The 4th century is the brilliant period of ancient painting. It opens with the painters of the Asiatic School, Zeuxis and Parrhasius and Protogenes, with their contemporaries Nicias and Apollodorus of Athens, Timanthes of Sicyon or Cythnus, and Euphranor of Corinth. It witnesses the rise of a great school at Sicyon, under Eupompus and Pamphilus, which was noted for its scientific character and the fineness of its drawing, and which culminated in Apelles, the painter of Alexander the Great, and probably the greatest master of the art in antiquity. To each of these painters a separate article is given, fixing their place in the history of the art. Of their paintings unfortunately we can form but a very inadequate notion. Vase-paintings, which in the 5th century give us some notion at least of contemporary drawing, are less careful in the 4th century. Now and then we find on them figures admirably designed, or successfully foreshortened; but these are rare occurrences. The art of the vase decorator has ceased to follow the methods and improvements of contemporary fresco painters, and is pursued as a mere branch of commerce.
But very few actual paintings of the age survive, and even these fragmentary remains have with time lost the freshness of their colouring; nor are they in any case the work of a noteworthy hand. We reproduce two examples. The first is from a stone of the vault of a Crimean grave (Plate IV. fig. 67). The date of the grave is fixed to the 4th century by ornaments found in it, among which was a gold coin of Alexander the Great. The representation is probably of Demeter or her priestess, her hair bound with poppies and other flowers. The original is of large size. The other illustration (fig. 42) represents the remains of a drawing on marble, representing a group of women playing knucklebones. It was found at Herculaneum. Though signed by one Alexander of Athens, who was probably a worker of the Roman age, Professor Robert is right in maintaining that Alexander only copied a design of the age of Zeuxis and Parrhasius. In fact the drawing and grouping is so closely like that of reliefs of about 400 B.C. that the drawing is of great historic value, though there be no colouring. Several other drawings of the same class have been found at Herculaneum, and on the walls of the Transtiberine Villa at Rome (now in the Terme Museum).
| Olympia, iii. 53. |
| Fig. 43.—Hermes of Praxiteles; restored. |
Until about the year 1880, our knowledge of the great Greek sculptors of the 4th century was derived mostly from the statements of ancient writers and from Roman copies, or what were supposed to be copies, of Praxiteles. their works. We are now in a far more satisfactory position. We now possess an original work of Praxiteles, and sculptures executed under the immediate direction of, if not from the hand of, other great sculptors of that age—Scopas, Timotheus and others. Among all the discoveries made at Olympia, none has become so familiar to the artistic world as that of the Hermes of Praxiteles. It is the first time that we have become possessed of a first-rate Greek original by one of the greatest of sculptors. Hitherto almost all the statues in our museums have been either late copies of Greek works of art, or else the mere decorative sculpture of temples and tombs, which was by the ancients themselves but little regarded. But we can venture without misgiving to submit the new Hermes to the strictest examination, sure that in every line and touch we have the work of a great artist. This is more than we can say of any of the literary remains of antiquity—poem, play or oration. Hermes is represented by the sculptor (fig. 43 and Plate VI. fig. 82) in the act of carrying the young child Dionysus to the nymphs who were charged with his rearing. On the journey he pauses and amuses himself by holding out to the child-god a bunch of grapes, and watching his eagerness to grasp them. To the modern eye the child is not a success; only the latest art of Greece is at home in dealing with children. But the Hermes, strong without excessive muscular development, and graceful without leanness, is a model of physical formation, and his face expresses the perfection of health, natural endowment and sweet nature. The statue can scarcely be called a work of religious art in the modern or Christian sense of the word religious, but from the Greek point of view it is religious, as embodying the result of the harmonious development of all human faculties and life in accordance with nature.
The Hermes not only adds to our knowledge of Praxiteles, but also confirms the received views in regard to him. Already many works in galleries of sculpture had been identified as copies of statues of his school. Noteworthy among these are, the group at Munich representing Peace nursing the infant Wealth, from an original by Cephisodotus, father of Praxiteles; copies of the Cnidian Aphrodite of Praxiteles, especially one in the Vatican which is here illustrated (Plate V. fig. 71); copies of the Apollo slaying a lizard (Sauroctonus), of a Satyr (in the Capitol Museum), and others. These works, which are noted for their softness and charm, make us understand the saying of ancient critics that Praxiteles and Scopas were noted for the pathos of their works, as Pheidias and Polyclitus for the ethical quality of those they produced. But the pathos of Praxiteles is of a soft and dreamy character; there is no action, or next to none; and the emotions which he rouses are sentimental rather than passionate. Scopas, as we shall see, was of another mood. The discovery of the Hermes has naturally set archaeologists searching in the museums of Europe for other works which may from their likeness to it in various respects be set down as Praxitelean in character. In the case of many of the great sculptors of Greece—Strongylion, Silanion, Calamis and others—it is of little use to search for copies of their works, since we have little really trustworthy evidence on which to base our inquiries. But in the case of Praxiteles we really stand on a safe level. Naturally it is impossible in these pages to give any sketch of the results, some almost certain, some very doubtful, of the researches of archaeologists in quest of Praxitelean works. But we may mention a few works which have been claimed by good judges as coming from the master himself. Professor Brunn claimed as work of Praxiteles a torso of a satyr in the Louvre, in scheme identical with the well-known satyr of the Capitol. Professor Furtwängler puts in the same category a delicately beautiful head of Aphrodite at Petworth. And his translator, Mrs Strong, regards the Aberdeen head of a young man in the British Museum as the actual work of Praxiteles. Certainly this last head does not suffer when placed beside the Olympian head of Hermes. At Mantinea has been found a basis whereon stood a group of Latona and her two children, Apollo and Artemis, made by Praxiteles. This base bears reliefs representing the musical contest of Apollo and Marsyas, with the Muses as spectators, reliefs very pleasing in style, and quite in the manner of Attic artists of the 4th century. But of course we must not ascribe them to the hand of Praxiteles himself; great sculptors did not themselves execute the reliefs which adorned temples and other monuments, but reserved them for their pupils. Yet the graceful figures of the Muses of Mantinea suggest how much was due to Praxiteles in determining the tone and character of Athenian art in relief in the 4th century. Exactly the same style which marks them belongs also to a mass of sepulchral monuments at Athens, and such works as the Sidonian sarcophagus of the Mourning Women, to be presently mentioned.
