Chapter III: A Head of Athena From Cyrene

In the first, and, as it was destined to be, the last report on the excavations by the Archæological Institute of America at Cyrene,[35] I published a marble head of Athena which we found a few inches below the surface on the top of the Acropolis.

The spot where it was found afforded no clew to its origin. It came to light in a small room constructed probably in the later Ptolemaic times, and had obviously fallen and been lost to sight, by one of those inexplicable accidents familiar to all excavators, on the spot where our picks discovered it. No temple stood near; no trace of pedestal could be found and no other fragment of marble came from the torn covering of protecting earth to help answer the eager questioning the quiet face aroused. Except for a flake off the hair, the tip of the helmet projecting over the brow, the edge of one ear and the point of the nose, the marble was as fresh as the day the figure was first unveiled to the worshipping multitude. (Plates LX, LXI.)

The perfect head alone is left us to solve the riddles the archæologist and artist may ask. Doubtless when in the oncoming years the Italians have the satisfaction of finishing the work which we inaugurated and made possible, further discoveries will dispel whatever doubts now harass our minds, and students, forgetful of the time and circumstances under which we wrought, will wonder why we hesitated, why we did not see, why the closed lips did not speak to us with as clear a note as to them. Doubtless, but still it seems likely that many years must elapse before others will be able to finish our work, and in the meantime it is well to bring this lovely bit of sculptor’s art more adequately to the attention of students than seemed wise before the hope of continuing the excavation was blighted by the careless hand of war.

Before studying the special characteristics of this head of Athena and showing how, notwithstanding the very numerous representations of the warrior Goddess which we possess, it is entirely individual and unlike any other, we may do well to recall certain facts regarding Cyrene as a centre of Greek life and thought, facts that are not open to question, being proved by historical and other positive evidence. The accounts given by the ancient historians and poets of the foundation and rapid rise to wealth of Cyrene were sufficient to make us certain that the archæologist’s spade would find in plenty those beautiful monuments of a long-since vanished spirit which make the work of the excavator on Greek soil so entrancing and satisfying.

Even at inaccessible Cyrene, however, we were not the first. In the early sixties of the last century, Smith and Porcher, two fine examples of men of English breadth of view combined with well-trained and persistent capacity, had brought to light a considerable number of bits of sculpture which showed clearly that Cyrene, like every other Greek city, had once been a kindly nurse to artists. True though it be that these broken fragments now sheltered in the British Museum were, with the exception of a magnificent bronze head, of second-rate quality, still they dispelled all doubt regarding one very important point; that is, they showed that at Cyrene itself there were large numbers of sculptors whose technical skill was of a high order. That there were numerous sculptors was proved by the fact that the works found by Smith and Porcher embraced a long stretch of years.

At first sight this fact may appear little noteworthy, and its bearing on our Athena head may not be perceived. It takes on a fresh aspect, however, when we realise that there is no marble to be found within hundreds of miles of Cyrene, and, in consequence, the stone must have been imported to the city. It might be suggested that not the marble but the finished carvings were imported, as we know from literary evidence was sometimes done in other parts of the Greek world. Had the English and ourselves found only one or two examples of supreme merit, this theory might be tenable. No one, however, will attempt to uphold it in the face of the numerous busts, statues, bas-reliefs, grave monuments and inscriptions, many of which are of very little importance, which were dug up by the Englishmen and ourselves. Portrait busts alone show that Cyrene had her own sculptors who, even though they lacked the advantage their _confrères_ of many Greek cities had in near-by quarries, managed to overcome the difficulties Nature put in their way and struggled to a mastery of their chosen art. The bearing of this on the Athena will become manifest as we go further into the study of the subject.

If only another Pausanias, one might suggest, had gone sightseeing and note-taking along the surprising shores of Libya, our work of interpretation had been far simpler. But though we are not helped by such written evidence, we can still discover the essential qualities and meanings of these sculptures, and the diggers who in years to come drive our trenches deeper into the ground will find nothing more unexpected than the Athena, for she is the drifted seaweed that proves the still invisible land. In fact, I for one am glad we have no Pausanias to dull the edge of our wits with his bald and often erroneous statements. He has helped much in making it possible to draw up chronological tables and schedules of all sorts regarding the development of Greek sculpture, yet had he never written, the true understanding of the art, the comprehension of the forces that moulded it from the days of its early promising effort through its bloom of unchallenged perfection on to its phosphorescent decay, would have been not less full and possibly even more intelligent than it is to-day. Pausanias and others of his kind have handed down many names which mean, in truth, no more to us than the titles “master this” or “master that” of the mediæval German school of painting. Such facts and data are of infinitely little importance. Even without them the razor-sharp critical powers of a Heinrich Brunn or an Adolf Furtwaengler (before he gave up his energy to acrimonious and petty dispute) were not to be denied and without any fictitious aid of names would have interpreted Greek art to us. That there are always blind souls who, when they see the Hermes of Praxiteles, think it Roman, and consider the Maiden of Anzio a work of the time of the Antonines, and who find other blind souls to follow them, does not delay the Brunns and Furtwaenglers when they make their rare appearance in the world of scholarship.

