Scarcely any feature of Greek art is more impressive to a student than its continuous and uninterrupted course. When once it has started it does not turn back, but goes forward steadily, for a time rising superior to difficulty after difficulty, attaining a higher and higher level, then in the fifth century branching out in various directions into styles and groups, then going on with great technical skill, but with a loss of inspiration. It is a course of evolution as steady as that of any kind of plant or animal. This shows that it did not depend upon the rise of successive men of talent or genius, each of whom was intent on expressing himself; but upon the rise and influence of successive artistic schools, each of which did not merely follow the personality of a founder or teacher, but stood for a phase in the development of the common life of the Greek people. The schools were Ionian or Dorian, Attic or Argive, and harmonized with the whole civilization of such fractions of the race. Ionian art went with the gay and pleasure-loving ways of the Asiatic coast. Dorian art reflected the restraint, the balance, the self-control of the people of Peloponnesus. Attic art not only conformed to the refined taste of the people of Athens, but suited also the strong mental bias of the most intellectual city which ever existed. Of course these schools did not flourish in complete isolation one from the other; city influenced city and artist artist; but in a far less degree than would be the case now. A school of sculpture was a species; and all the individuals of the species were more like one another than they were like any of their contemporaries outside.

Thus when we examine any work of Greek sculpture, before the eclectic schools came into being, we find it easy to determine its period, often within narrow limits, and we are usually able to assign it with confidence to a particular school, imperfect as is our knowledge of the history of Greek art. But we can scarcely ever say that it is the work of an individual artist, unless it stands on a basis bearing the author’s name, or unless ancient critics and historians have left us detailed descriptions of a work which survives. I am speaking of Greek originals; the copies of earlier works made by Greek artists of a late period for Roman galleries are often so confused in style and so careless in execution that they serve only to mislead, even if they have escaped the Italian restorer of recent date.

Great and connected series of statues and reliefs, such as constitute the sculptural adornment of such temples as that of Zeus at Olympia or the Parthenon or the Mausoleum, are the joint productions of a number of sculptors who worked together, no doubt under the general supervision of some architect or chief mason, but probably under very little control. Such works combine considerable variety in execution with a general similarity so great that a superficial observer does not see their differences. Public opinion in London seems to hold that Pheidias made the whole of the pediments and the frieze of the Parthenon; though in some cases contiguous figures are so markedly various amid the general likeness as to prove separate hands. In the case of the Erechtheum at Athens there is extant a long list of payments to a number of artists for the several figures of the frieze. There was no general contractor, no artist who hired his masons by the day, but every man who produced one of the figures in relief was paid for it sixty drachmas, without regard to its difficulty or its simplicity.

It is comparatively easy to get a set of skilled stone-masons to carry out with exactness a plan of which all the details are worked out for them, and which requires only faithful copying. And it must have been easy for a set of Egyptian sculptors who made their figures according to a rigid conventional pattern to produce a uniform result. But for a number of skilled workers who were allowed great liberty in detail to produce an harmonious whole was infinitely harder. And that the Greek masons regularly accomplished this result shows how strong upon them was the influence of the school. Nor did they merely work from nature; but their production was of an idealizing kind. It is clear that they must have had not merely similar tools and similar mechanical processes, but the same purposes and ideals. They must have had what we should call a collective personality. It is more than probable that among the workers on the Parthenon were Alcamenes and Agoracritus, two sculptors who rose to great fame. It is certain that among the workers on the Erechtheum was Praxias, a pupil of Calamis, and probably a relative of Praxiteles. The distinction between artist and mason, so marked in our day, scarcely existed in Greece. The mason who had talent became a noted sculptor; and the sculptor, instead of making a model in wax or plaster, set to work, like Michelangelo, on the block of marble himself. Probably sometimes, like Benvenuto Cellini, he cast his own bronze statues.

Generally in all great periods of art there is such fellowship. And in sculpture in particular the design and the execution are so closely connected that it is an abuse to assign the two functions to different men, and even to different classes of men. Greece was pre-eminently the land of productive guilds, of families of artists, of groups of workers who were of one heart and one spirit, and who therefore worked in one style. One of the closest parallels to a Greek school of sculpture is to be found in the group of Pre-Raphaelite artists of the middle of the last century, Morris, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Millais, Collins, and their companions. This group had a religious or ideal starting-point in the revived Anglo-Catholicism which arose in Oxford at the time, and they had principles of art in common which they embodied in their work. Their paintings, before they diverged one from another, form a distinct species, and have an interest for the historian of civilization greater than that of any other English school.

