History of Ancient Art

by Franz von Reber

During this period a second school of painting, not less prominent, flourished in Thebes, and, after the hastily acquired importance of this city had as rapidly declined, was transferred to Athens. At its head was Nicomachos—360 B.C.—son and pupil of the otherwise unknown artist, Aristiæos. Eight of his pictures are mentioned; but, though he was accounted one of the greatest masters, we have little information in regard to the painter himself. As contrasted with the quiet, stately works of the Sikyonians, we may conclude, from the subjects, that there was greater excitement and action in those of Nicomachos, among which are mentioned the Rape of Proserpine, Victory Ascending with a Quadriga, and Bacchantins Surprised by Satyrs. His unsurpassed rapidity in painting was praiseworthy only because united to great talents, with an unusual and masterly sureness of hand. The character of his pupil Aristides is more intelligible, and more important. If ever there was a painter whose subjects alone sufficed to give an idea of his chief aim, it was Aristides. One of his most celebrated works was the Conquest of a City: a wounded mother, lying upon the ground, sees her infant creeping towards her breast, and visibly betrays the fear that, when the milk fails, the child will take the blood. Another, a woman who, “for love of her brother, gives herself up to death.” A third, according to Pliny most highly prized, represented a sick man. In these, and in one more, perhaps also to be ascribed to Aristides, the Heracles Suffering from the Poisoned Garment of Deianeira, a fundamental tone of great pathos is unmistakable. In the praying man, whose voice one almost seemed to hear, and in the old man teaching a boy to play upon the harp, the predominant expression of feeling was unmistakable. The latter reminds us of that beautiful Pompeian wall-painting of the Centaur Cheiron instructing the boy Achilles. Pliny distinctly says that Aristides aimed at the pathetic, by which is meant the expression of tender as well as painful and passionate emotions. In this master, therefore, may be recognized one whose aims were similar to those of Scopas and Praxiteles.

Euphranor, a pupil of Aristides—360 to 330 B.C.—was a remarkable phenomenon in the domain of art. Few, either in sculpture or in painting, have been so many-sided, and yet, though standing in the first rank, the insufficient accounts of his pictures that have come down to us prevent our forming any positive judgment about them. A certain indication, however, lies in the remark of the artist himself, that the Theseus of Parrhasios looked as if fed upon roses; his own, on the contrary, as though nourished by the flesh of oxen. This comparison must have included two points, color and drawing; the likeness to roses would have been inapt if Parrhasios had not failed in depth of flesh-tint; on the other hand, besides the healthy color, the strong nourishment suggested by the Theseus of Euphranor proved an energetic development of muscles. It was probably a somewhat massive figure, characteristic of Euphranor, and, with certain limitations, reminding us of the Heracles of Lysippos. It may be understood, from the noble expression of the Theseus, how Euphranor brought his heroes to a typical perfection. In a similar sense he had raised his Poseidon to such power that there remained no further means at his command for surpassing it in his conception of Zeus. The remark of Euphranor expressed not only the difference, and his own superiority to Parrhasios, but suggested a certain relationship in subject and aim, both masters having painted the Theseus, and the Assumed Madness of Odysseus.

The Isthmian Euphranor had changed the scene of his labors, and, at the same time, the centre of the entire school, to Athens, which continued to be the artistic metropolis for his scholars and successors. Among the latter, Nikias is especially celebrated—340 to 300 B.C. He devoted his attention chiefly to feminine beauty, somewhat influenced, perhaps, by his older contemporary Praxiteles, in connection with whom he is mentioned. His taste was for extensive compositions, surprising for their novelty of conception, and, like Parrhasios, he endeavored to give roundness to his figures. The lack in the Theban-Attic school of that individuality which existed in the Sikyonian was completely overcome by Euphranor, and gave place to a more universal aim. He and Nikias were artists whose tone came less from their school than from their own personal convictions. They early learned to understand technical and artistic acquisitions of all kinds, and to carry them forward independently. We may conceive them as holding the same loose relations towards their teachers which existed between the Sikyonian master Pamphilos and their contemporary Apelles.

