the multitude of those initiated into the mysteries of Ceres. Rhamnus which overlooks the plain of Marathon, raised a sanctuary to Nemesis, the goddess of just vengeance; and on the summit of Cape Sunium, two temples consecrated to Poseidon and Athene, the tutelary deities of Attica, signalised from afar, to sailors coming from the isles or the coast of Asia, their approach to the ground where the Persians had found a tomb and the Greeks liberty. When on the days of the sacred festivals, the people arrived in long theoria (embassies) at the promontory now called Cape Colonna, they saw extending at their feet that sea which had now become their own domain, and fervently thanked the two divinities for having given them: for their leaders, political wisdom; for their mariners, favourable winds. At a later time philosophy was to take its seat near the temple of the gods, and we, like it, believe that Sunium heard some of the discourses of Plato.
The school of Athens extended her influence to distant places. It did not build the temple of Olympia, but Phidias made the statue of Zeus; Pæonius of Mende and Alcamenes of Lemnos have been credited, without absolute proof, with the sculptures of the two pediments, on one of which was represented the combat of Pelops and Œnomaus, and on the other the contests of the Lapithæ and Centaurs at the nuptials of Pirithous.
Ruins of Temple of the Olympian Jove. Athens
Time, barbarians, perhaps fire, destroyed the temple, and the Alpheus, in overflowing its banks, covered the plain of Altis which Pausanias had seen in such beauty with eight or ten metres (about 26 or 32 ft.) of alluvium. Before the Expédition de Morée, which brought away some fragments for the Louvre, even the spot in which so much magnificence stood was unknown. The successful excavations of the German commission have brought to light a victory of Pæonius, a Hermes of Praxiteles and other masterpieces.
The Ionic style is also native to the coast of Asia, where the Doric had preceded it. It was exhibited there in all its grace in the sixth century, when the temple of Ephesus was erected. The Cretan Chersiphron and his son Metagenes began its construction, which was carried on, like that of our Gothic cathedrals, with a tardiness that extended it over two or three centuries. Its columns, several of which were given by Crœsus, had a height of eight diameters, with bases which lacked the Doric columns and voluted capitals which the ancients compared to the drooping curls of a woman’s hair. Of the Ionic temple at Samos, burned by the Persians, a single column remains upright, and according to the diameter of the base it was sixteen metres (about 52½ ft.) high. This temple was therefore a colossal structure. At Athens the Erechtheum and the temple of the Wingless Victory are in the same style, but of very small dimensions. The first contained the oldest image of Athene: a statue of olive wood which was said to have fallen from heaven. In the second was a warlike Minerva; in order to attach her permanently to the fortunes of Athens, the sculptor had not given her the wings which are the attributes of the fickle goddess of lucky battles.
In the time of Pericles the Corinthian style has not yet appeared but is about to do so. It is related that Callimachus, having seen on a child’s tomb at Corinth, a basket filled with its playthings and enveloped in the graceful curves of the leaves of an acanthus, took from it the idea of the Corinthian capital. The date of his birth is unknown, but since Ictinus after the plague of Athens, and Scopas in 396 constructed, the one at Phigalia, the other at Tegea, two temples in which traces have been found of the new style of architecture, its invention must have followed very soon after the construction of the Propylæa.
There is a question concerning Greek architecture which has only been answered in our own day, that of polychromy. In spite of our very decided preference for bare stone, we have been forced to recognise that the Greeks had a different taste. Light and colour are the joy of the eyes; but their rôle is not the same in countries in which the sky often appears like a shroud suspended above the earth, and in those where that earth, animated by the sun, sings, with its thousand voices, the poem of nature. In the north a wan light casts gloom upon the monuments; thus we are not loath to build them with materials which at first give them a dazzling whiteness. In the south they are too vividly illuminated, and the dazzling brightness of the marble would burn the eyes if the sun did not clothe the stone in a golden tint which rests the gaze. Colour, unnecessary and somewhat incommoding to the sculptor, whose main concern is with the form and truth of outline, furnishes the architect on the contrary with a valuable means of animating the great flat surfaces which in their nakedness would be cold and lifeless. He does not, like the polychromic sculptor, seek to create a deceitful illusion; colour and ornamentation make no false pretence, and are a charm the more when, in the case of a building standing in the midst of a sacred wood, it establishes a needful harmony between the work of art and that of nature.
