ARCHITECTURE
[Sidenote: [460-430 B.C.]]
Policy united with natural inclination to induce Pericles to patronise
the arts, and call forth their finest productions for the admiration and
delight of the Athenian people. The Athenian people were the despotic
sovereign; Pericles the favourite and minister, whose business it was to
indulge the sovereign’s caprices that he might direct their measures;
and he had the skill often to direct even their caprices. That fine
taste, which he possessed eminently, was in some degree general among
the Athenians; and the gratification of that fine taste was one means
by which he retained his influence. Works were undertaken, according
to the expression of Plutarch, in whose time they remained still
perfect, of stupendous magnitude, and in form and grace inimitable; all
calculated for the accommodation or in some way for the gratification
of the multitude. Phidias was superintendent of the works: under him
many architects and artists were employed, whose merit entitled them to
fame with posterity, and of whose labours (such is the hardness of the
Attic marble, their principal material, and the mildness of the Attic
atmosphere) relics, which have escaped the violence of men, still, after
the lapse of more than two thousand years, exhibit all the perfection of
design, and even of workmanship, which earned that fame.[c]
But the Greeks had not attained all at once to the architectural
perfection which we admire on the Acropolis. They had assigned their gods
the crest of the mountains or the deep forests for their first abode;
they desired to have them nearer to themselves and, from the earliest
times, they built them dwellings, at first rustic and clumsy, but which
were gradually embellished and attracted other arts with religious pomp;
the poets celebrating the gods and their native country, the philosophers
raising the great problems of nature and of the soul. The temple was the
centre of Hellenic life.
But the gods, like men, have to reckon with time. Before sending out
the radiations of their divine majesty from the midst of the wonders of
art, those destined to become the glorious dwellers on Olympus were at
first obscure and indefinite personalities, inhabiting the trunk of an
oak, then wretched wooden structures, and later on houses of stone and
sometimes of brass, like the Athene Chalciœcus of Sparta. It was only
with the progress of civilised life that their habitation grew in size
and loftiness. The true temples, and the most ancient of them, those of
Corinth, Samos, and Metapontum--date only from the seventh century.
The Greeks were acquainted neither with the pointed arch nor the dome.
Some have thought to find that at Tiryns and Mycenæ, but if some of
the bays and galleries end in a point, it is because the courses draw
closer and closer together and end by meeting at the top. The method is
therefore clumsy and barbarous; it was abandoned for the lintel and the
pediment.
All the Greek temples resemble one another in their general plan of
construction; and yet the architectural combinations might be very
numerous, inasmuch as they all differ in the nature of the material
employed and the ornamentation which decorates them, in the number of
the columns and the size of the intercolumniations, which determine the
proportions of the edifice, above all in the character peculiar to each
of the three orders--the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian. A single
member of the structure, the column with the portion of the entablature
which it supports, determines this character.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE PARTHENON]
The first temples worthy of the name were in the Doric style. The walls
were large and heavy, the columns short and stunted without any base,
like the stake which had been the primitive support, but with flutings,
a capital, and a double pediment stretching above a wide face, like an
eagle with outstretched wings--the expression is Pindar’s. The whole
edifice, built of ordinary stone, was hidden, as in the case of many
of the Egyptian temples, under a coat of stucco which displayed vivid
colours. The remains of this are to be seen at Assus, on the coast of
Asia; at Corinth, Delphi and Ægina in Greece; at Syracuse, Agrigentum and
Selinus in Sicily; at Metapontum and especially at Pæstum in Italy, where
the grandest ruins in the ancient Doric order are to be found. The common
characteristic of these buildings, which nearly all belong to the seventh
or sixth century, was their sturdy but heavy and thick-set appearance.
The columns have a height of only four diameters--four and two-thirds
at most; and the stucco in coming off has displayed the poverty of the
material employed. Even the temple of Olympia was built of a hard and
porous tufa which the stucco had concealed under a brilliant covering.
That of Ægina was also of stone, not marble; there remain of it at least
some beautiful ruins.
We must go to Athens to find Doric architecture in its severe elegance.
Even in the temple of Ægina the column is higher: five and a third
diameters; at the Theseum it is five and a half; at the Parthenon,
six, and this is the proportion which is most pleasing to the eye. Of
these three temples the first, in which we can still find traces of an
archaic character, belongs to the sixth century; the second, which has
better proportions, to the first half of the fifth; the third is the
architectural triumph of the age of Pericles.
