A History of Sculpture

by Ernest Henry Short

The earliest Hellenic images were of wood hewn into the rough semblance of human figures. There was no attempt at more than vaguely indicating the limbs. The heavy blocks were, however, covered with richly embroidered dresses which served to hide some of their rudeness. When stone began to be used instead of the more perishable wood, the masons did not conceive the possibility of any great improvement. Yet these painted wooden images were not the first instances of the sculptor’s art in the Ægean peninsula. Six hundred years before, the Mycenæan civilisation in the south of the Peloponnesus and in the island of Crete, which the excavations of Dr. Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans have recently revealed, had given birth to work far nearer to nature than any produced in the eighth and ninth centuries. But during the years following the so-called Dorian invasion this was lost. Mycenæ, Tiryns, and Cnossus became vague memories—the dwelling-places of mythical kings and heroes—invaders and natives, settling down to an agricultural life in a not-too-fruitful country. The bare necessities of life were hard to come by. There was no leisured class such as alone could support an art like sculpture.

But this is scarcely a sufficient explanation of the extreme roughness of the early temple images of Greece before the sixth century. We still ask why a race in which the artistic instinct was so strong, and which had already inspired a great epic poem, did not produce more natural representations of the deities they had evidently clearly imaged mentally. An answer is suggested by an analogous case in early Egyptian history. Among the temple shrines of the Nile Valley, natural flints have been found that had evidently been selected on account of their rough resemblance to some animal form. Limestone figures have been found alongside these, the workmanship of which is almost as rough. These carved lumps of limestone are rather the result of improving natural forms than of actual modelling. Applying this analogy to the case of Greece, the early temple images seem to have been chosen, in the first place, on account of some fancied resemblance to a human or superhuman figure. The temptation to commit a pious fraud by adding a nostril, or an eye, or a suggestion of drapery would be very great, but it could not be carried too far. Beauty or naturalism were not aimed at or desired.

The suggestion that the extreme rudeness of the early Hellenic religious sculptures was deliberate, becomes still more probable when we turn to the history of Renaissance art, two thousand years after the age of which we speak. At a time when the artists of Italy were lavishing all their imagination and technical skill upon figures of the Madonna, the old symbolic representations of the Byzantine type were still preserved as precious relics in church and cathedral. Of the Italians of his day, for instance, no man realised the beauty of physical form and the possibility of expressing it by means of pigment and brush, more than Guido, the father of Italian painting. Yet he did not worship at the foot of one of his own pictures of the Madonna. Week by week he knelt before the little Madonna della Guardia from the East, black with age as it was. He felt instinctively that, for all the sheer beauty that he was striving to impart to his pictures of the Mother of Christ, they lacked the spiritual appeal of this old work. And so it was long after the time of Guido. Seeing that the Italian worshipper, who saw the most lovely representations of the Divine Motherhood in every church, still regarded the old conventional types with awe, we need not be surprised that the Greek peasant was content to worship the rough wood or stone image which he was told was heaven sent.

If this explanation is correct, the image would be an object of awe on account of the very artlessness which is surprising in a race so gifted as the Greeks. We escape the difficulty of believing that such a temple image as the “Hera of Samos,” in the Louvre, was the highest stage that the craftsmanship and the imagination of the Greek sculptor could then attain.

THE GROWTH OF NATURALISM
(550 b.c. TO 480 b.c.)

The Ionic Colonies in Asia Minor were the first of the Greek-speaking races to acquire material prosperity, and it was there that the sculptor first began to shake off the old conventional shackles. The Ionians were in touch with the civilisations of Babylonia and Egypt, and merchandise from the East flowed through their markets for Greece and the Grecian Colonies in the far west. Sculpture, in which the Oriental influence was strongly marked, flourished there considerably earlier than in Argos or Attica. About the middle of the seventh century b.c. these Ionian Colonies began to influence Greece strongly, and Athens in particular. This is evidenced by the manner in which the Ionic linen chiton, or sleeved tunic, gradually superseded the woollen peplos which the Athenians had worn earlier.

At this time the Greeks were becoming richer; their Colonies continued to demand ever increasing quantities of their manufactures, and to send more and more of the raw materials. The greater cities were able to replace the old shrines of brick and wood, which had contained the wooden images of their gods, by new stone structures. During the second half of the sixth century, temples were erected all over the Greek-speaking world, the ruins of those at Ægina and Selinus still remaining to show us the general type. Sculpture was the twin sister of architecture. Pediments, metopes, and friezes were all adorned with marble groups or reliefs. In Greece proper, the tyrants, who had usurped the power in many States, spent vast sums on beautifying their capitals. Such a one as Pisistratus turned to Ionia for the craftsmen he needed, and, particularly, to the school of sculpture in the island of Chios. Many Ionians skilled in the working of marble from Naxos and Paros settled in Athens, and they instructed their Athenian brethren. With the increasing facility that resulted from the greater number of workmen who could give their lives to mastering its technical difficulties, sculpture gradually lost its conventionalities.

By this time the art had made immense strides beyond the rude wooden images of the earlier age, as can be seen from the well-known archaistic “[Diana],” in the National Museum, Naples. This particular work was executed in Roman times under the influence of a strong tendency to reproduce the prominent characteristics of the archaic style. But though it dates from a time when sculpture was once more falling into lifeless conventionalism, it gives a good idea of the results of the first earnest efforts after truthful representation. The sculptor is not yet master of his material. Note the strange expression known as “the archaic smile,” a direct consequence of the craftsman’s inability to represent correctly the human eye in profile.

DEDICATORY STATUE (ARCHAIC)