The Apollo of Tenea, Glyptothek, Munich.
Take the same people down to the Cast Room and show them the Apollo of Tenea, and what will they say?
When I first halted before this bewilderingly beautiful statue in the Glyptothek at Munich, I felt I was in the presence of something very much more masterful, very much more impressive, and infinitely more commanding than anything Greek I had ever seen in London, Paris, or Athens.
Here was a style which was strange. But it was evidently a style which was the product of a will, and of a long observance of particular values that had at last culminated in a type; for this Apollo resembled nothing modern, Egyptian, Assyrian, Mediæval, or of the Renaissance.
This statue scorns to make a general appeal. It is the apotheosis of a type. Of this there can be no question. It is the work of a loving and powerful artist, who could simplify the human frame, and express stenographically, so to speak, the essential features of the people he represented, because he knew the essential features to which their values aspired.
The arms, alone, transcend everything that I have ever seen in Hellenic Art for consummate skill in transfiguring and retaining bare essentials alone; and although, here and there, particularly in the breast, there is a broadness and a sweeping ease, which I admit ought to be attributed more to incomplete control of essentials than to their actual simplification, the whole figure breathes a spirit so pure, so certain and so sound, that it is the nearest approach I can find in Greek Art to that ideal artistic fact in which the particular values of a people find their apotheosis in the transfigured and simplified example of their type.
I would deny that the qualities of this statue are not ultimate qualities. I would deny that there is anything transitional or archaic in them. What is archaic, what is transitional, is the weak treatment of the chest and abdomen. Compared with the simplified chest and abdomen of an Egyptian statue of the fourth or fifth dynasty, it shows a minimum rather than a maximum of command of, and superiority over, reality. Any healthy development of such an art, however, ought only to have led to greater perfection in the treatment of the parts mentioned, and I seriously question the general belief that it marks a progress in sculpture which must ultimately lead to the rendering of the athletic types for which the sculptors of Argos and Sicyon became famous. There is something strange and foreign in this statue which does not reappear in the Hellenic Art of the Periclean age.[34] Like the vases of the sixth century and some of the ante-Periclean Acropolis statues, there is a Ruler form in its execution that makes quite a limited appeal— a fact which would be consistent with its having been the apotheosis of a type. Its exhortation is not directed at mankind in general. It communicates little to the modern European, and the crowds that stream through the Elgin Room of the British Museum would probably pass it by without either sympathy or understanding.
And yet, as I have shown, it cannot be regarded as a perfect specimen of Ruler-art; there are too many uncertainties and too many doubts in it.