Apelles was destined to bear away the palm from all his predecessors and successors. Although three cities—Colophon, Ephesos, and Cos—claimed the honor of calling him their own, it is reasonably certain that the first was the place of his birth, the second that where his labors commenced, and the third may not improbably have been that of his death. The Ephesian Euphoros is named as his first teacher, but his fame dates from the time when he left the academy of Pamphilos for that of Sikyon. Perhaps the fact that Pamphilos was a Macedonian by birth may have paved the way for Apelles to the royal court at Pella, whence he appears to have returned to Ephesos among the followers of Alexander the Great. He seems never to have founded a permanent school; at least, we gather from classical notices that he worked transiently at Athens, Corinth, Rhodes, and even in Alexandria. We learn also that he outlived, by a considerable time, his great patron Alexander. His works are to be divided into three groups—paintings of gods and heroes, allegories, and portraits; these were also sometimes combined. At the head of the first group stands the Aphrodite Anadyomene, one of the most celebrated pictures of antiquity. It was transferred to Augustus for the remission of one hundred talents of taxes; by him carried to Rome and placed in Cæsar’s Temple of Venus, where it became so much injured—thus obtaining the sobriquet Monocmenon, one-legged—that Nero had it taken away and replaced by a copy. She was represented as the “sea-born,” nude, and pressing with her hands her dripping hair. Far from being an ideal figure, it was rather patterned after the celebrated courtesans of the time, two of whom are named—Pancaste, or Pancaspe, the paramour of Alexander, who afterwards presented her to the artist himself; and Cratine, or Phryne, mistress of Apelles, who may have been the more direct model for the Venus, as, at the festival of Poseidon at Eleusis, she bathed, naked, in the sea before the eyes of the assemblage. A second Aphrodite, in which Apelles hoped to surpass the first, remained unfinished at his death. Of these representations the first was certainly without any devotional or even ethic character; but the Artemis, in the Sacrifice of the Virgins, was something more than a genre piece with a mythological motive; and his heroes, who, according to Pliny, challenged nature itself, were more than mere stately portraits.

The Heracles may be regarded as a study. Charis and Tyche were allegories, the latter having been represented sitting “because happiness does not stand fast.” The most celebrated of them all, Calumny, is minutely described by Lucian. It portrayed a man, whose inclination to credit evil reports was characterized by large ears, sitting between two women, Ignorance and Mistrust, and receiving Calumny, a magnificent woman excited with passion, preceded by Envy; she drags in a youth by the hair, who vainly, with hands uplifted, calls the gods to witness. Behind the train advances Repentance, a mourning female figure in black, looking back with pain and shame upon the tardy appearance of Truth. Similar in character is the picture of the chained war demon, belonging partly to the group of portraits. A third allegory, of little intrinsic worth, is set forth with great artistic ability—Bronte, Astrape, and Keraunobolia—thunder, with the flash and stroke of lightning.

Among the portraits, allegorical in nature, was the famous picture in which Alexander, with lightning in his right hand, was represented as Jupiter. The monarch himself was so well pleased with this that he said there were two Alexanders—one the unconquered son of Philip, the other the inimitable creation of Apelles. But little is known of the king’s portraits, whether equestrian, in triumphal chariots, or surrounded by deities and allegorical figures; nor of those of Philip and his generals, of the tragic actor Gorgosthenes of Habron, nor of that of the artist himself.

If Apelles be scrutinized more closely in order to make clear the chief characteristics by which he won such brilliant renown, it will be found that it was not in composition. In this, as in treatment of perspective, he gave precedence to his fellow-pupils Melanthios and Asclepiodoros. That he was aware of this weakness, and avoided occasion for manifesting it, is shown by the fact that most of his paintings contained few figures. When more appeared, instead of being picturesquely grouped and treated, they were ranged in rows, almost like reliefs, better suited to the allegorical subjects so prevalent with Apelles, and so common in his time, than to mythological and historical representations. Though allegory may, in great measure, be unfavorable to true art, because, as Winckelmann says, it forces the painter “to tint his brush with reason,” still that of Apelles has lately been too much depreciated. The Calumny has been pronounced an error of fancy, rough symbolism, and an inharmonious assemblage of persons and personifications. But these were the legitimate materials of the artist, and he succeeded, at least, in the representation of character and in truthfulness of drawing. The lightning group was something more than a piece of technical bravura. Who would prize the picture less because thunder and lightning were represented instead of Zeus, a deity who would have been attempted by no painter of antiquity, or, indeed, of later times? Though his motive may have been purely intellectual, the painter remained the same, whether he portrayed a Cassandra or a Diabole—whether he more or less displayed his astounding mastery. Apelles will be more rightly judged if he be treated as a painter rather than an artist; as such we recognize in him a technical and many-sided perfection. Different accounts speak of him as rapid and sure in drawing, his lines being not only correct, but in the highest degree characteristic. The maxim of Apelles “No day without a line”—that is, without exercise in drawing—has become a proverb, if not quite in its original sense. Through this incessant practice his hand acquired such sureness that it followed the will implicitly, and made possible even the hair-splitting execution related in an anecdote which has been unjustly discredited by critics. Apelles entered one day the workshop of Protogenes, in the absence of the latter, and made known his visit by drawing a line upon a tablet at hand with such swing and surety, such purity and smoothness, that the Rhodian master, upon his return, recognized the hand of Apelles. In order to show himself equal, Protogenes split the line by a second one in a different color, but acknowledged himself defeated when Apelles divided this through its entire length by a third. An evidence of the sharpness and certainty of his characterization with simple lines is given in the story of a servant who had injured him, and whom Apelles, though he had seen him only once, so sketched with charcoal upon the wall that the likeness was recognized by King Ptolemy after the first strokes. It will readily be understood that such capacity must have fitted the artist especially for portraiture; and his portraits attained such striking likeness and truthfulness that a physiognomist assumed to be able, by them, to discern not only the exact age of the subject, but even the time of his future death. No further testimony is needed than the Anadyomene to prove that his works were perfect in correctness and expression as well as in beauty.

