Part 14 (1/2)

The work most nearly related to this, also in marble, and perfectly similar in conception, is a figure of the Marsyas group, the celebrated Knife-sharpener in the Uffizi at Florence. This is also a representative of barbarism, probably a Scythian, the others having been Gauls; but, artistically, this makes no difference. No originals remain of the other figures in the group, of which the barbarian, cowering upon the ground and sharpening the knife for the flaying of Marsyas, probably formed no very important part. Another aim, the careful anatomical treatment of the body, is ostentatiously displayed in the copies of this work now in Berlin and Florence. The group suggests another locality, and forms a connecting medium between those two most important centres of art in that period, Pergamon and Rhodes.

Among the few republics of the time, the island of Rhodes was able to rival the brilliant courts of kings, in regard to artistic treasures, by its wealth of commerce and its political neutrality--the latter being rendered possible, as nowhere else, by its situation and importance.

That the influence of Lysippos prevailed there is clear from the fact that, after this master had sent thither his Phoibos upon the quadriga, the Rhodian Chares went to learn of him, and afterwards executed for his native city the above-mentioned colossus. This was followed in the same place by a hundred other colossal figures, which were probably related, in point of style, to the works of Lysippos. The statement of Pliny that each, singly, would have sufficed to make the place of its exposition famous is hardly intelligible. Numerous names of artists, mostly of Rhodes, found partly in inscriptions upon the bases, and partly mentioned by Pliny, might here be mentioned.

The multiplied productions of colossal works, however, would not suffice to give a very favorable idea of the state of art in Rhodes, were it not for the preservation of two examples, prominent among many, which were famous even in antiquity. These were the group of the Laoc.o.o.n, in the Vatican, and the so-called Farnese Bull, in Naples. The first (_Fig._ 237), which Pliny, with extravagant praise, calls the work of three Rhodians, Agesandros, Athanodoros, and Polydoros, was found in 1506--not in one piece, as he describes it, but in six--among the ruins of the house of t.i.tus, in whose palace Pliny says it was placed. It represents the priest Laoc.o.o.n, who sinned at the altar through love, and whom Apollo chastised by means of two serpents. This expiation became tragic, from its having taken place at the moment when Laoc.o.o.n had resolved to save his native city, Troy; and also from the suffering of the children, innocent, though born in sin. The serpents have encircled the three figures; the youngest is falling from the deadly sting; the father, sinking upon the altar after a desperate defence, is no longer able to protect himself; while the elder son, not yet threatened with instant death, but hopelessly entangled in the coils of the serpent, turns upon his father a look of despairing horror.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 237.--Group of Laoc.o.o.n and his Sons, by Agesandros, Athanodoros, and Polydoros. (Vatican.)]

This grand work, though from Pliny down to later times esteemed beyond its real merit, still makes evident to us peculiarities in the art of Rhodes which, in many respects, render it of independent value. We find in it a choice of subject new in sculpture, the technical and artistic difficulties of which appear almost insurmountable, so that it could only be treated by ability well trained and long experienced. It gave opportunity to surpa.s.s all existing productions in its display of artistic technical superiority. When the body of the Laoc.o.o.n is compared with the type of Heracles, it cannot be doubted that the canon of Lysippos was followed; but the forms, which with him were developed from the living model, in this, as in the Marsyas of Pergamon, are taken from anatomical studies, and are wanting in fulness of life: the overdetailed muscles are too studied, distinct, and separated; they are marble, and not flesh. The composition would, in real life, be impracticable; the action is visibly so ordered that it never could be possible, and is throughout developed with an aim towards the greatest effect. But this effect is by no means merely formal, limited to the restless and disquieting play of the lines of the limbs and trunks, and of the coils of the serpents. It is in the highest degree pathetic. Thus this element of the school of Praxiteles existed in this work, both the leading characteristics of that master being here displayed with an excessive ostentation. The pathos confronts us too exclusively, not modified by any ethic principle. The work does not, therefore, have the tragic power which lies in the descriptions of Sophocles, because, in the group, only the effect is to be seen; we have no hint as to the cause. The pathetic blends far more with the pathological event than with the ethical. The mastery of rendering, the composition, the effect--everything is wonderful; but it all lies in the realm of display: our admiration is given to the artist rather than to the work. It cannot be denied that this effective treatment was the dominant feature in the art of Rhodes; but it set technical mastery in the foreground, to the neglect of absolute and intrinsic merit.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 238.--The Farnese Bull of Apollonios and Tauriscos.

