Bulle[499] has gone carefully into the technique of the hair by different Greek artists. In archaic times this was “ein, man darf sagen, unmoegliches Problem.” The primitive means at the disposal of the early artist made it impossible to render the hair naturally and hence it was conventionalized. Two styles arose in archaic times, which endured with modifications all through Greek art. The one was the pictorial (malerisch), where only the general appearance of the hair was represented, the merest necessary plastic form being added.[500] Painting here helped the shortcomings of the sculptor to some extent. The second style was the plastic (plastisch), where individual locks were attempted. The plastic use of light and shade made the use of color now less necessary. Such examples as the Korai of the Akropolis Museum and the Rampin head in the Louvre show the difficulty which the early artist encountered in representing hair plastically. In the Rampin head[501] we see examples of three sorts of plastic hair treatment: the pearl-string (Perlschnuerre) on the neck, grained hair (Koerner) in the beard, and snail-volutes (geperlte Schnecken) on the forehead. None of the three seems to belong integrally to the head, but each appears to have been pasted on. The pearl-string fashion was first used in the soft poros stone and was only later successfully transferred to marble. During the severe style of Greek sculpture, both fashions, pictorial and plastic, were used, as we see them in the pediment groups from the temple of Zeus at Olympia. In the period of Pheidias the plastic treatment was used almost exclusively, as we see in the Lemnian Athena. In the next century impressionism came in, though the plastic treatment still continued, for we see it in the bronze work of Lysippos and the marble work of Praxiteles. The old pictorial treatment was revived again in the later Hellenistic age.
ICONIC AND ANICONIC STATUES.
In a well-known passage Pliny says that “the ancients did not make any statue of individuals unless they deserved immortality by some distinction, originally by a victory at some sacred games, especially those of Olympia, where it was the custom to dedicate statues of all those who had conquered, and portrait statues if they had conquered three times. These are called iconic.”[502] Many solutions of this passage have been offered. Older commentators, as Hirt and Visconti,[503] interpreted Pliny’s word iconicas as life-size statues. Scherer, however, easily refuted this idea and showed that the adjective εἰκονικός, though ambiguous in its meaning, had nothing to do with size, but referred rather to an individual as opposed to a typical sense in relation to statuary. In his explanation he referred to the words of Lessing in the Laokoön: es ist das Ideal eines gewissen Menschen, nicht das Ideal eines Menschen ueberhaupt.[504] Nowadays all scholars agree that Pliny’s word refers to portrait statues.[505] However, Pliny’s dictum about the right of setting up portrait statues is certainly open to doubt.[506] It can not have been true of monuments erected before the fourth century B. C., when portrait statues were rare. Portraiture was a form of realism and was a product of the later period of Greek art—especially after the time of Lysippos. In the fourth century B. C. we find one well-attested exception to Pliny’s rule. The discovered inscription from the base of a monument erected to the horse-racer Xenombrotos of Cos,[507] reads (fifth line): τοῖ[ος], ὁποῖο[ν] ὁ[ρ]ᾷς Ξεινόμβροτο[ς]. These words indubitably point to a portrait statue. However, neither the recovered epigram nor Pausanias indicates anything about this victor being a τρισολυμπιονίκης, and consequently he appears not to have merited a portrait statue.[508] Pliny’s statement can be explained in many ways: it may be apocryphal, or different usages may have fitted different periods; or the rule may have held good only for gymnic victors and not for equestrian ones, which, being strictly votive in character, may not have been restricted to its operation.[509]
Portrait Statues.
