Argos deserves the second place as the site of the artistic industry of this period, which had then been greatly advanced by Polycleitos of Sikyon, a fourth scholar of Ageladas, and somewhat younger contemporary of Pheidias, but in a direction different from that of the Attic school. Myron had characterized intense and momentary animal life, Pheidias that of absolutely ideal and divine being. Polycleitos chose as his aim the artistic representation of the highest human beauty—a positive type of bodily perfection. The Doryphoros, known in antiquity as the masterpiece of the latter, and celebrated as a canon, was a youth in a quiet position, bearing a lance; it was considered the embodiment of perfect form, the master himself having written a treatise upon the proportions of the human figure in illustration of this statue. It is not improbable that Polycleitos, in this work, desired to set a pattern before his numerous scholars; that he was himself too dependent upon this academical tendency may be judged from the slightly disparaging words of Pliny that “his works were almost as if taken from one model.” According to the intention of the artist and to the general conviction of his time, the Doryphoros represented absolute perfection of the human body; and this left the master but little scope for the varying of his model, if he would not prove untrue to that beauty which Cicero has praised so highly in all his works. The so-called Apoxyomenos—an athlete scraping himself with a strigil—similar in subject to the statue of Lysippos (Fig. 229), was also a figure placed in the quiet attitude of parade, if not, like the Doryphoros, with an academic purpose. A third work, the so-called Diadoumenos, a boy binding his head with a fillet—sometimes considered as a companion piece to the Doryphoros—appears to have shown a more youthful and less athletic development of form. It is not strange that archaeologists have taken great pains to identify, among the numberless works of Roman sculptors, imitations of these two canonical figures, the existence of which was naturally assumed from the great celebrity of the Greek originals. The scholars Friederichs, Schwabe, Michaelis, Helbig, Kekule, and Benndorf have accordingly discovered six repetitions of the Doryphoros, preserved in Cassel, Naples, Florence, the Vatican, and the Villa Medici; while several other statues in Dresden, the Louvre, the Vatican, and the Villa Albani have been recognized as variations differing more or less from this type (Fig. 216). In like manner, copies of the Diadoumenos have been found in Madrid, in two marbles of the British Museum, in a bronze statuette of the National Library of Paris, and in a relief of the Vatican: all of which are allied in point of conception and artistic character. Still it is inexplicable how these thick-set and muscular forms could be spoken of by Pliny as viriliter puer and as molliter juvenis, or by Lucian as graceful dancers; though it is possible that, in these academical studies, the canonical perfection of form decided by Polycleitos was not so well embodied as in the bronze Idolino of the Florentine Museum. The question is far from settled, and it should not be forgotten that eminent authorities doubt this origin, Conze imputing them rather to the school of Cresilas, while Petersen even maintains the type to have been a Roman invention.
An Amazon in a quiet pose gave Polycleitos an opportunity for portraying a female form of muscular development, yet of typical beauty. It is not difficult to believe that this statue was adjudged even superior to the similar productions of Pheidias, Cresilas, and Phradmon, which could hardly have been the case if the subject treated had been a deity or a figure of momentary action. (Fig. 217.) The artist could even better follow his academic aim in the two Canephoræ—basket-bearers—whose quiet pose and want of inner expression were so well suited to display an outward, formal beauty and correctness of modelling. But the Astragalizontes—the boy throwing dice of knuckle-bones—which, according to Pliny, was the most perfect work of art in Greece, should not be imagined in an excited, striking situation, or as a street scene conceived with a truthfulness to nature characteristic of Murillo, but as representing the consummation of boyish beauty.
When Quintilian says that Polycleitos elevated the human figure above what is seen in nature, and yet, contrary to Pheidias in his statues of the deities, had not attained to the majesty of the gods, this signifies that he had not so fully represented the divine nature. His devotional images are few and without especial fame, with exception of the colossal chryselephantine Hera in the temple between Argos and Mykenæ. The goddess, seated upon a throne, was draped in garments of gold, with only the head and arms bare; the sceptre in her right hand was crowned with the cuckoo, symbol of conjugal fidelity, and in her left was a pomegranate; at her side stood Hebe, the work of Naukydes, the master’s best assistant. As the Pheidian head of Zeus has been recognized in the mask of Otricoli, so the splendid colossal mask of the Ludovisi Juno (Fig. 219) has been referred to an original by Polycleitos. But it is probable that the head of Hera, in the museum at Naples (Fig. 218) came nearer to this original (Brunn). Though it be asserted that all the heads of Zeus may be referred to the complete and established type of Pheidias, the ideal of Polycleitos, by no means divine, renders it doubtful whether his Hera acquired a similar position among the succeeding representations of that goddess.
The effort after perfection of form sufficed to make the master of Argos a pre-eminent teacher; yet none of his many direct scholars, with the exception perhaps of the before-mentioned Naukydes, acquired such fame as the associates of Pheidias, perhaps on account of this very schooling and discipline, the rigid constraint of a canon fettering the wings of artistic individuality. We are not able to judge how far this tendency was furthered during the short period of Theban ascendency by the somewhat later branch of the Theban school, although, among many others, the Theban artists Hypatodoros and Aristogeiton were of considerable importance. The groups consecrated at Delphi about 380 B.C. were of particular interest; they represented the advance of the Seven against Thebes, and the successful repetition of the invasion by the sons of those warriors. It was not until Lysippos, an indirect scholar of Polycleitos, in his desire to represent men as they should be, had raised himself entirely above the canon of his master, who aimed to show them as they are, that another artist of the first rank appeared. Examples from the workshop of Polycleitos still exist, though unfortunately scarcely recognizable in the mutilated fragments of sculpture from the Temple of Hera, discovered by Rangabe and Bursian in 1854—works which were doubtless executed under the direct guidance of the Argive master, as those of the Parthenon were under that of Pheidias.