Hellenistic Sculpture - Guy Dickins

Pasiteles was an artist of great versatility and scientific attainments. He wrote a work on Greek art in five books, which served as a primary authority for Pliny.[107] He was a goldsmith and a metal worker, and his range of sculptural subjects was very wide. He is known to have paid special attention to the sculpture of animals, and it is recorded that he studied a lion from life at the Roman docks. He seems also to have been the originator of a device, which did much to injure the later development of marble sculpture.[108] Bronze workers had always had to prepare clay models usually finished in wax after the invention of the cire perdue process; metal workers of all kinds had need of the same preparation; but in marble sculpture the use of models had hitherto been confined to pedimental designs or similar productions prepared by great artists and worked out by masons. The effect on architectural sculpture had usually been unfortunate. It is expressly told us of Pasiteles that he always made use of clay models for all his work, that is, including his marble sculpture. It was, no doubt, inevitable in a commercial age, where copies were in great request, and where several replicas were made of the one original, that the use of clay models designed by the master and copied in marble by pupils and workmen should become general. The ultimate results of such a procedure were destructive to the whole art; for workshops came to possess a stock of models and to turn out machine-made copies on demand. The finished statue became merely the work of masons untouched by the original master, who devoted himself entirely to the preparation of models and designs. The sculptor’s workshop instead of being a studio degenerated into a factory. No doubt Pasiteles himself was an artist who did much original work, but in the hands of his pupils and followers statue-making was a mere trade. Unfortunately the works of his school, which survive for us, are almost wholly these mechanical and commercial by-products. The works of real fancy and charm have almost wholly disappeared. Many of the Hellenistic reliefs, especially those of the Palazzo Spada type, are to be attributed to the Greek sculptors in Rome. These show an elegance and a dainty affectation quite in keeping with the spirit of the age. The group of Appiades ([Fig. 51]) by Stephanos,[109] a pupil of Pasiteles, has been recognized in the group of three nude girls holding up a water-pot, now in the Louvre.[110] The Three Graces are also a conception of this age. Neat competent work of a decorative type seems to sum up the original achievements of this school, which fall more or less in line with the Neo-Attic reliefs shortly to be considered.

But most of our remains of the school of Pasiteles belong to a different class of statue, best illustrated by the athlete of Stephanos, Pasiteles’ pupil, in the Villa Albani ([Fig. 53]). All periods of art which are bankrupt in new ideas tend to be archaistic; the Greco-Roman school looked backwards for all its inspiration; but while Neo-Attics found their models in Ionian art of the sixth century, the pupils of Pasiteles studied their larger sculpture mainly in the light of the early fifth-century Argive school. The athlete of Stephanos shows the proportions, the stiff pose, and the surface treatment of the pre-Polykleitan types of Ageladas. He is comparable with the Ligourio bronze[111] or the Acropolis ephebe[112] of Kritios for all his Lysippic slenderness and later expression. The type was immensely popular and may have originated with Pasiteles himself. We have it in single examples and combined in groups, as in the Orestes and Electra of Naples,[113] where the companion figure is female, or in the Ildefonso group[114] where it is combined with another male statue. All these figures are copied from early fifth-century art, though the signs of eclectic archaism are sufficiently clear. If we examine the so-called Electra of Naples, we see an archaic early fifth-century head together with a pose approaching the Praxitelean, transparent drapery of the style of Alkamenes, and a low girdle and uncovered shoulder reminiscent of Pergamon. The group of Menelaos,[115] a pupil of Stephanos, in the Terme Museum, is a less archaic-looking and a more satisfactory work. Fifth century in detail, in style it reminds us rather of the fourth-century grave reliefs. To the same period, or perhaps a later one, belongs the idea of grouping well-known statues originally separate. Thus we have in the Capitol a group of the Melian Venus with the Ares Borghese.[116] This actual group, however, belongs to a much later time.

Arcesilaos was another well-known sculptor of the age, a friend of Pompey and Caesar. The Venus Genetrix of the Louvre[117] was made for the House of the Julii. It bears its fifth-century origin clearly stamped on its style. Arcesilaos also was a great provider of clay models, which he sold outright to workshops for manufacturing purposes, so that a finished statue might have never been seen by the artist responsible for its design. A series of herms in the Terme Museum[118] show a strong archaistic tendency towards fifth-century models, but bear also in details of pose and drapery the clear stamp of the Greco-Roman age. Statues of this type were intended for the decoration of Roman palaces. They are no longer self-sufficing works of art, but are subject to the general demands of artistic decoration.

This brings us to the third division of Greco-Roman sculpture, in reality its most original contribution to the history of Greek art: the Neo-Attic reliefs,[119] all of which are primarily decorative in their purpose. The works with which we have hitherto dealt—the Apollo Belvedere, the Torso Belvedere, or the Venus Genetrix—have all been eclectic in style, and consequently have lacked the sense of harmony or uniformity, which is one of the conditions of great sculpture. The same criticism applies to all the sculpture of the mainland in the Hellenistic age. On the other hand the schools of Pergamon, Rhodes, and Alexandria attained a uniformity of style, and consequently were enabled to produce masterpieces of art. Their works can be attributed to a school, because they contain common elements of style and technique based on a common theory of art. This community of purpose has been wholly lacking in the works of Euboulides, Damophon, and the Melian artists, and only partially felt in the works of Pasiteles and Arcesilaos. All these artists were individualists selecting and combining at their own will and pleasure. The Neo-Attic artists are quite different. Their names are immaterial, because their works all bear the impress of precisely the same style. There is no chance of mistaking a Neo-Attic work; its origin is clear in every line. These reliefs represent the last true school of Greek sculpture, the last monuments in which a common line of development can be studied unaffected by individual idiosyncrasies. They are strongly archaistic, but in spite of this they are essentially modern. They neither copy the antique exactly, nor adapt it to existing modes as the followers of Pasiteles did. They rather invent a new mode and a new style in art, but they make use of archaic technical details for its expression. Their art is essentially artificial and symbolic, so that they represent a reaction against the academic classicism of the period; but it is also meticulous in detail, so that it can merit no reproach of a loose impressionism. The Neo-Attic artists of the first century B.C. are really the pre-Raphaelites of Greek art, and Rossetti and Burne-Jones are the nearest parallel to them in later art history.