Chapter VIII: Greek Art (2)

Struggle into existence, growth and development, acme and decline, follow in rapid succession. Wood-carvers and potters begin; then we have a transition to bronze-works under _Glaukos_, who was the first to solder the separate parts of the statues, which prior to him had been always beaten into union. Following up this improvement, the artists of Samos succeeded in making a clay-model, and then in covering it with the fluid metal. As if by a supernatural charm the bright metal statue grew out of the gloomy clay, and formed an everlasting monument to adorn temples, squares, and streets. _Rhœkos_ and _Theodorus_ of Samos, with _Smilis_, built the Labyrinth at Lemnos, which they adorned with 150 columns, which were turned out by an ingenious mechanism, an improvement on the art of casting in bronze. Pliny describes a bronze figure by _Theodorus_, which held in its right hand a file, and in its left a quadriga with a charioteer, which was so small that the car, with the four horses and the driver, could be covered by the wing of a fly. The celebrated ring of Polykrates, admirably wrought gold and silver sacrificial vessels, and a vine with golden leaves and grapes of precious stones, were also attributed to this artist. At Chios, the birth-place of Glaukos, the family of _Mêlas_ worked for the first time in Parian marble; whilst _Byzes_ of Naxos cut marble into thin slabs for architectural purposes, giving a more exquisite finish to the houses of the gods. On every side a marked improvement took place. The head-dress of Apollo was still that of the Egyptian sphinx. The faces of the statues were placid, mask-like, as if modelled separately and then fixed on; the eyes looked as if first cut out, and then placed into their sockets; but the anatomy of the body was treated with greater care and a more refined feeling. The legs were close together and the arms hung down perpendicularly, with a prescribed stiffness, but there were details in the treatment of the stone surface, which promised well for the future of Greek art, and the promise was most faithfully kept.

The struggling art freed itself from the fetters of stern canons. Custom, struck by the lightning of genius, had to vanish, and life, truth, and beauty as essential elements ruled the Greek mind. To blend the isolated perfections of the two sexes into one became the aim of Greek art. Women were sculptured with the colder lines of manly firmness, and men received gentler forms through a less angular treatment. The artists conscientiously purified their works from all passions and second thoughts, expressing nothing that could divert the mind from the simple admiration of idealised nature. At this period they only succeeded in animating the limbs of their statues: action was expressed with great power in strained muscles and swelling veins. The faces were still without life, and without a comprehension of those emotions which vibrate electrically in the countenances of excited humanity. They could not yet petrify the thinking soul, but they undoubtedly already succeeded in sculpturing the animated body to perfection.

The _second_ period was ushered in by the versatile and productive talents of Onatas, Ageladas, Kalamis, Iphikrates, Pythagoras of Regium, and Myron. Greece had attained her independence, the Persian hordes of despotism were vanquished, and Athens enjoyed her hegemony. Freedom and national exultation produced Sokrates, Plato, and Anaxagoras in philosophy; Kimon, Perikles, and Themistokles in politics; Æschylus, Sophokles, and Euripides in dramatic poetry; and Pheidias, Praxiteles, and Skopas in sculpture. If we add to this fourfold triad Herodotus, Thukydides, and Xenophon, we have given an array of names each of which singly would have filled the world with its fame, and become a landmark in the progressive development of humanity. Athens was at this period the most brilliant centre of intellectual and artistic life. Men were inspired by the general animation; they began to modify old thoughts, to transform eîdola, and to give birth to numberless productions which in beauty and striving for truth surpassed anything attempted before. Schools of arts vied with the schools of wrestlers, poets, and thinkers, and all excited the dramatists to their grand conceptions, which again reacted on plastic art. Under these influences the imaginary theogony yielded to a more scientific inquiry into the origin of all things, which led to the recognition of the first incomprehensible, immutable, eternal cause, no longer based on mere belief, but on the immovable rock of scientific conviction. No wonder that art was also inspired by this spiritual movement. The conceptions of the priests and philosophers were to be loudly proclaimed in visible forms, and the sculptor, from a deep feeling of veneration for the Supreme Artist of the Universe, became the expounder of the divinity, and the exclusive high priest of beauty and truth. Instead of singing Vedantic hymns or Egyptian psalms and litanies to the glory of God, the Greek sculptors hewed the gods in majestic forms, and every touch of their chisels on the lifeless marble, every blow of their hammers, became an eternally resounding prayer in honour of God.

