Part 8 (2/2)
There, or elsewhere in Rome, tolerated in the general destruction of ancient sculpture--like the ”Wolf of the Capitol,” allowed by way of heraldic sign, as in modern Siena, or like the equestrian figure of Marcus Aurelius doing duty as Charlemagne,--like those, but like very few other works of the kind, the Spinario remained, well-known and in honour, throughout the Middle Age. Stories like that of Ladas the famous runner, who died as he reached the goal in a glorious foot- race of boys, the subject of a famous work by Myron himself, (the ”last breath,” as you saw, was on the boy's lips) were told of the half-grown bronze lad at the Capitol. [292] Of necessity, but fatally, he must pause for a few moments in his course; or the course is at length over, or the breathless journey with some all-important tidings; and now, not till now, he thinks of resting to draw from the sole of his foot the cruel thorn, driven into it as he ran. In any case, there he still sits for a moment, for ever, amid the smiling admiration of centuries, in the agility, in the perfect navete also as thus occupied, of his sixteenth year, to which the somewhat lengthy or attenuated structure of the limbs is conformable. And then, in this attenuation, in the almost Egyptian proportions, in the shallowness of the chest and shoulders especially, in the Phoenician or old Greek sharpness and length of profile, and the long, conventional, wire-drawn hair of the boy, arching formally over the forehead and round the neck, there is something of archaism, of that archaism which survives, truly, in Myron's own work, blending with the grace and power of well-nigh the maturity of Greek art. The blending of interests, of artistic alliances, is certainly delightful.
Polycleitus, the other famous name of this period, and with a fame justified by work we may still study, at least in its immediate derivatives, had also tried his hand with success in such subjects.
In the Astragalizontes, for instance, well known to antiquity in countless reproductions, he had treated an incident of the every-day life of every age, which Plato sketches by the way.
[293] Myron, by patience of genius, had mastered the secret of the expression of movement, had plucked out the very heart of its mystery. Polycleitus, on the other hand, is above all the master of rest, of the expression of rest after toil, in the victorious and crowned athlete, Diadumenus. In many slightly varying forms, marble versions of the original in bronze of Delos, the Diadumenus, indifferently, mechanically, is binding round his head a ribbon or fillet. In the Vaison copy at the British Museum it was of silver.
That simple fillet is, in fact, a diadem, a crown, and he a.s.sumes it as a victor; but, as I said, mechanically, and, prize in hand, might be asking himself whether after all it had been worth while. For the active beauty of the Agonistes of which Myron's art is full, we have here, then, the pa.s.sive beauty of the victor. But the later incident, the realisation of rest, is actually in affinity with a certain earliness, so to call it, in the temper and work of Polycleitus. He is already something of a reactionary; or pauses, rather, to enjoy, to convey enjoyably to others, the full savour of a particular moment in the development of his craft, the moment of the perfecting of restful form, before the mere consciousness of technical mastery in delineation urges forward the art of sculpture to a bewildering infinitude of motion. In opposition to the ease, the freedom, of others, his aim is, by a voluntary restraint in the exercise of such technical mastery, [294] to achieve nothing less than the impeccable, within certain narrow limits. He still hesitates, is self-exacting, seems even to have checked a growing readiness of hand in the artists about him. He was renowned as a graver, found much to do with the chisel, introducing many a fine after-thought, when the rough-casting of his work was over. He studied human form under such conditions as would bring out its natural features, its static laws, in their entirety, their harmony; and in an academic work, so to speak, no longer to be clearly identified in what may be derivations from it, he claimed to have fixed the canon, the common measure, of perfect man. Yet with Polycleitus certainly the measure of man was not yet ”the measure of an angel,” but still only that of mortal youth; of youth, however, in that scrupulous and uncontaminate purity of form which recommended itself even to the Greeks as befitting messengers from the G.o.ds, if such messengers should come.
And yet a large part of Myron's contemporary fame depended on his religious work--on his statue of Here, for instance, in ivory and gold--that too, doubtless, expressive, as appropriately to its subject as to himself, of a pa.s.sive beauty. We see it still, perhaps, in the coins of Argos. And has not the crowned victor, too, in that mechanic action, in his demure att.i.tude, something which reminds us of the religious significance of the Greek athletic service? It was a [295] sort of wors.h.i.+p, you know--that department of public life; such wors.h.i.+p as Greece, still in its superficial youth, found itself best capable of. At least those solemn contests began and ended with prayer and sacrifice. Their most honoured prizes were a kind of religiously symbolical objects. The athletic life certainly breathes of abstinence, of rule and the keeping under of one's self. And here in the Diadumenus we have one of its priests, a priest of the religion whose central motive was what has been called ”the wors.h.i.+p of the body,”--its modest priest.
The so-called Jason at the Louvre, the, Apoxyomenus, and a certain number of others you will meet with from time to time--whatever be the age and derivation of the actual marble which reproduced for Rome, for Africa, or Gaul, types that can have had their first origin in one only time and place--belong, at least aesthetically, to this group, together with the Adorante of Berlin, Winckelmann's antique favourite, who with uplifted face and hands seems to be indeed in prayer, looks immaculate enough to be interceding for others. As to the Jason of the Louvre, one asks at first sight of him, as he stoops to make fast the sandal on his foot, whether the young man can be already so marked a personage. Is he already the approved hero, bent on some great act of his famous epopee; or mere youth only, again, arraying itself mechanically, but alert in eye and soul, prompt to be roused to any [296] great action whatever? The vaguely opened lips certainly suggest the latter view; if indeed the body and the head (in a different sort of marble) really belong to one another. Ah!
the more closely you consider the fragments of antiquity, those stray letters of the old Greek aesthetic alphabet, the less positive will your conclusions become, because less conclusive the data regarding artistic origin and purpose. Set here also, however, to the end that in a congruous atmosphere, in a real perspective, they may a.s.sume their full moral and aesthetic expression, whatever of like spirit you may come upon in Greek or any other work, remembering that in England also, in Oxford, we have still, for any master of such art that may be given us, subjects truly ”made to his hand.”