The Parthenon, built entirely of Pentelic marble, is not the most vast of
the Greek temples, but its execution is more perfect and it is this which
made it the masterpiece of Hellenic art. A very small detail will show
the finish of the work. It is with difficulty and by the assistance of
eye and hand that one succeeds in discovering the joints of the tambours
forming the colonnade which surrounds the building, so skilfully have
these enormous masses been adjusted. Even in her masons Athens possessed
artists.
The interior of the Parthenon contained two halls: the smaller at the
back, the _opisthodomus_, enclosed the public treasure; the larger, or
_cella_, contained the statue of the goddess born without mother from the
thought of the master of the gods, and who was as the soul of which the
Parthenon was the material casing. Figures in high relief, about twice
life size, adorned the two pediments of the temple. The frieze, which ran
round the _cella_ and _opisthodomus_ at a height of thirteen metres (42
ft., 8 ins.), and to a length of more than one hundred and sixty metres
(525 ft.), represented the procession of the great Panathenæa.
The work was finished in 435 B.C. It is neither the centuries nor the
barbarians that have mutilated it. The Parthenon was still almost intact
in 1687, when on the 27th of September Morosini bombarded the citadel.
One of the projectiles, setting fire to the barrels of powder stored
in the temple, blew up a part of it; then the Venetian desired that
the statues should be taken down from the pediment and he broke them.
Lord Elgin, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, tore down the
bas-reliefs of the frieze and the metopes: this was another disaster.
The Ilissus or Cephisus, the Hercules or Theseus, the Charities, “vernal
goddesses”--called by some the Three Fates, by others Demeter, Core, and
Iris--are still, though somewhat mutilated, the most precious of our
relics of antiquity. In 1812 some other Englishmen carried off the frieze
of the temple of Phigalia (Bassæ), built by Ictinus. All these fragments
of masterpieces were sold for hard cash, and it is under the damp and
gloomy sky of England that we are reduced to admiring the remains of that
which was the imperial mantle which Pericles wrapped about Pallas Athene.
Thus to understand the incomparable magnificence of the Parthenon, we
must render back to it in imagination what men have taken away, then
place it on its lofty rock, one hundred and fifty-six metres (512 ft.)
high, whence a magic panorama is unrolled before the eyes, and surround
it with the buildings of the Acropolis; the Erechtheum, which exhibited
all the graces of art, beside the severe grandeur of the principal
temple; the bronze statue of Athene Promachus, “she who fought in the
front rank,” to which the artist gave a colossal height, so that the
sailors arriving from the high sea steered by the plume on her helmet and
the gold tip of her lance, _maris stella_; and lower down, at the only
place by which the rock was accessible, the wonderful vestibule of the
Propylæa and the temple of Victory which formed one of its wings; but,
above all, it must be seen wrapped in the blazing light of the eastern
sky, compared to which our clearest day is but a twilight.
One thing has been observed in the Parthenon which proves the profound
artistic sense the Greeks possessed and how well they understood how to
correct geometry by taste. In all the Parthenon there is no surface which
is absolutely flat. As the columns owe their full beauty only to the fact
that they exhibit towards their centre a slight outward curve, of which
the eye is not aware, so the entire building, colonnades and walls, is
inclined slightly inwards towards an invisible point which would be lost
in the region of the clouds, and all the horizontal lines are convex. But
all with such delicacy that it is sufficient to allow the eye and the
light to wander gently over the surfaces and to give the monument at once
the grace of art and the solidity of strength; but not enough for it to
assume the compressed and heavy aspect of a truncated pyramid like the
Egyptian temples. On the southern façade the rise of the curve is only
one hundred and twenty-three millimetres (about 4½ inches).
The Propylæa, the masterpiece of civil and military architecture,
belonged, like the Parthenon, to the Doric order, and stood at the only
accessible point of the Acropolis. The architect Mnesicles disposed
its various parts in such a manner as to give an aspect of grandeur to
the entrance to the Holy of Holies of pagan Athens and also to secure
its defence. Epaminondas would have transported it to Thebes to adorn
the Cadmea: six centuries after, Pausanias admired it more than the
Parthenon, and Plutarch said: “These works have preserved a freshness, a
virginity which time cannot wither; they appear still bright with youth
as if a breath would animate them and as if they had an immortal soul.”
Athens had other monuments which were erected at very diverse epochs:
the Anaceum, the temple of Castor and Pollux, where the sale of slaves
took place; the Pantheon or temple of all the gods, the work of the
emperor Hadrian; the octagonal Tower of the Winds, an indifferent work
built about the first century before Christ. On each of its eight sides,
corresponding to the quarters of the principal winds, was sculptured the
figure of one of them. This tower still exists, as well as the choragic
monument erected by the choregus Lysicrates, in 334 B.C., on the occasion
of the victory of the Acamantid tribe in a chorus. The remains of the
theatre of Bacchus are still to be seen on the south-eastern slope of the
citadel, some of the marble seats bearing very beautiful sculptures. But
the Stadium beyond the Ilissus, according to Pausanias one of the wonders
of Athens, has disappeared and the excavations made there produced
nothing remarkable.