The employment of color had fully kept pace with this matchless drawing, though Apelles seems to have been limited to painting in distemper, without the use of encaustic. The softened glazings are particularly mentioned, which made the unbroken light all the more brilliant. In the portrait of Alexander, the hand, outstretched with the lightning, appeared to stand quite out from the panel, a result perhaps equally owing to masterly foreshortening in the drawing. The beauty of his color was noted, and especially its vigor; the fame of the Aphrodite cannot be understood without the former, nor that of the Alexander and the Lightning without the latter. This many-sided, technical perfectness, unattained before Apelles, and in which Pliny says that he excelled all other painters together, may have had its germ in the school of Pamphilos, as the Sikyonians devoted especial attention to artistic execution. To these eminent qualities, however, were added the intrinsic merits of the master himself, upon which he laid the greatest stress, and which he ascribed to that charm understood by the Greeks in the word charis. That this was chiefly to be found in the just measure of completeness was explained by Apelles when he declared himself to have been surpassed by Protogenes in all but the knowledge of the right moment to lay aside the brush, without which this charm, through overmuch care, is lost.

By this technical mastery, clearness of characterization and grace, Apelles so delighted all who saw his works that, according to the numerous anecdotes that illustrate his position, he was the most popular artist of all antiquity. In face of such authority, it would be unjust to see in him, as some have done, the beginnings of the decline of art. Though his artistic efforts may not have equalled those of Polygnotos, because he could more easily satisfy the ethical demands of his time, still it must be acknowledged that, as a painter, he surpassed him as far as, in sculpture, Praxiteles surpassed Calamis and the other predecessors of Pheidias. But in Pheidias a high ideal was united to an absolute perfection of execution which, in painting, Polygnotos was far from having attained. “In the history of painting,” says Brunn, “each of these two fields has its separate point of greatest elevation; the fame, therefore, which, in sculpture, undoubtedly raised Pheidias above all others, appeared, in painting, divided between Polygnotos and Apelles.”

Protogenes of Caunos, or rather, with reference to his work, of Rhodes, was a rival of Apelles. He seems to have been self-taught, or, at least, to have been the pupil of an entirely obscure master. The admiration of Apelles for Protogenes was so great that he expressed a desire to buy up his works and publish them as his own; but numerous anecdotes show that Apelles was in the way of bestowing his flattery upon every great and celebrated man. Protogenes is said to have painted over his Ialysos four times, the better to secure it from destruction, so that, on the peeling of the outer layer of pigment, the surface below might present the same color. But this can only be a foolish legend, invented to illustrate his extreme care. Similar tales of a later time reported him to have worked upon the Ialysos seven or eleven years, and to have fed upon nothing but lupines, for fear that luxury might blunt the acuteness of his senses. Perhaps this means that the painter’s genius was not recognized until late in life, up to which time he had lived in great poverty. Of his picture in the Propylæa at Athens, representing Paralos and Hammonias—personifications of Athenian ships—there is an equally idle story that he did not paint the ships themselves because, until his fifteenth year, he had earned his bread as a ship-painter.