(In Naples.)]

This applies equally to the second great work, the so-called Farnese Bull (_Fig._ 238), the creation of two artists from Tralles, Apollonios and Tauriscos, who may have worked in Rhodes, as, according to Pliny, the group was to be seen there before it was brought to Rome under Augustus. This large group was found in the Baths of Caracalla soon after the discovery of the Laoc.o.o.n, and was transported to Naples, where it now stands in the Museo n.a.z.ionale. The scene is probably taken from the _Antiope_, a tragedy of Euripides, and an understanding of the story is necessary to its comprehension. Antiope was the daughter of King Nycteus of Thebes; he being angry with her because of the love of Zeus, and incredulous as to the cause of her pregnancy, she fled to Mount Kithairon, where she bore the twins Zethos and Amphion. Having given these to the care of a shepherd, she was received by King Epopeus of Sikyon; but Lycos, the brother and successor of Nycteus, carried on the hateful persecution, even to the extent of making war against her protector. Sikyon was destroyed, and Antiope returned as a slave to Thebes, where the ill-treatment of Dirke, wife of Lycos, obliged her to fly once more to the mountains. There, at a festival of Bacchus, she was found again by her persecutor, and, for her flight, was given the terrible punishment of being dragged to death by a bull. Zethos and Amphion were ready to execute the command when a recognition took place, and a just vengeance brought the fate intended for Antiope upon the head of Dirke. This moment forms the imposing scene of the group. The raging bull is only with difficulty held by the avenging sons; Dirke, a most beautiful woman, praying in vain for grace, clasps the knee of one while the other is ready to throw around her the noose by which she is to be dragged over the rough ground of Kithairon. The pa.s.sion of the avenging sons, and the fear of Dirke, make the work highly pathetic and impressive; but it is not so really tragic as the Laoc.o.o.n, because the motive of the evidently brutal deed, though not entirely neglected, as in the former, is still not entirely comprehensible. Antiope, the heroine of the tragedy, is indeed present. But she is not brought into the action, and stands, in fact, behind the princ.i.p.al characters. She is therefore hardly more than a lay figure, expressing nothing. It might perhaps have been better to omit Antiope altogether, and to leave the action without any motive at all. The figure has, however, an interest of its own, being in an excellent state of preservation, while the others have suffered by restoration and by retouching. The composition, with its numerous figures, admirably executed, has a picturesque effect which is somewhat new in the history of Greek sculpture. This is enhanced by the accessories of the story, the rocky ground, and many local details symbolical of the occasion. Besides a fine large dog, really belonging to the group, there are a chaplet and a basket, a disproportionately small boy ornamented with a wreath, and, still more inferior in size, two lions seizing a bull and a horse. There are also two boars coming out from a grotto, a lioness, a stag, a hind, a ram, an eagle with a snake, and a falcon over a dead bird; even turtles, snakes, and snails are represented. The mastery over the technical and artistic difficulties in this work is scarcely less admirable than in the Laoc.o.o.n, and it gives the same impression of a successful piece of bravura, astonis.h.i.+ng and quite fascinating for its novelty, boldness, and versatile power. The age, indeed, satiated with the best products of various schools, demanded the stimulus of an excessive appeal to superficial sources of interest. The group of the Marsyas is attributed to artists of Pergamon, and the Wrestlers in the Uffizi at Florence (_Fig._ 239) may, with greater certainty, be ascribed to those of Rhodes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 239.--The Wrestlers. (In the Uffizi, Florence.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 240.--Apollo Belvedere. (In the Vatican.)]