Like its capital, Attica too had monuments of victory, of patriotic
pride, and pious gratitude to the gods: and all these monuments were
constructed in the severe style whose principal models we have just
studied. In the sacred city of Eleusis, in sight of Salamis, a vast
religious edifice was built, capable of containing the multitude of
those initiated into the mysteries of Ceres. Rhamnus which overlooks the
plain of Marathon, raised a sanctuary to Nemesis, the goddess of just
vengeance; and on the summit of Cape Sunium, two temples consecrated to
Poseidon and Athene, the tutelary deities of Attica, signalised from
afar, to sailors coming from the isles or the coast of Asia, their
approach to the ground where the Persians had found a tomb and the Greeks
liberty. When on the days of the sacred festivals, the people arrived
in long _theoria_ (embassies) at the promontory now called Cape Colonna,
they saw extending at their feet that sea which had now become their own
domain, and fervently thanked the two divinities for having given them:
for their leaders, political wisdom; for their mariners, favourable
winds. At a later time philosophy was to take its seat near the temple
of the gods, and we, like it, believe that Sunium heard some of the
discourses of Plato.
The school of Athens extended her influence to distant places. It did
not build the temple of Olympia, but Phidias made the statue of Zeus;
Pæonius of Mende and Alcamenes of Lemnos have been credited, without
absolute proof, with the sculptures of the two pediments, on one of which
was represented the combat of Pelops and Œnomaus, and on the other the
contests of the Lapithæ and Centaurs at the nuptials of Pirithous.
[Illustration: RUINS OF TEMPLE OF THE OLYMPIAN JOVE. ATHENS]
Time, barbarians, perhaps fire, destroyed the temple, and the Alpheus,
in overflowing its banks, covered the plain of Altis which Pausanias
had seen in such beauty with eight or ten metres (about 26 or 32 ft.)
of alluvium. Before the _Expédition de Morée_, which brought away some
fragments for the Louvre, even the spot in which so much magnificence
stood was unknown. The successful excavations of the German commission
have brought to light a victory of Pæonius, a Hermes of Praxiteles and
other masterpieces.
The Ionic style is also native to the coast of Asia, where the Doric
had preceded it. It was exhibited there in all its grace in the sixth
century, when the temple of Ephesus was erected. The Cretan Chersiphron
and his son Metagenes began its construction, which was carried on, like
that of our Gothic cathedrals, with a tardiness that extended it over two
or three centuries. Its columns, several of which were given by Crœsus,
had a height of eight diameters, with bases which lacked the Doric
columns and voluted capitals which the ancients compared to the drooping
curls of a woman’s hair. Of the Ionic temple at Samos, burned by the
Persians, a single column remains upright, and according to the diameter
of the base it was sixteen metres (about 52½ ft.) high. This temple
was therefore a colossal structure. At Athens the Erechtheum and the
temple of the Wingless Victory are in the same style, but of very small
dimensions. The first contained the oldest image of Athene: a statue of
olive wood which was said to have fallen from heaven. In the second was
a warlike Minerva; in order to attach her permanently to the fortunes of
Athens, the sculptor had not given her the wings which are the attributes
of the fickle goddess of lucky battles.
In the time of Pericles the Corinthian style has not yet appeared but is
about to do so. It is related that Callimachus, having seen on a child’s
tomb at Corinth, a basket filled with its playthings and enveloped in
the graceful curves of the leaves of an acanthus, took from it the idea
of the Corinthian capital. The date of his birth is unknown, but since
Ictinus after the plague of Athens, and Scopas in 396 constructed, the
one at Phigalia, the other at Tegea, two temples in which traces have
been found of the new style of architecture, its invention must have
followed very soon after the construction of the Propylæa.
