Phidias did not confine himself to representing gods, that is to say to making colossi; with his own hands, or more often through those who worked under his direction, he lavished less divine sculpture on the frieze, the metopes, and the double pediment of the temple, the figures of which, as seen from below, do not appear to be of more than ordinary height. Those which he chiselled on Minerva’s shield and on her sandals, were still smaller. The magnificent fragments which remain to us from the two pediments, Demeter and Core, Iris and Cephisus, the Charities or Fates, the Hercules or Theseus, are the works of his school and we may say of his mind. In spite of their mutilations, these marbles, like those of the Victory untying her sandal, may be ranged beside, if not above, the most glorious creations of Renaissance sculpture in the purity of the style and the calm serenity of the figures, which neither have their limbs twisted in violent action nor their brows overcharged with thought, as happened when statuary strove to rival painting. What a puissant life is in these divinities tranquilly seated in the pediments, and how calm on their fiery horses are the riders in the Panathenaic procession! Later on the school of grace and voluptuousness will appear, with an Athenian, Praxiteles, as its chief; still later, passion will agitate the marble: then the decay of art begins—such a drama as the “Farnese bull”[46] depicts may not fittingly be presented in stone.
It is to the eternal honour of Phidias that he finally broke with hieratic art, whose influence is still traceable in the beautiful statues of Ægina, with their admirably studied but lifeless shapes and grinning heads exhibiting, even in pain and death, the same idiotic smile. The great artist sought the beauty which is the spiritual essence of things, whether it be in the soul seen through the body; or nature contemplated in her most harmonious expansion; and this ideal beauty he realised without making the effort visible. This is supreme art; for there is no grandeur without simplicity.
Greek Lyres
PAINTING, MUSIC, ETC.
If the description in the Iliad of the shield of Achilles is a work of imagination, those of the Athene of the Parthenon and the Zeus of Olympia, as given by Pausanias after an attentive study of the works themselves, show that the school of Athens had carried the art of carving metal and ivory to a high degree of perfection, as well as that of working hard stones for casts or in relief. Yet this skill was borrowed from the school of Argos, where work in bronze was held in high honour.
It was not so with painting, which in Greece had never the perfection of statuary, whatever may be said on the faith of anecdotes more famous than veracious. Modern painting seeks to move; that of the ancients was rather sculptural in its character, in the sense that it sacrificed colouring to design and the effects of light and shade to form—a stranger to what might be called, if we have Rembrandt in mind, the drama of light and shade, or, in referring to the Venetians, the harmonious chant of colours. Sicyon was the first Greek town which had a school for design. Athens, Miletus, and subsequently Corinth, followed this example. We shall see presently that Greece had great painters, and that those of Athenian origin did not occupy the first rank in this art. But it would be rash to speak of Greek painting except according to the judgment of the ancients, since nothing of it remains save painted vases, which belong to industry rather than art; and the mural decorations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which are too often mere conventional productions, executed hurriedly and probably for small payment by workmen rather than artists. The Roman mosaics were also made by Greek hands, but there is not one, except the battle of Issus, which is of a high order of art.
Lyre Player
The Greeks possessed the merit of realising that the highest intellectual culture is one of the conditions of greatness in the individual and the state; and they understood how to utilise every means of attaining it. In their plan of education, besides the study of poets and philosophers to form the mind, and gymnastic exercise to develop suppleness and strength, they included music, which habituates the mind to harmony, and dancing, which bestows grace. These two secondary arts were the chief ones at Lacedæmon; they also ranked high among the Athenians, though Athens did not set her mark on them as she did on architecture and the art of statuary. They were indispensable auxiliaries at festivals, sacrifices, and funerals, and played a part in the performance of religious rites. The marvellous effects of the lyre of Orpheus were universally kept in mind, and Achilles, the hero who was the ideal type of warlike courage, was represented celebrating his exploits on the cithara; in the Iliad or the Odyssey there is no feast to which a melodious singer is not invited. Down to the last days of Greece the beneficent action of music was believed in: Polybius attributed the misfortunes of the Arcadians to the neglect among them of the art which calms the passions and which, by teaching the rules of harmony, trains the learner not to violate public peace. Damon the musician, a friend of Pericles and of Socrates, held that musical methods could not be changed without threatening the foundation of morality and the laws of the city. Plato thinks the same, and Aristotle calls music “the greatest charm of life.” It is well known how much importance was attached to it by the school of the Pythagoreans, who professed to hear the music of the celestial spheres turning harmoniously through infinite space.