Thus with no help or suggestion derived from information given us by ancient travellers we start on our study of the Athena with the knowledge that the technique of the art of sculpture was so well understood, and the practice of it so common, at Cyrene, that we need not, unless forced by internal evidence, look elsewhere for the nameless sculptor who carved this masterpiece. The result will show that all the internal evidence is in favour of its Cyrenean origin.

Since, then, sculpture was at Cyrene, as everywhere else in the Greek world, one of the common modes of expression, it remains for us to study the influences to which it was subjected. We meet here the strange phenomenon that the millennial-old civilisation of Egypt exerted apparently no influence whatever on the young Greek town to the west. That towards the end of the latter’s career, when she had fallen under Ptolemaic control, she should be unaffected by Egyptian thought is not surprising, for Egypt herself had at that time submitted to the spell of Greece, and the true Egyptian art must have seemed to the fellahin who then cultivated the Nile valley almost as strange as it does to us. If, however, the often-expressed theory, supposed to be borne out by certain statues found on the Acropolis of Athens and elsewhere, that the archaic sculptors of the Greek mainland were more or less governed by Egyptian ideals, be true, then it is odd that even the most archaic art of Cyrene, represented by statuettes of the sixth century B.C., does not exhibit a similar tendency. But this belief in the Egyptian influence on the artists of Greece is based, it seems to me, on unsound evidence.

There are obviously two, and only two, chief points to consider, if one would fully understand a work of art. One is its outer form, the other what it is trying to express; for even the childish and misdirected efforts of the “Futurists” are an endeavour to express something—how futile these efforts are is shown by the fact that were it not for the titles given the works by the Futurists themselves no one, no matter how capable an artist or how mystical a dreamer, could possibly guess what they were intended to represent. The works show an even greater confusion of mind than that of Father Castel who in the early part of the eighteenth century attempted to make instruments which he called _clavecin des couleurs_ and _clavecin des odeurs_, instruments intended to produce by means of changing colours and perfumes the same effects as music.

Now one thing in very truth Greek art never was, either in poetry, sculpture, painting, or in any other form: it was never confused, but had always perfect lucidity. In sculpture, for instance, the composition of the groups and figures, though often displaying an intricacy almost as great as that of a knot by Leonardo, is never anything but clear to the trained eye. To understand the value of this quality one need only look at the work of Rodin, which, no matter what elements of greatness it may be thought to have, certainly has not one slightest atom of Greek quality. Besides the evil of confusion another failure sculpture may show is the stagnation of formalism. This is one of the most noticeable features of Egyptian art. Notwithstanding the wonderful technical dexterity of the workers in that land, hieratic influences were too strong for them and their natural impulses were shackled by the bonds of dogma. This blight, too, the Greeks avoided. What then is the ground for maintaining that their early art was influenced by Egypt? That the early sculptors may have learnt many technical processes from Egyptians I would neither deny nor affirm. They may even have had Egyptian teachers, just as later the Romans had Grecian ones, but that does not mean that Greek art was of necessity moulded in accordance with Egyptian feelings and ideals.

True it is that there are certain Greek statues which resemble in pose and stiffness certain Egyptian statues, but there is a fundamental difference between the two groups. The pose is an accident and can be duplicated in work from other parts of the world. The fundamental difference is that the stiffness of the Greek work does not represent the formalism of Egypt, but it is due to the awkwardness of inexperience. Take, for instance, the “Aunts” found on the Athenian Acropolis. They are by an unpractised, stiff hand and in that sense they are formal; but they are far more, delightfully spontaneous. Such work would have been inconceivable to an Egyptian and would have seemed to him irreligious and indecent. It is not to be thought that Greek art even in its period of fullest bloom was not formal; it was. It was the wonderful talent of the Greek clearly to understand the laws proper to the various arts, but he was always spontaneous and original, and his work exhibits formality but not formalism.

