Part 6 (1/2)

The ideal aim of Greek sculpture, as of all other art, is to deal, indeed, with the deepest elements of man's nature and destiny, to command and express these, but to deal with them in a manner, and with a kind of expression, as clear and graceful and simple, if it may be, as that of the j.a.panese flower-painter. And what the student of Greek sculpture has to cultivate generally in himself is the capacity for appreciating the expression of thought in outward form, the constant habit of a.s.sociating sense with soul, of tracing what we call expression to its sources. But, concurrently with this, he must also cultivate, all along, a not less equally constant appreciation of intelligent workmans.h.i.+p in work, and of design in things designed, of the rational control of matter everywhere. From many sources he may feed this sense of intelligence [222] and design in the productions of the minor crafts, above all in the various and exquisite art of j.a.pan. Carrying a delicacy like that of nature itself into every form of imitation, reproduction, and combination-- leaf and flower, fish and bird, reed and water--and failing only when it touches the sacred human form, that art of j.a.pan is not so unlike the earliest stages of Greek art as might at first sight be supposed.

We have here, and in no mere fragments, the spectacle of a universal application to the instruments of daily life of fitness and beauty, in a temper still unsophisticated, as also unelevated, by the divination of the spirit of man. And at least the student must always remember that Greek art was throughout a much richer and warmer thing, at once with more shadows, and more of a dim magnificence in its surroundings, than the ill.u.s.trations of a cla.s.sical dictionary might induce him to think. Some of the ancient temples of Greece were as rich in aesthetic curiosities as a famous modern museum. That Asiatic poikilia,+ that spirit of minute and curious loveliness, follows the bolder imaginative efforts of Greek art all through its history, and one can hardly be too careful in keeping up the sense of this daintiness of execution through the entire course of its development. It is not only that the minute object of art, the tiny vase-painting, intaglio, coin, or cameo, often reduces into the palm of the hand lines grander than those of [223] many a life-sized or colossal figure; but there is also a sense in which it may be said that the Venus of Melos, for instance, is but a supremely well-executed object of vertu, in the most limited sense of the term. Those solemn images of the temple of Theseus are a perfect embodiment of the human ideal, of the reasonable soul and of a spiritual world; they are also the best made things of their kind, as an urn or a cup is well made.

A perfect, many-sided development of tectonic crafts, a state such as the art of some nations has ended in, becomes for the Greeks a mere opportunity, a mere starting-ground for their imaginative presentment of man, moral and inspired. A world of material splendour, moulded clay, beaten gold, polished stone;--the informing, reasonable soul entering into that, reclaiming the metal and stone and clay, till they are as full of living breath as the real warm body itself; the presence of those two elements is continuous throughout the fortunes of Greek art after the heroic age, and the constant right estimate of their action and reaction, from period to period, its true philosophy.

NOTES

192. +The related Greek noun techne is defined as follows: ”art, skill, regular method of making a thing.” (Liddell and Scott.)

193. *Il. xviii.468-608.

193. *Od. vii.37-132.

197. +Transliteration: porpas te gnamptas th' helikas, kalukas te kai hormous. Translation: ”delicate brooches, spriralled bracelets, rosettes, and necklaces.” Homer, Iliad 18.400.

201. +Empaestik derives from the verb empaio, ”to strike in, stamp.”

(Liddell and Scott.)

210. +The names are etymological--chalkos, argyros, and chrysos signify, respectively, bra.s.s (or copper), silver, and gold.

216. +Transliteration: poikilia. Liddell and Scott definition: ”embroidery . . . (metaph.) cunning.” The metaphorical sense is the one Pater invokes.

218. +Euploea . . . Anadyomene. Euploea means ”fair voyage”; Anadyomene, a participial form derived from the verb anadyo, ”to rise, esp. from the sea,” (Liddell-Scott) may be rendered ”she who emerges from the sea.”

222. +Transliteration: poikilia. Liddell and Scott definition: ”embroidery . . . (metaph.) cunning.” The metaphorical sense is the one Pater invokes.

BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE II: THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES

[224] CRITICS of Greek sculpture have often spoken of it as if it had been always work in colourless stone, against an almost colourless background. Its real background, as I have tried to show, was a world of exquisite craftsmans.h.i.+p, touching the minutest details of daily life with splendour and skill, in close correspondence with a peculiarly animated development of human existence--the energetic movement and stir of typically n.o.ble human forms, quite worthily clothed--amid scenery as poetic as t.i.tian's. If shapes of colourless stone did come into that background, it was as the undraped human form comes into some of t.i.tian's pictures, only to cool and solemnise its splendour; the work of the Greek sculptor being seldom in quite colourless stone, nor always or chiefly in fastidiously selected marble even, but often in richly toned metal (this or that sculptor preferring some special variety of the bronze he worked in, such as the [225] hepatizon or liver-coloured bronze, or the bright golden alloy of Corinth), and in its consummate products chryselephantine,--work in gold and ivory, on a core of cedar. Pheidias, in the Olympian Zeus, in the Athene of the Parthenon, fulfils what that primitive, heroic goldsmiths' age, dimly discerned in Homer, already delighted in; and the celebrated work of which I have first to speak now, and with which Greek sculpture emerges from that half-mythical age and becomes in a certain sense historical, is a link in that goldsmiths' or chryselephantine tradition, carrying us forwards to the work of Pheidias, backwards to the elaborate Asiatic furniture of the chamber of Paris.

When Pausanias visited Olympia, towards the end of the second century after Christ, he beheld, among other precious objects in the temple of Here, a splendidly wrought treasure-chest of cedar-wood, in which, according to a legend, quick as usual with the true human colouring, the mother of Cypselus had hidden him, when a child, from the enmity of her family, the Bacchiadae, then the n.o.bility of Corinth. The child, named Cypselus after this incident (Cypsele being a Corinthian word for chest), became tyrant of Corinth, and his grateful descendants, as it was said, offered the beautiful old chest to the temple of Here, as a memorial of his preservation. That would have been not long after the year 625 B.C. So much for the [226] story which Pausanias heard--but inherent probability, and some points of detail in his description, tend to fix the origin of the chest at a date at least somewhat later; and as Herodotus, telling the story of the concealment of Cypselus, does not mention the dedication of the chest at Olympia at all, it may perhaps have been only one of many later imitations of antique art. But, whatever its date, Pausanias certainly saw the thing, and has left a long description of it, and we may trust his judgment at least as to its archaic style. We have here, then, something plainly visible at a comparatively recent date, something quite different from those perhaps wholly mythical objects described in Homer,--an object which seemed to so experienced an observer as Pausanias an actual work of earliest Greek art.

Relatively to later Greek art, it may have seemed to him, what the ancient bronze doors with their Scripture histories, which we may still see in the south transept of the cathedral of Pisa, are to later Italian art.

Pausanias tells us nothing as to its size, nor directly as to its shape. It may, for anything he says, have been oval, but it was probably rectangular, with a broad front and two narrow sides, standing, as the maker of it had designed, against the wall; for, in enumerating the various subjects wrought upon it, in five rows one above another, he seems to proceed, beginning at the bottom on the right-hand side, along the front [227] from right to left, and then back again, through the second row from left to right, and, alternating thus, upwards to the last subject, at the top, on the left-hand side.

The subjects represented, most of which had their legends attached in difficult archaic writing, were taken freely, though probably with a leading idea, out of various poetic cycles, as treated in the works of those so-called cyclic poets, who continued the Homeric tradition.

Pausanias speaks, as Homer does in his description of the s.h.i.+eld of Achilles, of a kind and amount of expression in feature and gesture certainly beyond the compa.s.s of any early art, and we may believe we have in these touches only what the visitor heard from enthusiastic exegetae, the interpreters or sacristans; though any one who has seen the Bayeux tapestry, for instance, must recognise the pathos and energy of which, when really prompted by genius, even the earliest hand is capable. Some ingenious attempts have been made to restore the grouping of the scenes, with a certain formal expansion or balancing of subjects, their figures and dimensions, in true a.s.syrian manner, on the front and sides. We notice some fine emblematic figures, the germs of great artistic motives in after times, already playing their parts there,--Death, and Sleep, and Night. ”There was a woman supporting on her right arm a white child sleeping; and on the other arm she held a dark child, as if asleep; [228] and they lay with their feet crossed. And the inscription shows, what might be understood without it, that they are Death and Sleep, and Night, the nurse of both of them.”

