and in connexion with the eastern kingdoms which Greece absorbed as
conqueror. We have yet one other aspect to consider: Greek sculpture
in connexion with the Roman world of the west, by which Greece was
conquered. ‘Conquered Greece led her conqueror captive,’ and while
Greek civilization as a whole strongly modified the Italic civilization
by which it was overthrown, Greek art in particular established its
mastery over the inartistic nation which supplanted it. We have many
accounts of how Roman connoisseurs filled their galleries with Greek
statues. Mummius, Aemilius Paulus, Verres, Cicero, Sulla, Asinius
Pollio, were all robbers or purchasers of Greek sculpture, and by the
time of Pompey and Caesar the great market for Greek sculpture was
in Rome. The demand exceeded the supply of antique marbles, enormous
as the supply must have been, for the systematic plundering of the
great shrines belongs to a later date. And as the Roman noble could
not be accommodated with originals, he had to content himself with
copies. Doubtless few of the collectors could tell the difference.
Rhodes continued to turn out original sculpture until the time of
Augustus, but Pergamon and Alexandria had long sunk into decay. It
was, therefore, the opportunity for a new school of artists to arise
in Athens, an opportunity which was promptly taken. Athens and Delos,
Ephesos, and later Aphrodisias, became great centres of the new
industry, which was primarily commercial. There was no longer any talk
of idealism or of votive offerings to deities. The necessity was to
turn out quantities of work suitable to the Roman taste.
Greco-Roman sculpture falls into three clear divisions. There are
copies pure and simple like the Delian Diadumenos, a straightforward
replica of the masterpiece of Polykleitos; there are adaptations of
earlier work like those turned out by the school of Pasiteles and
Arcesilaos; and there are, finally, new works, mostly in relief,
which have been termed Neo-Attic, and which represent a new artistic
development based on an elegant and artificial archaism. Athens is the
centre of all this art, and she thus recovers in the first century B.C.
the position which she had lost for so long.
The direct copies of this age need not be considered here. Direct
copying from the antique as distinguished from adaptation is a new
feature very eloquent of the poverty of original ideas both in the
buyer and seller of statues. But it is important to realize that
the Roman market made sculpture for the first time a really paying
business, and therefore saved it from the possibility of extinction.
Had it not been for the new Attic school of sculptors, who sprang up
in the two preceding generations, it is hard to see how Augustus could
have secured the workmen for his great Roman buildings, which formed
the basis of a fresh artistic development in Roman imperial sculpture.
The copies of this period are the best and most faithful which we
possess. They have still some vitality of their own, and are not the
dead and soulless caricatures produced by a later age.
But in addition to their copying work the latest generation of Attic
artists busied themselves with free adaptations from the antique on
lines laid down by contemporary art. These productions are to be
distinguished both from purely archaistic works, which copy the style
as well as the poses of ancient sculpture, and from works like the
Aphrodite of Melos, which make a wide selection from ancient styles
and poses. Statues such as the Farnese Herakles of Glycon,[102] the
Apollo Belvedere,[103] or the Artemis of Versailles,[104] are not
eclectic at all; they are older types taken over and translated into
modern style. They show less originality than the Melian goddess,
because there is no real change of pose or of meaning. An old statue
is simply worked out with a new technique. Thus the Farnese Herakles
gives a Hellenistic rendering of a statue by Lysippos, while the
Apollo Belvedere is perhaps a new version of a work by Leochares. The
former attempts to render the massive strength of the hero by immense
exaggeration of muscular development in a style worse than anything
perpetrated at Pergamon. The latter attempts to outdo the elegance of
its original by an ultra-refinement of surface in every direction,
and by an affected stage-pose and gesture. In both cases we see the
effect of commercialism on art, for the artist no longer works on
his own high standard of achievement. He is bound by the tastes of
the patrons for whom he caters, and the uneducated Roman buyer liked
to see strength shown by mighty muscles and refinement by daintiness
of gesture. Both the Herakles of Glycon and the Apollo Belvedere are
fine pieces of sculpture, but as works of art they are little short of
abominable. We have no evidence about the original of the Artemis of
Versailles, a statue of somewhat similar type to the Apollo. We may
notice how the little fold of drapery above the left knee is turned
up without any justification simply for the purpose of displaying the
outline of the leg. The Medici Venus in Florence[105] is an adaptation
of the later version of the Praxitelean nude Aphrodite, the Capitoline
rather than the Cnidian type. It is also an Attic work of this period,
finely executed, but adding a yet further degradation to the Capitoline
version by the additional elegance of its gestures.