These qualities are seen in the earliest work found at Cyrene, the terra-cottas already mentioned. That they should be so manifested is but another proof of the amazing force and individuality of the Greek mind. Any other race would almost surely have felt the influence of Egypt. Her territory joined that of Cyrene on the eastern border and the land between the city and the Nile offered no barriers of mountains or desert to hinder easy and comparatively rapid communication, yet the outer form and inner content of these early Cyrenean figures is completely and unmistakably Greek. That traders passed back and forth from one region to the other cannot be doubted. Caravans plodded their slow way from the sacred fountain to the mysterious river, coastwise boats skirted the inhospitable shore even as they do to-day. The Greek, then as now the costermonger of the Mediterranean, made his money, but he kept his individuality. Throughout the centuries, until at last spiritual aloofness was trampled down by a ruder and more powerful race, at Cyrene as completely as at Athens, the Greek maintained his own standards and beliefs. As the clumsy terra-cottas, wrought not very long after the first settlers were guided to the spring which made a great city possible, show this, so also does the Athena. Individual she is, and unique, but she is pure Greek. The reasons for some part of her individuality will become clear as we study her still further.

We see, then, that the Athena is a work expressing with unveiled distinctness the Greek spirit, and also that there is no reason to suppose that the sculptor was other than Cyrenean; it remains to find out at what date the figure was carved. Often a mere fragment like this exhibits some detail that makes it easy to fix the date of its origin with considerable accuracy. In this case the question is complicated by both technical points and general considerations. Had this head been found in Greece itself or in any part of the Greek portion of Asia Minor, the history of which is well known and the art of which has been laid bare by the archæologist, we should have various well-established criteria by which to test and estimate the head. But the definite historical records of Cyrene are very scanty, and though what is probably in general a fairly accurate idea of the development of the city can be built up from the verses of poets, the accounts of historians and other sources of various kinds, still there is little to help us date a single work of art. There is, however, no reason to suppose that the deeper currents which gave the course to the life of Cyrene were very different from those which guided the life of other colonies. Pindar’s odes alone would serve to show that the African city was in pretty constant relation with the mother country. Hence it is safe to assume that the arts developed in Cyrene very much as they did elsewhere in the Greek world.

At the present time surely enough is known of the various parts of that world to make us realise that all advance did not spring from Greece herself. Though the Greek spirit was bound to express itself in similar forms wherever Greeks settled, still sometimes one region, sometimes another, was in the lead. Hence any chronological scale as applied to art must be elastic, and one must not give way to the temptation to judge every new find by the standards set by the artists of Greece herself. Provincialism and archaism often take similar external forms. So, too, it is a general law that colonies develop more rapidly than the country from which they spring. A rapid development may be brought about also by geographical and climatic conditions in places which, at first sight, do not appear to be conducive to the advancement of art.

In years to come it will be proved beyond a doubt, I believe, that Cyrene was such a place. Her distance from the regions in which we are accustomed to think of the Greeks as working out their destiny saved her from the wastage of those wars which it is hard to regret because they have given us immortal pictures of Greek courage and devotion. What her relations with the native powers were we do not yet know, but had they led to any such struggles as made the pride of Athens and the other cities of the mother country, surely some echo would have reached our ears. So we may think of Cyrene as waxing fat from the moment when the first settlers, after their long wanderings to find a habitable spot, climbed the rocky hillsides and quenched their thirst at the spring which with its bright arms still holds a small settlement. It is for these general considerations of easy colonial growth, and freedom from external distractions, that I think the Athena can be safely dated rather earlier than we should be tempted to date her had she been found, let us say, in Athens or Sparta.

The technical point which I mentioned as making it difficult to date the head, is the helmet. It is of the Corinthian type, but there is nothing in its general shape or details of form by which a date can be fixed. Furthermore, it covers the head so completely that only a few waving locks of hair over each ear and the heavy braid resting on the nape of the neck are visible. This concealment of the hair takes away in large measure one of the most helpful methods of dating statuary.

In the case of female figures, nevertheless, the treatment of the hair is less helpful, perhaps, than in statues of the rougher sex because in the former the more severe and orderly dressing of the bound locks gave less chance for individuality of treatment than did the crisp and wind-tossed curls of youths and men; still, even in the women’s figures the hair very often betrays the date of the sculptor. Few though the tresses are which escape the stern covering of Athena’s helmet, they are sufficient to help us in our elusive pursuit. The general method in which the hair is arranged, parted over the brow and drawn closely back above the ears to a knot or short doubled up braid at the back, is one that suffered but little change during several centuries. In the archaic time the locks fell more loosely behind, while in the fourth century they were more knotted, but these slight variations occur now and again throughout the whole period of great Greek art and were due more to individual fancy of artist or model than to the stifling rules of fashion.

