The Medusa Metope of Sellinus, Palermo.
This is not the usual view, I know. As a rule, the art of the age of Pericles is considered to be the highest that Greece ever produced. But in this art I see a preponderance of realism which reveals to what extent the other and inferior will was beginning to prevail. And when I study Hellenistic art, and see this evil assuming such proportions as to make even modern historians and Art-scholars deliberately denounce it, I cannot help but recognize the germs of this decay in the art which hitherto has been most praised and admired.
As I say, I am judging purely from the artistic records. But I have no doubt that, if I possessed the necessary scholarship, I could trace the two Art-wills to two distinct races of men who, from the days of the fall of Mycenæan culture, strove for mastership in Greece. I also entertain no doubts that the fall of Greece might be attributed to the gradual triumph of that race which possessed the inferior Art-will, and nothing I have read, either in Grote, Bury, Oman, Curtius, Schnaase, Miss Harrison and others, has led me seriously to hesitate before suggesting this hypothesis.
Professor Ridgeway's Early Age of Greece leads me to suppose that the problem might be solved in the way I suggest. But, in any case, whether this is so or not, the style of the art of Pheidias shows a descent from the style of the Apollo of Tenea, which only an age with a mistaken conception of what art really is could possibly have overlooked.
The art of the fifth and fourth centuries, I will not and cannot deny, contains a large proportion of Ruler form, or what modern and ancient art-historians call the "ideal."[37] No people, any portion of which had been capable of producing the Apollo of Tenea, could have avoided it; but that it preponderates in realism, the evidence of history, alone, apart from that of our own senses, proves beyond a doubt.
The appreciation which it has met with at the hands of almost all Europeans of all ages, and particularly at the hands of the Renaissance realists, shows how general its appeal has been; and no art which has been so very much above Nature as to apotheosize the particular values of a particular people at its zenith, has ever made such a general appeal.
[D. Greek Painting.]
In regard to the painting of Greece, I will not detain you long. Practically all I have said in regard to Greek sculpture may be applied with equal force to Greek painting, and I cannot do better than sum up this side of the question with the words of that profound Japanese artist Okakura-Kakuzo.