As with these, so with their prototypes at Olympia, or at the Isthmus, above all perhaps in the Diadumenus of Polycleitus, a certain melancholy (a pagan melancholy, it may be rightly called, even when we detect it in our English youth) is blent with the final impression we retain of them. They are at play indeed, in the sun; but a little cloud pa.s.ses over it now and then; and just because of them, because they are there, the whole aspect of the place is chilled suddenly, beyond what one could have thought possible, into what seems, nevertheless, to be the proper and permanent light of day. For though they pa.s.s on from age to age the [297] type of what is pleasantest to look on, which, as type, is indeed eternal, it is, of course, but for an hour that it rests with any one of them individually. a.s.suredly they have no maladies of soul any more than of the body--Animi sensus non expressit. But if they are not yet thinking, there is the capacity of thought, of painful thought, in them, as they seem to be aware wistfully. In the Diadumenus of Polycleitus this expression allies itself to the long-drawn facial type of his preference, to be found also in another very different subject, the ideal of which he fixed in Greek sculpture--the would-be virile Amazon, in exquisite pain, alike of body and soul--the ”Wounded Amazon.” We may be reminded that in the first mention of athletic contests in Greek literature--in the twenty-third book of the Iliad--they form part of the funeral rites of the hero Patroclus.
It is thus, though but in the faintest degree, even with the veritable prince of that world of antique bronze and marble, the Discobolus at Rest of the Vatican, which might well be set where Winckelmann set the Adorante, representing as it probably does, the original of Alcamenes, in whom, a generation after Pheidias, an earlier and more earnest spirit still survived. Although the crisply trimmed head may seem a little too small to our, perhaps not quite rightful, eyes, we might accept him for that canon, or measure, of the perfect human form, which [298] Polycleitus had proposed. He is neither the victor at rest, as with Polycleitus, nor the combatant already in motion, as with Myron; but, as if stepping backward from Myron's precise point ofinterest, and with the heavydiscusstill in the left hand, he is preparing for his venture, taking stand carefully on the right foot. Eye and mind concentre, loyally, entirely, upon the business in hand. The very finger is reckoning while he watches, intent upon the cast of another, as the metal glides to the goal. Take him, to lead you forth quite out of the narrow limits of the Greek world. You have pure humanity there, with a glowing, yet restrained joy and delight in itself, but without vanity; and it is pure. There is nothing certainly supersensual in that fair, round head, any more than in the long, agile limbs; but also no impediment, natural or acquired. To have achieved just that, was the Greek's truest claim for furtherance in the main line of human development. He had been faithful, we cannot help saying, as we pa.s.s from that youthful company, in what comparatively is perhaps little--in the culture, the administration, of the visible world; and he merited, so we might go on to say--he merited Revelation, something which should solace his heart in the inevitable fading of that. We are reminded of those strange prophetic words of the Wisdom, the Logos, by whom G.o.d made the world, in one of [299] the sapiential, half-Platonic books of the Hebrew Scriptures:--”I was by him, as one brought up with him; rejoicing in the habitable parts of the earth. My delights were with the sons of men.”+
NOTES
271. +Transliteration: tymbos amphipolos. Translation: ”a much frequented tomb.”
274. In some fine reliefs of the thirteenth century, Jesus himself draws near to the deathbed of his Mother. The soul has already quitted her body, and is seated, a tiny crowned figure, on his left arm (as she had carried Him) to be taken to heaven. In the beautiful early fourteenth century monument of Aymer de Valence at Westminster, the soul of the deceased, ”a small figure wrapped in a mantle,” is supported by two angels at the head of the tomb. Among many similar instances may be mentioned the soul of the beggar, Lazarus, on a carved capital at Vezelay; and the same subject in a coloured window at Bourges. The clean, white little creature seems glad to escape from the body, tattooed all over with its sores in a regular pattern.
279. +Transliteration: Ariston hydor. Translation: ”Water is best...”
The ode goes on to praise the Olympic contests. Pindar, Odes, Book O, poem 1, line 1. The Odes of Pindar including the Princ.i.p.al Fragments with an Introduction and an English Translation by Sir John Sandys, Litt.D., FBA. Sir John Sandys. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1937.
280. +Transliteration: epeon hoimon ligyn. Translation: ”the clear strain of words [i.e. song].” Pindar, Odes, Book O., poem 9, line 47. See page 279 note for reference.
281. +Transliteration: mousike. Liddell and Scott definition: ”any art over which the Muses presided, esp. music or lyric poetry set and sung to music....”
288. +Transliteration: to de phya hapan kratiston. Pater's translation: ”The natural is ever best!” Pindar, Odes, Book O., poem 9, line 100.
See See page 279 note for reference.
299. +Proverbs 8.30-31.
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