But though we must finally conclude that the mode of wearing the hair does not assist us, as the cut of the dress most certainly would have done had we been fortunate enough to find the body of the statue, still the tresses between the temple and the ear have a quality of their own which points to a definite time. They suggest the loose waving form of life with noteworthy success. The sculptor belonged to a period when the special nature of marble was thoroughly understood. The period had passed when bronze and marble were treated in almost identical fashion, and the time had come when sculptors could manage various materials with complete understanding and were enabled to reproduce surfaces or substances in the way best suited to malleable metal or to friable stone.

The most perfect example of this understanding of substance which we possess, and one that has never been surpassed, is the head of Hermes by Praxiteles made in the first half of the fourth century before Christ. The hair of the Athena is handled in much the same way. The locks and strands are not sharply outlined and separated one from another but flow from brow to neck in subtly broken masses among which the light plays in and out as softly as in nature. This naturalistic treatment became common after it had once been arrived at, but the tendency after the end of the fourth century was to try for purer realism. This could not be attained by greater skill in modelling and carving but only by polishing or engraving the surface. The Athena exhibits neither of these signs of decadence but the surface still shows that lovely dusty softness which is characteristic of the best work of the late fifth and early fourth centuries, a softness which would not have been imperceptible and lacking in effect even when the figure was tinted with colour, as, probably, all Greek sculpture was.

It is not only the hair which suggests the date of the early fourth century as the time when the Athena was made. The broad chin, projecting well away from the neck, a chin that would be heavy, were it not for the exquisiteness of its outline, which seems to have the living force of a coiled steel spring, is such as was common in the fifth and early fourth centuries. So, too, are the broad set, wide opened eyes overhung by the long low curve of the brow. Not a sign in these of the sentimentally dreaming eyes with their melting lower lids which we associate with the work of the imitators and followers of Praxiteles; not a trace of the furrowed brow and the eye gleaming, like a live coal, from the deep shadowed socket such as we see in the work of Scopas and the superb masters of Pergamon.

In discussing such a fragment as this Athena it cannot be too clearly remembered that the sculptor, like the poet, does but express his own day, and if Praxiteles was delicate and sentimental or Scopas forceful and passionate, it was because these were characteristic qualities of their periods. These are, furthermore, exactly the qualities one would expect at a time when old standards were beginning to be doubted and the future offered nothing so substantial to take their place.

The same phenomenon is seen in the seventeenth century of our era. In both periods thoughtful people either clung to a sentimental repetition of old ideas which no longer had life-giving and creative force, but were loved and dwelt on for the sake of old association, or else they were driven to a passionate striving after new and dimly seen hopes and ideals. Sentimental dreaming took the place of good hope and assurance while mystical passion took that of intelligent piety. In the face of the Athena there is seen no sign of a troubled spirit, she is calm and steadfast with the strength of perfect self-poise, which could hardly be, were she sprung from a later time than the early fourth century.

It has been insisted that there is in this head no trace of sentimentality, and it may be thought that I have failed to notice, or to give due weight to, the curious pose, drooping over slightly to one side. This is one of the most noticeable points about the head, but, to my mind, it expresses a feeling common in the fifth and early fourth centuries and is not motived in the slightest degree by the later sentimentality. In the old man seated on the ground in the Olympia pediment, in the Mourning Athena at Athens, in most of the grave steles of the late fifth and early fourth centuries, in the portrait bust of Pericles, is to be seen, in the pose and expression of the figures, the expression of a deep sentiment of combined gravity and tenderness. Again and again this sentiment is expressed by the great dramatists in words that ring down the centuries like distant bells. It is the recognition of suffering and sorrow but also of the self-control that meets them undismayed. When the Greeks lost their faith, at the same time they lost this control. In the Demeter of Cnidos and the portrait of Mausolus there are unmistakable signs of lack of control,—in the former the startled pose, and in the latter the look of distress plainly visible in the fine and vigorous face. The Athena resembles the Pericles and the grave steles in this respect. The head leans over as though bent by the wind (a position which emphasises the exquisite shape of the neck), but in the steady, quiet eyes and in the sensitive closed lips one sees plainly that simple directness that distinguished the Greeks of the period to which I attribute this head, from all the other peoples who have inhabited this earth.

I have just mentioned the mouth of the figure, and this is the feature to which I referred before as showing, possibly, the effect of local circumstance on the sculptor. It is a very noticeable mouth; large with unusually full and richly modelled lips—lips that could send the battle cry echoing across the scarred and rock-strewn hills or could whisper like the brook beneath the rosy-plumed oleanders. In shape it is by no means a typical Greek mouth, but has a trace of the fuller form common to the Libyans with whom the Cyreneans were in constant and close intercourse. While it is true that history fails to note a single case of an individual of pure black blood accomplishing anything of note except in a military way, such do often possess great beauty of form and feature, and this fact has been seized upon by the sculptor of the Athena. With great skill he has softened the somewhat savage shape and given it the lines that are consequent upon a higher civilization.