The Torso Belvedere (Fig. 52) is another Attic work of great technical
ability. Its prototype is unknown, and considerable controversy exists
about its meaning and correct restoration. It is a seated figure with
head and upper torso turned sharply towards its left, a position which
suggests a Lysippic original. The massive musculature of the torso
recalls Glycon’s Herakles, but the influence here is more Rhodian than
Pergamene. One of the most popular suggestions[106] for its restoration
makes it a Polyphemos shading his eyes with one hand, as he looks out
for Galatea, and holding a club in the other. A similar type is known
from wall paintings. No agreement on this point has, however, been
reached.
Works of this quality of technique, even if uninspired by high artistic
feeling, show how greatly the Attic school has improved since the
days of Euboulides. In sculpture the skill of the workman depends
largely on the popularity of, and demand for, his work. The new vogue
of sculpture soon produced a high standard of technical efficiency.
But if Greco-Roman art remained wholly and unalterably Greek, Greece
itself was not allowed the monopoly of its production. During the
early years of the first century two Greek artists transferred their
business to Rome itself, and initiated thereby a new school of
Hellenistic sculpture. These were Pasiteles and Arcesilaos, names of
high importance for Greek art.
[Illustration: 51]
[Illustration: 52]
[Illustration: 53]
Pasiteles was an artist of great versatility and scientific
attainments. He wrote a work on Greek art in five books, which served
as a primary authority for Pliny.[107] He was a goldsmith and a metal
worker, and his range of sculptural subjects was very wide. He is known
to have paid special attention to the sculpture of animals, and it
is recorded that he studied a lion from life at the Roman docks. He
seems also to have been the originator of a device, which did much to
injure the later development of marble sculpture.[108] Bronze workers
had always had to prepare clay models usually finished in wax after
the invention of the _cire perdue_ process; metal workers of all kinds
had need of the same preparation; but in marble sculpture the use of
models had hitherto been confined to pedimental designs or similar
productions prepared by great artists and worked out by masons. The
effect on architectural sculpture had usually been unfortunate. It is
expressly told us of Pasiteles that he always made use of clay models
for all his work, that is, including his marble sculpture. It was,
no doubt, inevitable in a commercial age, where copies were in great
request, and where several replicas were made of the one original, that
the use of clay models designed by the master and copied in marble by
pupils and workmen should become general. The ultimate results of such
a procedure were destructive to the whole art; for workshops came
to possess a stock of models and to turn out machine-made copies on
demand. The finished statue became merely the work of masons untouched
by the original master, who devoted himself entirely to the preparation
of models and designs. The sculptor’s workshop instead of being a
studio degenerated into a factory. No doubt Pasiteles himself was an
artist who did much original work, but in the hands of his pupils and
followers statue-making was a mere trade. Unfortunately the works of
his school, which survive for us, are almost wholly these mechanical
and commercial by-products. The works of real fancy and charm have
almost wholly disappeared. Many of the Hellenistic reliefs, especially
those of the Palazzo Spada type, are to be attributed to the Greek
sculptors in Rome. These show an elegance and a dainty affectation
quite in keeping with the spirit of the age. The group of Appiades
(Fig. 51) by Stephanos,[109] a pupil of Pasiteles, has been recognized
in the group of three nude girls holding up a water-pot, now in the
Louvre.[110] The Three Graces are also a conception of this age. Neat
competent work of a decorative type seems to sum up the original
achievements of this school, which fall more or less in line with the
Neo-Attic reliefs shortly to be considered.
