and the naked, violent Satyr distending his cheeks as flute-playing barbarians were not ashamed to do. It is evident that the Marsyas is a quotation by Praxiteles of the celebrated figure by Myron. We note, as a technical point in the history of relief sculpture, the effect produced by the wide spacing of the figures. On the other slabs are beautiful though mutilated figures of the Muses, who acted as umpires in the contest.
We have copies also of another Praxitelean original, Apollo Sauroctonos (the Lizard-slayer),[86] but the copyist has evidently exaggerated almost to caricature the elegant slimness of the young god. But on the basis of our knowledge of the Hermes I think we can reconstruct in imagination an exquisite statue even out of the effeminate Vatican copy. The true Apollo would not lean all his weight upon the tree; consequently the tilt of his hips would be less violent. His face would be much more carefully modelled, with less of that womanish smoothness of contour. But the copyist has noted and tried to express the lovely brow which Praxiteles gave to all his heads. The careless grace, the impression of youth and playful strength belong to the original, and are highly characteristic of the artist. The motive of the statue seems to have been a new and rather bold invention; we know of no cult of a lizard-slaying Apollo. It is true that Apollo was the deity commonly invoked in cases of natural plagues, such as invasions of field-mice or locusts, but it seems more probable that Praxiteles, desiring to represent Apollo in a new guise, deliberately chose to portray him as a boy at play. It is clear that Praxiteles was a strongly original and inventive genius, who was not afraid to give his own impression of established types. He was the first who dared to portray Aphrodite naked; out of the gross and bestial Satyr he made a delightful elf of the woods, and he turned the vigorous athlete Apollo into a slender stripling.
Of Scopas the Parian, the second great sculptor of the fourth century, we have no important remains. Two mutilated heads found on the site of the temple at Tegea, where he made his great pedimental scene of the Calydonian boar-hunt, indicate the new note of pathos and emotion which he introduced into the carving of the human head. We know that Scopas was engaged on the Mausoleum and on one of the thirty-six sculptured columns of the great temple at Ephesus, but nothing that remains from either of those buildings can be ascribed to him with certainty. Perhaps his most famous work was the Palatine Apollo at Rome. We may get the best notion of his style by studying the head, not the body, of a beautiful statue of Meleager[87] at Rome, which is considered by the most competent archæologists to be a copy of the work of Scopas.
The third is Lysippus of Sicyon, an extraordinarily prolific artist, of whose style we may form a very clear conception, although we have no originals. Athletic types were his favourite work, and his favourite technique was bronze-casting. His discovery was the added grace and beauty which could result from decreasing the proportion of the head to the body. Wherever we find small curly heads very lightly poised upon a strong, vigorous body we may trace the influence of Lysippus. His most famous statue was the young athlete scraping off the oil from his arm with the strigil. The emperor Tiberius fell in love with this “Apoxyomenus,” as it is called, and removed it from the front of the baths of Agrippa to his own bed-chamber, but the people of Rome raised such an outcry that he had to restore it. Modern critics have shown that our “Apoxyomenus”[88] is not a faithful copy of this statue. On the other hand, the “Agias” recently discovered at Delphi[89] is a contemporary marble copy of a bronze by Lysippus, and gives us a very fine example of his style. Lysippus was also the sculptor-in-ordinary to Alexander the Great, and we may trace to Lysippean originals all the numerous portraits of the Macedonian conqueror. Lysippus was a theorist as well as a practical sculptor, and, like Polycleitus, produced his own theoretical “Canon” of sculptural proportions. He was (with
Plate LXXII. THE “LUDOVISI” ARES
Anderson