| Fig. 34.—West Pediment, Olympia. Two Restorations. |
Among the sculptural works of this period the first place may be given to the great temple of Zeus at Olympia. The statue by Pheidias which once occupied the place of honour in that temple, and was regarded as the noblest monument Olympia: Temple of Zeus. of Greek religion, has of course disappeared, nor are we able with confidence to restore it. But the plan of the temple, its pavement, some of its architectural ornaments, remain. The marbles which occupied the pediments and the metopes of the temple have been in large part recovered, having been probably thrown down by earthquakes and gradually buried in the alluvial soil. The utmost ingenuity and science of the archaeologists of Germany have been employed in the recovery of the composition of these groups; and although doubt remains as to the places of some figures, and their precise attitudes, yet we may fairly say that we know more about the sculpture of the Olympian temple of Zeus than about the sculpture of any other great Greek temple. The exact date of these sculptures is not certain, but we may with some confidence give them to 470-460 B.C. (In speaking of them we shall mostly follow the opinion of Dr Treu, whose masterly work in vol. iii. of the great German publication on Olympia is a model of patience and of science.) In the eastern pediment (fig. 33), as Pausanias tells us, were represented the preparations for the chariot-race between Oenomaüs and Pelops, the result of which was to determine whether Pelops should find death or a bride and a kingdom. In the midst, invisible to the contending heroes, stood Zeus the supreme arbiter. On one side of him stood Oenomaüs with his wife Sterope, on the other Pelops and Hippodameia, the daughter of Oenomaüs, whose position at once indicates that she is on the side of the newcomer, whatever her parents may feel. Next on either side are the four-horse chariots of the two competitors, that of Oenomaüs in the charge of his perfidious groom Myrtilus, who contrived that it should break down in the running, that of Pelops tended by his grooms. At either end, where the pediment narrows to a point, reclines a river god, at one end Alpheus, the chief stream of Olympia, at the other end his tributary Cladeus. Only one figure remains, not noticed in the careful description of Pausanias, the figure of a handmaid kneeling, perhaps one of the attendants of Sterope. Our engraving gives two conjectural restorations of the pediment, that of Treu and that of Kekule, which differ principally in the arrangement of the corners of the composition; the position of the central figures and of the chariots can scarcely be called in question. The moment chosen is one, not of action, but of expectancy, perhaps of preparation for sacrifice. The arrangement is undeniably stiff and formal, and in the figures we note none of the trained perfection of style which belongs to the sculptures of the Parthenon, an almost contemporary temple. Faults abound, alike in the rendering of drapery and in the representation of the human forms, and the sculptor has evidently trusted to the painter who was afterwards to colour his work, to remedy some of his clumsiness, or to make clear the ambiguous. Nevertheless there is in the whole a dignity, a sobriety, and a simplicity, which reconcile us to the knowledge that this pediment was certainly regarded in antiquity as a noble work, fit to adorn even the palace of Zeus. In the other, the western pediment (fig. 34), the subject is the riot of the Centaurs when they attended the wedding of Peirithous in Thessaly, and, attempting to carry off the bride and her comrades, were slain by Peirithous and Theseus. In the midst of the pediment, invisible like Zeus in the eastern pediment, stands Apollo, while on either side of him Theseus and Peirithous attack the Centaurs with weapons hastily snatched. Our illustration gives two possible arrangements. The monsters are in various attitudes of attempted violence, of combat and defeat; with each grapples one of the Lapith heroes in the endeavour to rob them of their prey. In the corners of the pediment recline female figures, perhaps attendant slaves, though the farthest pair may best be identified as local Thessalian nymphs, looking on with the calmness of divine superiority, yet not wholly unconcerned in what is going forward. Though the composition of the two pediments differs notably, the one bearing the impress of a parade-like repose, the other of an overstrained activity, yet the style and execution are the same in both, and the shortcomings must be attributed to the inferior skill of a local school of sculptors compared with those of Athens or of Aegina. It even appears likely that the designs also belong to a local school. Pausanias, it is true, tells us that the pediments were the work of Alcamenes, the pupil of Pheidias, and of Paeonius, a sculptor of Thrace, respectively; but it is almost certain that he was misled by the local guides, who would naturally be anxious to connect the sculptures of their great temple with well-known names.
