To the imagination of the Athenian of the age of Lysippus, this would have appeared forced. The muscularity of the hero would have struck him as excessive. Lysippus indeed satisfied the craving for a deeper naturalism, which arose from a surfeit of the sensuous idealism of Praxiteles. But his judgment would have avoided the pitfall of excessive realism which distinguishes Glycon’s conception of Hercules from that which any fourth-century Athenian would have formed.
A less significant example but in some respects an even more interesting one, is to be found in the magnificent nude, the “[Cerigotto Bronze],” recovered, near the island after which it is named, about the year 1900. This derives its importance from the fact that it is a bronze original and not the work of a Roman copyist as so many Hellenistic marbles are.
The story of its romantic recovery would alone ensure this bronze becoming historic.
“A thousand years it lay in the sea With a treasure wrecked from Thessaly. Deep it lay ’mid the coiled sea-wrack.”
The second chapter in its history opened when a party of sponge-fishers happened upon what they found to be the wreckage of an ancient vessel which had run upon the rocks to the east of the island of Cerigotto and sunk in thirty fathoms of water. The cargo had evidently been the property of a dealer in antiques, the wreck probably dating from the second century b.c. A considerable portion of the cargo was brought to the surface.
THE CERIGOTTO BRONZE
Athens
The marbles, with one exception, were unrecognizable. But the bronzes had fared better. In particular, a life-sized statue of an athlete, with right arm outstretched, proved capable of complete restoration. It now stands in the museum at Athens. The critical battle as to the date of its casting was a long one. General opinion to-day regards it as an early Hellenistic work based upon the Lysippic style. In the “[Cerigotto Bronze],” the tendency towards excessive realism noted in the “[Farnese Hercules]” has not proceeded so far. But in the body, and especially in the treatment of the abdominal muscles, a departure from the idealistic standard approved by the great masters of the fourth century can be clearly detected. Instead of being content with a suggestion of the natural form, the Hellenistic sculptor aims at realistic representation. He seeks to copy the human form, regardless of the lesson afforded by every great sculptor of Greece, that the more indirect methods of idealism are far better calculated to arouse the uplifting emotions which every true man and woman must feel before the grandest object Heaven ever made.
The classical art critics were fully aware of the snare which lay in this passion for extreme realism of detail. They clearly recognized it to be a characteristic feature of much Hellenistic sculpture. They tell, for instance, of the statue of the “Dying Jocasta” in which the Hellenistic sculptor mingled silver with the bronze, to denote the pallor of coming death. Pliny adds that the sculptor Aristonidas of Rhodes mixed iron with the metal from which he cast a statue of Athamas—that the ruddy glow might suggest the blush of remorse which a father who had hurled his son from the rocks would naturally wear. Both these instances are narrated as mere eccentricities. Their interest for ourselves lies in the fact that they illustrate precisely the same tendency which distinguishes the “[Hercules]” of Glycon from that which Lysippus had made three centuries earlier or the “[Cerigotto Bronze]” from a similar work by a fourth-century sculptor.