Pausanias mentions the monuments of several victors at Olympia who were entitled to portrait statues on the strength of Pliny’s rule, though we have no indication that they were so honored. Thus he mentions the statues of Dikon,[510] Sostratos,[511] Philinos,[512] and Gorgos.[513] The early fifth-century boxer Euthymos[514] also won three victories, but at a time before we should expect a portrait statue. The Periegete also mentions several victors who won three or more times, though he does not say that they had any statues, portrait or otherwise.[515] Percy Gardner[516] has shown how erroneous is the prevailing view that the Greeks neglected portraiture in their art and left it for the Romans to develop. He shows that Greek artists of the third and second centuries B. C. left a great many portraits of the highest artistic value and that portraits of Romans before the time of Augustus, and the best Roman examples during the Empire, were made by Greek sculptors. The number of Greek portraits in our museums, especially in Rome, is very great.[517] From archaic times down to the middle of the fifth century B. C. we should not expect portraiture. In the earlier period, therefore, it is difficult to distinguish between statues of gods and those of men. In the great period of Greek art, from the time of Perikles on to that of Alexander, the general tendency of Greek sculpture was so ideal that portraits, when they existed, seem impersonal. The later copyists of portraits also idealized them. Thus Pliny, in speaking of Kresilas’ portrait of Perikles, says that this artist nobiles viros nobiliores fecit—in other words, that he idealized them.[518] The portraits of Alexander were especially idealized. In the first half of the fourth century we first hear of realistic portraiture. Thus Demetrios, who flourished 380–360 B. C.,[519] made a “very beautiful” statue of a Corinthian general named Pelichos, which Lucian[520] says had a fat belly, bald head, hair floating in the wind, and prominent veins, “like the man himself.”[521] Except for the hair this description by the satirist seems to have been correct. At the end of the fourth century B. C. anatomical detail began to be shown in sculpture. Largely under the influence of Lysippos, the personality of victors began to be emphasized in figure and face in a very realistic way. We can distinguish between such portraits of victors before and after the time of Lysippos.[522] Pliny[523] says that Lysistratos, the brother of Lysippos, was the first to obtain portraits by making a plaster mould on the features and so to render likenesses exactly, as “previous artists had only tried to make them as beautiful as possible.” In any case, by the time of Lysippos realistic portraiture began to be emphasized. We see it at Olympia in the later bronze pancratiast’s head found there (Fig. [61], A and B), and in a still more revolting style in the Seated Boxer of the Museo delle Terme (Pl. [16], and Fig. [27]).
The reason why the privilege of erecting portrait statues was given so seldom to Olympic victors was probably not because it was a highly esteemed honor. The real reason seems to have been that portraiture, with its tendency to realism, subordinated beauty to that realism and so conflicted with the Greek artistic ideal. The Thebans had a law which forbade caricature and commanded artists to make their statues more beautiful than the models. The Greeks worshiped beauty and hated ugliness. Many games in Greece were held in honor of personal beauty. Thus a contest of manly beauty among old men (ἀγὼν εὐανδρίας) was a part of the Panathenaic games at Athens.[524] A contest of beauty among women, originating in the time of Kypselos, king of Arkadia, was kept up until the time of Athenæus.[525] We hear of contests of beauty in Elis, at which three prizes were given,[526] and of similar ones on the islands of Tenedos and Lesbos.[527] The Crotonian Philippos, who won at Olympia in an unknown contest about 520 B. C., was honored after his death by the people of Egesta with a heroön and sacrifices because of his beauty.[528] At Tanagra, in Bœotia, the most beautiful ephebe was chosen to carry a ram on his shoulders around the city wall at the festival of Hermes Kriophoros.[529] At Aigion in Achaia the most beautiful boy was anciently chosen to be priest of Zeus.[530] The most beautiful youths among the Spartans and Cretans dedicated offerings to Eros before battle.[531] These and similar examples show the Greek feeling for beauty. The representation of passion and violence was foreign to the spirit of the best Greek art; it was rather the “quiet grandeur” (Stille Groesse) or “repose,” of which Winckelmann made so much, that was characteristic of that art. In Homer both men and gods, when wounded, shriek. Philoktetes, in the drama of Sophokles, wails throughout a whole act, when suffering from a gangrened foot. With the poets Zeus casts his thunderbolt in anger, but Pheidias has him hold it quietly in his hand. So we can see why portrait statues were rare at Olympia, where the representation of manly beauty and vigor was the rule. They were ruled out, not because of their increasing the honor accorded to the victor, but rather because they honored his egotism.[532]
Aniconic Statues.
Accordingly, since only victors who had won three or more contests at Olympia could set up iconic statues, the great majority of statues there represented some ideal type of common applicability, in which there was no attempt to show the individual features of this or that victor, but rather the typical athlete of muscular build. The older statues were merely variations of a few types which were held to be appropriate to the purpose. In process of time these few types in their treatment of details gradually approached truth to nature; this was especially characteristic of the Peloponnesian schools, which adopted the Doryphoros of Polykleitos as their norm of proportions. Statues of victors were the stock subject of the closely related schools of Argos and Sikyon.[533] Doubtless, as E. A. Gardner says,[534] there existed at Olympia itself a school of subordinate artists, who filled the regular demand for victor statues. However, some of these statues, especially those of the fifth and fourth centuries B. C., as we see them in originals and in Roman copies, and read the æsthetic judgments of them in Greek writers, were real works of art.