History of Ancient Art

by Franz von Reber

Before we pass to the last active period of Hellenic art, one other work, preserved from this age, the Apollo Belvedere of the Vatican (Fig. 240), still claims our consideration. Though without the name of the artist, or of the place of its origin, and not, perhaps, to be classed directly with the greatest productions of Pergamon and Rhodes, it is yet not unworthy to rank by their side. It is, like the Laocoon, one of the best-known statues among the existing treasures of antiquity, and scarcely needs a minute description. The splendid triumphant head looking into the distance, the slender figure, as fine in modelling as it is noble, the pleasing grace of the light step, assure for it an admiration, the more universal as these beauties—the combined result of the schools of Lysippos and of Praxiteles—are just those which are the most generally recognized. It is not an original work, in the full sense of the word, but an early Roman copy from the bronze, and seems to bear a closer relation to it than does the lately discovered head which is now in the museum at Basle. This latter has lost the characteristic features of the bronze style, and from the greater freedom of its treatment may be called a translation into marble, in distinction from the copy in the Vatican. Another reproduction of this work recently made known by Stephani, a bronze statuette in the Strogonoff collection, at St. Petersburg, has given an additional explanation of the action in which the god was represented. In the marble the left hand was wanting, and in the restoration this was supplied with a bow; but in the Strogonoff Apollo remains are still to be seen of the ægis, held in the hand, with which the deity drove back the Greeks, as described by Homer, Il. xv. 306. If the far-shooter be thus changed into the ægis-bearer, the shaking of the ægis symbolizing the storm, a plain reference may be found to the original motive of the work. When the Gauls threatened Delphi in 279 B.C., the defence of the Greeks was effectively assisted by a terrible storm, which threw the barbarians into a fearful panic, and which was regarded by the Greeks as caused by the personal intervention of Apollo, Athene, and Artemis. This might well have had an effect upon art similar to that of the victory of Attalos over the Gauls in Asia Minor. The Ætolians, indeed, proposed to erect at Delphi a votive offering, with figures of field-officers and of the three gods, while a statue of Apollo was erected in Patrae from a similar reason. In view of this, Overbeck has ventured to combine the Apollo Belvedere, the Artemis of Versailles (Fig. 241), and the striding Athene of the Capitoline Museum into one group, to which ideal union the unsimilarity of the workmanship, and even of the scale of the three statues, is not so much opposed—since these are all copies that have come down to us from different times—as is the movement of the Apollo, the middle figure, towards the right. This difficulty might be met by changing the positions, so that Athene should stand at the right and Artemis at the left, whereby the action of the figures might be from, rather than towards, each other, Artemis being turned decidedly more towards the front. If, however, this work originated in consequence of the victory in 279 B.C., it shows that a generation before the time of Attalos, at least in Greece proper, although attention had already been devoted to momentary action, art nevertheless still stood upon an ideal height, and could still delineate gods worthy of admiration.

These artistic efforts do not, on the whole, refute the opinion of Pliny that art ceased from the 121st to the 156th Olympiad—that is, from 300 to 150 B.C. The chief localities of its activity, Pergamon and Rhodes, may be considered only as asylums found by the higher sculpture after it had lost all foothold in its native home. But when he says it took a new flight at the close of that period, we must acknowledge that the result was not of that kind which could charm us as it did the Roman narrator. As Brunn remarks, the date of Pliny agrees with that period when Hellenic art attained a decided mastery in Rome. Scarcely any evidences of the monumental art of Greece were to be recognized in Rome before the conquest of Syracuse in 212 B.C. After this time the Roman triumphs brought forth, one after another, an almost oppressive number of productions, so that the art of the Greek colonies, and of Greece itself, overflowed Rome in a broad stream. Not to mention the plundering of Capua, Tarention, and numerous Grecian cities in Lower Italy, we have an example in the triumphs of Quintius Flaminius, the conqueror of Kynoskephalæ, 197 B.C., when the transportation of the statues lasted an entire day. The booty taken from Western Greece by M. Fulvius Nobilior, in 189 B.C., also contained not less than five hundred and fifteen statues. These extensive plunderings were at least equalled by the triumphs of L. Cornelius Scipio, the victor over Antiochos; of Æmilius Paulus, conqueror of Perseus; of Metellus Macedonicus, and of the destroyer of Corinth, Mummius, who has become proverbial for his barbarous robberies. It was not strange that at last a living art followed the triumphal chariot of Roman victories. Metellus employed many Grecian artists in the erection and ornamentation of his new buildings in Rome.

The scene of artistic industry thus became changed, and Rome, a foreign city, became the central point—first of possession, and afterwards of artistic activity. It might therefore be questioned whether what follows were not better suited to the chapter upon Rome; but it must be considered that the Romans were, from our present point of view, only wealthy collectors and patrons of art, and that the artists employed were still Grecian, and of the Hellenic school. This was not altered by their working in Rome, or even by their learning from the numberless productions accumulated there.

Roman grandeur was long contented with artistic booty for the ornamenting of its forums, temples, and public buildings; the immense wealth of the empire and proconsulate giving opportunity for procuring celebrated works by force, by purchase, or as honorary gifts. This brought forth dilettanteism, which led to the study of art, and to a zeal for collecting which made every new acquisition an additional incentive to covetousness. Study choked that impulse which, in a degenerate way, had endeavored to outdo what had been done by masters of the best period, and, accounting their method to be exclusively good, turned art back by a sort of reaction upon those earlier paths. The passion for collecting was not limited to the works ready at hand, but would have restorations and imitations by contemporary artists, made in the spirit of the originals. It could not have been otherwise than that art, after having exhausted the originals, and attained its aims in all directions, should react upon itself; but doubtless the circumstances of Rome had an essential influence upon the manner in which this took place, and greatly furthered this renaissance—to use a somewhat unsuitable term which, in its restricted sense, has been adopted for the far more original awakening of art at the close of the Middle Ages.