We have come now to the end of our study of this bit of sculpture. It could be compared indefinitely with other heads, and the similarities or differences could be pointed out. Little would result, however, from such comparisons. What is needed is more sculpture from the same region with which to study the Athena. But till this is forthcoming, we are left to the general conclusions derived from this single example. These conclusions are that the Athena was carved by some as yet unknown artist at Cyrene in the first half of the fourth century B.C. and that the work differs from the Greek work we are accustomed to in showing local characteristics both in special features and in method. This may seem to be of small importance and the head to be unworthy so elaborate a discussion; such would be the case were we to think of it merely as an archæological remnant of a forgotten city and time. But this head is more than a mere bit of flotsam. It is not a dead and meaningless fragment, but has still the suggestive and creative power of any true work of art. This vitality and artistic veracity are shown by the extreme clearness with which it illustrates two of the fundamental characteristics of the Greek genius—humanism and directness.

The simplicity and directness of the Greek showed itself in all he did or made. He never attributed human emotions to nature and never bound himself with dogmatic conventions. For these reasons he was never sentimental and never dry or false. He saw ugliness, moral as well as material, in the world around him, but recognising that it in no way added to happiness, he did not wallow in it and proclaim himself a “realist.” When he came to consider religion he was straightforward in his treatment of the Gods as he was with himself. They were but a superior race born from the same great mother Earth (Pindar, Nem. VI. 1). Athena, the Goddess, is but a woman and nothing more. He saw beautiful women in the cities where he dwelt and in form of their physical perfection he represented the bright-eyed Goddess. He sought no imaginary qualities, he attempted to express no hazy, mystical dreams but finding beauty in mankind, he was satisfied to reproduce it so well as might be.

Ordinary everyday life was the chief interest of the thoughtful Greek. He had the same circumstances of existence around him as we have to-day, and knew just as much of the origin or the end of it all. Life, death and the passing show of time were his schoolmasters as they are ours, and from them he learnt humanism. He thought of the world not as a blind accident nor as a mystical promise but merely as the setting for man and hence the conduct of life became his chief interest.

The Greek sought for all means whereby he might avoid the pitfalls of youth, secure the comforts of well-rounded growth and minimise the weaknesses and griefs of old age. To attain this ideal certain things were seen to be necessary, and from Solon, who considered that the man was happy who had health, good fortune, good looks and children, to Aristotle, who (Rhet. 1360 b, 14) gave the same definition in a more amplified form, the ideal did not alter. Even to-day there is but one part of this that seems strange to us. That is the stress laid on personal beauty. Good fortune, health, wisdom, children and particularly wealth go to form the general ideal of the modern world, but there can be only few who would admit that the desire for physical beauty was part and parcel of their ideal. The Greek on the other hand frankly desired it almost more than anything else and showed his perfectly simple and entirely pleasant belief in its value by his games and by many a story which he told as illustrative of enduring truths. One of these tales has a bearing on the Athena of Cyrene. It is that of Peisistratus, who in order to become ruler of Athens came there accompanied by a beautiful woman in regard to whom he told the credulous citizens that she was the Goddess Athena herself.

Thus we see that it is due to no mere partiality for the pleasing form on the part of the unknown sculptor that this head from Cyrene is beautiful, but because his brain and hand were guided by ideals that were second nature to him. As we grow familiar with the head, the loveliness of every feature, the sharp insistence on sweet feminine beauty make one wish destruction might fall on the vague and dreamy and contorted realisms with which many of the modern artists would attract our attention. The calm and steadfast eyes look at us across the centuries and question our mysticism. The straightforward, immediate, perfect humanity gives us pause in our mad search for novelty, and should we conclude that this is perfect art, though we may lose the sympathy of our contemporaries, we shall win the companionship of those whose laurels are immortal.

GIORGIONE

_Although in the following Study of Giorgione I express certain conclusions which seem to me certain, it is nevertheless probable that there will never be absolute agreement about his works. The indubitable facts concerning him are so very few that no two critics can be expected to see the matter eye to eye. I disagree in many points with the pathbreakers Morelli and Berenson, but it should not be forgotten that the knowledge of such men gives an added keenness to the innate powers of perception of those who come after them. Their torch lights ours, and so the path is pursued._

_The publication of Justi’s valuable work on Giorgione (Berlin, 1908), in which all the pictures still in existence that have bearing on Giorgione are reproduced, makes full illustration of this Study quite unnecessary._