Wood, metal, clay, precious stones, and marble had by degrees yielded to the creative power of the Greek masters; and matter could no longer resist in any way their ruling intellectual force. At this moment, under these circumstances, Pheidias, the son of Charmides of Athens, the pupil of Hegias and Ageladas, stepped forward, and was raised by the superiority of his genius to the dignity of king of Greek plastic art. The Zeus of Olympia and the Athene of the Parthenon qualified Pheidias as _the_ sculptor of the concrete _form_ of the divinity; for if the father of the gods had had a visible form, and his wisdom and intellect had been incarnate in Athene, both must have looked as they were sculptured by Pheidias. In symbolic emblems he poetically expressed the powers of the two divinities; and used the mineral, the vegetable, and animal kingdoms to glorify their power.

Nothing is left us of these two master-pieces but the glowing descriptions of those who saw and admired them. That which a combination of thousands of our artists, with all our technical advancement, can scarcely accomplish; the drawing of thousands and thousands of _intellectual_ human beings together to admire their works of art; was done by Pheidias. Men flocked from all parts of the world to see and admire his statues, and to offer fervent thanks to the Father of all for having endowed one of his creatures with the power to give a correct form to Homer’s lines:

He (Zeus) spoke, and awful bends his sable brows;
Shakes his ambrosial curls and gives the nod,
The stamp of fate, and sanction of the god;
High heaven with trembling the dread signal took,
And all Olympus to the centre shook.

We possess in the Vatican a copy of the original head of the Jupiter, and what a master-piece even this _bad_ copy is! What a power in the bold, arched brows; the large eyes with their benevolent, forgiving, and yet commanding glance; the full, parted lips ready to bless and to forgive; the luxuriant beard, the mighty locks inspiring veneration, and the beautifully-rounded cheeks, expressive of creative force and eternal manly beauty! The independent works of Pheidias were very numerous. Besides the two colossal divinities of bronze (Athene Promachos, 50 feet high, and Athene ἡ Λημνία {hê Lêmnia}), we find twelve others mentioned: of these, six were statues of Athene; one colossal Apollo of bronze, 70 feet high; one marble Hermes; three of Aphrodite (two of marble, and one of ivory and gold); a mother of the gods, material unknown; and an Asklepios (Æsculapius) of gold and ivory. Of sacrificial statues, a group of thirteen bronze figures, in commemoration of the victory of Marathon, is mentioned as having been executed by him. In this work twelve mythical characters surrounded _one_ historical figure--that of Miltiades; a proof that the Greeks attributed their victory far more to the help of the gods than to the exertions of their leaders. They were much more inclined to adorn the courts of their temples and their public places with the statues of orators, wrestlers, poets, artists, and philosophers, than with those of men who, in defending their country against invading hordes of barbarians, did their duty and nothing more. What a scope for our artists if we were to adorn our town-halls, courts of justice, our museums, universities, academies, public places, and churches with the statues of those who had devoted their energies to religion, oratory, science, art, politics, and the general welfare of their country! If gratitude were to prompt us to do this, and not childish vanity or egotistical pride, we should shortly have many Pantheons with excellent sculptures.

