Excursions in Art and Letters

by William Wetmore Story

There remains, then, the Aphrodite Urania. Pausanias is the sole authority for considering this statue the work of Phidias; and as, being in marble, it would be the only one ascribed to him upon which there are not either the gravest doubts as to his authorship or the clearest indications that he was not the author, we should accept it with caution. Can we trust Pausanias? He certainly does not agree with other writers as to the authorship of various statues. The statue of Athena at Elis, attributed by him to Phidias, Pliny says is by Kolotes. The Mother of the Gods, said by him to be a work of Phidias, is, according to Pliny, the work of Agoracritos. The Æsculapius at Epidaurus, given by him to Thrasymedes, is given by Athenagoras to Phidias. In respect of the Nemesis, he is clearly mistaken. Pausanias wrote long after Pliny, when facts were still more obscured by time. Tradition changes names; transmutes facts, and tends always to give great names to nameless works. He was a traveler in Greece in the age of Marcus Aurelius, when the arts, even in Rome, were in their decline; and he only reports what he sees and hears. He does not pretend to be a critic or a connoisseur in art. He was not one; and his accounts of the great statues in Greece are singularly dry and meagre. He would naturally be told who was the author of this, that, and the other statue that he saw; and he seems to have taken common report without a question, just as a traveler in Rome without particular knowledge or interest in art would accept the authorship of the Colossi in the Quirinal, and without hesitation follow the tradition and ascribe them in his book to Phidias and Praxiteles. If he were always accurate in these matters, or if he had ever shown any critical doubts about the authorship of any work, a statement by him on such a subject would be entitled to more consideration; but as it is, in view of the facts that no other author before him has ascribed the Aphrodite Urania to Phidias, and that if it be by him it is his only marble work of which we have any clear testimony, little faith can be placed in the statement by Pausanias. Add to this that no contemporary of Phidias, and no writer anywhere near his age, has ever spoken of any marble work of his, and I think we must reject this statue as we have rejected the others.

In estimating the value of any such statements as to the authorship of statues, we must keep in mind the fact that it was not only not the custom for the ancient Greek sculptors to inscribe their names on their own statues, but it was not ordinarily permitted to them to do so on any public work; and undoubtedly it was for this reason that Phidias himself made his own likeness as well as the portrait of Pericles on the shield of the Athena, to indicate that the work was done by him while Pericles had the administration of affairs at Athens. In the same way Batrachus and Saurus, two Lacedæmonian artists who built the temples inclosed in the Portico of Octavia, being prohibited from inscribing their names on the walls, adopted the device of sculpturing on the spirals of the columns a lizard and a frog, which their names signified,—thus punning in marble, to perpetuate their names as architects of the temples. So also Myron is said to have inscribed his name on the thigh of his Discobolos in such minute characters as to be visible only on the closest inspection. In the case of some of the great statues, the names of the authors were exceptionally allowed to be inscribed after their deaths; and this was probably the case with the Zeus of Phidias. Ordinarily no such practice was permitted. Such being the case, the authorship of Greek statues at the time of Pausanias would rest entirely upon tradition—and tradition is little to be trusted.

Besides, what adds to the difficulty is that it was the custom in later times to put the names of ancient sculptors on works not made by them, to give them a higher value; it is of this practice that Phædrus speaks in one of his Fables:—

“Æsopi nomen sicubi interposuero
Cui reddidi jampridem quidquid debui
Auctoritatis esse scito gratia;
Ut quidem artifices nostro faciunt sæculo
Qui pretium operibus majus inveniunt, novo
Si marmore adscripsere Praxitelem suo
Trito Myronem argento.”

Of the statues which now exist, there are only some thirty on which names are inscribed, and these are certainly for the most part, if not entirely, apocryphal. The name of Phidias, together with that of Ammonius, for instance, appears on a monkey in basalt in the Capitol at Rome; that of Praxiteles on a draped figure in the Louvre; and that of Lysippus on a marble Hercules in the Pitti Gallery at Florence—not one of which is of the least value as a work of art. So, on the torso of the Belvidere is the name of Apollonius; on the Farnese Hercules that of Glycon; on the Gladiator of the Louvre that of Agasias the Ephesian, son of Dositheos—though these names are not mentioned by any writers of antiquity. No authority can be granted to these inscriptions, and possibly the very fact that these names are on the statues is an indication that they are copies; all have ἐποίει. D’Hancarville and Dallaway make a distinction between ἐποίει and ἐποίησεν,—the former, according to them, signifying a copy, and the latter an original work. On the Nemesis at Rhamnus was the inscription, ΑΓΟΡΑΚΡΙΤΟΣ ΠΑΡΙΟΣ ΕΠΟΙΗΣΕΝ; and this would seem to confirm their notion. On the Zeus of Phidias, also, was the inscription, ΦΕΙΔΙΑΣ ΧΑΡΜΙΔΟΥ ΥΙΟΣ ΑΘΗΝΑΙΟΣ Μ’ ΕΠΟΙΗΣΕΝ.

