Greek sculpture

“ Modern criticism differentiates sharply the characteristics of the several periods and even of the individual artists, but such subtleties are beyond the grasp of the unlearned. The majority of people continue to regard Greek sculpture in its entirety, as if it were the homogeneous product of a single age. To the popular imagination it is as if some gigantic machine turned out the Apollo Belvedere, the Venus of Milo, the Elgin Marbles, and all the rest, in a single day. ”

“ Greek sculpture can be sympathetically understood only by catching something of the spirit which produced it. One must shake off the centuries and regard life with the childlike simplicity of the young world: one must give imagination free rein. The same attitude of mind which can enjoy Greek mythology and Greek literature is the proper attitude for the enjoyment of Greek sculpture. The best interpreter of a nation's art is the nation's poetry. ”

“ A new statue was, in a certain sense, a new deity, although the whole aim of the sculptor must, undoubtedly, have been to render visible the thoughts contained in myths and purified by poetry, and so to pass onward step-wise to a fuller and fuller realization of the spiritual type. It is this unity, combined with difference, that makes the study of Greek sculpture fascinating in itself, and fruitful for the understanding of the Greek religion. ”

“ Greek sculpture has come to be regarded as the product of a peculiarly limited art, dealing with a specially abstracted range of subjects; and the Greek sculptor as a workman almost exclusively intellectual, having only a sort of accidental connexion with the material in which his thought was expressed. He is fancied to have been disdainful of such matters as the mere tone, the fibre or texture, of his marble or cedar-wood, of that just perceptible yellowness, for instance, in the ivory-like surface of the Venus of Melos ”

“ To all but the highest culture, the reserved faces of the gods will ever have something of insipidity. Again, in the best Greek sculpture, the archaic immobility has been thawed, its forms are in motion; but it is a motion ever kept in reserve, which is very seldom committed to any definite action. Endless as are the attitudes of Greek sculpture, exquisite as is the invention of the Greeks in this direction, the actions or situations it permits are simple and few. There is no Greek Madonna; the goddesses are always childless. ”

“ CHAPTER I THE RISE OF GREEK SCULPTURE AND THE
ATHLETIC SCULPTURES OF GREECE
Nowadays sculpture is not an acknowledged queen in the Tourney of the Arts. The writer who has thrust her colours into his casque and would break a lance on her behalf, struggles for some unstoried damsel about whose very existence he has been playfully twitted by the champions of the reigning beauties.
Rightly considered, art is but a form of speech—sculpture speaking through words formed from chiselled marble and moulded bronze. ”

“ The material, itself marble, is utterly unlike life, it is perfectly cold and still, it has neither the texture nor the colouring of life. The story of Pygmalion who fell in love with the statue he had himself sculptured is as false as it is tasteless. Greek sculpture is the last form of art to incite physical reaction. It is remote almost to the point of chill abstraction. The statue in the round renounces not only human life itself, but all the natural background and setting of life. The statues of the Greek gods are Olympian in spirit as well as subject. ”

“ They have called forth the glory of art; and wonderful were the periods that stamped on earth their statues, as if all men's intellect had been tasked to the work, that they should leave a mark and memorial of beauty than which no age hereafter should show a greater. We acknowledge the perfection in the remains that are left to us. Greek art stills sways the mind of every country—all the world mistrusts every attempt in a contrary direction. The excellence of Greek sculpture is reflected back again upon Greek fable, the heathen mythology from which it was taken ”

“ And if one here or there, in looking at these things, bethinks himself of the required substitution; if he endeavours mentally to throw them back into that proper atmosphere, through which alone they can exercise over us all the magic by which they charmed their original spectators, the effort is not always a successful one, within the grey walls of the Louvre or the British Museum.
And the circumstance that Greek sculpture is presented to us in such falsifying isolation from the work of the weaver, the carpenter, and the goldsmith, has encouraged a manner of regarding it too little sensuous. ”

“ Again, Greek art is distinctly an art of generalization, dealing with types rather than with individuals. This characteristic is of varying degrees in different periods and with different sculptors. It is seen in its perfection in the Elgin Marbles, in exaggeration in the Apollo Belvedere, and at the minimum in the work of Praxiteles. Yet it is everywhere sufficiently marked to be indissolubly connected with Greek sculpture. ”

“ Every Greek statue owes its greatness to the intensity of the artist’s attachment to one or other of these dominating beliefs. The Panathenaic frieze on the Parthenon was, primarily, the result of the first; the great temple statues of Zeus, Hera, Athena and Asclepius represent the fruits of the second; the glorious series of athletic statues by Hellenic sculptors of every period witness to the potency of the third. ”

“ The very idea of exceeding the excellence of a great Greek statue hardly enters the mind of the modern sculptor. If he could but approach the work of Praxiteles, or even of the nameless workers who carved the great tomb of Sidon, he would regard it as an astounding achievement.
We shall find not a few who attribute this perfection of Greek sculpture to the great opportunities they had of observing the play of limb and muscle in their daily exercises in the palæstra, where men and boys exercised naked. ”

“ The whole history of Greek sculpture, from its rise in the sixth century to its decline in the third, is inspired by this desire to represent the divine by the most beautiful things on earth. The sculpture of the great nations of the East, Egypt and Assyria, is full of figures of the Gods, and of scenes of worship. But these figures do not rise above the human. The gods appear as conventional figures, mere ordinary men and women. ”

“ The Greeks considered that the human form was the most fitting subject for representation in sculpture, yet they were not great portrait makers; that was left for a later race to achieve. What they aimed at doing was to give outward expression to those qualities of the mind and spirit which they, as a people, prized so highly: Beauty, Self-control, Harmony, Restraint. The greatest Greek sculpture was, as it were, the answer, wrought in marble, to the prayer of Socrates to Pan: "Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul ”