| Olympia, iii. 45. |
| Fig. 35—Metope: Olympia; restored. |
| Olympia, iii. 48. |
| Fig. 36—Nikē of Paeonius; restored. |
The metopes of the temple are in the same style of art as the pediments, but the defects of awkwardness and want of mastery are less conspicuous, because the narrow limits of the metope exclude any elaborate grouping. The subjects are provided by the twelve labours of Heracles; the figures introduced in each metope are but two or at most three; and the action is simplified as much as possible. The example shown (fig. 35) represents Heracles holding up the sky on a cushion, with the friendly aid of a Hesperid nymph, while Atlas, whom he has relieved of his usual burden, approaches bringing the apples which it was the task of Heracles to procure.
Another of the fruits of the excavations of Olympia is the floating Victory by Paeonius, unfortunately faceless (fig. 36), which was set up in all probability in memory of the victory of the Athenians and their Messenian allies at Sphacteria in 425 B.C. The inscription states that it was dedicated by the Messenians and people of Naupactus from the spoils of their enemies, but the name of the enemy is not mentioned in the inscription. The statue of Paeonius, which comes floating down through the air with drapery borne backward, is of a bold and innovating type, and we may trace its influence in many works of the next age.
Among the discoveries at Delphi none is so striking and valuable to us as the life-size statue in bronze of a charioteer holding in his hand the reins. This is maintained by M. Homolle to be part of a chariot-group set up Delphic charioteer. by Polyzalus, brother of Gelo and Hiero of Syracuse, in honour of a victory won in the chariot-race at the Pythian games at Delphi (fig. 37). The charioteer is evidently a high-born youth, and is clad in the long chiton which was necessary to protect a driver of a chariot from the rush of air. The date would be about 480-470 B.C. Bronze groups representing victorious chariots with their drivers were among the noblest and most costly dedications of antiquity; the present figure is our only satisfactory representative of them. In style the figure is very notable, tall and slight beyond all contemporary examples. The contrast between the conventional decorousness of face and drapery and the lifelike accuracy of hands and feet is very striking, and indicates the clashing of various tendencies in art at the time when the great style was formed in Greece.
| Mémoires, Piot, 1807, 16. |
| Fig. 37.—Bronze Charioteer: Delphi. |
The three great masters of the 5th century, Myron, Pheidias and Polyclitus are all in some degree known to us from their works. Of Myron we have copies of two works, the Marsyas (Plate III. fig. 64) and the Discobolus. The Marsyas (a copy in the Lateran Museum) represents the Satyr so named in the grasp of conflicting emotions, eager to pick up the flutes which Athena has thrown down, but at the same time dreading her displeasure if he does so. The Discobolus has usually been judged from the examples in the Vatican and the British Museum, in which the anatomy is modernized and the head wrongly put on. We have now photographs of the very superior replica in the Lancelotti gallery at Rome, the pose of which is much nearer to the original. Our illustration represents a restoration made at Munich, by combining the Lancelotti head with the Vatican body (Plate IV. fig. 68).
Of the works of Pheidias we have unfortunately no certain copy, if we except the small replicas at Athens of his Athena Parthenos. The larger of these (fig. 38) was found in 1880: it is very clumsy, and the wretched device by which a pillar is introduced to support the Victory in the hand of Athena can scarcely be supposed to have belonged to the great original. Tempting theories have been published by Furtwängler (Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture) and other archaeologists, which identify copies of the Athena Lemnia of Pheidias, his Pantarces, his Aphrodite Urania and other statues; but doubt hangs over all these attributions.