I do not recall, however, a single statue which has come down to us on which the word ἐποίησεν occurs, except an interesting and coarsely executed relief in the British Museum, representing the deification of Homer. Where there is any inscription it is ἐποίει; but it is an exceedingly rare exception that any ancient statue has a name inscribed on it. Almost all, if not all, the statues having names of the artists are of a late date, and probably most of them as late as the time of Hadrian. It was he who revived the art of sculpture; and during his reign a great number of copies, more or less good, were made of the famous statues of antiquity; but unfortunately there has not come down to us a single accredited statue by any of the great sculptors of antiquity.

There are only two other authorities, so far as I am aware, who mention or make any allusion to marble work by Phidias; these must be considered. Seneca, nearly five hundred years after the death of Phidias, says of him, “Not only did Phidias know how to make a statue in ivory, but he also made them in bronze.” Thus far he speaks absolutely; he then continues hypothetically, “If you had given him marble, or even a viler material, he would have made the best thing out of it that could be made.”[7] This is considered by the author of the work on the Elgin and Phigaleian Marbles an important statement in confirmation of Pliny. In reality it contains nothing but a simple hypothetical expression of belief that if you had given Phidias a piece of marble he would have made something excellent out of it. Does any one doubt this? Seneca states as a fact only that Phidias really did work in ivory and bronze; and it is plain that he knew no work of Phidias in marble, or he never would have expressed a purely hypothetical opinion on such a matter.

The other authority which has been evoked in favor of the theory that Phidias worked in marble is that of Valerius Maximus, who states that there existed a tradition that he desired to execute the Athena of the Parthenon in marble, but that the Athenians would not permit him to do so: “Iidem Phidiam tulerunt quamdiu is marmore potius quam ebore Minervam fieri debere dicebat, quod diutius nitor esset mansurus; sed ut adjecit et vilius tacere jusserunt.” (Lib. i. c. i., Externa 7.)

There is no authority for this tradition. It comes up five hundred years after the death of Phidias, and is manifestly absurd. Phidias had identified himself and his fame with his great chryselephantine and bronze works. He knew too well his own power, and his mastery over these arts, to wish to make the Athena in any other material than that in which it was made. But suppose he did so advise the Athenians, his advice was not accepted. The statue was not made of marble. Perhaps also he proposed to them to give it to Alcamenes, Agoracritos, or Polyclitus. What sort of value can be given to a statement like this appearing suddenly and solely in one writer five hundred years after the Athena was made? If we are to accept such traditions as this, we may as well “gape and swallow” any gobemouche. Let us have at once a life of Shakespeare written in Leipzig, or any other foreign country at least as far away as that.

This is all the testimony we have as to any work by Phidias in marble. Has it any real weight? But grant all these statements, vague and visionary as they are, to their fullest extent, what do they prove? Not that Phidias was especially a marble-worker, but only that he made, exceptionally, one or two statues in marble, and was supposed by some writers five hundred years after his death, to have had a connection with two more, though other testimony, and the facts and dates, clearly show that he could not have made them, or at least throw the very gravest doubts upon his having done so. In this way, we might assert that Raffaelle was a sculptor, because he is supposed to have made, or helped to make, the statue of Jonah in the Santa Maria del Popolo at Rome. But to jump from such shaky facts to the statement and belief that Phidias was the author, or at all events the designer, of all the marble figures in the pediment, theme topes, and the frieze of the Parthenon, is truly “a long cry.” Where is the ground on which such a belief can be founded? There is not a statement or even an allusion by any ancient writer to justify it. The testimony of Plutarch, so far as it goes, is directly opposed to it, and all the known facts are in contradiction of it.