A History of Sculpture

by Ernest Henry Short

Nominally, every citizen in the federation over the age of thirty could exercise his suffrage. Practically, the distance from the seat of government caused the Common Assembly to become more and more a constitutional fiction. The real power passed into the hands of the few who held positions upon the executive. Patriotism naturally lost much of its old force. Certainly it was no longer the one goad to artistic production as had been the case in the age of Pericles.

Nor was this all. With the decay of the virile life in the city, the exquisite sense of form and the power of imaginative generalization which sculpture had derived from continual discussion in the market-place and the law courts, began to weaken. The changed social and political circumstances necessitated an art with fresh methods and fresh ideals.

Passing in review the numberless sculptures of Greece produced after 300 b.c., with a view to finding the intellectual and emotional atmosphere which shaped them, we continually meet with a certain romantic subjectivity which is essentially modern. It is this fact which makes much Hellenistic sculpture peculiarly akin to the art of our own day. Hellenic sculpture implied a type of character and a body of ideas of which the twentieth-century man can have no first-hand experience. The Western European of to-day is a member of a community numbering between forty million and eighty million people. He pays his rates and taxes—under protest. There, unless a system of universal military service prevails, his civic duties end. Any very active sympathy with the member of a microscopic city-state is impossible. The typical modern cannot be expected to realize clearly how a political or social event struck one whose chief joy was that he, as an individual, played a very real part in every national action. During the Hellenistic age, however, all this was changed. An essentially twentieth-century individualism prevailed—an individualism which rejected the narrowing limits set by the love of a single city.

With the broadening of the individual sympathies, a certain subjectivity replaced the marked objectivity of fourth- and fifth-century Greek thought. With it went much of the earlier depth of passion, much of the old artistic initiative, precisely as it has gone from the “universe-loving” art of to-day. In the new philosophy the individual played a far larger rôle. His own thoughts and feelings, as opposed to the thoughts and feelings of his fellow citizens, became predominant. Private life and the interests arising from the family began to suggest a great majority of the themes of the sculpture by which the Hellenistic Greek expressed himself.

This can be beautifully illustrated by a brief survey of the Hellenistic Greek’s treatment of woman as a theme for his sculptural art. In dealing with Praxiteles we dwelt upon the position which the women of Greece occupied in fourth-century Athens compared with her sister in the fifth century. In the course of the next hundred years the position was reversed. During the Hellenistic period the social necessity for the sacrifice of the Athenian woman vanished completely. She was permitted to share the life of her husband and her sons to the full. The whole of her womanly nature was developed. Nor were her energies confined to the larger sphere offered by the changed circumstances in the Greek home. Woman in Hellenistic times began to play a rôle upon the world’s stage which would have struck the old-fashioned Greek of the Periclean age as grotesque and immoral. Towns named after such women as Laodicea, Berenice, and Arsinoe, testify to the immense influence of a long line of princesses of the type of Cleopatra of Egypt in national and international politics.

Unfortunately, the Greek woman sacrificed a good deal to gain the new liberty. The mysterious respect with which she had been regarded in the fifth century became a thing of the past. It had depended upon the fact that women lived in a world apart from men. This social convention commenced to wane during the fourth century. It vanished almost entirely during Hellenistic times.

What was the effect of all this upon sculpture? We can trace it most surely in the sculptor’s treatment of the incarnation of true womanhood—Aphrodite or Venus.

The fifth-century sculptor always depicted Aphrodite clad in the full robe of every-day life. In all fifth-century statues of women the girdle was placed low on the figure. The idea was to emphasize the qualities of modesty and reserve which were the cardinal feminine virtues in such a city as Athens at that time. But in the following century, under the influence of the more individualistic age of Praxiteles, the sculptor began to dwell upon the frankly physical attributes of womanhood. The girdle was set well above the level of the natural waist. We have also seen how Praxiteles dared to lay aside drapery altogether when he carved his Aphrodite for the islanders of Cnidus. But even the artistic courage of Praxiteles dared not omit a plausible excuse for the change. The robe in the hands of Aphrodite gave the necessary suggestion to the Greek imagination, that womanhood had not put off all womanly reserve when it discarded its drapery.

The Hellenistic sculptor, however, not only in Greece but throughout the post-Alexandrian Empire, made no effort to restrain the tendency to insist upon the merely sensuous beauties of womanhood. In the well-known slab from the altar frieze of the Pergamene Acropolis, the girdle of the goddess Athena is placed just beneath the breasts. In the “[Venus of Medici]”—the typical embodiment of the womanhood of the Hellenistic age—drapery is laid aside altogether. In the sculptor’s view, he owes the world no explanation of the situation in which the goddess finds herself. He is content to offer those external charms of youthful beauty which fascinate the senses but do not satisfy the human heart. Accepting his standpoint, the “[Venus of Medici]” is one of the most perfect statues in the world. But the Aphrodite of Praxiteles and such a work as “[The Three Fates]” of Phidias, remind us that the grace of form in the Medicean Venus is, after all, rather humanly human than humanly divine. We feel that the suggestion of reserve to which the earlier sculptors clung only deepened the sensuous emotion which every sculptor seeks to arouse when he sets forth the physical charms of the Goddess of Love.