We have a period in which monster chases monster; then a period in which men kill monsters; then, when men begin to settle down, and to pass from the barbarous state of mere hunters into a more settled mode of living, freed from obnoxious wild animals, they fight against men. The conquerors have decidedly Aryan features, whilst the conquered have unmistakably Turanian faces. (See the work of Lord Hamilton.) At length we suddenly surprise them before the walls of Troy; the incidents of the Iliad are known, and furnish the potters with heroic subjects. Achilles and Hektor, Penelope and Ulysses, may be recognised; the first two in deadly combat, the two latter meeting after a long separation. The subject, in these Archaic vases and vessels, is not yet thoroughly purified, for amongst the heroes we see Gorgons with spread wings and lolling tongues. Other monsters, destroying animals, surround the principal actors of the drama as mere unconcerned ‘dummies.’ We accompany the development a step further, and observe that the monsters have a share in the action; they seem to take part pro and con, like the gods in the Iliad, and, later, they appear in yet more purified forms as protecting divinities. It is as if the Iliad had first been drawn in clay by potters and improved upon, till at last it was shaped in its divine form, and edited under the name of Homer.
B. The Hellenic, or classic, style of Greek pottery, based on the Archaic, shows great improvements in every direction. The paste is harder, finer, and well glazed, and the colours are less discordant. The red is of a fiery brightness, and the black without any spots—sometimes with a greenish hue. In the decoration great delicacy of shape and feeling is prominent. The figures are laid on with anatomical accuracy. The limiting frame is dispensed with, giving ampler scope to a freer and still more connected ornamentation. The curves are less protruding, and the transition from concave to convex lines is gentler. The canon of this period, that the vessel had to form in all its parts one continuous line, rendered these products sometimes stiff and over-regulated. The influence of the progress in the Attic style, however, soon corrected this evil, and the potters of Greece vied with the very best sculptors and painters in beautiful works. The Asiatic types of winged or unwinged monsters were merely used as grotesque or comical friezes, and soon began to disappear altogether, to make room for some useful animal, and, finally, to give place to frets or garlands of the most beautiful combinations. For the monstrous creations of an overheated imagination, heroes, gods, and goddesses were substituted. Perseus destroying Medusa; the Forge of Hephaistos; a triclinium with Herakles and Alkmene, Hermes and Athene; diskoboli and their teachers; Aphrodite at her toilette; Ares, Herakles, Athene, and Zeus driven in their quadrigas by Nikê; Elektra at the tomb of Agamemnon; Aphrodite crossing the sea on a swan; the blind Chiron healed by Apollo; the weighing of Cupids—‘young loves for sale;’ and rows of well-sketched warriors, representing the victories of valour, beauty, and honesty over barbaric roughness, dishonesty, and despotism, form the subjects of pictorial ornamentation. What an immense field for the student of art to peruse, to fill his imagination with lively classical scenes!
II. The polychromatic style took its origin in the very first attempts in pottery, when white pipe-clay was painted over. The colours used were red, violet, and yellow oxides of iron. At the period when marble was introduced in architecture, and ivory in sculpture, during the middle of the fifth century B.C., we find these highly-coloured and richly-decorated vases. The paste was very fine, originally white, and the colouring encaustic. Not only mineral pigments and metallic oxides, but also vegetable colours, requiring only a very slow fire, were known and used. The encaustic consisted of a polychromatic paste more or less opaque, containing, in addition to wax, also flint, whether as principal or secondary element it is difficult to decide. This polychromatic treatment is to be observed on some smaller vessels, and vases known under the name of Lekythus (with a narrow mouth), and on saucers of large dimensions, the outsides having reddish figures on black grounds, and the insides, coloured figures on white grounds. Pottery led to fashioning in clay, and this to modelling in bronze and sculpture.