But most of our remains of the school of Pasiteles belong to a
different class of statue, best illustrated by the athlete of
Stephanos, Pasiteles’ pupil, in the Villa Albani (Fig. 53). All periods
of art which are bankrupt in new ideas tend to be archaistic; the
Greco-Roman school looked backwards for all its inspiration; but while
Neo-Attics found their models in Ionian art of the sixth century,
the pupils of Pasiteles studied their larger sculpture mainly in
the light of the early fifth-century Argive school. The athlete of
Stephanos shows the proportions, the stiff pose, and the surface
treatment of the pre-Polykleitan types of Ageladas. He is comparable
with the Ligourio bronze[111] or the Acropolis ephebe[112] of Kritios
for all his Lysippic slenderness and later expression. The type was
immensely popular and may have originated with Pasiteles himself. We
have it in single examples and combined in groups, as in the Orestes
and Electra of Naples,[113] where the companion figure is female, or in
the Ildefonso group[114] where it is combined with another male statue.
All these figures are copied from early fifth-century art, though the
signs of eclectic archaism are sufficiently clear. If we examine the
so-called Electra of Naples, we see an archaic early fifth-century
head together with a pose approaching the Praxitelean, transparent
drapery of the style of Alkamenes, and a low girdle and uncovered
shoulder reminiscent of Pergamon. The group of Menelaos,[115] a pupil
of Stephanos, in the Terme Museum, is a less archaic-looking and a
more satisfactory work. Fifth century in detail, in style it reminds
us rather of the fourth-century grave reliefs. To the same period, or
perhaps a later one, belongs the idea of grouping well-known statues
originally separate. Thus we have in the Capitol a group of the Melian
Venus with the Ares Borghese.[116] This actual group, however, belongs
to a much later time.
Arcesilaos was another well-known sculptor of the age, a friend of
Pompey and Caesar. The Venus Genetrix of the Louvre[117] was made for
the House of the Julii. It bears its fifth-century origin clearly
stamped on its style. Arcesilaos also was a great provider of clay
models, which he sold outright to workshops for manufacturing purposes,
so that a finished statue might have never been seen by the artist
responsible for its design. A series of herms in the Terme Museum[118]
show a strong archaistic tendency towards fifth-century models, but
bear also in details of pose and drapery the clear stamp of the
Greco-Roman age. Statues of this type were intended for the decoration
of Roman palaces. They are no longer self-sufficing works of art, but
are subject to the general demands of artistic decoration.
This brings us to the third division of Greco-Roman sculpture, in
reality its most original contribution to the history of Greek art:
the Neo-Attic reliefs,[119] all of which are primarily decorative in
their purpose. The works with which we have hitherto dealt--the Apollo
Belvedere, the Torso Belvedere, or the Venus Genetrix--have all been
eclectic in style, and consequently have lacked the sense of harmony
or uniformity, which is one of the conditions of great sculpture. The
same criticism applies to all the sculpture of the mainland in the
Hellenistic age. On the other hand the schools of Pergamon, Rhodes,
and Alexandria attained a uniformity of style, and consequently were
enabled to produce masterpieces of art. Their works can be attributed
to a school, because they contain common elements of style and
technique based on a common theory of art. This community of purpose
has been wholly lacking in the works of Euboulides, Damophon, and the
Melian artists, and only partially felt in the works of Pasiteles
and Arcesilaos. All these artists were individualists selecting and
combining at their own will and pleasure. The Neo-Attic artists are
quite different. Their names are immaterial, because their works all
bear the impress of precisely the same style. There is no chance
of mistaking a Neo-Attic work; its origin is clear in every line.
These reliefs represent the last true school of Greek sculpture, the
last monuments in which a common line of development can be studied
unaffected by individual idiosyncrasies. They are strongly archaistic,
but in spite of this they are essentially modern. They neither copy the
antique exactly, nor adapt it to existing modes as the followers of
Pasiteles did. They rather invent a new mode and a new style in art,
but they make use of archaic technical details for its expression.