THE ERECHTHEUM
Greek Head
(In the British Museum)
Egypt and Asia were prodigal of colour, whether in painting or by the use of enamelled faiences with which the monuments of Persia are still covered. The most ancient inhabitants of Hellas passed under their influence. Colour has been found on the walls of dwellings older than Homer by ten centuries; it was to be seen at Tiryns, one of the capitals of the heroic age, and on the prows of the first ships which ventured into the midst of the waves. This usage continued through the epochs which succeeded; but, as in every domain of art, the Greeks modified this legacy of their ancestors and of the peoples which had preceded them in civilised life, according to the requirements of a delicate taste. Hues more or less vivid covered the stone of the temple, even the sculptures of the frieze, the metopes, and the pediment; terra-cottas, whose colours mixed with a kind of paste were indestructible, decorated the upper parts of the monument and enlivened these severe structures. But a distinction must be drawn between the polychromy of Athens in the time of Pericles and that of other Hellenic countries. In Sicily, in greater Greece, even in Ægina, where the materials which the architects had to dispose of were of a coarse description, it may be that the temples received a brilliant colouring. But at Athens the beautiful Pentelic marble employed in the construction of the temples was certainly not entirely concealed under crude and violent colours. The words of Plutarch, quoted above, on the freshness and youth preserved by the monuments of the Acropolis, when six centuries had already passed over them, does not allow us to believe in more than a moderate colouration for the columns and walls. At one point only of the building there was certainly greater variety. In all countries women, who are ingenious artists, apply themselves to adorning their heads, and with reason: it is the stronghold from which formidable arrows are shot. Ictinus also decorated the upper portions of the Parthenon with all the graces he could call into play. Ornaments of gilt bronze fastened to the draperies of the figures, inlaid enamels, and magnificent carvings running all along the frieze. On festival days treasures and garlands were added, so that the edifice wore on its brow, as it were, a crown of flowers and foliage over a circlet of precious stones.
Antiquity has preserved us no details concerning the artists; we are ignorant of even the native country of most of them. For centuries their works spoke for them, but the very ruins of the monuments they raised have perished. Only the Parthenon still proudly lifts its mutilated head above the mass of rubbish.
A great poet saw a gloomy vision of Europe dying and Paris vanishing. Twenty-five centuries before, Thucydides drew a less poetic but more faithful fantasy for Athens and Lacedæmon. Comparing the sterility of the one to the fertility of the other, he said: “Let both towns be destroyed and the mere débris of the monuments and temples of Athens will reveal a glorious city; the ruins of Lacedæmon will be only those of a large village.”
SCULPTURE
Art is a natural instinct which is to be found even amongst the last of the savages who were the prehistoric inhabitants of Gaul, and which the most intelligent of animals do not possess. This instinct is developed or arrested, not, as has been said, according to race, but in response to the social influences to which a people is subjected amidst melancholy and severe or peaceful and smiling scenes which extinguish or call forth the creative imagination. These influences, working through the centuries, predisposed Hellas to change the paths which art had been pursuing in the East; and habits which were easily acclimatised in Greece, but which could not have had their birth on the banks of the Nile and Euphrates, favoured this slow evolution.
Thanks to a good system of education, to long-continued gymnastic exercises and to a life in the open air, often without clothing and always without a dress which could hamper the harmonious development of the body, the Greeks became the most beautiful race under the sun. As they had always before their eyes the ephebi, so agile in the race, the wrestlers and the athletes, who displayed so much virile grace, the æsthetic sense developed in them with a strength which, when nature had given genius to the artists, produced masterpieces. Religion still further increased this tendency. Their gods having been conceived in the image of man, as a superior humanity, the sculptors, as the religious conscience grew more elevated and taste was purified, took their ideal for the representations of the dwellers on Olympus from human beauty carried to perfection. The people even looked upon it as a gift of heaven, and after death men were accorded heroic honours on account of their beauty.