Before we pa.s.s to the last active period of h.e.l.lenic art, one other work, preserved from this age, the Apollo Belvedere of the Vatican (_Fig._ 240), still claims our consideration. Though without the name of the artist, or of the place of its origin, and not, perhaps, to be cla.s.sed directly with the greatest productions of Pergamon and Rhodes, it is yet not unworthy to rank by their side. It is, like the Laoc.o.o.n, one of the best-known statues among the existing treasures of antiquity, and scarcely needs a minute description. The splendid triumphant head looking into the distance, the slender figure, as fine in modelling as it is n.o.ble, the pleasing grace of the light step, a.s.sure for it an admiration, the more universal as these beauties--the combined result of the schools of Lysippos and of Praxiteles--are just those which are the most generally recognized. It is not an original work, in the full sense of the word, but an early Roman copy from the bronze, and seems to bear a closer relation to it than does the lately discovered head which is now in the museum at Basle. This latter has lost the characteristic features of the bronze style, and from the greater freedom of its treatment may be called a _translation_ into marble, in distinction from the _copy_ in the Vatican. Another reproduction of this work recently made known by Stephani, a bronze statuette in the Strogonoff collection, at St. Petersburg, has given an additional explanation of the action in which the G.o.d was represented.

In the marble the left hand was wanting, and in the restoration this was supplied with a bow; but in the Strogonoff Apollo remains are still to be seen of the aegis, held in the hand, with which the deity drove back the Greeks, as described by Homer, Il. xv. 306. If the far-shooter be thus changed into the aegis-bearer, the shaking of the aegis symbolizing the storm, a plain reference may be found to the original motive of the work. When the Gauls threatened Delphi in 279 B.C., the defence of the Greeks was effectively a.s.sisted by a terrible storm, which threw the barbarians into a fearful panic, and which was regarded by the Greeks as caused by the personal intervention of Apollo, Athene, and Artemis. This might well have had an effect upon art similar to that of the victory of Attalos over the Gauls in Asia Minor. The aetolians, indeed, proposed to erect at Delphi a votive offering, with figures of field-officers and of the three G.o.ds, while a statue of Apollo was erected in Patrae from a similar reason. In view of this, Overbeck has ventured to combine the Apollo Belvedere, the Artemis of Versailles (_Fig._ 241), and the striding Athene of the Capitoline Museum into one group, to which ideal union the unsimilarity of the workmans.h.i.+p, and even of the scale of the three statues, is not so much opposed--since these are all copies that have come down to us from different times--as is the movement of the Apollo, the middle figure, towards the right. This difficulty might be met by changing the positions, so that Athene should stand at the right and Artemis at the left, whereby the action of the figures might be from, rather than towards, each other, Artemis being turned decidedly more towards the front. If, however, this work originated in consequence of the victory in 279 B.C., it shows that a generation before the time of Attalos, at least in Greece proper, although attention had already been devoted to momentary action, art nevertheless still stood upon an ideal height, and could still delineate G.o.ds worthy of admiration.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 241.--Artemis of Versailles.]

These artistic efforts do not, on the whole, refute the opinion of Pliny that art ceased from the 121st to the 156th Olympiad--that is, from 300 to 150 B.C. The chief localities of its activity, Pergamon and Rhodes, may be considered only as asylums found by the higher sculpture after it had lost all foothold in its native home. But when he says it took a new flight at the close of that period, we must acknowledge that the result was not of that kind which could charm us as it did the Roman narrator.

As Brunn remarks, the date of Pliny agrees with that period when h.e.l.lenic art attained a decided mastery in Rome. Scarcely any evidences of the monumental art of Greece were to be recognized in Rome before the conquest of Syracuse in 212 B.C. After this time the Roman triumphs brought forth, one after another, an almost oppressive number of productions, so that the art of the Greek colonies, and of Greece itself, overflowed Rome in a broad stream. Not to mention the plundering of Capua, Tarention, and numerous Grecian cities in Lower Italy, we have an example in the triumphs of Quintius Flaminius, the conqueror of Kynoskephalae, 197 B.C., when the transportation of the statues lasted an entire day. The booty taken from Western Greece by M. Fulvius n.o.bilior, in 189 B.C., also contained not less than five hundred and fifteen statues. These extensive plunderings were at least equalled by the triumphs of L. Cornelius Scipio, the victor over Antiochos; of aemilius Paulus, conqueror of Perseus; of Metellus Macedonicus, and of the destroyer of Corinth, Mummius, who has become proverbial for his barbarous robberies. It was not strange that at last a living art followed the triumphal chariot of Roman victories. Metellus employed many Grecian artists in the erection and ornamentation of his new buildings in Rome.