In no town in Europe can the artist study the sculptural splendour of ancient Greece with greater ease than in London. Of the ninety-two metopes which adorned the Parthenon on the Akropolis at Athens we possess seventeen; of the frieze of the cella 3-1/5 feet high and 524 feet long, representing the Panathenaic procession, we possess fifty-three plates and casts of the whole western side. In all these sculptures what a clear power of grouping, what a variety of characters, what handsome men and women! The flower of Athens is seen assembled to do homage in joyous excitement to the supreme divinity of the State, the embodiment of wisdom and intellect. Some are crowned with wreaths; others carry sun-shades, chairs, splendid pitchers, ornamented vases, or decorated pateras; some are ready to start; others, preparing in animated haste to take their places, are in the act of mounting their prancing horses, or, already mounted, eagerly await the arrival of their friends. On the eastern side, under the entrance to the temple, there was an admirable group of gods and goddesses, in whose presence _peplus_, or sacred veil, is delivered to the authorities of the temple; animals are led to be sacrificed--flute and kythara-players follow. Amongst the hundreds and hundreds of figures not one is like the other; the exquisite variety in the folds of the dresses of the sitting, standing, walking, riding, driving groups is in general unsurpassed for beauty of design, and perfection of execution. None of the figures are raised more than _three_ inches from the background, and yet the most correct perspective is observed. There is such a softness and truthfulness, such a firmness and ideal vitality in this frieze, that we may at least attribute the composition to Pheidias himself. Some plates of the western side are less excellent in execution; the forms are marked with roughness and dryness, and some faults in the outlines are also apparent to the critic. Some of the horses have legs too long, and bodies too thin; in one of the horses, which is bending its neck to rub its head against one of its fore feet, the curves are much too stiff. The execution of these reliefs must have been left to some inferior artist. What we must admire is, that there are so few faults. The correct study of this frieze ought to serve us as an example in grouping, and would teach us how to arrange a marble strip round some monument for the sake of decoration. Little of this influence, however, is to be observed in our sculptors. We intend to evolve sculpture from our own inner consciousness, and neglect these ancient books with their glorious poems in Pentelic marble; we prefer ‘_going to nature_’ as the popular phrase runs, and ignore or despise the study of the antique. Now the Greeks had an opportunity of going to real nature--not with the darkened eye of Asiatic prejudice, despising matter and exalting _spirit_--but with a prejudice in the very opposite direction, cultivating spirit only so far as it served to embellish and to reproduce form. In this they attained perfection, and to surpass them in sculpture is after all impossible; we can only try to equal them, and to learn from what they have left us, to produce other combinations. In this spirit we ought to study the nine figures from the eastern pediment of the Parthenon, in the British Museum. What forms, what exquisite drapery! The finest tissue of pliable stuff is reproduced in hard Pentelic marble. The drapery disguises, and at the same time reveals, the beautiful forms of the human frame. Softness and sensationalism were equally avoided by Pheidias and his school. The study of anatomy was not yet degraded to coarse realism. It was not yet the aim of Greek sculptors to distort the human body so as to exhibit expanded muscles, over-strained sinews, and swelling veins, as expressions of pain, grief, distress, or contortions of the death-agony. Anatomy served Pheidias as a mould, into which he poured his beautiful conceptions--the spiritualised forms of gods and men. Katharsis was the principle of his school. The very heights of perfection were reached by Pheidias, Polykletus, and Alkemenes. Gods and goddesses were the subjects of their chisels. They were not only the high-priests of art--but inspired prophets, to whom divine beauty was revealed in all its brightness and splendour.

The existence of the Greek State was suddenly shaken to its very foundation. Internal dissensions weakened the safety of the citizens; sophistry destroyed philosophy, and mannerism grasped Greek art, dragged it down from its heights of idealised beauty and hurled it into the abyss of sensational realism. The best specimen of this school is the frieze from the temple of Apollo at Bassæ, near Phigalia in Arkadia. (Found 1812, now in the British Museum.) It represents Kentaurs fighting with Amazons. The old Indian Ghandarvas, the moist and heavy clouds that hinder the sun from breaking forth in all his glory, and are conquered by his fiery shafts, became in time monsters, half-men, half-horses, fighting against loveliness and civilisation. The Amazons in this instance represent fair Greece rushing into civil strife. Passion is predominant in action and expression. Amazons are dragged by the hair and by the legs from their horses; a Kentaur is seen biting a warrior in the shoulder. Bold naturalism and vulgar realism go hand-in-hand in these sculptures. How sensitive art is--how faithfully it reflects the social condition of a nation! and the feelings by which the artists were pervaded may be studied in this frieze. The nude is treated with exquisite truthfulness, but there is heaviness in the sudden, too violent movements. Action and expression lose the balance of the symmetrical. The women are common; their drapery floating and yet stiff, deranged for the sake of effect. The artists worked no more with love and security. The political party spirit troubled their imagination. The chisel trembled with rage or fear, with hatred or passion, in their hands; they saw prophetically the national downfall of their country, and with it science, art, poetry, and philosophy were to be rendered for thousands of years houseless and homeless.

