In spite of many obscurities, it may be said that what we know, and what we do not know, of Canachus illustrates the amount and sort of knowledge we possess about the artists of the period which he best represents. A naïveté—a freshness, an early-aged simplicity and sincerity—that, we may believe, had we their works before us, would be for us their chief aesthetic charm. Cicero remarked that, in contrast with [250] the works of the next generation of sculptors, there was a stiffness in the statues of Canachus which made them seem untrue to nature—"Canachi signa rigidiora esse quam ut imitentur veritatem." But Cicero belongs to an age surfeited with artistic licence, and likely enough to undervalue the severity of the early masters, the great motive struggling still with the minute and rigid hand. So the critics of the last century ignored, or underrated, the works of the earlier Tuscan sculptors. In what Cicero calls "rigidity" of Canachus, combined with what we seem to see of his poetry of conception, his freshness, his solemnity, we may understand no really repellent hardness, but only that earnest patience of labour, the expression of which is constant in all the best work of an early time, in the David of Verrocchio, for instance, and in the early Flemish painters, as it is natural and becoming in youth itself. The very touch of the struggling hand was upon the work; but with the interest, the half-repressed animation of a great promise, fulfilled, as we now see, in the magnificent growth of Greek sculpture in the succeeding age; which, however, for those earlier workmen, meant the loins girt and the half-folded wings not yet quite at home in the air, with a gravity, a discretion and reserve, the charm of which, if felt in quiet, is hardly less than that of the wealth and fulness of final mastery.
NOTES
228. *Chrysoun is the word Pausanias uses, of the cup in the hand of Dionysus—the wood was plated with gold. Liddell and Scott definition of the adjective chryseos: "golden, of gold, inlaid with gold."
233. *Pausanias, in recording the invention of casting, uses the word echôneusanto, but does not tell us whether the model was of wax, as in the later process; which, however, is believed to have been the case. For an animated account of the modern process:—the core of plaister roughly presenting the designed form; the modelling of the waxen surface thereon, like the skin upon the muscles, with all its delicate touches—vein and eyebrow; the hardening of the plaister envelope, layer over layer, upon this delicately finished model; the melting of the way by heat, leaving behind it in its place the finished design in vacuo, which the molten stream of metal subsequently fills; released finally, after cooling, from core and envelope—see Fortnum's Handbook of Bronzes, Chapter II.
+Liddell and Scott definition of the noun chônê and the verb chônnymi: "a melting-pit, a mould to cast in. . . . to throw or heap up . . . to cover with a mound of earth, bury."
234. +Transliteration: kedrou zôdia chrysô diênthismena. Pater's translation: "Figures of cedar-wood, partly incrusted with gold." The root verb anthizô means "to strew with flowers…and so, to dye with colours." (Liddell and Scott.) Pausanias, Description of Greece, Book VI, Chapter 19, Section 12. Pausaniae Graeciae Descriptio, 3 vols. F. Spiro. Leipzig, Teubner. 1903.
237. +Daidaleos means "cunningly or curiously wrought"; it is derived from the verb daidallô, "to work cunningly, work with curious art…." (Liddell and Scott.)
242. +The verb toreuô means "to bore through . . . to work in relief . . . to chase." (Liddell and Scott.)
244. *Now preserved at Munich.