The whole history of Greek sculpture, from its rise in the sixth century to its decline in the third, is inspired by this desire to represent the divine by the most beautiful things on earth. The sculpture of the great nations of the East, Egypt and Assyria, is full of figures of the Gods, and of scenes of worship. But these figures do not rise above the human. The gods appear as conventional figures, mere ordinary men and women. And to distinguish them from mortal beings, the artists of the East proceed in the manner of symbolism: they make additions to the human types which are to signify the divine attributes, but do not really embody them. They add wings to represent the swiftness of the deity, wings not meant for actual flight, but only symbols of rapid motion. They represent them as victoriously overthrowing wild beasts and monsters, which stand for the powers of evil, ever bent on thwarting their action. In some of their most archaic works, the Greeks fall into the imitation of this way. They represent Apollo flanked by two vanquished griffins, Artemis with wings, and holding in her hands captive lions. But their artistic sense soon revolted against such crude and clumsy ways of representation. They began to try to represent the divine character of their deities, not by arbitrary and external symbols, but by modifying the human types in the direction of the ideal. Sometimes, indeed, in later art we find survivals of early symbolism in the form of an attribute. Hermes is still winged, but the wings are transferred to his cap or his boots. Zeus may still carry the thunderbolt, the symbol of his rule over the storm. Apollo may be still radiate, combining human form with the rays which proceed from the visible sun.
But these are only survivals, and do not affect the process, carried on by artist after artist and school after school, by which the gods absorbed ever more fully the qualities of the most perfect manhood. Zeus, as father of gods and men, is an idealization of the human father, combining justice and dignity with benevolence and kindness; Athena becomes the embodiment of the divine reason and wisdom, perhaps the most fully idealized of all the forms of the gods, since this armed and victorious virgin with wisdom seated on her brow had little in common with the secluded and domestic women of her city of Athens. Apollo has not the muscles of the trained athlete, but in his nobleness of countenance and perfect symmetry of shape, he stands for all that a young man might grow towards by self-restraint and aspiration. At a somewhat lower level Herakles bears the form of the wrestler, admirably proportioned but more powerful than even the greatest of athletes; Hermes is the ideal runner, every muscle adapted to swift and lithe movements.
Thus in the types of the gods which were produced when Greek art was at its best we have a series of supermen and superwomen who represent the highest and best to which mortals can hope to attain, types embodying the highest perfection of body and mind. The influence of those types has gone on from century to century, never in the darkest ages wholly forgotten, and serving at all times to redeem human nature from foulness and degradation. All through the history of art they have been acting as a raising and purifying element.
It was not until the decay of the Olympic religion in the fourth century that these types fell to a lower level. The sense of beauty in the artist remained as keen as ever, the technique of art even improved, but the religion of humanism was debased by less noble tendencies, and the gods took on too much not the nature of man as he might become, but the form of man as he actually is in the world.
Not the forms only of the gods, but the history of their appearances on earth and their dealings with mankind found expression in painting and relief. Plato, as we know, condemned the myths of the gods as unworthy from the ethical point of view. But we shall misjudge myths if we suppose that they were actually believed in, or served to regulate conduct. What they did was greatly to further the picturesqueness and joy of life. And when they became less important in cultus they survived in poetry, and served greatly to temper the harsh prose of actual life. We must remember that some of the Jewish tales which have so much interested and charmed our forefathers are hardly to be defended on strict ethical principles, yet they have been a leavening and widening influence. Who would wish to expel from churches the stories of Adam and Eve, of Joseph and David, on grounds of ethical purism? The life of the many is not so highly decorated that we should wish to expel from it elements so pleasing.
As the Gods tend more and more to take forms beautiful but entirely human, so do the notable features of the landscape, rivers and mountains, sky and sea, take on themselves human shape. Sun and moon, wind and storm, are completely humanized. The society of Olympus, the powers manifested in nature, appear in sculpture as a human society, but of more than human beauty and dignity. And such rendering of the gods leads, as we shall presently see, to an ideal rendering of men. As the gods come down in the likeness of men, so men are raised to the level of the gods. Hence the intrinsic and inexhaustible idealism of Greek sculpture, to which I will presently return.
Few works of art more fully and more attractively show the anthropomorphic tendency of Greek art than the sunrise vase of the British Museum. It shows us the whole morning pageant of nature humanized. On the right appears the sun-god driving a chariot of winged horses, who rise out of the sea. Before him the stars, represented as youths, plunge into the water. To the left is the moon-goddess on horseback, setting behind the hills, on one of which is a mountain-god in an attitude of surprise. Before the sun hurries Eos, the winged dawn, who by a bold citation of mythology is represented as pursuing Cephalus the hunter, of whom she was enamoured. We have the features of the daybreak; but they are all represented not as facts of nature, but in their influence on Gods and men.
I do not figure this vase, as I have already done so in my Principles of Greek Art; but instead I give an almost equally beautiful representation from the lid of a toilet vase in the Sabouroff Collection at Berlin. We have here the same three figures of the sun-god, the moon-goddess, and the winged dawn, who, however, in this case is driving a chariot. The form of the whole group and the radiate symbol in the midst stands admirably for the vault of heaven (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. VASE REPRESENTING SUNRISE