Their art is essentially artificial and symbolic, so that they
represent a reaction against the academic classicism of the period;
but it is also meticulous in detail, so that it can merit no reproach
of a loose impressionism. The Neo-Attic artists of the first century
B.C. are really the pre-Raphaelites of Greek art, and Rossetti and
Burne-Jones are the nearest parallel to them in later art history.
Their reliefs are all decorative in purpose, for the adornment of
altars, candelabra, fountains, well-heads, or wall-panels; and
therefore they are not unnaturally attracted by the most decorative of
all the archaic schools, the late Ionian or Attic-Ionian art of the
end of the sixth century. They make use also of later models, of the
Victories of the Balustrade, of Scopaic Maenads, of Praxitelean satyrs,
but all the models which they adopt are treated in a uniform style,
a new style of exaggerated daintiness of pose and gesture accompanied
by an archaistic formality of drapery and modelling. In this detail
they contrast strongly with the realism of the pre-Raphaelites. Their
daintiness and formality are derived from Ionian models, but reproduced
in a wholly different setting.
The vase of Sosibios in the Louvre[120] reproduces some of their
favourite types, which occur over and over again in the decorative art
of the early empire. The flute-playing satyr, the dancing maenad, the
armed dancer, and all the other types are reproduced in every variety
of combination, but in identical form. The Neo-Attic sculptors were
content with the elaboration of a few types which they combined at
pleasure. They never attempted more intricate groups than their variant
of the two Victories with a bull from the Acropolis Balustrade. Usually
they merely group single figures in long rows without any connexion in
thought. Nothing could bring out more clearly their essential poverty
of ideas and the purely commercial character of their art. The designs
are like so many stencil patterns which can be applied to any form of
monument.
When we examine the figures more closely, we can see the elements
which make up their characteristic style. The figures invariably
march on tiptoe. Their fingers are extended and the little finger
is usually bent back in an affected manner. This detail is derived
from the archaic pose of the hand holding out a flower, so common in
late Ionian art. The tiptoe pose is also found on ancient reliefs.
The drapery is based mainly on that of the late fifth-century Attic
school, but with various additions and refinements. The fluttering
ends of cloaks and mantles recall fourth-century reliefs, while the
curving swallow-tail ends of flying drapery are imitated directly from
the sixth century. The drapery on the figure itself usually hangs in
straight archaic lines as in the Artemis of Pompeii,[121] where the
zigzag shape of ancient folds is reproduced with great formality; or
it follows an almost equally artificial system of wavy folds, based
on the school of the Balustrade, as in the fine relief of a dancing
Maenad in the Conservatori Museum.[122] The elegant lounging poses with
bent head, which remind us somewhat of Burne-Jones figures, are based
no doubt on Praxiteles. The delineation of the surface muscles of the
nude body also follows a uniform rule derived rather from the middle
fifth-century Attic art than from that of Ionia. The muscles of the
male figures tend to be over-emphasized, so far as that is conformable
with the elegant slenderness of their figures. But a description of
the figure-types of Neo-Attic art is incomplete without some notice of
the intricate decorative designs of plants and animals which always
frame and enshrine the reliefs on altar or candelabrum. Archaic
Greek decoration was always formal and conventional in character.
The exquisite mouldings of the Erechtheum or of the later Corinthian
capital are not naturalistic but highly stylized. Naturalistic
floral or animal decoration begins with the Hellenistic age, and is
especially prominent in the Neo-Attic monuments. The trailing vine,
grape-clusters, wreaths of flowers, new heraldic sphinxes, lions’
heads, &c., are carefully worked out from nature and combined with the
remnants of the old decoration of palmettes, volutes, and tongue and
dart mouldings. The vase of Sosibios shows a combination of the two
principles, which is truly symbolic of the Greco-Roman combined school,
for naturalistic decorative designs are just as representative of Roman
art as formal ones are of Hellenic. From the combined system of the
Neo-Attic reliefs we pass directly to the purely naturalistic floral
designs of Augustan architectural sculpture.
