The group of Niobe and her dying children, attributed to Skopas or Praxiteles. Greece was fast sinking. Niobe-Greece sees her children struck down one after the other by the inexorable decree of the gods, who are bent on punishing the proud mother who only cared for the outward beauty of her children, and neglected their moral inner grandeur. Niobe, amidst a harmonious confusion of misery and endless woe, stands erect, and presses the youngest child to herself, turning her proud looks upwards, her eyes filled with tears of heroic resignation—for she knows the gods have willed her downfall, and their will is unalterable. This moment of agony, of mental rather than bodily suffering, makes the group a master-piece of antique beauty and grandeur.
This cannot be said of the sensational Laokoön, the joint work of Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydoros (of which there is a copy in the Vatican), and the so-called ‘Farnese Bull,’ the joint work of Apollonios and Tauriskos (a copy of which exists in the museum at Naples). Bodily anguish is the dominating element in these two groups. If it were the province of art to depress the soul, and to fill us with pain and horror, nothing could surpass the technical skill with which these two are arranged.
In the first we have:—
1. In the father a stifled death scream.
2. In the younger son, to the right, the last convulsions of a dying boy.
3. In the elder son, to the left, an unbounded horror at witnessing the frightful death of father and brother.
There is no psychological necessity in this group to indemnify us for the pathological and anatomical truthfulness of so great an amount of horrible suffering. Art has never to serve as a hospital ward, and to force us to witness the contortions of a poor family dying poisoned by strychnine or arsenic. Not less objectionable is the revenge of a mother and her two sons on a defenceless woman. In this group we have:—
1. The horror-stricken, half-dying, half-imploring look of poor Dirkê.
2. The merciless glance of the jealous Antiope, wrapt in placid satisfaction to see herself revenged on her rival.
3. The ferocious anger of the two passionate sons; and, lastly,