Delphi Museum
HARMODIUS
National Museum, Naples
Still the stiffness and conventionality of the archaic period died hard. Even in the works of Myron, whose reputation was established by the middle of the fifth century, there are still traces of archaic treatment, as in the hair. But in such a statue as his “[Discobolus],” with its truthfulness to nature, its rhythmic grace of design and its triumphant mastery over all technical difficulties, we can realise how far the sculpture of his age was ahead of the best work possible fifty years earlier.
The mention of Myron, the earliest artist to benefit by the freeing of the plastic arts from the shackles of conventionalism, brings us upon one of the prime problems of Greek sculpture. Practically, the history of Greek sculpture depends upon the connections which can be established between the art and three leading ideals. The difficulty of really understanding it depends upon the distance we moderns have progressed—pardon us the term—from those three dominating ideas.
“How we jabber about the Greeks! What do we understand of their art, the soul of which is the passion for naked male beauty?” So says Nietzsche. And he proceeds to point out that for this very reason the Greeks had a perspective altogether different from our own. Nothing can be truer; nor can anything be more certain than that this truth must be realised absolutely by all who would penetrate beyond the outer courts of the temple of Hellenic sculpture. But though we cannot look at a Greek statue with the understanding of a Hellene, though classic sculpture is, as it were, written in an alien tongue, the historian can readily enumerate the influences by which the art was fostered, and the ideals which it sought to embody.
The first was a civic pride so intense that no Greek of the best period hesitated to sacrifice all individual considerations for the sake of the common weal. To the true Hellene, life was life in the Greek city-state.
The second was a realisation of the extent and limit of human powers so complete that it left little room for the idea of the extra-mundane God which Christian nations have found so satisfying. The immediate consequence was a religious tolerance so complete that we Christians, who are apt to estimate religious fervour by proselytising energy, too often regard it as proceeding from a mere poetical philosophy.
The third was a love, amounting to worship, for the human physical frame—for the actual bone, flesh and muscle, which make the man.