Once more art revived under Skopas, Praxiteles, and Lysippus, but in a totally different shape. Greece had lost through her civil war the proper balance between her moral and intellectual forces. Simplicity and refinement of thought had vanished. In literature metaphors prevailed; in politics Aristides had to yield to the double-tongued Alkibiades; in tragedy Sophokles was superseded by Euripides; in sculpture the immortal Pheidias was followed by Praxiteles. The national spirit of the Greeks, inspired by common interests, swayed by the very highest aspirations in arts and sciences, suddenly collapsed into a narrow-minded, particularising egotism. Tribes cared only for tribes, parties for parties. The public buildings began to be neglected, whilst the private dwellings gained in ornamentation and comfort, what was denied to the grand national enterprises. The public places were no longer adorned with the statues of those who had gained the general approbation of the masses. The artist, doubtful whom to please, tried to please everyone, or to satisfy the individual fancy of a paying patron. Art was no more the chaste virgin sacrificing to beauty, but became a courtesan seeking general and special favour at all hazards. The divinities were no more the representations of a spiritual eîdolon, but a glowing sentiment of sensual love was poured over their frames; they were no longer ideal conceptions in marble, but beautiful flesh forms in stone or bronze. They lost all generalisation, they were more correct in the anatomical outlines, but a passionate sentiment of sensuality thrilled through every point. Kephisodotus (the elder), probably the father of Praxiteles, embodied the change in Greek thought in a beautiful group. Eirene (peace) fondles the child Pluton (riches)--a splendid allegorical representation of the political condition of Greece at this time. ‘Let us put an end to our quarrels; let us have peace, and enjoy life once more.’

Skopas, born on the island of Paros, expressed the modern flow of ideas in Greece with greater clearness. Violent scenes of deadly struggle filled the pediments of the temple of Athene Alea at Tegea. In front, the hunt of the Kalydonian boar by Herakles, at the back Achilles fighting with Telephos was represented. An under-current of thought, a kind of allegory, may be traced in this composition, for the boar to be hunted was the opposition. Art was no longer to exalt the mind unconditionally, but to fulfil another purpose--to irritate, to excite to hatred, and to arouse passion; thus placed, art must lose its civilising influence, and it did this step by step. Even the divinities sculptured by Skopas were not to inspire veneration, but to please by little allegorical additions; his Apollo (Smintheus) stood on a mouse; Apollo, the leader of the muses, the representative of vivifying light in art, science, and the universe, degraded to a beautiful ‘_mouse-killer_.’ Aphrodite, the mother of humanity, was sculptured sitting on a goat--the vilest emblem of passion in union with the purest eîdolon of tender love. Another Apollo was represented in the long waving robes of an elegant Grecian lady playing the lyre; this was still more objectionable. Though the drapery excites our admiration by its exquisite softness and finish, the statue appears to have been chiselled to show the artist’s skill in carving a heap of waving drapery. Whenever art condescends to such tricks it is on the high-road to degradation. Skopas composed a splendid group for a pediment, representing Achilles receiving from his mother the arms forged by Hephaistos. The principal figures are Thetis, the queen of the bright green waves, Poseidon, and Achilles; they are surrounded by a crowd of Nereids and Tritons, all in harmonious arrangement. Richer in grouping are some marble reliefs (now in the Glyptothek at Münich), representing the wedding of Poseidon and Amphitrite. The mother of the bride, Doris, is seated on a Hippokamp (sea-horse), holding two torches towards the couple; Tritons play on shells and lyres a merry wedding tune. Nereids surround them. One rides on a sea-bull, led by a mischievous-looking Eros, standing on its left fore-foot; another, mounted on a fantastic sea-monster, is accompanied by another, borne by a Triton; other Nereids follow, pointing towards the principal group, one sitting on a Hippokamp, with an Eros on its curled tail; a dragon carrying a Nereid is led with self-conscious pride by another Eros, whilst a Triton carries another sea-nymph on his winding body with placid and contented looks. The composition in general, and in all its details, is perfect. Without over-crowding the allotted space, it could not be better filled up. There is a striking freedom in the lines, and lively contrast of forms. We may consider this relief the prototype of all those fantastic compositions of the pure renaissance style, in which we see dragons and monsters, bulls and horses, entwined with plants and flowers, nymphs and gods, everything real and imaginary, beautiful and graceful, united into one great dissonant harmony. Skopas was the first (so far as we know) who sculptured Venus in the full beauty of her nude body. Pheidias would have considered such a treatment of the mother of mankind blasphemy. In a group of Eros, Himeros, and Pothos (Love, Longing, and Desire), we find a classification of a general feeling into three distinct subdivisions, executed with conscious discernment in order to produce a sensational effect. A raving Bacchante appears to rush away with dishevelled hair, in flowing robes; the head is thrown backwards in delirious delight; the marble lives and breathes maddening joy, but is vivified with sensual feelings, and not inspired with the elevating spirit of artistic simplicity and purity.

