In this truth lies the key which unlocks the mystery of the sculpture of Hellenistic Greece, one of the most elusive problems in the history of art. Before any marble of this age we feel we are face to face with the work of lesser spirits—men who cannot boast of the eagle wings of their brothers of the fourth and fifth centuries. Few can recall the name of a single Greek sculptor of the later age. There is certainly no Scopas, no Praxiteles, no Lysippus. Yet the mere enumeration of the “[Farnese Hercules],” the “[Belvedere Apollo],” the “[Venus of Milo],” and the “[Venus of Medici],” witnesses to craftsmen of the highest technical skill. What the sculpture of Hellenistic Greece lacks is the passionate enthusiasm for emotional and intellectual beauty which impressed the personality of such a man as Praxiteles upon his age, and made him not only a sculptor of note but a cosmic force. Praxiteles found sculptural expression for new loves and new hates. This is the power which creates a school. It is the absence of men possessed of this faculty, together with the absence of the new loves and hates themselves, which the historian of Hellenistic Greek sculpture must explain.
But, first of all, terms require definition. “Hellenistic Greece” connotes both a period and a locality. In point of time, it roughly includes from 300 b.c., when the immediate influence of Lysippus was removed, to, say, 50 b.c., when Rome realized her task of ruling the Western world. In point of place, the sculpture of Hellenistic Greece is to be sharply distinguished from that of Rhodes, Pergamus, and Alexandria. This is the more important, as the term Hellenistic is properly applicable to all these schools. Moreover, there are many characteristics common both to the Hellenistic sculpture of Greece itself and the art of the various States of the Alexandrian empire. Neither Rhodes nor Pergamus, for instance, gave rise to masterful spirits of the type which directed the course of Hellenic art during the fourth and fifth centuries. Both Pergamus and Rhodes, however, were centres which had never encountered the full tide of Hellenic civilisation.
It was not hard to correlate political and social circumstances which had no counterpart in fourth- and fifth-century Greece with the characteristics which distinguished the “[Dying Gaul]” and the “[Laocoon]” from the sculptures of Praxiteles and Scopas. But in Greece, during the post-Alexandrian age, the problem is far more complicated. The old methods of life and thought lingered on. The difference between “Hellenic” and “Hellenistic” is far more intangible than it is in countries where the Greek city-state system had never taken root. It is true that even in Greece the peculiar political and social conditions which gave rise to Hellenic sculpture passed away. But, once developed, the body of ideas which arose from them continued to influence the sculptor and the public to whom he appealed.
THE FARNESE HERCULES
National Museum, Naples
THE FOLLOWERS OF LYSIPPUS
Putting aside then for the moment the characteristics which distinguish the art of Hellenistic Greece from that of the earlier age, let us fix our attention upon the long series of works which owe their inspiration to the great sculptors of the fourth century. Nowhere can any affinity with the works of Phidias and the other fifth-century masters be detected. The men of Hellenistic Greece were entirely out of sympathy with the ideals of Periclean Athens. But they could realize the emotions aroused by Scopas, with his insistence upon the struggles of the individual soul. They could seek to express for themselves the feminine graces of Praxiteles. Above all they realized the value of the more strenuous ideals embodied in the sculpture of Lysippus.
The “[Farnese Hercules]” affords a striking instance of the effect of the Hellenistic outlook upon a theme which had been closely identified with a Hellenic sculptor of the first order. Lysippus had done for Hercules what Praxiteles had done for Hermes. He fixed the type. The “[Farnese Hercules],” however, is the work of the Athenian sculptor, Glycon, and dates from the first century b.c. Glycon has chosen the moment when the hero, worn out by his labours, stands with every muscle relaxed, resting. The keynote of his statue is to be found in
“The spreading shoulders, muscular and broad, The whole a mass of swelling sinews.”