A History of Sculpture

by Ernest Henry Short

No pleasant picture. But it is to these events that the world owes the sculptures of Scopas and Praxiteles.

Accepting, as we do, the dictum of Pericles, “Athens is the school of Hellas,” we have no hesitation in turning to her social and political history for an explanation of the essential difference between the sculpture of Greece in the fifth and the fourth century. The term “Athenian” cannot be used at will for “Hellenic.” Every city and state in Greece contributed something to the Hellenic genius. Each added its quota to the fund of intellectual and emotional experience upon which the great Greek artists drew. In these 150 city-states all types of political institutions and social customs flourished. Some developed their citizens in one direction, others in another. Men of all types were created. But Athens alone absorbed and utilized all the artistic energies generated in the Ægean peninsula. In the Athenian character alone do we find those traits which, for want of a better name, we may term Pan-Hellenic.

The first effect of the shattering of the imperial dream was to scatter Athenian culture broadcast over the Hellenic world. The store-house of Athenian genius was opened to all. The typical Greek of the new era was the cosmopolitan Xenophon. The ideal of Pericles, “my state right, or my state wrong, but my state, right or wrong,” was sadly out of date. Phidias was an Athenian, born and bred. His life-work was for Athens, and the one thing that Athens shared with Greece—the worship of Zeus. But Scopas was a Parian by birth and an Athenian only by adoption. He worked everywhere and for anybody—as a young man in Tegea; as an old man in Asia Minor upon the great mausoleum erected by the Ephesian Artemisia to her Carian husband.

THE MAUSOLEUM CHARIOTEER

British Museum

For thirty years after Ægospotami, Sparta, with the help of Persia, ruled Greece. After the peace of Callias in 371 b.c. came the domination of Pheræ and Thebes, and the military supremacy of Epaminondas. During all this time Athens looked on. Her commerce had suffered little. The wealth of her capitalists had rather been increased than decreased by the abandonment of the luxury of empire. But if the material difference was small, the psychological difference was immense. Whereas Demosthenes could cry of the Athenian who had fought at Salamis, that he believed himself “not born to his father and mother alone, but also to his country,” the State in the fourth century came to be regarded as a joint stock corporation, to be bled for the benefit of its most noisy members. Mercenaries took the place of citizen soldiers in the army of the State. Regardless of the necessity for providing against emergencies, the citizens voted themselves largesses from the public funds. A popular statesman was the man who lessened the cost of public administration, and so could distribute ever increasing dividends of festival money to the proletariat.

This new regard for the individual was entirely foreign to the ideals which had dominated Hellas fifty years earlier. Each man began to realise that apart from citizenship there was an entity which also claimed attention, an “I” with passions and emotions which required satisfaction and called for artistic expression. The sculptor no longer rejected those subjects which derived their interest from the successful expression of individual emotion.

THE AGE OF SCOPAS
(400 b.c.-350 b.c.)

Scopas was the first artist to realise the new necessity laid upon the plastic arts. He was the chief architect of his day, and in his work we can trace the effect of the new ideas before sculpture was divorced in great measure from architecture. We have already mentioned his association with the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus—one of the “Seven Wonders.” The Carian ruler Mausolus died in 353 b.c., leaving his widow Artemisia to rule. She determined to erect a great monument to his memory, and impressed the best known artists of Magna Græcia into her service for the purpose. The restoration by C. R. Cockerell in the Mausoleum Room at the British Museum, or, still better, that by Oldfield (The Antiquary, vol. liv., pp. 273-362), give some idea of the great pyramidical building, glowing with colour, which stood on a lofty basement by the harbour side. The whole was surmounted by a great chariot group by Pythis, containing the heroic figure of Mausolus, possibly accompanied by Artemisia, after the fashion of Zeus and Hera in the chariot of the gods.