Of this period we may study another master-piece in the British Museum; the frieze of the tomb of Mausolos at Halikarnassus. The greater part is in London and the remainder at Genoa. The subject is a battle between Greeks and Amazons. The composition is nearly as good as that on the Parthenon. There is a continuous symmetrical stream of action and reaction, as in the dashing waves of a stormy sea. _Skopas_ worked the eastern, _Bryaxis_ the northern, _Timeotheos_ the southern, and _Leochares_ the western side. Many mistakes may be found in the details, but the whole is a master-piece of manly thought;--it may be said to have been the _last manly_ product of the period.

_Praxiteles_ altogether turned the scale; Aphrodite, Demeter, Persephone, Flora, Eros, Dionysius, and Apollo, are the divinities mostly sculptured by him. Everything is smooth, young, and effeminate. All harshness of line is avoided, all loftier ideas discarded. The flesh become stone is placed before us in charming and full roundness. Aphrodite was no longer draped--but with the concealing drapery the higher conception of the divinity fled. Venus, conscious of her charms, with a smile on her lips, and a coquettish movement of her hand, sinks to the level of an every-day woman. Venus had eaten of the tree of knowledge; with the consciousness of her particular womanly charms the ideal of divine universality was gone.

We possess of Praxiteles, an Eros in the Vatican, and his celebrated Apollo with the lizard (Saurokthonos) in the Louvre. Both these statues are more women than men. The lines are too soft; the bodies as though without muscles or bones, composed only of flesh and fat. It is true that the older artists also softened down the too marked lines of the sexes, and in blending them together created ideal forms of beauty; but now the mere surface of the woman’s body was used for both sexes, to affect the senses exclusively.

Three groups (the one probably for the pediment of a temple, the other two forming independent works of art) deserve special mention.

The group of Niobe and her dying children, attributed to Skopas or Praxiteles. Greece was fast sinking. _Niobe-Greece_ sees her children struck down one after the other by the inexorable decree of the gods, who are bent on punishing the _proud mother_ who only cared for the _outward_ beauty of her children, and neglected their moral _inner_ grandeur. Niobe, amidst a harmonious confusion of misery and endless woe, stands erect, and presses the youngest child to herself, turning her proud looks upwards, her eyes filled with tears of heroic resignation--for she knows the gods have willed her downfall, and their will is unalterable. This moment of agony, of mental rather than bodily suffering, makes the group a master-piece of antique beauty and grandeur.

This cannot be said of the sensational Laokoön, the joint work of Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydoros (of which there is a copy in the Vatican), and the so-called ‘Farnese Bull,’ the joint work of Apollonios and Tauriskos (a copy of which exists in the museum at Naples). Bodily anguish is the dominating element in these two groups. If it were the province of art to depress the soul, and to fill us with pain and horror, nothing could surpass the technical skill with which these two are arranged.

