One of the characteristics of Greek art is the subordination of the artist to his work, as of the art itself to its purpose. This is but a part of the general subordination of the individual to society in Greek life. Hence it follows that we seldom have to think of isolated genius, and never of the genius of Greek artists as of some fitful and inexplicable freak of nature. For this reason it is not as incredible that there should have been several different Homers all men of genius as that two Vergils should have arisen at Rome, or two Shakespeares in England. Sappho is one among a group of superlative lyric poets. Sophocles is one of four. Demosthenes is the greatest of a group of great orators. This remains a remarkable fact, in view of the natural tendency of time to sharpen the outline of peaks in the ranges of culture, and the national tendency of the Greeks to personify all processes and movements.
Great as Pheidias is, he is nevertheless surrounded by a circle of sculptors and architects, engravers and painters, who are all great. In execution they may be ranked in grades of ability, and their individualities are clearly discernible, but they are all inspired by the same nobility of artistic character, so that the spirit of fifth-century art is a thing that the eye can easily perceive. Reserve and dignity are its most prominent characteristics. It shares with all Greek art the
Plate XLVI. STATUE OF MARSYAS. AFTER MYRON
Mansell & Co.
qualities of grace and directness, by which we mean a vivid and logical intelligence which knows its aim and pursues it unswervingly.
Pheidias had Myron for a fellow-student. Of Myron’s athletic work I have already spoken. He was as original as it was possible to be in the fifth century. As he was chiefly engaged in minor works of a private and occasional nature, he has naturally caught the attention of the epigrammatists. We hear much of the animal statues he carved and of their extraordinary realism, for that was the thing that appealed to the ancient art critic. He seems to have been a master of bronze technique and a skilful goldsmith. The marble copy of his Marsyas in the Lateran and the bronze in the British Museum[55] show the satyr advancing in amazement to pick up the flute which Apollo has just discarded. As in the “Discobolus,” we see the love of distorted poses which enabled Myron to exhibit his fine draughtsmanship and anatomy. Herein, indeed, he is peu cinquième siècle; but we must remember that this figure is one of a dramatic group. I have spoken of Polycleitus too as an athletic sculptor. It is rather remarkable that this youthful art should already in the fifth century be producing its “Canon” and its technical treatises. Though the “Doryphorus” is the most famous of his works, the head of his “Diadumenus” from Rome is probably the most faithful rendering of a Polycleitan original. Other names are mentioned by ancient writers as being worthy to be classed with Pheidias; Calamis, for example; but they are mere names to us, and the ingenious attempts of modern archæology to fit them with appropriate works on the score of qualities attributed to them by ancient critics are hazardous, and for the most part unsatisfactory. Considering the few facts so recorded and the multitude of difficulties they raise, we cannot put much faith in the ancient art critic. Alcamenes and Pæonius, for example, are said to have been the sculptors of the two pediments at Olympia, and yet Alcamenes is described as a pupil of Pheidias, which to any one comparing the Apollo of the west pediment with the pedimental sculptures of the Parthenon is absurd. The other name is also doubtful, for Pæonius was the author of the famous Victory at Olympia,[56] with its superb study of flying drapery. The inscription testifies that it was set up by the Messenians of Naupactus from the spoil of the enemy—presumably the Spartan garrison captured by Cleon at Sphacteria. If, therefore, Pausanias is right in his account of the authorship of the Olympian pediments, both these sculptors must have made extraordinarily rapid progress in their art or have adopted a consciously archaic style for the pediments.
