one that apparently never entered those of Pheidias. One reason for this
is that the art of painting was more completely comprehended in Italy
than in Greece, and the Italian artists, more commonly than the Grecian,
practised both arts. Hence, great painter as well as great sculptor,
endowed with a readiness of hand, such as scarcely any other artist ever
had, to reproduce whatever his mind imaged, it is no wonder that Michael
Angelo at times went beyond the bounds of one art and seemed magically
to interfuse the beauties of both of them. It would have been a greater
wonder had he not done so. It was not a sign of his weakness so much as
of his strength, of the inability of any one art to satisfy the artist’s
desire and ideal. In this greater complexity, which shows at times in
the detail of his work, Michael Angelo differed from Pheidias, but,
almost invariably, the two artists, while differing in their feeling for
line, or gesture, or substance, treat the human figure and its
accessories in the same way. In both one sees a distinct and necessary
dwelling on the nude.
[Illustration: PLATE LIII.]
Where the human figure is chosen as the object of a work of art, there
are but two chief means by which to represent the emotions it contains,
one the expression of the face, one the action of the body as a whole.
It is in the representation of the face, the most palpable index of the
emotions, that painting, with its power over almost infinitesimal lights
and shades, finds fullest scope for its power, while it is in the
greater lines of the frame and the larger gestures that sculpture
satisfies herself. So it is that in the sculptural work of both Michael
Angelo and Pheidias one finds drapery treated not, as was distinctly the
case in the statues of Praxiteles, for its own special beauty apart from
the whole work, but as a means of emphasising the beauty of the body
whose details it hid.
Look at the group of three women from the western pediment of the
Parthenon, or the Lemnian Athena, or the Caryatids of the Erechtheum
(Plate LII)—for these are utterly Pheidian in character even if not by
the master himself—or the figures on the frieze of the Parthenon (Plate
LVII) or the Hegeso relief. In all these the drapery ripples over the
shoulders and breasts, breaking in great falls around the waist and legs
to disappear and fade away in little curling waves around the feet, not
hiding the soft details of the figure underneath but serving rather as a
frame to emphasise the beauties and set them in true relation to the
surroundings. That there was any ethical need of hiding the figure would
have seemed the height of absurdity to the Greek or the Italian. Out of
the dark it comes and back to the dark it goes in this Adamite
condition, so why should the artist not use it so if it serves his
purpose?
Thus it has been used in all times when there was a vital art, and such
times have been distinguished for greater sanity of thought and health
of body than when art was governed by mediæval fanaticisms. Michael
Angelo’s figures are as distinguished for this quality as are those
shaped by the Grecian chisel. His feeling for the value of the nude is
so strong that he can hardly suffer the drapery at all. The Moses, the
Madonnas, the Medici Princes are to all intents in large measure
undraped. Considered as draped figures they distinctly lack the
temperance and quiet nobility of the Greek figures, for the reason that
although his feeling towards the relation of draped and nude parts is
the same, Michael Angelo does not attain his end in as consummate a way.
He makes too sharp a distinction between the parts that are really
draped, the parts that are but seem not to be, and the nude. But in one
point of this same nature the two artists are completely alike. They
both regarded the human figure from the purely artistic point of view as
a means to suggest certain ideas. The religious meaning, the question as
to its sanctity or unhallowedness, no more occurred to them than to
question the advisability of warming themselves before the fire when
they were cold because there were fires in Hell. They were completely
natural.
In regard to the lack of complexity and to the greater repose, it may be
admitted that Pheidias has the advantage over Michael Angelo whose
works, true index as they are of his character, suffered from the time
in which he lived—his character suffered and hence his work. His was a
time of scepticism and hence of worry. The tranquillity that marked the
Greek mind was rarely found in his day. Aretino was planting the
destructive roots of modern journalism, and except, in a way marked by
strong affectation, at certain courts, one would have had to go far to
find Platonic Symposia or Olympic gatherings. The cloudy brow of Michael
Angelo himself as well as of many of his figures is a sign how the
perplexity of the times preyed upon the sculptor and in turn affected
not only the chief motive of many of his works but also their very
details.
