Nevertheless, the whole historic course of Greek sculpture is steeped in the study of nature; and we see as it proceeds more and more clearly the results of careful observation. The artist had in fact opportunities for the study of what he considered the one important group of phenomena, human bodies, such as a modern artist cannot hope to compass. In the baths and gymnasia where all young men of free birth spent part of their mornings in running, leaping, wrestling, or swimming, he could daily watch the beautiful bodies of athletes in every variety of pose and action. He knew them as a trainer knows horses, or a fancier knows dogs. He would have little need of a special model; but would daily observe some fresh detail of muscles, some notable pose which he could add from memory to his conception of the human body.
But in the greatest periods of art naturalism is not predominant. Its constantly working tendency is kept in check by noble ideas and noble style. There is in the development of sculpture a constant approach to nature, but nothing of the nihilism which looks on all aspects of nature as equally fit subjects for art. The artists of the pediments of Aegina could not bring themselves to conceal the beautiful bodies of the fighting warriors by rigid armour like that copied in Vischer’s group. Thus we find the paradox of armed men in battle, but without armour. The utmost pains are taken with the nude limbs. In the wonderful bronze charioteer found at Delphi (Fig. 4), which dates from about 470 B. C., the garment necessary to protect the man from the rush of air is very simply treated; but the arms and feet, which the garment does not conceal, are wrought with marvellous accuracy and truth to nature. It seems almost as if the artist were compensating himself for the extremely simple work on the drapery by an almost excessively close study of nature where it was possible. The head, on the other hand, is typical and not individual; for in fact individual portraits were scarcely possible at the time.
This would be the place to speak of Greek portraits, if space allowed it. I will only point out the erroneousness of the popular view, that Greek portraits were conventional and uninteresting; and that it was the Romans who introduced individuality into portraiture. It is strange that a view which is utterly false should have gained such currency. It is true that Greek portraits of the fifth and even the fourth century have in them much of the type, and individual traits are softened in accord with the strongly idealizing tendencies of the age. But from the third and second centuries we have a great number of portraits which are in the highest degree characteristic and individual, a wonderful gallery of philosophers and poets and statesmen which for lifelikeness cannot be surpassed. All the finest of the portraits of Romans were by Greek artists. I can give but one example of really fine Greek portraiture, a statue of Demosthenes of the third century B. C. (Fig. 8). It is a portrait indeed. The long lean arms and the pose are quite as individual and characteristic as the face with its melancholy expression and deep lines of anxiety. We have the man from head to foot; not as is so often the case in modern statues, a portrait head set on a conventional body.
For comparison with Demosthenes I set a statue of a great modern statesman, Abraham Lincoln, by Barnard (Fig. 9), not the best statue of him, but one which is approved by many. It aims at truth, but only attains caricature, by exaggerating Lincoln’s awkwardness and angularity, the size of his hands and feet, and the anxiety in his face. This exaggeration has been proved by a comparison with many photographs of Lincoln, which show that he was careful in dress and by no means wanting in dignity. The statue of Demosthenes is marvellous for truth; but it adds a touch of pathos; the statue of Lincoln misses the truth, through exaggerating the least pleasing features of the subject.
|
Fig. 8. DEMOSTHENES By Polyeuctus |
Fig. 9. ABRAHAM LINCOLN By Barnard |
When we want to ascertain how close Greek sculpture could come to actual fact, we turn from the great ideal age to the Hellenistic period. Lysistratus, the brother of Lysippus, began to take moulds in plaster from individual faces. At the great medical school of Alexandria the anatomy of the human frame, from which earlier ages in a spirit of piety had shrunk, became usual: some of the great physicians, such as Herophilus and Erasistratus, being noted for the completeness of their study of anatomy. In the art of the third century B. C. we see the inevitable result of such studies in a more precise and learned rendering of the muscles and the skin. And artists no longer hesitated to represent bodies wasted with toil and exposure to the weather, or emaciated with fasting. There are many such figures in our museums, showing a marvellously close study of the forms of peasants and old women and children. I figure one of these, preserved in the museum of the Conservatori of the Capitol at Rome, an aged shepherdess carrying a lamb (Fig. 10). But it will be observed that close as this form is to the facts of common life, there is yet in it nothing repulsive. It is in a sense a type rather than an individual, a poem of nature rather than a portrait. It is parallel to the pastorals of Theocritus. It strongly contrasts with such loathsome figures as some modern sculptors in their exaggerated love of fact, even if repulsive, have inflicted upon us, such as the Vieille Héaulmière of Rodin (Fig. 11), a figure of an aged and decayed prostitute. I know, of course, that some critics would defend the last-mentioned work on ethical grounds, as showing how hideous the decay of sensual beauty may become; but I venture to doubt whether sculpture is an appropriate vehicle for a moral lesson of that kind, because it can only represent and cannot explain.
|
Fig. 10 AGED SHEPHERDESS Alexandrian |
Fig. 11 LA VIEILLE HÉAULMIÈRE By Rodin |
V
So we come to the fifth lamp of Greek art, Ideality. It is in the idealism of their rendering of the body of man that the Greeks have surpassed all other peoples and left an imperishable record. The history of Greek art is the history of a search for beauty, for poetry, for whatever can charm and delight.
In the earliest sculptural works of Greece, as Lange the Dane was the first to point out, we find not a direct imitation of the facts of the visible world, but impressions taken from that world, stored in the memory, and put together in accordance with subjective purpose rather than objective law. It is indeed thus that clever children work, when in the picture-writing of their sketch books they violate the laws of perspective by combining separate aspects and memories of an object into an inconsistent whole. They will not omit any peculiarity of a person which happens to have struck them, even when in the profile which they sketch it would be invisible. They think of a face as turned towards them, of legs as walking past them. Every face must have two eyes, every body two arms, whether they would be visible under the natural conditions or not. In early Greek reliefs it is common to find the body down to the waist full-face, the body below the waist in profile, with no transition between the two. The well-known metopes from Selinus in Sicily are good examples. It is a kind of procedure common to the early art of all peoples. But the Greeks differ from other nations in this; that when they improved away these early crudities they retained the predominance of thought over things, of man over nature, in a word of the ideal element in art. They regarded the body of man not, as the materialists do, as man himself, but as a shell produced by the inner working of the spirit, to be seen by the eyes of thought and imagination, as well as by the bodily eyes. Hence they were always aspiring from that which exists in appearance to that which lies behind the mere phenomenon. They realized that nature, when she produces an individual, never wholly succeeds, she falls short of the idea. And the artist by a loving sympathy with the creative Spirit, may venture to improve what she has made, to carry out her intentions more fully, to incorporate more completely the idea. The Greek artist, appreciating and venerating the body, tries to raise it to a higher and more perfect level. A simple kind of idealism may be found in athletic art. In their practice of athletics the Greeks did not, like the moderns, think only of the number of feet an athlete could leap, or the space of time he would take to run a distance. They thought also of his form, of the rhythmic and harmonious character of his action. If an athlete showed ugly form, they would hiss him, as they would an incompetent actor. Most of their exercises were done to the accompaniment of the flute. In all the statues of athletes which have come down to us, not one shows an inharmonious development, powerful chest and weak legs, or muscular legs and poor arms. It is more than probable that as the features of Alexander the Great influenced the portraits of his officers and followers, so the specially beautiful forms of some of the athletes who were most admired, tended to create a type, something of which appears in all the athlete figures of the time.