Excavation on the site of the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea has resulted in the recovery of works of the school of Scopas. Pausanias tells us that Scopas was the architect of the temple, and so important in the case of a Greek Scopas. temple is the sculptural decoration, that we can scarcely doubt that the sculpture also of the temple at Tegea was under the supervision of Scopas, especially as he was more noted as a sculptor than as an architect. In the pediments of the temple were represented two scenes from mythology, the hunting of the Calydonian boar and the combat between Achilles and Telephus. To one or other of these scenes belong several heads of local marble discovered on the spot, which are very striking from their extraordinary life and animation. Unfortunately they are so much injured that they can scarcely be made intelligible except by the help of restoration; we therefore engrave one of them, the helmeted head, as restored by a German sculptor (Plate III. fig. 63). The strong bony frame of this head, and its depth from front to back, are not less noteworthy than the parted lips and deeply set and strongly shaded eye; the latter features impart to the head a vividness of expression such as we have found in no previous work of Greek art, but which sets the key to the developments of art which take place in the Hellenistic age. A draped torso of Atalanta from the same pediment has been fitted to one of these heads. Hitherto Scopas was known to us, setting aside literary records, only as one of the sculptors who had worked at the Mausoleum. Ancient critics and travellers, however, bear ample testimony to his fame, and the wide range of his activity, which extended to northern Greece, Peloponnese and Asia Minor. His Maenads and his Tritons and other beings of the sea were much copied in antiquity. But perhaps he reached his highest level in statues such as that of Apollo as leader of the Muses, clad in long drapery.
| Fig. 44.—Amazon from Epidaurus. |
The interesting precinct of Aesculapius at Epidaurus has furnished us with specimens of the style of an Athenian contemporary of Scopas, who worked with him on the Mausoleum. An inscription which records the sums Timotheus, Bryaxis, Leochares. spent on the temple of the Physician-god, informs us that the models for the sculptures of the pediments, and one set of acroteria or roof adornments, were the work of Timotheus. Of the pedimental figures and the acroteria considerable fragments have been recovered, and we may with confidence assume that at all events the models for these were by Timotheus. It is strange that the unsatisfactory arrangement whereby a noted sculptor makes models and some local workman the figures enlarged from those models, should have been tolerated by so artistic a people as the Greeks. The subjects of the pediments appear to have been the common ones of battles between Greek and Amazon and between Lapith and Centaur. We possess fragments of some of the Amazon figures, one of which, striking downwards at the enemy, is here shown (fig. 44). Their attitudes are vigorous and alert; but the work shows no delicacy of detail. Figures of Nereids riding on horses, which were found on the same site, may very probably be roof ornaments (acroteria) of the temple. We have also several figures of Victory, which probably were acroteria on some smaller temple, perhaps that of Artemis. A base found at Athens, sculptured with figures of horsemen in relief, bears the name of Bryaxis, and was probably made by a pupil of his. Probable conjecture assigns to Leochares the originals copied in the Ganymede of the Vatican, borne aloft by an eagle (Plate I. fig. 53) and the noble statue of Alexander the Great at Munich (see [Leochares]). Thus we may fairly say that we are now acquainted with the work of all the great sculptors who worked on the Mausoleum—Scopas, Bryaxis, Leochares and Timotheus; and are in a far more advantageous position than were the archaeologists of 1880 for determining the artistic problems connected with that noblest of ancient tombs.
Contemporary with the Athenian school of Praxiteles and Scopas was the great school of Argos and Sicyon, of which Lysippus was the most distinguished member. Lysippus continued the academic traditions of Polyclitus, but he was far bolder in his choice of subjects and more innovating in style. Gods, heroes and mortals alike found in him a sculptor who knew how to combine fine ideality with a vigorous actuality. He was at the height of his fame during Alexander’s life, and the grandiose ambition of the great Macedonian found him ample employment, especially in the frequent representation of himself and his marshals.
We have none of the actual works of Lysippus; but our best evidence for his style will be found in the statue of Agias an athlete (Plate V. fig. 74) found at Delphi, and shown by an inscription to be a marble copy of a bronze original by Lysippus. The Apoxyomenus of the Vatican (man scraping himself with a strigil) (Plate VI. fig. 79) has hitherto been regarded as a copy from Lysippus; but of this there is no evidence, and the style of that statue belongs rather to the 3rd century than the 4th. The Agias, on the other hand, is in style contemporary with the works of 4th-century sculptors.