The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, November 1883 / A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Promotion of True Culture. / Organ of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

by Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle; Chautauqua Institution

“The works which are known to have been executed by the sculptors contemporary with Phidias, and by others who formed what is spoken of as ‘the later Athenian school,’ did not approach the great examples of the Parthenon. Sculpture then reached the highest point in the grandest style, whether in the treatment of the statue in the round, or of bas-relief as in the frieze, or alto-relievo as in the metopes. As to the chryselephantine statues of Phidias, it may be concluded without hesitation that though we are compelled to rely upon descriptions only, they must have been works of the great master even more beautiful than the marbles.”

At Argos during the time of Phidias, a somewhat younger school flourished under the leadership of Polycleitus. “The aspiration of Polycleitus was to depict the perfect beauty of the human form in calm repose.” His Amazon and Juno represent best his style; so perfect are all his works in their proportions that the invention of the canon has been assigned to him.

In the works of the later Athenian school, at the head of which were Scopas and Praxiteles, the sublime ideal of Greek art was no longer sustained by any new creations that can be compared with those of the Phidian school; no rivalry with those great masters seemed to be attempted. The severe and grand was beyond the comprehension, or probably uncongenial to the spirit of the age, which inclined toward the poetic, the graceful, the sentimental and romantic. The whole range of the beautiful myths found abundant illustration in forms entirely different from the ancient archaic representations, and in these the fancy of the sculptor was allowed the fullest and freest indulgence. Nymphs, nereids, mænads, and bacchantes occupied the chisel of the sculptor in every form of graceful beauty.

After this epoch, to which so many of the fine statues belong—repetitions in marble of famous originals in bronze—Greek sculpture took another phase in accordance with the social life and the taste of the age, which inclined toward the feeling for display that arose with the domination of the Macedonian power, brought to its height by the conquests and ambition of Alexander the Great. Lysippus, a self-taught sculptor of Sicyon, was the leading artist of his time. He was evidently a student of nature and individual character, as he was the first to become celebrated for his portraits, especially those of Alexander. He departed from the severe and grand style, and in the native conceit of all self-taught men sneered at the art of Polycleitus in the well-known saying recorded of him, “Polycleitus made men as they were, but I make them as they ought to be.” He seems to have been the first great naturalistic sculptor.

Rhodes had unquestionable right to give her name to a school of sculpture, both from the great antiquity of the origin of the culture of the arts in the island, and from the number, more than one hundred, of colossal statues in bronze. The Rhodian school is also distinguished by those remarkable examples of sculpture in marble of large groups of figures—the Toro Farnese and the Laocoon. In these works there is the same feeling for display of artistic accomplishment that has been noticed as characteristic of the Macedonian age, with that effort at the pathetic, especially in the Laocoon, which belongs to the finer style of the later Athenian school as displayed in the works of Scopas and Praxiteles, in the Niobe figures and others.

At Pergamus, another school allied in style to that of Ephesus arose, of which the chief sculptor was Pyromachus, who, according to Pliny, flourished in the 120th Olympiad, B. C. 300-298. A statue of Æsculapius by Pyromachus was a work of some note in the splendid temple at Pergamus, and is to be seen on the coins of that city. It is also conjectured that the well-known Dying Gladiator is a copy of a bronze by Pyromachus. The vigorous naturalistic style of these statues, surpassing anything of preceding schools in the effort at expression, may be taken as characteristic of the school of Pergamus, then completely under Roman influence, and destined to become more so. But all question as to the nature of the sculptures was set at rest by the discovery of many large works in high relief by the German expedition at Pergamus in 1875. These are now in the Museum at Berlin. They are of almost colossal proportions, representing, as Pliny described, the wars of Attalus and the Battles with the Giants. The nude figure is especially marked by the effort to display artistic ability as well as great energy in the action. In these points there is observable a connection with the well-known and very striking example of sculpture of this order—the Fighting Gladiator, or more properly the Warrior of Agasias, who, as is certain from the inscription on his work, was an Ephesian.

The equally renowned statue of the Apollo Belvedere, finely conceived and admirably modeled as it undoubtedly is, bears the stamp of artistic display which removes it from the style of the great classic works of sculpture.

The history of Roman sculpture is soon told. If it have any real roots, they are to be traced in the ancient Etruscan; for all that was really characteristic in it as art is associated with that style, in that intense naturalism which became developed so strikingly in the production of portrait statues and busts, and in those great monumental works in bas-relief which are marked by the same strong feeling for descriptive representation of the most direct and realistic kind, upon their triumphal columns and arches.

As has already been stated, early Roman sculpture, if such it can be called, was entirely the work of Etruscan artists, employed by the wealth of Rome to afford the citizens that display of pomp in their worship of the gods and the triumphs of their warriors which their ambition demanded. All important works were made of colossal size. Some of the early Roman (quasi Etruscan) statues spoken of by the historians are a bronze colossus of Jupiter, an Etruscan bronze colossus of Apollo, eighty feet high, in the Palatine Library of the temple of Augustus. A portrait statue of an orator in the toga, and a chimæra, both of bronze, are in the Florence Museum. Sculpture, from the love of it as a means of expressing the beautiful in the ideal form of the deities or the heroic and the pathetic of humanity, never existed as a growth of Roman civilization. The inclination of the Roman mind was toward social, municipal, and imperial system and ordering; in this direction the Romans were inventors and improvers upon that which they borrowed from the Greeks. But in art they began by hiring, and they ended by debasing the work of the hired.

They took away the bronze statues of Greece as trophies of conquest, covered them with gold, and set them up in the palaces and public places of Rome. They subsidized the sculptors of Greece, who under Roman influence had fallen away from their high traditions; they did nothing for the sake of art, but simply manufactured, as it were, copies and imitations of Greek statues for their own use. Happily we have to be grateful for the fact, though we can not honor the motive. Had it not been for this bestowal of their wealth in the gratification of their taste for luxury and display, many of the renowned statues of ancient Greek art would have been known only by the vague mention of them by Pausanias and Pliny, or the early Christian writers of the Church, or the poetic allusions of the Greek anthologists and the Latin epigrammatists.