“ Athens has practically acknowledged defeat in the struggle for the hegemony of Greece. Instead of the all-pervading pride in citizenship, the Athenian is conscious of an increasing interest in himself as an individual. The old absorption in the ideal citizenship vanishes. For this very reason the sculptor strikes a note more akin to our nature. The cold, almost repellent, beauty of the fifth-century sculpture is replaced by a new and more sensuous grace.
What were the historical circumstances which brought about this entire change in the Greek artists’ outlook upon life? ”

“ Out of this root-idea sprang the whole of that Greek sculpture, which is still, and perhaps ever will be, one of the unrivalled wonders of the world.
Their first statues, remember, were statues of the gods. This is an historic fact. Before B.C. 580 there were probably no statues in Greece save those of deities. But of what form? We all know that the usual tendency of man has been to represent his gods as more or less monstrous. ”

“ Still there remains enough, uniting the fragments of statues and of bas-reliefs which are continually being discovered, [94] to give us a general conception of Greek sculpture.
Greek sculptors sought above everything else to represent the most beautiful bodies in a calm and noble attitude. They had a thousand occasions for viewing beautiful bodies of men in beautiful poses, at the gymnasium, in the army, in the sacred dances and choruses. They studied them and learned to reproduce them; no one has ever better executed the human body. ”

“ Even in the case of substantive sculpture, figures or groups made to stand by themselves in market-place or portico, the Greek love of harmony, or as they would have put it, of rhythm and symmetry prevails: ancient critics in those accounts of Greek sculpture, of which fragments have come down to us in the writings of Pliny and Quintilian, lay great stress on these features. They show us that whereas in early art a merely external and mechanical balance had prevailed, in the course of the fifth century this love of order and measure was taken into the very being of art. ”

“ The ordinary Egyptian stone-cutter knew of only two positions, well established by custom; he renounced fundamentally the countless different appearances of life, and, with this, all representation of action and of individuality. Primitive Greek sculpture, on the contrary, arose from a sound naturalism, which directed the eye of the artist to real and peculiar appearances from the outset, often neglecting the proportions of the whole in the desire characteristically to express important details. ”

“ Greek sculpture is not to be hastily identified with what we call classicism in art and contrasted with romanticism and realism. Greek art is classic, if we mean by that term academic, only for a brief period of its decadence. During the fourth century and the Hellenistic age it displays all the phenomena of romantic and realistic art. In fact Greek art as a whole comprises every form of artistic expression, and exhibits wellnigh the whole of the possibilities that lie between the caveman and the aesthete. ”

“ We have seen that in Greek sculpture the artist was not always left to represent the divinities according to his own imagination. For each one a certain fixed type had been gradually thought out in very early times, and this type was handed down from generation to generation. A statue or bust could always be recognized without any title. No one, for instance, could ever mistake Zeus for Apollo, or confuse Hera and Athena. ”

“ The works of the highest Greek sculpture are indeed intellectualised, if we may say so, to the utmost degree; the human figures which they present to us seem actually to conceive thoughts; in them, that profoundly reasonable spirit of design which is traceable in Greek art, continuously and increasingly, upwards from its simplest products, the oil-vessel or the urn, reaches its perfection. ”

“ Nothing can be truer; nor can anything be more certain than that this truth must be realised absolutely by all who would penetrate beyond the outer courts of the temple of Hellenic sculpture. But though we cannot look at a Greek statue with the understanding of a Hellene, though classic sculpture is, as it were, written in an alien tongue, the historian can readily enumerate the influences by which the art was fostered, and the ideals which it sought to embody. ”

“ Our modern museums are so full of specimens of Greek sculpture, either originals or ancient copies of masterpieces, that we feel it possible to obtain an adequate idea of the genius of Pheidias or Praxiteles at first-hand, so to speak. But ancient literature clearly shows that painting was held by the Greeks in equally high estimation with sculpture, if not even higher. Consult the writings of the elder Pliny on ancient art. ”

“ The conception, the anatomy, and beauty of form found in these statues denote a highly cultivated artistic taste and power, to which the peculiar faces, the invariable smile on the mouth, and a certain stiff angularity of treatment, form a marked contrast. We observe in them that turning-point in the history of Greek sculpture, when the conventionalities of an earlier system were receding before that love of nature and extraordinary perception of the Beautiful, which subsequently rendered the Greeks so pre-eminent in art. ”

“ The mention of Myron, the earliest artist to benefit by the freeing of the plastic arts from the shackles of conventionalism, brings us upon one of the prime problems of Greek sculpture. Practically, the history of Greek sculpture depends upon the connections which can be established between the art and three leading ideals. The difficulty of really understanding it depends upon the distance we moderns have progressed—pardon us the term—from those three dominating ideas. ”

“ What would Greek sculpture have been without the deified personifications of the mysterious powers of nature which inspired it? and it is the fact of the pagan religion being both sensuous and realistic which explains the perfection of Greek art. The highest ideal being so low as not to soar beyond the greatest perfection of humanity, was thus within the grasp of the artist to express. Given a manly figure with the fullest development of strength; a female one showing the greatest perfection of form ”

“ It needs little imagination to see the effect of this general acceptance of Greek ideals of life and conduct upon sculpture. It rendered possible the production of hundreds of statues which would [Pg 176] have been meaningless a century earlier. Beyond this we may not go. Every vital art must be largely indebted to the Greek tradition, and Renaissance sculpture was no exception. But, in the end, a great style cannot be transferred. A second-hand style, like a second-hand coat, is apt to be an ill-fit. Taking a few typical fifteenth-century sculptures we do not say “how Greek they are.” ”