A History of Sculpture

by Ernest Henry Short

It is to be found in a large class of sculptures which we shall designate as Lysippic. These contain strongly marked characteristics, and a moment’s consideration will show that they must be traced to a social opinion entirely different to that pervading such works as the “[Olympian Hermes],” the “[Aphrodite of Cnidus],” and the “[Eros of Centocelle].”

But if a school of sculpture opposed to that of Praxiteles was an artistic necessity, a reaction against the social circumstances which had rendered a Praxiteles possible was equally sure. The art change indeed witnesses to the social revolution; the social change to the artistic.

Nor is the reaction in any sense the result of a merely passive objection to a dangerous method of living and feeling. Athens was impelled by misfortune into adopting sounder ideals. Such an incident as the sack of the shops in the Piræus by the pirate vessels of Alexander of Pheræ after the battle of Mantinea (362 b.c.) had rudely shaken the self-confidence of the Athenians. At the time, the outrage led to no more vigorous step than the exiling of the Athenian statesman, Callistratus. But these rebuffs reached a climax in 338 b.c. when Thebes and Athens were routed by Philip and Alexander at Chæronea. The impossible had happened. With the victory of Chæronea, the hegemony of Greece had passed to Macedonia—a non-Greek power. The Athenians prepared for root and branch reform. As if to justify the taunt of Demosthenes, “the administration has risen from beggary to wealth, while the Treasury wants sustenance for one day’s march,” such an incorruptible as Lycurgus was elected to the Ministry of the Public Revenue. What is more he was permitted to act. The Navy was increased to 400 galleys. The marble store-house for ships’ gear (the Skeuotheke of Philo) was completed. With grim irony, the cases that lined the triple-aisled arcades were left open for public inspection, “that those who passed might see all the gear in the gear-house.”

It was almost a century since the seeds of decay had been sown in the city-state system. It needed no Demosthenes to prove that with all its faults it was to this system that Athens owed its most enduring glories. It had developed the powers of the citizens to the greatest extent. Faced with the possibility of the absolute monarchy embodied in the power of Macedonia triumphing over the free commonwealth, Athens naturally looked to the past. The rule of Phocion and Lycurgus was the result. It was marked by a closer return to the ideals of the fifth century than had prevailed in Athens since the death of Pericles, a century earlier. Many of the old shrines were restored, and the theatre of Dionysus rebuilt. Aided by the produce of the silver mines of Laurion, Lycurgus was able to rebuild the Lycæan gymnasium and construct the Panathenaic stadion.

But an even more signal proof of the reaction against the selfish policy of the previous fifty years is to be found in the effort made to rid Athens of the mercenary system which was sapping the military strength of the state. After Chæronea the youth of Athens was once more trained to arms. Young men had to serve the state for at least two years. These Epheboi, under the direction of a marshal and ten masters of discipline, wore a common uniform, lived together and dined frugally at a common mess. The system was almost Spartan in its simple temperance. The Epheboi were trained in the exercises of the hoplite. At the end of the first half of their training they gave a public exhibition of athletic and military skill in the Athenian theatre. The ministry of Lycurgus between 338 and 326 b.c. was not a second golden age for Athens. But it was a faithful copy. There was, at least, a partial return to the good old times when Athenian lads ran races under the sacred olives, redolent of convolvulus and whitening poplar, “rejoicing in the sweet o’ the year when the plane-tree whispers to the elm.”

It was in a world dominated by these ideals that Lysippus (roughly 375 b.c. to 300 b.c.), the last of the great Greek sculptors, worked. In place of the less virile type favoured by the age of Praxiteles he aimed at the expression of natural manly beauty. Lysippus moulded his style upon that of Polyclitus. Like Polyclitus, he preferred to work in bronze. The preference is typical of his departure from the style of the Athenian artists who had dominated sculpture during the forty years before Chæronea. Marble had proved the very medium for the portrayal of the softer graces of the human form and the delicate expression of emotion. But it was inadequate for the representation of the more vigorous human forms which Lysippus sought to portray.

Lysippus, however, was no blind follower of Polyclitus. It is narrated that he once said, “Polyclitus made men as they were, but I make them as they appear to the eye.” Lysippus added the truth of expression which the beautifully symmetrical but impassive figures of Polyclitus lacked. He aimed at imparting to his figures a lightness that those of the Argive sculptor wanted.

The Vatican “[Apoxyomenus]” is without doubt the finest statue extant embodying these tendencies. This fine marble was excavated in April 1849 from among the ruins of a large private house in the Vicolo delle Palme in Transtevere. It is doubtless a marble copy of the bronze which was one of the most popular works of art in Rome during the Empire. In the bronze original the supports which are necessary for the marble copy were absent.

MELEAGER