When we compare poet and painter in particular instances, we should be
careful to inquire whether both have had entire freedom, and been
allowed to labor for the highest results of their art without the
exercise of any constraint from without.
Religion often exercised such constraint upon the old artists. A work,
devotional in character, must often be less perfect than one intended
solely to produce pleasure. Superstition loaded the gods with symbols
which were not always reverenced in proportion to their beauty.
In the temple of Bacchus at Lemnos, from which the pious Hypsipyle
rescued her father under the guise of the deity,[65] the god was
represented horned. So he doubtless appeared in all his temples, the
horns being symbols typical of his nature and functions. The unfettered
artist, whose Bacchus was not designed for a temple, omitted the symbol.
If, among the statues of the god that remain to us, we find none with
horns,[66] that circumstance perhaps proves that none of them were
sacred statues, representing the god in the shape under which he was
worshipped. We should naturally expect, too, that against such the fury
of the pious iconoclasts in the first centuries of Christianity would
have been especially directed. Only here and there a work of art was
spared, because it had never been desecrated by being made an object of
worship.
But since, among the antiques that have been unburied, there are
specimens of both kinds, we should discriminate and call only those
works of art which are the handiwork of the artist, purely as artist,
those where he has been able to make beauty his first and last object.
All the rest, all that show an evident religious tendency, are unworthy
to be called works of art. In them Art was not working for her own sake,
but was simply the tool of Religion, having symbolic representations
forced upon her with more regard to their significance than their
beauty. By this I do not mean to deny that religion often sacrificed
meaning to beauty, or so far ceased to emphasize it, out of regard for
art and the finer taste of the age, that beauty seemed to have been the
sole end in view.
If we make no such distinction, there will be perpetual strife between
connoisseurs and antiquarians from their failure to understand each
other. When the connoisseur maintains, according to his conception of
the end and aim of art, that certain things never could have been made
by one of the old artists, meaning never by one working as artist from
his own impulse, the antiquarian will understand him to say that they
could never have been fashioned by the artist, as workman, under the
influence of religion or any other power outside the domain of art. He
will therefore think to confute his antagonist by showing some figure
which the connoisseur, without hesitation, but to the great vexation of
the learned world, will condemn back to the rubbish from which it had
been dug.[67]
But there is danger, on the other hand, of exaggerating the influence of
religion on art. Spence furnishes a remarkable instance of this. He
found in Ovid that Vesta was not worshipped in her temple under any
human image, and he thence drew the conclusion that there had never been
any statues of the goddess. What had passed for such must be statues,
not of Vesta, but of a vestal virgin.[68] An extraordinary conclusion!
Because the goddess was worshipped in one of her temples under the
symbol of fire, did artists therefore lose all right to personify after
their fashion a being to whom the poets give distinct personality,
making her the daughter of Saturn and Ops, bringing her into danger of
falling under the ill treatment of Priapus, and narrating yet other
things in regard to her? For Spence commits the further error of
applying to all the temples of Vesta and to her worship generally what
Ovid says only of a certain temple at Rome.[69] She was not everywhere
worshipped as in this temple at Rome. Until Numa erected this particular
sanctuary, she was not so worshipped even in Italy. Numa allowed no
deity to be represented in the shape of man or beast. In this
prohibition of all personal representations of Vesta consisted,
doubtless, the reformation which he introduced into her rites. Ovid
himself tells us that, before the time of Numa, there were statues of
Vesta in her temple, which, when her priestess Sylvia became a mother,
covered their eyes with their virgin hands.[70] Yet further proof that
in the temples of the goddess outside the city, in the Roman provinces,
her worship was not conducted in the manner prescribed by Numa, is
furnished by various old inscriptions, where mention is made of a priest
of Vesta (Pontificis Vestæ).[71] At Corinth, again, was a temple of
Vesta without statues, having only an altar whereon sacrifices were
offered to the goddess.[72] But did the Greeks, therefore, have no
statues of Vesta? There was one at Athens in the Prytaneum, next to the
statue of Peace.[73] The people of Iasos boasted of having one in the
open air, upon which snow and rain never fell.[74] Pliny mentions one in
a sitting posture, from the chisel of Scopas, in the Servilian gardens
at Rome, in his day.[75] Granting that it is difficult for us now to
distinguish between a vestal virgin and the goddess herself, does that
prove that the ancients were not able or did not care to make the
distinction? Certain attributes point evidently more to one than the
other. The sceptre, the torch, and the palladium would seem to belong
exclusively to the goddess. The tympanum, attributed to her by Codinus,
belongs to her, perhaps, only as the Earth. Or perhaps Codinus himself
did not know exactly what it was he saw.[76]