And, if we admit the truth, this worry and perturbation is more natural
to us than is the Greek grace and calm which, to those who do not
understand the time, seems unnatural and forced. It was not so, however.
The Greek was never forced, but though he felt intensely, he considered
that the possession and exercise of control over emotion was as much to
be desired as the power which found expression in beating back barbarian
hordes. The tenderness of Greek friendships is proverbial, but the whole
tone of Greek tragedy is of passion held in check,—carried in the heart
rather than worn on the face. Slaves and servants gave way to noisy
grief, but not their masters. A Greek of the Periclean age could
scarcely have understood the worn, wearied, soul-troubled look of the
Pensieroso. It was not that the Greek was unimpassioned, but he never
let his passions govern him. He guided them as a rider guides a restive
horse—as the youths on the Parthenon guide theirs—calming and soothing
them lest the animal become the master and break away from the chosen
path.
This difference in the character of the two races was due largely to
religion, which had the most marked effect on the work produced in the
two countries. One is apt to think, when one sees the limitless mass of
churches, decorated by painter and sculptor, in Italy, and the unending
array of lesser works of distinctly religious intent, that no art could
be more religious than that of Italy. But just as in the conduct of
individuals it is the spirit rather than the form of action that is the
true index to their character, so in art it is the feeling the work
shows, and not merely its outer form, which indicates its true nature
and value. Now not merely in the number of religious works was Greece in
the Periclean days as distinguished as ever Italy was, but she was far
more noteworthy, in that her religion was a much more vital impulse than
that of Italy. This is certainly true of the Periclean as opposed to the
Medicean age.
In the light of present knowledge the circumstances that led to these
conditions are discernible. Like every innocent race the Greeks had a
firm belief in the Gods, beings developed in their minds by very varied
influences, and for the most part not of a character to serve as guides
to ideal conduct after the race had once gained the capacity for using
its mind in a logical way. One or two of these beings were, however, as
noble as any such conceptions at any time. This power to use the mind
rationally was not yet a national possession when Pheidias grew up. It
was just becoming so. The development of the mind, the strength of it,
was there, but for a few decades circumstances turned the thoughts of
the people away from philosophic consideration to more ecstatic modes in
which old conceptions were clung to with passionate fondness and made
more beautiful, but a change of belief was the work of a following
generation.
These circumstances were chiefly a consequence of the Persian Wars.
Greece was threatened with destruction. Athens was harried, and the
glories of the Acropolis were razed to the ground. Phœnix-like they
disappeared in fire to have an image of themselves more splendid in its
youth and vigour rise as a light to all the world. But though the
barbarian had for a moment seemed master of the situation, the Greeks
had, with the active help of the Gods, been the final victors and it was
in the service of thanks to their divine helpers that Pheidias found his
chief employment. It was only in the very early years of the Renaissance
that the Italians experienced any such miracles as those which
Pheidias’s elder contemporaries had known—as, for instance, at the
battle of Ravenna—and the effect on them then was much the same as it
had been on the Greeks. It was the actual presence of the Gods at
critical moments that stirred the Greeks. In Athens Athena’s snake led
them to safety, at Salamis the Aiakidoi inspired the heroes with their
battlecry, and Pan himself urged the weary messenger over the mountain
passes. The Greeks no more doubted that their victory was due to
assistance lent them by the Gods than that there had been a war. One
event was as real to them as the other, so it was natural for them, as
soon as their hearths were once more lit, to render thanks to their
Divinities by raising images of them on all sides, that they might never
forget them, and by building for the houses of their Gods as beautiful
temples as could by any possible means be made.
