A History of Sculpture

by Ernest Henry Short

CHAPTER III

THE AGE OF SCOPAS AND PRAXITELES
(400 b.c. TO 330 b.c.)

There is a wealth of worldy wisdom in the saying “Close sits my shirt, but closer my skin.” It reminds us that the relation of the individual to society answers many a riddle. The Athens of the fifth century has furnished us with one great type of individualism—that in which the citizen was willing simply to add his unit to the energy directed by the State. In its sculpture we saw the consequences of a social system which rested upon a foundation essentially unselfish. But, after all, such social altruism is unnatural. Individuality does stand for a dominant passion in humanity. The Athenian communal spirit lasted for a few short years. Then, like many another truly great ideal, it vanished, and with it the school of sculpture to which it had given birth.

After 400 b.c. the Hellenic sculptor found himself in a new world of thought and emotion. The Greek to whom he appealed looked to marble and bronze to express ideals entirely different from those which had been potent fifty years earlier. It would not have been surprising had the sculptor of the later age been overwhelmed by the sense of the achievements of the earlier era. We could have pardoned a half-century of decadent workmanship, while a method suited to the new ideas was being evolved. As a matter of fact, the Greek sculptor passed from one to the other without perceptible effort. The succession of great artists was unbroken.

Nevertheless, the break with the old epoch was complete. Indeed, it will ever be one of the mysteries of art how human craftsmanship could successfully express thoughts and emotions so diverse by the same medium. There was the same sleepless criticism of nature, the same overpowering impulse towards generalisation, which gave the keynote to the sculpture of the fifth century. But the younger school found fresh themes for plastic expression. It drew new passions from the pulsating humanity in the city-states. That the Greek sculptor passed so easily from the one to the other is a sure proof of the natural bias of the Hellenic genius towards sculpture. It shows that for one century and a half, at any rate, Greece was peopled by a race of sculptors. Many individuals lacked the technical resources of the craftsman, but the average Athenian thought in terms of marble or bronze. Denied an outlet in one direction, the natural impulse found it elsewhere. The result was a new melody, a harmony equally perfect—so true is it that the poet-soul of a nation of artists has “but to be struck, and the sound it yields will be music.”

It is by no means easy to distinguish thus strongly between the sculpture of the fifth-century Greece and that of the fourth without, in a measure, appearing to depreciate the one or the other. It is particularly easy to convey some such impression when we have to assert that Scopas and Praxiteles, the typical sculptors of fourth-century Greece, failed to embody in their bronzes and marbles the inmost revelations vouchsafed to the Greek imagination. It is as true that Greece owes to Phidias and Polyclitus the sculpture which is most truly Hellenic, as that we owe to Shakespeare the drama which is most truly English. But the appreciation of the art produced by the England of the twenty years after the Armada does not necessitate our decrying such lyricists as Herrick and Rochester. We know that our literature is the richer for both these elements. We can spare neither the awful pathos of Leah’s recognition of Cordelia, nor Herrick’s “Night Piece to Julia.” We must hold the scales at least as evenly between the art of Phidias and the art of Praxiteles.

In many ways the “[Niobe]” of Scopas and the “[Hermes]” of Praxiteles testify even more strongly to the vitality of the Hellenic genius. Certainly the best work of the fourth-century sculptors appeals far more directly to us. The period is that of the Spartan and Theban supremacy. Athens has practically acknowledged defeat in the struggle for the hegemony of Greece. Instead of the all-pervading pride in citizenship, the Athenian is conscious of an increasing interest in himself as an individual. The old absorption in the ideal citizenship vanishes. For this very reason the sculptor strikes a note more akin to our nature. The cold, almost repellent, beauty of the fifth-century sculpture is replaced by a new and more sensuous grace.

What were the historical circumstances which brought about this entire change in the Greek artists’ outlook upon life? Upon the withdrawal of the calm judgment and imaginative grip of Pericles, the Athenian political system degenerated rapidly. Drunk with the lust for conquest, Athens forgot that no single town could hope to conquer and rule any large portion of the Hellenic world. Under the influence of such firebrands as Alcibiades, Athens pursued the mad phantom of Empire. Defeat was inevitable, and the catastrophe at Syracuse in 413 b.c. was but a prelude to the final disaster nine years later.

There is perhaps no more awful page in the book of human history than that which pictures the scene in the Piræus after Ægospotami, when the last Athenian fleet was destroyed by Lysander in 405 b.c. “That night not a man slept.” Every Athenian remembered the fate of Demosthenes and Nicias at the hands of the revengeful Syracusans. He called to mind the living death of his 7000 countrymen condemned to a slavery in the stone quarries of Achradina. Now that the final catastrophe had come, his memory must have carried him back to his vote in 428 b.c., when the Assembly ordered the execution of the whole adult male population of Mytilene and Lesbos. He recalled the sentence passed upon the inhabitants of the rebellious Melos, which ended in the death of every man of military age. As these thoughts crowded in, each man must have asked if the gods would save him as they had saved the men of Mytilene, or whether his fate would be the death he had meted out to the soldiers of Melos and that of his wife and children the slavery that had befallen the rest of the islanders.