There is a question concerning Greek architecture which has only been
answered in our own day, that of polychromy. In spite of our very decided
preference for bare stone, we have been forced to recognise that the
Greeks had a different taste. Light and colour are the joy of the eyes;
but their rôle is not the same in countries in which the sky often
appears like a shroud suspended above the earth, and in those where that
earth, animated by the sun, sings, with its thousand voices, the poem of
nature. In the north a wan light casts gloom upon the monuments; thus we
are not loath to build them with materials which at first give them a
dazzling whiteness. In the south they are too vividly illuminated, and
the dazzling brightness of the marble would burn the eyes if the sun
did not clothe the stone in a golden tint which rests the gaze. Colour,
unnecessary and somewhat incommoding to the sculptor, whose main concern
is with the form and truth of outline, furnishes the architect on the
contrary with a valuable means of animating the great flat surfaces
which in their nakedness would be cold and lifeless. He does not, like
the polychromic sculptor, seek to create a deceitful illusion; colour
and ornamentation make no false pretence, and are a charm the more when,
in the case of a building standing in the midst of a sacred wood, it
establishes a needful harmony between the work of art and that of nature.
[Illustration: THE ERECHTHEUM]
[Illustration: GREEK HEAD
(In the British Museum)]
Egypt and Asia were prodigal of colour, whether in painting or by the
use of enamelled faiences with which the monuments of Persia are still
covered. The most ancient inhabitants of Hellas passed under their
influence. Colour has been found on the walls of dwellings older than
Homer by ten centuries; it was to be seen at Tiryns, one of the capitals
of the heroic age, and on the prows of the first ships which ventured
into the midst of the waves. This usage continued through the epochs
which succeeded; but, as in every domain of art, the Greeks modified this
legacy of their ancestors and of the peoples which had preceded them in
civilised life, according to the requirements of a delicate taste. Hues
more or less vivid covered the stone of the temple, even the sculptures
of the frieze, the metopes, and the pediment; terra-cottas, whose colours
mixed with a kind of paste were indestructible, decorated the upper parts
of the monument and enlivened these severe structures. But a distinction
must be drawn between the polychromy of Athens in the time of Pericles
and that of other Hellenic countries. In Sicily, in greater Greece,
even in Ægina, where the materials which the architects had to dispose
of were of a coarse description, it may be that the temples received a
brilliant colouring. But at Athens the beautiful Pentelic marble employed
in the construction of the temples was certainly not entirely concealed
under crude and violent colours. The words of Plutarch, quoted above,
on the freshness and youth preserved by the monuments of the Acropolis,
when six centuries had already passed over them, does not allow us to
believe in more than a moderate colouration for the columns and walls.
At one point only of the building there was certainly greater variety.
In all countries women, who are ingenious artists, apply themselves to
adorning their heads, and with reason: it is the stronghold from which
formidable arrows are shot. Ictinus also decorated the upper portions of
the Parthenon with all the graces he could call into play. Ornaments of
gilt bronze fastened to the draperies of the figures, inlaid enamels,
and magnificent carvings running all along the frieze. On festival days
treasures and garlands were added, so that the edifice wore on its brow,
as it were, a crown of flowers and foliage over a circlet of precious
stones.
Antiquity has preserved us no details concerning the artists; we are
ignorant of even the native country of most of them. For centuries their
works spoke for them, but the very ruins of the monuments they raised
have perished. Only the Parthenon still proudly lifts its mutilated head
above the mass of rubbish.
A great poet saw a gloomy vision of Europe dying and Paris vanishing.
Twenty-five centuries before, Thucydides drew a less poetic but more
faithful fantasy for Athens and Lacedæmon. Comparing the sterility of the
one to the fertility of the other, he said: “Let both towns be destroyed
and the mere débris of the monuments and temples of Athens will reveal
a glorious city; the ruins of Lacedæmon will be only those of a large
village.”
SCULPTURE
Art is a natural instinct which is to be found even amongst the last of
the savages who were the prehistoric inhabitants of Gaul, and which the
most intelligent of animals do not possess. This instinct is developed or
arrested, not, as has been said, according to race, but in response to
the social influences to which a people is subjected amidst melancholy
and severe or peaceful and smiling scenes which extinguish or call
forth the creative imagination. These influences, working through the
centuries, predisposed Hellas to change the paths which art had been
pursuing in the East; and habits which were easily acclimatised in
Greece, but which could not have had their birth on the banks of the Nile
and Euphrates, favoured this slow evolution.
Thanks to a good system of education, to long-continued gymnastic
exercises and to a life in the open air, often without clothing and
always without a dress which could hamper the harmonious development of
the body, the Greeks became the most beautiful race under the sun. As
they had always before their eyes the _ephebi_, so agile in the race,
the wrestlers and the athletes, who displayed so much virile grace, the
æsthetic sense developed in them with a strength which, when nature
had given genius to the artists, produced masterpieces. Religion still
further increased this tendency. Their gods having been conceived in the
image of man, as a superior humanity, the sculptors, as the religious
conscience grew more elevated and taste was purified, took their ideal
for the representations of the dwellers on Olympus from human beauty
carried to perfection. The people even looked upon it as a gift of
heaven, and after death men were accorded heroic honours on account of
their beauty.