We may frankly concede that the grandeur of this work, the generousness
of it, can only be understood when one fully grasps the fact that a
Greek temple was, what the Christian’s is not, the house of the Lord. In
it but few and most private services were performed,—no processions, no
crowds of more or less attentive worshippers, no expounding of the word,
nothing whatever of that sort. The temple was the sacred dwelling place
of the deity, and the curious no more thought of entering it than of
opening uninvited their fellow-citizen’s door. It was a free gift to the
God and not to be thought of as a source of satisfaction to the builders
except in the same way as it pleases a lover to have his mistress accept
some gift at his hands. This feeling is repeated frequently in Pindar
and in other poets inspired by the ‘golden muse.’ So it was that,
flushed with the excitement of a great cause nobly won, the Greeks
turned the full force of their keen, glad energy to works that showed
their own greatness by manifesting with the sharpness of full
understanding the form of their ideals.
In our day, animated by so different interests and ambitions, it is hard
to sympathise with this natural idealistic work done in Athens, and it
is perhaps even harder to understand why it was that Pheidias and the
other artists were not called on to erect portrait statues of the great
leaders of the war as were the artists of the Renaissance. There is
mention of a statue to Miltiades, and this is all. The reason becomes
clear immediately we consider well what were the fundamental principles
of conduct as taught by the poets, who were in those days in large
measure the formulators of public opinion. Pindar is as clear-spoken
about this as need be, and he but repeats what one finds in the
fragments that are preserved of Solon’s writings and of other earlier
writers. He tells us that what is natural is best and that the deed done
without the deity is best left unspoken (Olym. IX), and again (Nem. I)
that each of us has his special power and we must earnestly endeavour
according as Nature shows the way. This is to be the moral of our
action, while that of our thought is that man is as nothing (Nem. VI),
ephemeral creature naught knowing what he is or what he may be, nothing
but a mirage-dream (Pyth. VIII).
[Illustration: PLATE LIV.]
Under the spell of such stern teaching as this it is no wonder that
Pheidias was not employed, as was Michael Angelo, in depicting for an
inquiring posterity the outer husk of the protagonist of his day. Nor
was it merely when he was called on to decorate Athens with his
accomplished powers that Pheidias found guiding principles of this stern
sort, but even in his other great work, the Olympian Zeus, he was
governed in the same way. By the Greek, victory in the games was no more
to be aspired to without the help of the Gods than was victory in
battle, and it was not praise for the winner but gratitude to the Gods
that was mete when Nike laid the ‘golden crown’ upon the athlete’s brow.
For it is the Gods who, as Pindar sings, guard the deep-breasted plain
of Sparta and grant success in the great games. Fame is to be sought but
it is to be the fame of honourable deeds (Pyth. VIII), but even this is
of less value than happiness and only he who has won both has attained
the acme of bliss (Pyth. I). Such men are almost unknown, for the soul
of honour is tarnished by lust of gain (Nem. IX). Thus were the athletes
in that “age of heroic prize-men” taught that physical power was of
value, but only as it was a stepping-stone to moral purity. No portraits
of such youths as these unless the Gods marked them as their own with
the triple crown. The deep-delved researches of epigraphist and
excavator show us how rare was that event.
Called upon to embody for the chosen youth of Greece their idea and
image of the guardian deity who meted out unquestioned justice to their
strife, Pheidias had to depict as it were a masculine counterpart to the
Goddess who made Athens her own. That he was as successful in the one
task as in the other is instantly apparent to one who notes the quality
of the praise bestowed upon his work by the highly trained critics of
the classic period. None speak of his figures as they do of Myron’s, for
instance, as deceiving the beholder by their realism. There is no
question as to the mastery over the material as with Kalamis and
Pythagoras,—no suggestion of conventionalism as with Polykleitos, none
of overrefinement as with Praxiteles,—but all agree that his works were
such nobly adequate representations of the divine beings that they added
a new glory to the religion of which they were the perfected expression.
