THE LUDOVISI ARES
Vatican, Rome
MENELAUS AND PATROCLUS
Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence
As we look upon the “[Niobe],” we feel at once that so dramatic a theme would have made no appeal to the generation before Scopas. But we must also feel that the fourth century has struck a new note—a note, moreover, to which marble can respond. But what is most wonderful is the magnificent reserve, the perfect moderation, with which the artist has expressed emotions that had been considered beyond the range of the art. The sculptor has not sacrificed that harmony and repose which he regards as essential to the idea of the beautiful.
The group usually called the “[Menelaus and Patroclus]” displays in equal degree this balance between the expression of deep emotion and the perfect moderation which the Greeks regarded as the hall-mark of the truly beautiful. The limitations incidental to marble as a medium for emotional expression are borne in mind. There is no effort to force the note of pathos.
THE AGE OF PRAXITELES
(360 b.c.-325 b.c.)
If Scopas may be regarded as the first Greek to realise that marble and bronze could express the more passionate intensity of feeling which naturally followed the increasing importance of the individual and the individual’s thoughts and emotions, his successor, Praxiteles, must be associated with the second great characteristic of fourth-century sculpture—its lyrical appeal. Greek sculpture had been epic. It had concerned itself with the heroic myths of the race. But as art became every year less a matter of communal concern, it began to voice the growing self-assertion of the individual Greek. In other words, sculpture became lyric.