[Illustration: MINERVA
(From a statue)]
Herodotus has preserved us a fact which exhibits the Greek character:
Philip of Croton was venerated as a hero after his death, in a small
building erected to him because he was the most beautiful man of his
time, and the old historian agrees with the Egestans who had made
this singular kind of god. He does not ask if Xerxes had truly royal
qualities. “In his vast army,” he says, “none was more worthy by his
beauty of the sovereign power.” In one of the choregiæ in which he often
triumphed by his magnificence, Nicias had given the part of Dionysus to
a young slave so perfectly handsome and so nobly attired that on his
appearance the people broke into applause. Nicias liberated him at once,
considering, he said, that it was an impiety to retain in servitude a man
who had been hailed by the Athenians in the character of a god. Nicias
indeed was performing a very popular act; it was the handsome _ephebus_,
not the god, who had excited the admiration of the spectators.
From first to last Greece thought thus. Many a time in the _Odyssey_,
Ulysses and Telemachus fancy that they see a god when they unexpectedly
encounter a tall and beautiful man; and the cold and severe Aristotle
writes: “If amongst mortals any were born resembling the images of the
gods, the rest of mankind would agree in swearing to them an eternal
obedience.” Simonides, without going so far, made beauty the second
of the four conditions necessary to happiness, and Isocrates said:
“Virtue is so honoured only because it is moral beauty.” It was because
he was the most beautiful of the _ephebi_ that Sophocles was charged,
after Salamis, with the task of leading the chorus which sung the hymn
of victory; and it is said Phidias engraved on the finger of Zeus at
Olympia: “Pantarces is beautiful”--a sacrilege which might have exposed
him to great danger. We no longer possess this inscription, but we find
a similar one on a painted vase, where Victory is offering a crown
to a handsome _ephebus_. The gods themselves had the reputation of
being sensible of this advantage, which had procured many mortals the
honour of their love. At Ægium Jupiter desired that his priests should
be chosen from among the young men who had carried off the prize for
beauty; for this merit Ganymede was snatched up to heaven, that he might
serve as cup-bearer to the gods, and Apollo admitted into his sanctuary
the statue of Phryne, the most admired of the courtesans of Greece. It
is notorious how Hyperides saved the beautiful _hetæra_ from a capital
charge, when she was standing before the judges, by simply tearing away
at an appropriate moment the veil which hid her beauty. The recollection
of these facts serves to explain the divine honours paid to Antinoüs by
the most Grecian of the Roman emperors; but they also show how much this
worship of beauty, of which the Greeks had made a religion and from which
Plato was to weave a theory, went to form the artists, and, to a certain
extent, the philosophers of Greece. Did not Plato utter words whence has
been legitimately derived the famous saying that Beauty is the splendour
of goodness? The jurisconsults of the Roman empire called themselves the
priests of law; Phidias and Polyclitus might have styled themselves the
priests of the beautiful; and this trait suffices to mark the difference
between the two civilisations, the Greek and the Roman. Beauty is the
perpetual aspiration of the French spirit which seeks it in everything,
in the great spectacles of nature or in the works of famous writers and
artists.
Amongst the statues of which the ancients were most proud, are some
which amaze us by their colossal height, and others which shock our
taste by the diversity of the colours and materials employed. The
Egyptians treated their Pharaohs and their gods in a similar fashion,
as did the Persians their kings, the Athenians the people or the senate
personified, and we ourselves do the same to translate certain ideas: the
Saint Borromeo of Lake Maggiore and the Liberty of New York are colossi.
Executed to be seen from afar, they strike the eye by their mass, and are
the expression in stone of elevated sentiments: of holiness, patriotism,
or independence. On the promontory where they are placed between
earth and heaven they appear as the very genius of the people which
erected them, a shining witness of their gratitude, and the figurative
representation of their inmost thought.
[Illustration: APOLLO
(From a Statue now in the Museum at Naples)]
The art of colossal sculpture was at the service of the gods, and
was in its place in or near their temples. It was the same with the
chryselephantine sculpture, and for the same reasons. The most celebrated
of these sculptures and those which from ancient descriptions we know the
best, were the Athene of the Parthenon and the Zeus of Olympia.
Reaching with her pedestal to a height of fifteen metres (about 49 ft.),
Minerva stood erect, enveloped in a talaric tunic, the dress of virgins.