In the first we have:--

1. In the father a stifled _death scream_.

2. In the younger son, to the right, the last _convulsions_ of a dying boy.

3. In the elder son, to the left, an unbounded _horror_ at witnessing the frightful death of father and brother.

There is no psychological necessity in this group to indemnify us for the pathological and anatomical truthfulness of so great an amount of horrible suffering. Art has never to serve as a hospital ward, and to force us to witness the contortions of a poor family dying poisoned by strychnine or arsenic. Not less objectionable is the revenge of a mother and her two sons on a defenceless woman. In this group we have:--

1. The horror-stricken, half-dying, half-imploring look of poor Dirkê.

2. The merciless glance of the jealous Antiope, wrapt in placid satisfaction to see herself revenged on her rival.

3. The ferocious anger of the two passionate sons; and, lastly,

4. The wild look of the furious bull, ready to dash the beautiful frame of a frail woman to pieces. Dramatic justice is here meted out by the artist in a most revolting way. A bull is called in to help to punish; it is the vulgarity of the cruel revenge that degrades the technically masterly work of art. The free grouping of marble statues is one of the most difficult tasks, and was never attempted during the classic period of ancient art. A mixture of men and animals is even more to be avoided.

As soon as the gods of Egypt changed their architectural and monumental position, they lost their sway over the superstitious masses; as soon as the Greeks lost that balance of morality, which, in the form of the beautiful, regulated their life, science, and art, they lost at the same time their productive power. Form and idea as in Asia came into conflict; the _formal_ had attained the extreme of perfection, and the new _ideas_ had not yet ripened.

Art was either to touch the feelings or to speak to reason--it was to be based on a mere imitation of nature, or to be the expression of some thought in some form. This ‘either,’--‘or,’--or this ‘neither,’--‘nor,’ which divided art-critics during this period, made an end of art altogether. The Asiatics rent the universe asunder with conflicting abstractions based on the phenomena of nature; the Greeks lost their power, when they once recognised that there was something higher than the mere _form_. A new sphere was felt to open new spiritual beauties--but this sphere was to be attained through totally different means. The formal was however so highly developed by the Greeks that we shall see the new spirit, after more than a thousand years, become incarnate in those forms.

We see then clearly that art, the product of the creative force of men, requires a certain moral and intellectual condition, under which alone it can actively live. Change the moral temperature through the superstitions of a terrified populace, the aspect of nature, the despotic organisation of government, or the rule of a wild, uneducated mob, and the artistic force will also change or die out altogether. The artist acts only to a certain degree on the public; the public reacts with a greater combined _vis inertiæ_ on the artist, who is merely the reflection of certain ideas floating in the intellectual atmosphere around him. Is a man who sees nothing but emaciated, beggarly, or sanctimonious faces, thin limbs, hungry looks, dwellings bare of all domestic comfort, decayed brick-houses and crumbling walls, to paint convivial scenes of happiness and joy? Or let him change this atmosphere and live in a sphere of so-called respectability; having always the same bland smile before him, the same trimmed whiskers, the same business-like self-contentment, the same stiff collars and cuffs; hearing the same stereotyped, insignificant phrases about the weather or the funds, the price of coals or meat--will he, influenced by such an atmosphere, not draw or paint only caricatures, and never grand and heart-stirring historical paintings, recording in glowing colours scenes full of life, excitement, passion, and dramatic action? In such surroundings it is necessary for an artist to create for himself a world of his own--an intellectual world--by turning to the glorious records of the past, and devoting every spare hour to the study of the ancients and the reading of history. His imagination, deadened by reality, must be fed and nourished by the poets, poetry, works of art, and historical facts of the past. Our meagreness and poverty in artistic productions take their origin in our unpardonable neglect of the study of history; through this neglect we have deprived art altogether of its firmest basis.

The very moment that the Greek artists lost their historical and poetical ground, they took to and excelled in painting barbers’ and shoemakers’ shops; oyster shells, vases, little combinations of chairs and musical instruments, and small things, with great accuracy. In fact the same causes produced the same pictorial effects; the mind of the Greek nation had dwindled, and their works of art embraced decorations of household furniture and pottery. In these ornamentations the reminiscences of a by-gone age may be traced; they are still symmetrical to the highest degree, plants are still treated with great conventional freedom, but the Greeks only worked as skilful workmen--artists they produced no more.