Still another noteworthy peculiarity of this religion in its effect on
his work remains to be mentioned. Both he and Michael Angelo had at
different times now mere mortals, now deities, to represent. In the case
of the Attic master this led to a greater unity of performance than was
possible with the Florentine. Between the dwellers on Olympus and those
on the broad-bosomed Earth there was to Pheidias’s mind only a
difference in degree, whereas to the believer in the Roman doctrines
there was no real similarity between the heavenly hosts and the
inhabitants of this vale of tears; and where such was suggested, it was
so as a symbol, not as a representation. To the Greek the Gods were
merely his grander, nobler, more powerful brethren, blessed with the
same virtues and troubled by similar faults, differing principally from
the dwellers on earth by usually escaping the results due to giving way
to passion. Even they were not blessed with absolute immunity and
freedom of action. Zeus himself was subject to Fate, but in the main the
Gods, at least in their outward form, were but more beautiful men and
women. Hence when called upon to carve the most noble being whom he
could imagine, and equally when carving ideal youths and maidens on the
Parthenon, he could only carve the same forms he saw about him every day
idealised by his imagination. Whichever branch of his art he followed
trained him for the other.
That such conditions and beliefs as these were very different from those
under which Michael Angelo had to work needs no elaborate exposition.
How different they were in their effect on the art of Pheidias and the
happiness of the period for such an artist becomes clearer the more one
studies. There is still another point to consider, however,—what might
be called a more practical one than the influences of religion, and in
this regard, too, Pheidias was the more favoured. I refer to the
political conditions of the time, and the relations of Pheidias to his
employers.
The lack of original documents makes it impossible for us to follow the
course led by Pheidias from its fortunate rise to its unhappy close, but
that in most ways he was much to be envied by Michael Angelo cannot be
questioned. Athens was at the height of her prosperity; freed from
foreign or internal foes, she was at liberty to pursue her ends as
occasion demanded or as consideration showed was best. It was a time of
thanksgiving and hope. No such condition of government as this was known
to Michael Angelo, nor did his country have the advantage of being led
by as high-minded a statesman, and probably as wise a one, as ever
lived. So long as Pericles was leader of the state, Pheidias was his
friend and helper. Here was no worry for the artist, no change of
master, no blighting of cherished hopes, all which ills were suffered by
Michael Angelo; on the contrary, existence in the midst of a most highly
cultivated community—a community moved by a common search after ideal
ends, a community which must have been a constant inspiration to the
sculptor to equal the expectations it had of him. With the rise of mob
rule brought on by the momentary successes won by certain demagogues
came the downfall of Pericles and in his train Pheidias. But his great
work was finished then. He had nothing to fear when he laid aside his
chisel, and fortunately he was not left long to mourn the fast vanishing
nobility of his city and race. The time of calm self-confidence had
passed and the time of trouble was threatening. Only a short time
elapsed before the tide of disaster engulfed the whole country, and if
we would seek a counterpart to the worn and restless spirit that
sometimes appears in Michael Angelo’s work, we can find it in the later
Greek masters—even Praxiteles shows traces of it. But it is not mere
likenesses we are in search of, so much as explanations and the
clarification of certain phenomena of art.
The effect of these conditions of life and thought on Pheidias was more
strong than on other sculptors of the time because the greater
sensitiveness and impressibility of his nature rendered him a more
encompassing recipient for ideas and feelings than most of his
contemporaries. But the qualities that show in his work with especial
sharpness are found diffused throughout all the work of the period, and
there is one very noticeable characteristic of this work which
distinguishes it markedly from the work produced by Michael Angelo’s
fellow-workmen. It is the emphasis laid on youth. Donatello, Verrocchio,
Desiderio and many others often represented youthful figures; but the
representation of youth and early manhood could scarcely be said to
distinguish the work of the Florentine from other epochs, yet this is
exactly what can be said of the product of the early Greek and
particularly the Attic School.
Look at the statues of youths and maidens, the never-fading ghosts of
past days, which the Attic chisel carved and the Attic soil has
preserved for us. Look at the young Apollos and their not less glorious
brethren, the athletes. Look at the guardians above the temple
porches—incarnations of youthful vigour even when the bearded head or
matronly form give sign of elder years. Look at the vases “with brede of
marble men and maidens overwrought.” Finally look well at the statues of
God and Goddess—even these have youth eternal moulded in their full,
strong figures.