In one hand she held a Victory, in the other the spear round which the
serpent Erichthonius was coiled. The draperies were of gold, the naked
parts of ivory, the head of Medusa, on the Ægis, in silver, the eyes
being of precious stones.
How did this Minerva, which was seen by Julian as late as the fourth
century of our era, finally perish? The Christians have been charged with
this, but the accusation should be brought against her wealth. So much
gold could not escape the barbarians, whoever they were, whether invaders
from the north, needy princes, or ordinary thieves. The pillage of the
Parthenon had already begun in the time of Isocrates and the Athene of
Julian must have been only a ruin.
Phidias was also summoned to Olympia. The treasures accumulated in the
temple from the offerings of all Greece, permitted him to execute a
work which surpassed that of the Parthenon. On a throne of cedar wood,
inlaid with gold and ivory, ebony, and precious stones, and covered with
bas-reliefs and paintings, Zeus was majestically seated. His thick hair
and beard were of gold; of gold and ivory was the Victory he carried in
his right hand, in token that his will was always triumphant; of gold,
too, mingled with other metals was the royal sceptre surmounted by an
eagle, which he held in his left hand. On the head was the crown of olive
leaves, which was given to the victors in the games, but, as was fitting,
that of the god was gold, as well as his sandals and his mantle, which
revealed his naked breast in ivory. His visage had the virile beauty
proper to the father of gods and men; his tranquil gaze was indeed that
of the all-powerful whom no passion stirs and behind whose broad forehead
should reside the vast intelligence of the orderer of worlds. Placed at
the back of the _naos_, at the point where the trend of the architectural
lines attracted the gaze, the statue, fifteen or sixteen metres (49 or 52
ft.) high, seemed still more colossal than it was.
[Illustration: MINERVA
(From a Greek vase)]
The Olympian Jupiter shared the fate of the Minerva of the Parthenon;
he was too rich for an age grown too barbarous and beliefs too hostile.
It is said that in 393 Theodosius had it transported to Constantinople,
where it perished some years later in one of the great conflagrations
that so often visited the new capital of the Empire; it is not likely
that it was so long respected. Already in the second century Lucian
laughs at this “honest fellow, the exterminator of giants, who remained
seated so quietly while brigands shaved his golden hair.”
Other towns besides Athens and Olympia had chryselephantine statues.
Costly materials were used for the Juno at Argos, the Æsculapius of
Epidaurus, and others.
Phidias did not confine himself to representing gods, that is to say
to making colossi; with his own hands, or more often through those who
worked under his direction, he lavished less divine sculpture on the
frieze, the metopes, and the double pediment of the temple, the figures
of which, as seen from below, do not appear to be of more than ordinary
height. Those which he chiselled on Minerva’s shield and on her sandals,
were still smaller. The magnificent fragments which remain to us from
the two pediments, Demeter and Core, Iris and Cephisus, the Charities or
Fates, the Hercules or Theseus, are the works of his school and we may
say of his mind. In spite of their mutilations, these marbles, like those
of the Victory untying her sandal, may be ranged beside, if not above,
the most glorious creations of Renaissance sculpture in the purity of
the style and the calm serenity of the figures, which neither have their
limbs twisted in violent action nor their brows overcharged with thought,
as happened when statuary strove to rival painting. What a puissant life
is in these divinities tranquilly seated in the pediments, and how calm
on their fiery horses are the riders in the Panathenaic procession! Later
on the school of grace and voluptuousness will appear, with an Athenian,
Praxiteles, as its chief; still later, passion will agitate the marble:
then the decay of art begins--such a drama as the “Farnese bull”[46]
depicts may not fittingly be presented in stone.
It is to the eternal honour of Phidias that he finally broke with
hieratic art, whose influence is still traceable in the beautiful statues
of Ægina, with their admirably studied but lifeless shapes and grinning
heads exhibiting, even in pain and death, the same idiotic smile. The
great artist sought the beauty which is the spiritual essence of things,
whether it be in the soul seen through the body; or nature contemplated
in her most harmonious expansion; and this ideal beauty he realised
without making the effort visible. This is supreme art; for there is no
grandeur without simplicity.
[Illustration: GREEK LYRES]
PAINTING, MUSIC, ETC.
If the description in the _Iliad_ of the shield of Achilles is a work
of imagination, those of the Athene of the Parthenon and the Zeus of
Olympia, as given by Pausanias after an attentive study of the works
themselves, show that the school of Athens had carried the art of
carving metal and ivory to a high degree of perfection, as well as
that of working hard stones for casts or in relief. Yet this skill was
borrowed from the school of Argos, where work in bronze was held in high
honour.