IX

In order that we may estimate the influence of Greek art on the civilization of Europe, it is necessary briefly to trace its reappearances through the ages. Its first conquest was Rome. The victorious Roman Generals, Marcellus, Scipio, Flamininus, Mummius, and others, brought to the imperial city, to adorn their triumphs, an immense quantity of Greek sculpture and paintings, of which they robbed the great storehouses of works of art in the temples and stoae of Hellas, Sicily, and Asia Minor. The earlier Emperors, especially Nero, followed their example, so that in the time of Pliny the naturalist all the public places of Rome were crowded with sculptures of bronze and marble and with the painted masterpieces of great artists. It became fashionable for wealthy Romans, such as Hortensius and Cicero, to stock their country-houses with such works. Even so, the demand was not satisfied; and Greek artists were imported into Rome, where they set up great workshops, and poured out an incessant stream of fresh works of art. Of such our modern museums are full. Generally speaking they are of little artistic merit, copies of various degrees of excellence of the great works of earlier generations. For the Roman plutocrats had little taste. Because certain figures or groups had a great reputation, and especially because they had been purchased at a high price by Greek cities and kings, the Roman collector liked to have copies of them in his villa; and the artists who produced these copies were mere workers for hire, without originality and without aspirations. Sometimes when employed on such works as the Arch of Titus, or the Column of Trajan, the novelty of the theme stimulated the artist to attempt something of a more original kind. And occasionally the fire within took course and produced a finer work than ordinary. Under the art-loving Emperor Hadrian there was a sort of St. Martin’s summer of sculpture; but its productions were smooth, elegant and refined rather than original or interesting. The charm of art was not appreciated by the Roman people; only the few who professed cultivation really cared whether a figure was good or bad, and even the few were a little ashamed of their preferences.

Into the Roman Empire, in the first three centuries of our era, Christianity gradually ate its way. It originated among the Jews, to whom all representation of living things was hateful. And it developed under the influence of Greek oriental mysticism, which had no kinship with sculpture and painting; and so far as it had any expression in those arts worked in the direction of that symbolism against which Greek art was a protest. Thus we could not expect any fresh inspiration for art from early Christianity; on the contrary, Christianity would work upon it as a blighting influence. If we examine the remains of Christian art in those early centuries, in sarcophagus and mural painting, we find that it merely copied the contemporary pagan art, only changing the subjects portrayed, and introducing a further development in the symbolic interpretation of ordinary scenes.

Christianity offered almost no field for the exercise of Greek anthropomorphism. The latter was closely bound up with polytheism and hero-worship. The Christian Apostles and Saints, who took the place of the pagan Deities, were men who had lived on the earth and whose deeds belonged not to mythology but to history, although at the time the line between history and mythology was not clearly drawn, and history was largely diluted with myth. A few impersonations of nature, such as river-gods, lingered on in the paintings of the Roman catacombs. And winged genii were common there, whether cupids or cherubs it would be hard to say. But there was no realm into which artistic fancy could stray, filling it with super-men and super-women. Angels might be portrayed; but they all came from the Jewish angelology; and there was no artistic tradition as to their types: it was only later that the types of Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and others were distinguished.

The second principle of Greek art, balance and symmetry, had almost disappeared in pagan art in the Antonine age. The reliefs of triumphal arches and of sarcophagi are crowded with figures inserted without order or method. Even the mural paintings of Pompeii have escaped from control; and show no purposeful arrangement. Law and order have given place to individual fancy, unless in cases where earlier schemes are adopted. And with artistic arrangement has disappeared all attempt to idealize, to produce forms nobler and more beautiful than those seen every day. The figure of Antinous is the latest in which we find any attempt to produce a type of ideal beauty. Even the Virgin Mary and her Son are depicted without any attempt to render them beautiful. Nor indeed does naturalism fare better than idealism. The representation of the human body is no longer studied. The figures are clothed: and the clothing is purely conventional, while the features of the landscape are far less carefully introduced than in Hellenistic Greek art.