But what is most noticeable is, as I have already said, that this work, like the chamber of Paris, like the Zeus of Pheidias, is chryselephantine, its main fabric cedar, and the figures upon it partly of ivory, partly of gold,* but (and this is the most peculiar characteristic of its style) partly wrought out of the wood of the chest itself. And, as we read the description, we can hardly help distributing in fancy gold and ivory, respectively, to their appropriate functions in the representation. The cup of Dionysus, and the wings of certain horses there, Pausanias himself tells us were golden. Were not the apples of the Hesperides, the necklace of Eriphyle, the bridles, the armour, the unsheathed sword in the hand of Amphiaraus, also of gold? Were not the other children, like the white image of Sleep, especially the naked child Alcmaeon, of ivory?

with Alcestis and Helen, and that one of the Dioscuri whose beard was still ungrown? Were not ivory and gold, again, combined in the throne of Hercules, and in the three G.o.ddesses conducted before Paris?

The ”chest of Cypselus” fitly introduces the first historical period of Greek art, a period [229] coming down to about the year 560 B.C., and the government of Pisistratus at Athens; a period of tyrants like Cypselus and Pisistratus himself, men of strong, sometimes unscrupulous individuality, but often also acute and cultivated patrons of the arts. It begins with a series of inventions, one here and another there,--inventions still for the most part technical, but which are attached to single names; for, with the growth of art, the influence of individuals, gifted for the opening of new ways, more and more defines itself; and the school, open to all comers, from which in turn the disciples may pa.s.s to all parts of Greece, takes the place of the family, in which the knowledge of art descends as a tradition from father to son, or of the mere trade-guild. Of these early industries we know little but the stray notices of Pausanias, often ambiguous, always of doubtful credibility. What we do see, through these imperfect notices, is a real period of animated artistic activity, richly rewarded. Byzes of Naxos, for instance, is recorded as having first adopted the plan of sawing marble into thin plates for use on the roofs of temples instead of tiles; and that his name has come down to us at all, testifies to the impression this fair white surface made on its first spectators. Various islands of the Aegean become each the source of some new artistic device. It is a period still under the reign of Hephaestus, delighting, above all, in magnificent [230] metal-work. ”The Samians,” says Herodotus, ”out of a tenth part of their profits--a sum of six talents--caused a mixing vessel of bronze to be made, after the Argolic fas.h.i.+on; around it are projections of griffins' heads; and they dedicated it in the temple of Here, placing beneath it three colossal figures of bronze, seven cubits in height, leaning upon their knees.” That was in the thirty-seventh Olympiad, and may be regarded as characteristic of the age. For the popular imagination, a kind of glamour, some mysterious connexion of the thing with human fortunes, still attaches to the curious product of artistic hands, to the ring of Polycrates, for instance, with its early specimen of engraved smaragdus, as to the mythical necklace of Harmonia. Pheidon of Argos first makes coined money, and the obelisci--the old nail-shaped iron money, now disused- -are hung up in the temple of Here; for, even thus early, the temples are in the way of becoming museums. Names like those of Eucheir and Eugrammus, who were said to have taken the art of baking clay vases from Samos to Etruria, have still a legendary air, yet may be real surnames; as in the case of Smilis, whose name is derived from a graver's tool, and who made the ancient image of Here at Samos.

Corinth--mater statuariae--becomes a great nursery of art at an early time. Some time before the twenty-ninth Olympiad, Butades of Sicyon, the potter, settled there. The record of [231] early inventions in Greece is sometimes fondly coloured with human sentiment or incident.