It was not so with painting, which in Greece had never the perfection of
statuary, whatever may be said on the faith of anecdotes more famous than
veracious. Modern painting seeks to move; that of the ancients was rather
sculptural in its character, in the sense that it sacrificed colouring
to design and the effects of light and shade to form--a stranger to
what might be called, if we have Rembrandt in mind, the drama of light
and shade, or, in referring to the Venetians, the harmonious chant of
colours. Sicyon was the first Greek town which had a school for design.
Athens, Miletus, and subsequently Corinth, followed this example. We
shall see presently that Greece had great painters, and that those of
Athenian origin did not occupy the first rank in this art. But it would
be rash to speak of Greek painting except according to the judgment of
the ancients, since nothing of it remains save painted vases, which
belong to industry rather than art; and the mural decorations at Pompeii
and Herculaneum, which are too often mere conventional productions,
executed hurriedly and probably for small payment by workmen rather than
artists. The Roman mosaics were also made by Greek hands, but there is
not one, except the battle of Issus, which is of a high order of art.
[Illustration: LYRE PLAYER]
The Greeks possessed the merit of realising that the highest intellectual
culture is one of the conditions of greatness in the individual and the
state; and they understood how to utilise every means of attaining it. In
their plan of education, besides the study of poets and philosophers to
form the mind, and gymnastic exercise to develop suppleness and strength,
they included music, which habituates the mind to harmony, and dancing,
which bestows grace. These two secondary arts were the chief ones at
Lacedæmon; they also ranked high among the Athenians, though Athens
did not set her mark on them as she did on architecture and the art of
statuary. They were indispensable auxiliaries at festivals, sacrifices,
and funerals, and played a part in the performance of religious rites.
The marvellous effects of the lyre of Orpheus were universally kept in
mind, and Achilles, the hero who was the ideal type of warlike courage,
was represented celebrating his exploits on the cithara; in the _Iliad_
or the _Odyssey_ there is no feast to which a melodious singer is not
invited. Down to the last days of Greece the beneficent action of music
was believed in: Polybius attributed the misfortunes of the Arcadians to
the neglect among them of the art which calms the passions and which,
by teaching the rules of harmony, trains the learner not to violate
public peace. Damon the musician, a friend of Pericles and of Socrates,
held that musical methods could not be changed without threatening the
foundation of morality and the laws of the city. Plato thinks the same,
and Aristotle calls music “the greatest charm of life.” It is well known
how much importance was attached to it by the school of the Pythagoreans,
who professed to hear the music of the celestial spheres turning
harmoniously through infinite space.
[Illustration: GREEK DANCING GIRL
(Hope)]
The Greeks also conceived of dancing in another fashion from ours, for
they had introduced into it number and measure, which in art are a
manifestation of beauty, but no longer remain so when whirling speed
is substituted for grace. With them the dance formed part of their
religious solemnities and military education. “The ancients,” says Plato
in the Seventh Book of the _Laws_, “have bequeathed us a great number of
beautiful dances.” In the Dorian cities dancing was one of the necessary
rites in the worship of Apollo, and the gravest people participated.
Theseus, returning from Crete, danced the γέρανος in the holy island of
Delos, to celebrate his victory over the Minotaur; and the Spartans, in
annual commemoration of their triumph over the people of Thyrea danced
the γυμνοπαιδια before the images of Apollo, Diana, and Latona, singing
verses of Aleman and the Cretan Thaletas. The Bacchic dances, with thyrsi
and lighted torches, were a mimic representation of the life of Dionysus.
In the neighbourhood of Eleusis was to be seen the fountain of beautiful
dances, Callichorum, where the initiated chanted the invocation to
Iacchus as they danced: “O adored god, approach at our voice. Iacchus!
Iacchus! come and dance the sacred thiasus in this meadow, thy
well-beloved home; strike the ground with a bold foot and mingle in our
free and joyous dances, inspired by the graces who rule our consecrated
chorus.”
Plato, in his treatise on “Law,” which is a kind of commentary on
Athenian legislation and customs, attaches extreme importance, even for
the moral education of youth, to the possession by the _ephebi_ of the
“art of choruses,” which includes song and dance.
We may well believe that demoralising dances existed in Ionia and
elsewhere. At Sparta and Athens the Pyrrhic dance was a military exercise
and a patriotic training. The _ephebi_ danced them at the greater and
lesser Panathenæa, imitating all the movements of a combat for attack,
defence, or the evasion of darts. And was not the heroic circle of the
Suliote women a recollection of these warlike dances? Having taken refuge
on the summit of a mountain to escape a harem or the yataghan of the
Turks, they sang their funeral hymn, joined hands and danced on this
narrow peak, which was surrounded by precipices. Each time that the ring
approached the abyss, the circle was narrowed, for one of their number
detached herself from it to fling herself down; and one after another,
all threw themselves over.