The scene of artistic industry thus became changed, and Rome, a foreign city, became the central point--first of possession, and afterwards of artistic activity. It might therefore be questioned whether what follows were not better suited to the chapter upon Rome; but it must be considered that the Romans were, from our present point of view, only wealthy collectors and patrons of art, and that the artists employed were still Grecian, and of the h.e.l.lenic school. This was not altered by their working in Rome, or even by their learning from the numberless productions acc.u.mulated there.

Roman grandeur was long contented with artistic booty for the ornamenting of its forums, temples, and public buildings; the immense wealth of the empire and proconsulate giving opportunity for procuring celebrated works by force, by purchase, or as honorary gifts. This brought forth dilettanteism, which led to the study of art, and to a zeal for collecting which made every new acquisition an additional incentive to covetousness. Study choked that impulse which, in a degenerate way, had endeavored to outdo what had been done by masters of the best period, and, accounting their method to be exclusively good, turned art back by a sort of reaction upon those earlier paths. The pa.s.sion for collecting was not limited to the works ready at hand, but would have restorations and imitations by contemporary artists, made in the spirit of the originals. It could not have been otherwise than that art, after having exhausted the originals, and attained its aims in all directions, should react upon itself; but doubtless the circ.u.mstances of Rome had an essential influence upon the manner in which this took place, and greatly furthered this renaissance--to use a somewhat unsuitable term which, in its restricted sense, has been adopted for the far more original awakening of art at the close of the Middle Ages.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 242.--Borghese Gladiator of Agasias. (In the Louvre.)]

In the desire to enliven the different phases of artistic development, it was natural not to return to first principles, but rather to take those creations which lay near at hand, and try to find in them the way to improvement. The period under consideration, up to the commencement of the empire, offers examples of every stage of development, the dates of which can only here and there be given; but it seems that the way for an h.e.l.lenic renaissance was, during this period, partially opened.

Agasias of Ephesos appears as successor to the master of the Laoc.o.o.n and of the Farnese Bull. The celebrated Borghese Gladiator in the Louvre, which represents a warrior in fict.i.tious battle with a horseman, may be referred to the school of Rhodes. (_Fig._ 242.) As the statue did not belong to a group, but was independent, we see in it nothing but a show figure, in which the artist only sought for a position where he might outdo all that had gone before, and give opportunity to parade his technical mastery and his anatomical knowledge. That the work should be placed in this time, and not in the best period of the Rhodian school, is plain from the later character of the writing in the artist's inscription, from the inferior understanding of the mutual relations of the muscles, and particularly from the insignificance of the idea, and the entire lack of the pathetic, all which elements lent to the works of Rhodes an especial value.

As examples from Rhodes and Pergamon not only lay near at hand for the artists of Asia Minor, but were germane to their civilization, so the numerous Attic masters of this period looked to the time of perfection in Attica and Sikyon. The tenets of the school of Lysippos still held sway there, and what splendid fruit it bore, even at this time, notwithstanding the retrogression from its earlier overvalued merit, is shown by the much admired torso, now in the Vatican Belvedere, by Apollonios, son of Nestor of Athens. (_Fig._ 243.) This must certainly have been a sitting Heracles, a motive repeatedly treated by Lysippos, though no restoration of it has yet been decidedly successful. The most probable is the latest by Petersen, which represents him as playing the kithara. The somewhat later statue by Glycon of Athens, the Heracles, who stands leaning upon his club (_Fig._ 231), though approaching somewhat in conception to a work of Lysippos, is far inferior. With this may be mentioned a still poorer repet.i.tion, the Heracles of the Pitti Palace in Florence, through a false inscription ascribed to Lysippos.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 243.--Belvedere Torso, by Apollonios. (In the Vatican.)]