It is on the b.u.t.terfly wing of such an incident--the love-sick daughter of the artist, who outlines on the wall the profile of her lover as he sleeps in the lamplight, to keep by her in absence--that the name of Butades the potter has come down to us. The father fills up the outline, long preserved, it was believed, in the Nymphaeum at Corinth, and hence the art of modelling from the life in clay. He learns, further, a way of colouring his clay red, and fixes his masks along the temple eaves.

The temple of Athene Chalcioecus--Athene of the brazen house--at Sparta, the work of Gitiades, celebrated about this time as architect, statuary, and poet; who made, besides the image in her shrine, and besides other Dorian songs, a hymn to the G.o.ddess--was so called from its crust or lining of bronze plates, setting forth, in richly embossed imagery, various subjects of ancient legend. What Pausanias, who saw it, describes, is like an elaborate development of that method of covering the interiors of stone buildings with metal plates, of which the ”Treasury” at Mycenae is the earliest historical, and the house of Alcinous the heroic, type. In the pages of Pausanias, that glitter, ”as of the moon or the sun,” which Ulysses stood still to wonder at, may still be felt. And on the right hand of this ”brazen house,” he tells us, stood an [232] image of Zeus, also of bronze, the most ancient of all images of bronze.

This had not been cast, nor wrought out of a single ma.s.s of metal, but, the various parts having been finished separately (probably beaten to shape with the hammer over a wooden mould), had been fitted together with nails or rivets. That was the earliest method of uniting the various parts of a work in metal--image, or vessel, or breastplate--a method allowing of much dainty handling of the cunning pins and rivets, and one which has its place still, in perfectly accomplished metal-work, as in the equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Coleoni, by Andrea Verrocchio, in the piazza of St. John and St. Paul at Venice. In the British Museum there is a very early specimen of it,--a large egg-shaped vessel, fitted together of several pieces, the projecting pins or rivets, forming a sort of diadem round the middle, being still sharp in form and heavily gilt. That method gave place in time to a defter means of joining the parts together, with more perfect unity and smoothness of surface, the art of soldering; and the invention of this art--of soldering iron, in the first instance--is coupled with the name of Glaucus of Chios, a name which, in connexion with this and other devices for facilitating the mechanical processes of art,--for perfecting artistic effect with economy of labour--became proverbial, the ”art of Glaucus” being attributed to those who work well with rapidity and ease.

[233] Far more fruitful still was the invention of casting, of casting hollow figures especially, attributed to Rhoecus and Theodorus, architects of the great temple at Samos. Such hollow figures, able, in consequence of their lightness, to rest, almost like an inflated bladder, on a single point--the entire bulk of a heroic rider, for instance, on the point of his horse's tail--admit of a much freer distribution of the whole weight or ma.s.s required, than is possible in any other mode of statuary; and the invention of the art of casting is really the discovery of liberty in composition.*

And, at last, about the year 576 B.C., we come to the first true school of sculptors, the first clear example, as we seem to discern, of a communicable style, reflecting and interpreting some real individuality (the double personality, in this case, of two brothers) in the masters who evolved it, conveyed to disciples who came to acquire it from distant places, and taking root through them at various centres, where the names of the [234] masters became attached, of course,. to many fair works really by the hands of the pupils. Dipoenus and Scyllis, these first true masters, were born in Crete; but their work is connected mainly with Sicyon, at that time the chief seat of Greek art. ”In consequence of some injury done them,” it is said, ”while employed there upon certain sacred images, they departed to another place, leaving their work unfinished; and, not long afterwards, a grievous famine fell upon Sicyon. Thereupon, the people of Sicyon, inquiring of the Pythian Apollo how they might be relieved, it was answered them, 'if Dipoenus and Scyllis should finish those images of the G.o.ds'; which thing the Sicyonians obtained from them, humbly, at a great price.” That story too, as we shall see, ill.u.s.trates the spirit of the age. For their sculpture they used the white marble of Paros, being workers in marble especially, though they worked also in ebony and in ivory, and made use of gilding. ”Figures of cedar-wood, partly incrusted with gold”--kedrou zodia chryso dienthismena+--Pausanias says exquisitely, describing a certain work of their pupil, Dontas of Lacedaemon. It is to that that we have definitely come at last, in the school of Dipoenus and Scyllis.