THE ARTISTS OF THE OTHER CITIES OF HELLAS
[Sidenote: [460-410 B.C.]]
The fifth century is the golden age of Greek art. We have told of the
artists whom Athens gave to the world; we shall now see what others the
rest of Hellas produced--such at least whose names have come down to us
with an indication of their works.
Chersiphron and his son Metagenes of Knossos, in Crete, are outside the
period with which we are dealing, for they began the construction of the
great temple of Ephesus in the sixth century.
The domain of statuary had a great artist whom the ancients have compared
to Phidias, Polyclitus of Sicyon or Argos. The artists of the century of
Pericles did not confine themselves to one corner of the regions of art;
they cultivated the whole. Polyclitus was as much a skilful architect
as a great sculptor. At Epidaurus he erected a circular monument, the
Tholus, and a theatre which was much admired by the ancients; at Argos
his Juno was the rival of the Minerva of the Parthenon, though it did
not stand as high, and was less costly. Phidias lived with the gods in
spirit, Polyclitus dwelt more among men. He even wrote on the proportions
of the human body, and applied his knowledge to his Doryphorus, which
was called the “canon,” or the “rule.” The ancients divided the palm
for statuary between the two great artists: giving it to the one for
his gods; to the other for his Canephorus, which Verres stole from the
Sicilians, his Amazon, which triumphed over that of Phidias in the famous
competition at Ephesus, and his statues of successful athletes, such as
the Diadumenus and the two Astragalizontes, or dice-players. Myron, whom
we might have included among the Athenian artists, went farther in his
imitation of nature; his bronze cow was famous, and still more so his
Discobolus, whose attitude must have been very difficult to render.
Polygnotus of Thasos, whom Cimon brought from that town in 463, lived
for a long time on the banks of the Ilissus, and was given the rights
of an Athenian citizen as a reward for his labours in the decoration
of the temple of Theseus, the Anaceum, the Pœcile, and a part of the
Propylæa. There was some stiffness in the designs of Polygnotus; his was
a sculptural painting which, nevertheless, obtained great effects by
very simple means. The ancients lauded the expression and beauty of his
figures, but they have neither the grace nor the dramatic character which
the painters of the period that followed were to give to their works. The
arts of painting and statuary are two sisters who resemble each other,
and both follow the variations of taste: the first with a vivacity at
times imprudent, the second with more reserve. Zeuxis of Heraclea Pontica
and his rival, Parrhasius of Ephesus, were younger than Polygnotus. Their
painting was already more scientific, less ideal, and nearer reality.
Aristotle reproaches Zeuxis with yielding too much to Ionian effeminacy.
If we are to believe anecdotes whose frequent repetition does not make
them more authentic, these painters even succeeded in deceiving the eye:
the one with a bunch of grapes which the birds came to peck at, the other
with a curtain which Zeuxis attempted to draw back, thinking that it
concealed the real picture. These would be triumphs of ingenuity rather
than art. It is to be noted that both men drew freely on the abundant
resources of ancient poetry. Both attained to great fame and opulence.
In spite of the misfortunes of the times, Greece still had gold for her
favourite painters. Archelaus, king of Macedon, paid four hundred minæ
for the painting of Zeuxis in his palace, and Parrhasius never appeared
in public without a robe of purple fringed with gold. He considered
himself “master of the elegancies,” as well as of his art, so we need
not wonder at his having inclined to effeminate gracefulness. “His
Theseus,” said Ephranor, “is fed on roses; mine was fed on meat.” But
it was at a later time, with Lysippus and Pamphilus, that the school of
Sicyon was to have its full splendour.
The sight of the sculptors and painters turning to Homer for their
inspiration, calls forth the remark that the _Iliad_ was the Bible of
Greece, as much for art as for religion. As our churches of the Middle
Ages constituted, by means of their windows, a grand book of religious
instruction, so the walls and pediments of the Greek temples exhibited to
the eye legends which spoke of the divinities and heroes of the Hellenic
race. Thus, while in Rome art was to be merely a foreign importation,
in Greece it came from the very heart of the country; and this was the
secret of its greatness.[b]
FOOTNOTES
[46] A famous group now in the Museum at Naples.
[Illustration: APOLLO MUSAGETES]
[Illustration: SOPHOCLES]