Minerva
(From a statue)
Herodotus has preserved us a fact which exhibits the Greek character: Philip of Croton was venerated as a hero after his death, in a small building erected to him because he was the most beautiful man of his time, and the old historian agrees with the Egestans who had made this singular kind of god. He does not ask if Xerxes had truly royal qualities. “In his vast army,” he says, “none was more worthy by his beauty of the sovereign power.” In one of the choregiæ in which he often triumphed by his magnificence, Nicias had given the part of Dionysus to a young slave so perfectly handsome and so nobly attired that on his appearance the people broke into applause. Nicias liberated him at once, considering, he said, that it was an impiety to retain in servitude a man who had been hailed by the Athenians in the character of a god. Nicias indeed was performing a very popular act; it was the handsome ephebus, not the god, who had excited the admiration of the spectators.
From first to last Greece thought thus. Many a time in the Odyssey, Ulysses and Telemachus fancy that they see a god when they unexpectedly encounter a tall and beautiful man; and the cold and severe Aristotle writes: “If amongst mortals any were born resembling the images of the gods, the rest of mankind would agree in swearing to them an eternal obedience.” Simonides, without going so far, made beauty the second of the four conditions necessary to happiness, and Isocrates said: “Virtue is so honoured only because it is moral beauty.” It was because he was the most beautiful of the ephebi that Sophocles was charged, after Salamis, with the task of leading the chorus which sung the hymn of victory; and it is said Phidias engraved on the finger of Zeus at Olympia: “Pantarces is beautiful”—a sacrilege which might have exposed him to great danger. We no longer possess this inscription, but we find a similar one on a painted vase, where Victory is offering a crown to a handsome ephebus. The gods themselves had the reputation of being sensible of this advantage, which had procured many mortals the honour of their love. At Ægium Jupiter desired that his priests should be chosen from among the young men who had carried off the prize for beauty; for this merit Ganymede was snatched up to heaven, that he might serve as cup-bearer to the gods, and Apollo admitted into his sanctuary the statue of Phryne, the most admired of the courtesans of Greece. It is notorious how Hyperides saved the beautiful hetæra from a capital charge, when she was standing before the judges, by simply tearing away at an appropriate moment the veil which hid her beauty. The recollection of these facts serves to explain the divine honours paid to Antinoüs by the most Grecian of the Roman emperors; but they also show how much this worship of beauty, of which the Greeks had made a religion and from which Plato was to weave a theory, went to form the artists, and, to a certain extent, the philosophers of Greece. Did not Plato utter words whence has been legitimately derived the famous saying that Beauty is the splendour of goodness? The jurisconsults of the Roman empire called themselves the priests of law; Phidias and Polyclitus might have styled themselves the priests of the beautiful; and this trait suffices to mark the difference between the two civilisations, the Greek and the Roman. Beauty is the perpetual aspiration of the French spirit which seeks it in everything, in the great spectacles of nature or in the works of famous writers and artists.
Amongst the statues of which the ancients were most proud, are some which amaze us by their colossal height, and others which shock our taste by the diversity of the colours and materials employed. The Egyptians treated their Pharaohs and their gods in a similar fashion, as did the Persians their kings, the Athenians the people or the senate personified, and we ourselves do the same to translate certain ideas: the Saint Borromeo of Lake Maggiore and the Liberty of New York are colossi. Executed to be seen from afar, they strike the eye by their mass, and are the expression in stone of elevated sentiments: of holiness, patriotism, or independence. On the promontory where they are placed between earth and heaven they appear as the very genius of the people which erected them, a shining witness of their gratitude, and the figurative representation of their inmost thought.
Apollo
(From a Statue now in the Museum at Naples)
The art of colossal sculpture was at the service of the gods, and was in its place in or near their temples. It was the same with the chryselephantine sculpture, and for the same reasons. The most celebrated of these sculptures and those which from ancient descriptions we know the best, were the Athene of the Parthenon and the Zeus of Olympia.
Reaching with her pedestal to a height of fifteen metres (about 49 ft.), Minerva stood erect, enveloped in a talaric tunic, the dress of virgins. In one hand she held a Victory, in the other the spear round which the serpent Erichthonius was coiled. The draperies were of gold, the naked parts of ivory, the head of Medusa, on the Ægis, in silver, the eyes being of precious stones.
