There is also sufficient evidence, that the most eminent and intellectual people, subsequent to the Chaldeans, were the Egyptians.
Every individual, who is in the slightest degree conversant with the history of the arts, knows that the Egyptian artisans had from the earliest periods been in the habit of constructing colossal statues of their numerous deities, and also of their benefactors, raised from gratitude and adulation.
To name only a single instance, the immense colossal statue of Memnon, who perished before the fall of Troy, according to Homer: also Ovid, who speaking of his mother Aurora, says,
“Nor Troy, nor Hecuba could now bemoan,
She weeps a sad misfortune now her own;
Her offspring, Memnon, by Achilles slain,
She saw extended on the Phrygian plain.”
Professor Flaxman has informed us, that this celebrated statue, had it stood upright, would have measured ninety-three feet and a half high; calculating from the dimensions of its ear, which is three feet long. We are informed by Dr. Rees, in his valuable Cyclopedia, that sculpture in marble was not introduced till eight hundred and seventy-three years before Christ. But having said this much for the origin, let us proceed to the art; and we candidly acknowledge that it is from the lectures of that truly distinguished individual, Professsor Flaxman, we are principally indebted for our information.
Sculpture in Greece remained long in a rude state; but we need not wonder at that, when we reflect that art is only an imitation of nature. Hence it follows that man, in a rude state of nature, for want of proper principles to direct his inquiries, and determine his judgment, is continually liable to errors, physical, moral, and religious;—all his productions, of what kind soever, partake of this primitive imbecility.
The early arts of design in Greece resembled those of other barbarous nations, until the successive intellectual and natural, political and civil advantages of this people raised them above the arts of the surrounding nations. The science employed by the Greeks may be traced in anatomy, geometry, mechanics, and perspective. From their earlier authors and coeval monuments, Homer had described the figure with accuracy, but insufficient for general purposes.
Of Anatomy.—Hippocrates was the first who enumerated the bones, and wrote a compendious account of the principles of the human figure; he described the shoulders, the curves of the ribs, hips and knees; the characters of the arms and legs, in the same simple manner in which they are represented in the basso relievo of the Parthenon, now in the National Gallery of the British Museum.
The ancient artists saw the figure continually exposed in all actions and circumstances, so as to have little occasion for other assistance to perfect their works; and they had also the assistance of casting, drawing, and other subsidiary means. The succeeding ancient anatomists did not describe the human figure more minutely or advantageously for the artist, than had been done by Hippocrates, till the time of Galen, whose external anatomy gave example for that analytical accuracy of arrangement followed by more modern artists. Sculpture, however, profited little from Galen’s labours, for the arts of design were in his time in a retrogade motion towards anterior barbarism.
The anatomical researches from Alcmæon of Crotona, a disciple of Pythagoras, to those of Hippocrates and his scholars, assisted Phidias and Praxiteles, their contemporaries and successors, in giving select and appropriate forms of body and limbs to their several divinities, whose characters were fixed by the artists from the rhapsodies of Homer, having then become popular among the Athenians.