Our survey of Greek sculpture must conclude with the great buildings
of Augustus. In them we see for the first time the combination of
Italian with Greek principles. The Greco-Roman art which we have
noticed hitherto has been archaistic and eclectic, but it has been
purely Greek. Roman tastes have been studied and gratified, but style
and technique have remained wholly Greek and uncontaminated. Even
in the new buildings this procedure still continued. Pliny tells us
that Augustus, who had the fashionable taste for the archaic in Greek
art, actually imported the _Korai_ of Bupalos and Athenis for use as
acroteria on his monuments. The Conservatori Museum contains an almost
exact copy of one of these _Korai_,[123] which must belong to the age
of Augustus, as well as a very inferior adaptation of the same type.
The _Kore_ figure was translated into the so-called Spes type for
mirror handles and other elements of decoration.
But Augustus was not the man to submit to a complete extinction of
Italian artistic principles. His system was closely identified with
a revival of ancient Italy in all directions, and he was not likely
to abandon Italic art. It therefore came to pass that in the greatest
sculptured monument of his period--the Ara Pacis[124] erected on the
Campus Martius, which is now being gradually and laboriously pieced
together again--we have a combination of Greek and Italian principles
of first-rate importance for the subsequent development of Roman art.
One side of the altar contained a relief of Tellus or the Earth, which
is hardly distinguishable from the pastoral Hellenistic reliefs, but
the procession which fills the greater part of the other sides is
treated in a very different manner. The general scheme is Greek, and
must have been influenced by the Parthenon frieze, but the treatment in
detail is Italian. Thus we have the Roman toga with its voluminous soft
folds, and the Roman principle of direct realistic portraiture in all
the heads. But more important than the portraiture is the appearance of
a new development of perspective in relief which is destined to have a
great career in the future of art, and which has been regarded by some
authorities as purely Italian.
Greek reliefs had always been represented as if against a tangible
background, at first practically in two planes only, and then in
Hellenistic times in truer perspective, but invariably against a
background of some kind. Roman art, on the other hand, in its more
developed reliefs like those on the Arch of Titus,[125] eliminates
the idea of background and regards the wall on which the reliefs are
placed as nonexistent. The reliefs are intended to give the illusion
of free sculpture, as if they were standing in the round against a
background of the sky. A much greater depth must, therefore, enter
into the principle of perspective. Just as in the bronze reliefs of
the Florentine Baptistery Ghiberti used the principle of no background
and attempted to show a whole countryside behind his figures as if
the relief were a picture, so the artist of the reliefs of the Arch
of Titus uses a strongly diminishing perspective and a pronounced
foreshortening of his figures to produce this same effect of free
sculpture.
In Greek sculpture of the Hellenistic age it is true to say that the
depth of the background has been greatly increased. This is visible
even as early as the Telephos frieze. But it would be hard to point to
a Greek relief in which the effect was wholly pictorial and the idea
of the background was entirely abolished. This principle, however,
does appear in the reliefs of the Ara Pacis, and therefore they mark
a new era in art. The perspective and the foreshortening are stronger
and more illusional. In the background we get flat heads just incised
in the marble to give the effect of the depth of the crowd. The scene
is in fact not a procession in Indian file but a true crowd many ranks
deep. The principle is not altogether adequately carried out in the Ara
Pacis, but soon it is more completely mastered. The stucco decorations
of the Villa Farnesina,[126] though in the lowest possible relief,
express a depth greater than any Hellenistic landscape relief. They are
purely pictorial in character.
The subordination of sculpture to pictorial ideas is Italian not
Greek. Italy through Etruria, her real artistic pioneer, was always
a patron of painting rather than sculpture, and therefore under the
Empire sculpture becomes either wholly decorative or merely devoted
to portraiture. During the reign of Augustus Greek influence still
persists, and under Hadrian we have a Greek revival, but from Tiberius
to the Renaissance sculpture descends from a primary to a secondary
art.