How did this Minerva, which was seen by Julian as late as the fourth century of our era, finally perish? The Christians have been charged with this, but the accusation should be brought against her wealth. So much gold could not escape the barbarians, whoever they were, whether invaders from the north, needy princes, or ordinary thieves. The pillage of the Parthenon had already begun in the time of Isocrates and the Athene of Julian must have been only a ruin.
Phidias was also summoned to Olympia. The treasures accumulated in the temple from the offerings of all Greece, permitted him to execute a work which surpassed that of the Parthenon. On a throne of cedar wood, inlaid with gold and ivory, ebony, and precious stones, and covered with bas-reliefs and paintings, Zeus was majestically seated. His thick hair and beard were of gold; of gold and ivory was the Victory he carried in his right hand, in token that his will was always triumphant; of gold, too, mingled with other metals was the royal sceptre surmounted by an eagle, which he held in his left hand. On the head was the crown of olive leaves, which was given to the victors in the games, but, as was fitting, that of the god was gold, as well as his sandals and his mantle, which revealed his naked breast in ivory. His visage had the virile beauty proper to the father of gods and men; his tranquil gaze was indeed that of the all-powerful whom no passion stirs and behind whose broad forehead should reside the vast intelligence of the orderer of worlds. Placed at the back of the naos, at the point where the trend of the architectural lines attracted the gaze, the statue, fifteen or sixteen metres (49 or 52 ft.) high, seemed still more colossal than it was.
Minerva
(From a Greek vase)
The Olympian Jupiter shared the fate of the Minerva of the Parthenon; he was too rich for an age grown too barbarous and beliefs too hostile. It is said that in 393 Theodosius had it transported to Constantinople, where it perished some years later in one of the great conflagrations that so often visited the new capital of the Empire; it is not likely that it was so long respected. Already in the second century Lucian laughs at this “honest fellow, the exterminator of giants, who remained seated so quietly while brigands shaved his golden hair.”
Other towns besides Athens and Olympia had chryselephantine statues. Costly materials were used for the Juno at Argos, the Æsculapius of Epidaurus, and others.
Phidias did not confine himself to representing gods, that is to say to making colossi; with his own hands, or more often through those who worked under his direction, he lavished less divine sculpture on the frieze, the metopes, and the double pediment of the temple, the figures of which, as seen from below, do not appear to be of more than ordinary height. Those which he chiselled on Minerva’s shield and on her sandals, were still smaller. The magnificent fragments which remain to us from the two pediments, Demeter and Core, Iris and Cephisus, the Charities or Fates, the Hercules or Theseus, are the works of his school and we may say of his mind. In spite of their mutilations, these marbles, like those of the Victory untying her sandal, may be ranged beside, if not above, the most glorious creations of Renaissance sculpture in the purity of the style and the calm serenity of the figures, which neither have their limbs twisted in violent action nor their brows overcharged with thought, as happened when statuary strove to rival painting. What a puissant life is in these divinities tranquilly seated in the pediments, and how calm on their fiery horses are the riders in the Panathenaic procession! Later on the school of grace and voluptuousness will appear, with an Athenian, Praxiteles, as its chief; still later, passion will agitate the marble: then the decay of art begins—such a drama as the “Farnese bull”[46] depicts may not fittingly be presented in stone.
It is to the eternal honour of Phidias that he finally broke with hieratic art, whose influence is still traceable in the beautiful statues of Ægina, with their admirably studied but lifeless shapes and grinning heads exhibiting, even in pain and death, the same idiotic smile. The great artist sought the beauty which is the spiritual essence of things, whether it be in the soul seen through the body; or nature contemplated in her most harmonious expansion; and this ideal beauty he realised without making the effort visible. This is supreme art; for there is no grandeur without simplicity.
Greek Lyres
PAINTING, MUSIC, ETC.
If the description in the Iliad of the shield of Achilles is a work of imagination, those of the Athene of the Parthenon and the Zeus of Olympia, as given by Pausanias after an attentive study of the works themselves, show that the school of Athens had carried the art of carving metal and ivory to a high degree of perfection, as well as that of working hard stones for casts or in relief. Yet this skill was borrowed from the school of Argos, where work in bronze was held in high honour.