Besides Apollonios, who was distinguished also by his youthful satyr and an Apollo, which are too little known for a more minute description, the school of Scopas and Praxiteles was followed by the son of Apollodoros of Athens, Cleomenes, the sculptor of the Venus de' Medici. When compared with the divine figure of the Venus of Melos, though pleasing, it appears degenerate. The G.o.dlike beauty which we impute to the Cnidian Aphrodite, and find in the Venus of Melos, is lost by the continual emphasis of sensuous effects, notwithstanding all the mastery and delicate feeling for beauty. With the exception of the Braschi Venus at Munich and the Venus of the Capitol, which are more nearly related to that of Cnidos, nearly all the nude figures of Venus in the various museums belong to the same circle and stage of development, even when they betray later work. The masters by no means appear to have been mere copyists; but the works of Praxiteles were altered, to suit the taste of the times, by artists in whom individuality was not quite extinct.

The school of Pheidias, with its high ideal, of which the age in question had little understanding, could never have become popular in the same degree. Rome possessed but few works of this master which could have served as examples, and those not the most important. Still, reminiscences of the best Attic style were not wanting, especially in those figures of the G.o.ds the type of which had been established by Pheidias, as in the statues of Zeus and Athene. The chryselephantine Zeus, by Polycles and Dionysios, in Metellus's Temple of Jupiter, as also the Capitoline of the same material by Apollonios, may justly be referred to the Olympian original; the former at least with the more certainty, when it is considered that the sons of Polycles--Timocles and Timarchides--copied the sculptures upon a s.h.i.+eld of the Parthenos for an Athene, designed for Elateia in Phokis. It is possible--and this may, perhaps, be still further established by Brunn, who has pointed out this connection--that the Pallas in the Villa Ludovisi, by Antiochos of Athens, which has been estimated below its worth, may be a reproduction of the Parthenos, modified and perhaps formed from memory. The treatment of the garments, and the whole position of this otherwise ill-executed figure, remind us of the chryselephantine works, and possess something of the dignity and n.o.bility of the better period.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 244.--Group by Menelaos. (In the Villa Ludovisi.)]

At a time when Cicero could say that in his opinion ”the works of Polycleitos were perfectly beautiful” the master from Argos must have come into fas.h.i.+on. The artistic representative of this stage of appreciative development was Pasiteles, who worked in the time of Pompey, and whose important school has left traces of this influence in examples that have been preserved. The pathetic tendency was not entirely to be avoided, and, though not so evident in the academic male figure of the Villa Albani, which bears the name of Stephanos, the scholar of Pasiteles, is yet undeniable in the groups of Orestes and Electra in Naples, and of Orestes and Pylades in the Louvre. This trait is still more marked in a work of Menelaos, the scholar of Stephanos, the beautiful and celebrated group in the Villa Ludovisi (_Fig._ 244), designated by Winckelmann and Welcker as Electra and Orestes; by Jahn, as Merope and Cresphontes; by Kekule, as Deianeira and Hyllos; and by Schulze and Burckhardt, as Penelope and Telemachos. Though the artist has here made concessions to more recent influences, they did not give the work an eclectic character, as a.s.serted by Kekule, but rather displayed a somewhat archaistic conception, and the short proportions of Polycleitos, long since abandoned for the canon of Lysippos. On the other hand, the remark of Kekule appears just, that the characters do not seem conceived and modelled after nature, but rather as seen through the medium of the tragedy of Euripides.

When the reproductions had run through the entire circle of styles from the best period of art, the archaic was at last brought forward. It is known that Augustus ornamented his buildings, particularly the gable of the Palatine Temple of Apollo, with sculptures of the masters from Chios, Boupalos and Athenis, and that he also carried away from Tegea the Athene of the old Attic Endoios. Archaic art, always possessing a charm for devotional images which was doubled in a time of such satiety, came thus into fas.h.i.+on. A large number of archaistic works appeared, imitated after the antique, as has already been mentioned. They not seldom betray the influence of single figures from larger compositions in relief, as in the instance of the Amphora of the Athenian Sosibios in the Louvre.