And it is pleasant to reflect that it is not the sculptor’s art alone
which found satisfaction in thus dwelling on the most beautiful forms of
human life, but the painters and the poets too immortalise the
entrancing splendours of the youthful form. Greek art of this time
presents us with the indubitable evidence of a belief, rooted deep as
life itself, that the everlasting joy of completest beauty was to be
found in the well-conditioned body of youth or maiden. What a
degradation the ascetic interpretation of the Holy Writ brought in the
art of the Renaissance! Many youthful figures do we find there, but they
were chosen as much for the sake of the quaintness of extremely youthful
forms as for the beauty inherent in vigorous development. The place of
the fine-drawn, well-groomed figures of the Greek youths and maidens is
taken by jolly, pot-bellied babies. Over the altars and among the graves
they scramble, and up the marble columns, to launch themselves, heedless
as screaming swallows, over the groined ceiling. From North to South and
across Italy from Sea to Sea this breed of fascinating babies
spread—their father the Church, their mother the great human heart of
the Italian race. And then, dulling the pleasant impression that such
figures make upon the mind, we are met on all sides by haggard figures
of men and women expressive only of a bitter ardour to seek salvation by
pain.
The wanness of Botticelli, the pain and trouble of Michael Angelo, the
mere ordinarily healthy look of Ghirlandaio, these are what take the
place of the deep-breasted, broad-shouldered, strong-pulsed, magnificent
Greeks—some repetition among these latter, ’tis true, but marvellous in
their vigour and constancy and impulsiveness. Or what poets can the
Medicean time show who sing of ideals and principles in the same
full-throated, calm, incisive way as Pindar or Sophocles sang them? We
have instead a scornful wrath or playful fancy. The deity is no longer
friendly but terrible, and dainty mistresses usurp the place of the
God-compelling Aphrodite. The momentary, not the eternal, is the
interest of the day.
[Illustration: PLATE LV.]
Some there were, Greek in spirit and in deed: Dante in part of his later
work, so far as a Catholic could be. The Vita Nuova in its heart-broken
passion, the Convito in its complexity, are purely Italian, but passages
of the Divine Comedy and the Letters might be the work of one of the
Attic dramatists, so intense are they, so cool, so assertive of the
power of right over wrong. But an artist much more Greek than Dante and
one who is often, but very mistakenly, thought to resemble Michael
Angelo, was Tintoretto. His was a Greek sense of form, his was a Greek
sense of beauty, and his was a completely and absolutely Greek sense of
what constituted true portraiture. There were others too of this group,
but they are rare and far between; men who seem to have been born two
thousand years too late, or else just in time to save the world from a
worship of what was mentally warped and physically unsound.
When one considers that the art of sculpture has found its chief
employment in the service of religion, it becomes plain why living among
a people whose religion led to asceticism, even though the age was
largely sceptical, Michael Angelo should impress his work with a feeling
quite opposed to that found in the works of Pheidias. Scepticism there
was in ancient Greece too, but not strong enough to free Pheidias
entirely from the bonds of the religion to which he was from infancy
accustomed. Furthermore, a scepticism that found much fuel for its
flames in the misconduct of the Vicar of Christ and his less powerful
imitators would have a very dissimilar effect on the mind from that
which was based on true mental development. The one was the natural
sloughing of the skin, the other the amputation of a diseased member.
The conditions at Rome had more effect on the formation of character in
those days than anything else, and they cannot have seemed much less
rotten to Michael Angelo than to Hildebrand five hundred years earlier.
The feeling that Christ was essentially the man of sorrows, which
affected the early artists, had passed from men’s minds, and in regard
to his comeliness there was nothing to prevent an artist working in a
Greek spirit; but employed though Michael Angelo was by the Popes, they
used him by no means always on religious work.