It was not so with painting, which in Greece had never the perfection of statuary, whatever may be said on the faith of anecdotes more famous than veracious. Modern painting seeks to move; that of the ancients was rather sculptural in its character, in the sense that it sacrificed colouring to design and the effects of light and shade to form—a stranger to what might be called, if we have Rembrandt in mind, the drama of light and shade, or, in referring to the Venetians, the harmonious chant of colours. Sicyon was the first Greek town which had a school for design. Athens, Miletus, and subsequently Corinth, followed this example. We shall see presently that Greece had great painters, and that those of Athenian origin did not occupy the first rank in this art. But it would be rash to speak of Greek painting except according to the judgment of the ancients, since nothing of it remains save painted vases, which belong to industry rather than art; and the mural decorations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which are too often mere conventional productions, executed hurriedly and probably for small payment by workmen rather than artists. The Roman mosaics were also made by Greek hands, but there is not one, except the battle of Issus, which is of a high order of art.
Lyre Player
The Greeks possessed the merit of realising that the highest intellectual culture is one of the conditions of greatness in the individual and the state; and they understood how to utilise every means of attaining it. In their plan of education, besides the study of poets and philosophers to form the mind, and gymnastic exercise to develop suppleness and strength, they included music, which habituates the mind to harmony, and dancing, which bestows grace. These two secondary arts were the chief ones at Lacedæmon; they also ranked high among the Athenians, though Athens did not set her mark on them as she did on architecture and the art of statuary. They were indispensable auxiliaries at festivals, sacrifices, and funerals, and played a part in the performance of religious rites. The marvellous effects of the lyre of Orpheus were universally kept in mind, and Achilles, the hero who was the ideal type of warlike courage, was represented celebrating his exploits on the cithara; in the Iliad or the Odyssey there is no feast to which a melodious singer is not invited. Down to the last days of Greece the beneficent action of music was believed in: Polybius attributed the misfortunes of the Arcadians to the neglect among them of the art which calms the passions and which, by teaching the rules of harmony, trains the learner not to violate public peace. Damon the musician, a friend of Pericles and of Socrates, held that musical methods could not be changed without threatening the foundation of morality and the laws of the city. Plato thinks the same, and Aristotle calls music “the greatest charm of life.” It is well known how much importance was attached to it by the school of the Pythagoreans, who professed to hear the music of the celestial spheres turning harmoniously through infinite space.
Greek Dancing Girl
(Hope)
The Greeks also conceived of dancing in another fashion from ours, for they had introduced into it number and measure, which in art are a manifestation of beauty, but no longer remain so when whirling speed is substituted for grace. With them the dance formed part of their religious solemnities and military education. “The ancients,” says Plato in the Seventh Book of the Laws, “have bequeathed us a great number of beautiful dances.” In the Dorian cities dancing was one of the necessary rites in the worship of Apollo, and the gravest people participated. Theseus, returning from Crete, danced the γέρανος in the holy island of Delos, to celebrate his victory over the Minotaur; and the Spartans, in annual commemoration of their triumph over the people of Thyrea danced the γυμνοπαιδια before the images of Apollo, Diana, and Latona, singing verses of Aleman and the Cretan Thaletas. The Bacchic dances, with thyrsi and lighted torches, were a mimic representation of the life of Dionysus.
In the neighbourhood of Eleusis was to be seen the fountain of beautiful dances, Callichorum, where the initiated chanted the invocation to Iacchus as they danced: “O adored god, approach at our voice. Iacchus! Iacchus! come and dance the sacred thiasus in this meadow, thy well-beloved home; strike the ground with a bold foot and mingle in our free and joyous dances, inspired by the graces who rule our consecrated chorus.”
Plato, in his treatise on “Law,” which is a kind of commentary on Athenian legislation and customs, attaches extreme importance, even for the moral education of youth, to the possession by the ephebi of the “art of choruses,” which includes song and dance.
We may well believe that demoralising dances existed in Ionia and elsewhere. At Sparta and Athens the Pyrrhic dance was a military exercise and a patriotic training. The ephebi danced them at the greater and lesser Panathenæa, imitating all the movements of a combat for attack, defence, or the evasion of darts. And was not the heroic circle of the Suliote women a recollection of these warlike dances? Having taken refuge on the summit of a mountain to escape a harem or the yataghan of the Turks, they sang their funeral hymn, joined hands and danced on this narrow peak, which was surrounded by precipices. Each time that the ring approached the abyss, the circle was narrowed, for one of their number detached herself from it to fling herself down; and one after another, all threw themselves over.