Architecture took its origin in religion, as also did sculpture. Opposed to the inorganic, objective productions of human intellect, as embodied in architecture, is spirit aspiring to a subjective existence in sculpture. The inorganic sternness of architecture is far surpassed by plastic art, which embodies spirit in a less fixed form. Spirit is not yet absolutely free, for it requires a tangible body to show its existence. Unlike music and painting, which by a mere movement of the air, or a mixture of tints, produce bodies, plastic art has to fill the three dimensions of space, and does this by means of coarse matter—with clay, wood, bronze, or stone.
Sculpture stands higher in the scale of art than architecture, for it is not obliged to transform inorganic matter for a utilitarian purpose.
At a certain period the Greeks were contented with shapeless divinities; a pointed stone, a square piece of wood, the deformed root of a tree, a pillar with a circular finish, or a cone, sufficed for their piety. Even Plato indulged in the untenable proposition that art was mere mimicry, and therefore a falsehood, and detrimental to virtue; as truth ought to be the only aim of humanity. The Beautiful with Plato was a mere abstraction, applicable exclusively to the absolute ‘good’; artistic beauty was looked down upon by him as something bad and altogether objectionable. The Kynic and Kyrenæic schools held to a certain degree the opinions of Plato. The Kynics said that anything good was beautiful—anything bad ugly; whilst the Kyrenæics propounded that everything beautiful must be good—anything ugly must be bad; and in this way the notions, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, changed places. This dialectic difference led at last to Aristotle’s deeper appreciation of art.
Aristotle, who rarely started from pre-conceived, à priori ideas, but attached his deep reasonings and admirable inductions to something tangible and really existent, pronounced, in opposition to the idealistic Plato, more correct thoughts on art. Imitation, mimicry (μίμησις {mimêsis}), is with him the subjective formation or creation of an idea, and therefore a process far superior to that of imperfect reality; in fact it is a sublimated, idealised representation and reproduction of reality. Next to the ‘mimesis’ he required purification from all passion (κάθαρσις {katharsis}) to be the aim and purpose of art. Genius and imagination were the means by which alone a work of art could be produced. The principal element in every work of art was with him ἦθος {êthos}, and wherever Ethos, the ethic or moral principle, was wanting, the product failed to be artistic in the highest sense of the word.
The development of Greek sculpture has borne out the sublime views of Aristotle on art. As soon as the merely naturalistic and sensational began to rule supreme, the Katharsis was neglected, the Ethic no longer swayed works of art, and the Antique died out.
The priests at Delphos, at a time when Greece abounded with the most exquisite Apollo-statues, still held to a pointed pillar as the emblem of the god of wisdom and the leader of the muses. Anthropomorphism was long opposed by the hierarchy of Delphi, but they encouraged the artists to produce beautiful vessels, tripods, lamps, sacrificial basins, &c., which had to be made according to certain prescribed forms. By degrees the Asiatic idea ‘that God created man in his own image’ was inverted by the Greeks, ‘and man began to create the gods in his own image.’ This one sentence embodies the cause of the progressive development of Greek sculpture on the one hand, and the ever-stationary forms of the East on the other. The Greeks had also idols that dropped from heaven, puppet-like forms or symbolic carvings, like the Artemis of Ephesus or the four-armed Apollo of the Lakedemonians, reminding us of Vishnu.
The discoveries at Athens, Kyprus, and most recently at Hassarlik by Dr. Schliemann, prove the gradual and slow progress of Greek sculpture in all its different phases. The first Parthenon, destroyed by the Persians, was adorned with divinities entirely different in shape from those which surrounded it after it had been rebuilt 444 B.C. The dresses, ornamentations, jewels, and pearls are of Assyro-Egyptian and Indo-Persian patterns. The faces of the divinities show far more of the Turanian than of the Aryan type. The eyes are protruding, the cheek-bones high, the drapery is extremely stiff, the anatomy doll-like, and the features bear a kind of repulsive grin. In the gigantic, rock-hewn bull, near Smyrna, we have a proof that the Indian Nundi and the Egyptian Apis must have had their worshippers in Greece.