THE ARTISTS OF THE OTHER CITIES OF HELLAS
[460-410 B.C.]
The fifth century is the golden age of Greek art. We have told of the artists whom Athens gave to the world; we shall now see what others the rest of Hellas produced—such at least whose names have come down to us with an indication of their works.
Chersiphron and his son Metagenes of Knossos, in Crete, are outside the period with which we are dealing, for they began the construction of the great temple of Ephesus in the sixth century.
The domain of statuary had a great artist whom the ancients have compared to Phidias, Polyclitus of Sicyon or Argos. The artists of the century of Pericles did not confine themselves to one corner of the regions of art; they cultivated the whole. Polyclitus was as much a skilful architect as a great sculptor. At Epidaurus he erected a circular monument, the Tholus, and a theatre which was much admired by the ancients; at Argos his Juno was the rival of the Minerva of the Parthenon, though it did not stand as high, and was less costly. Phidias lived with the gods in spirit, Polyclitus dwelt more among men. He even wrote on the proportions of the human body, and applied his knowledge to his Doryphorus, which was called the “canon,” or the “rule.” The ancients divided the palm for statuary between the two great artists: giving it to the one for his gods; to the other for his Canephorus, which Verres stole from the Sicilians, his Amazon, which triumphed over that of Phidias in the famous competition at Ephesus, and his statues of successful athletes, such as the Diadumenus and the two Astragalizontes, or dice-players. Myron, whom we might have included among the Athenian artists, went farther in his imitation of nature; his bronze cow was famous, and still more so his Discobolus, whose attitude must have been very difficult to render.
Polygnotus of Thasos, whom Cimon brought from that town in 463, lived for a long time on the banks of the Ilissus, and was given the rights of an Athenian citizen as a reward for his labours in the decoration of the temple of Theseus, the Anaceum, the Pœcile, and a part of the Propylæa. There was some stiffness in the designs of Polygnotus; his was a sculptural painting which, nevertheless, obtained great effects by very simple means. The ancients lauded the expression and beauty of his figures, but they have neither the grace nor the dramatic character which the painters of the period that followed were to give to their works. The arts of painting and statuary are two sisters who resemble each other, and both follow the variations of taste: the first with a vivacity at times imprudent, the second with more reserve. Zeuxis of Heraclea Pontica and his rival, Parrhasius of Ephesus, were younger than Polygnotus. Their painting was already more scientific, less ideal, and nearer reality. Aristotle reproaches Zeuxis with yielding too much to Ionian effeminacy. If we are to believe anecdotes whose frequent repetition does not make them more authentic, these painters even succeeded in deceiving the eye: the one with a bunch of grapes which the birds came to peck at, the other with a curtain which Zeuxis attempted to draw back, thinking that it concealed the real picture. These would be triumphs of ingenuity rather than art. It is to be noted that both men drew freely on the abundant resources of ancient poetry. Both attained to great fame and opulence. In spite of the misfortunes of the times, Greece still had gold for her favourite painters. Archelaus, king of Macedon, paid four hundred minæ for the painting of Zeuxis in his palace, and Parrhasius never appeared in public without a robe of purple fringed with gold. He considered himself “master of the elegancies,” as well as of his art, so we need not wonder at his having inclined to effeminate gracefulness. “His Theseus,” said Ephranor, “is fed on roses; mine was fed on meat.” But it was at a later time, with Lysippus and Pamphilus, that the school of Sicyon was to have its full splendour.
The sight of the sculptors and painters turning to Homer for their inspiration, calls forth the remark that the Iliad was the Bible of Greece, as much for art as for religion. As our churches of the Middle Ages constituted, by means of their windows, a grand book of religious instruction, so the walls and pediments of the Greek temples exhibited to the eye legends which spoke of the divinities and heroes of the Hellenic race. Thus, while in Rome art was to be merely a foreign importation, in Greece it came from the very heart of the country; and this was the secret of its greatness.[b]
FOOTNOTES
[46] A famous group now in the Museum at Naples.
Apollo Musagetes
Sophocles