Greek Studies A Series of Essays 13

Greek Studies A Series of Essays 13

But, one by one, at last, as in the medieval parallel, monuments

illustrative of the earlier growth of Greek art before the time of

Pheidias have come to light, and to a just appreciation. They show

that the development of Greek art had already proceeded some way

before the opening of Egypt to the Greeks, and point, if to a foreign

source at all, to oriental rather than Egyptian influences; and the

theory which derived Greek art, with many other Greek things, from

Egypt, now hardly finds supporters. In Greece all things are at once

old and new. As, in physical organisms, the actual particles of

matter have existed long before in other combinations; and what is

really new in a new organism is the new cohering force--the mode of

life,--so, in the products of Greek civilisation, the actual elements

are traceable elsewhere by antiquarians who care to trace them; the

elements, for instance, of its peculiar national [216] architecture.

Yet all is also emphatically autochthonous, as the Greeks said,

new-born at home, by right of a new, informing, combining spirit

playing over those mere elements, and touching them, above all,

with a wonderful sense of the nature and destiny of man--the dignity

of his soul and of his body--so that in all things the Greeks are

as discoverers. Still, the original and primary motive seems,

in matters of art, to have come from without; and the view to which

actual discovery and all true analogies more and more point is that

of a connexion of the origin of Greek art, ultimately with Assyria,

proximately with Phoenicia, partly through Asia Minor, and chiefly

through Cyprus--an original connexion again and again re-asserted,

like a surviving trick of inheritance, as in later times it came

in contact with the civilisation of Caria and Lycia, old affinities

being here linked anew; and with a certain Asiatic tradition, of

which one representative is the Ionic style of architecture,

traceable all through Greek art--an Asiatic curiousness, or poikilia,+

strongest in that heroic age of which I have been speaking, and

distinguishing some schools and masters in Greece more than others;

and always in appreciable distinction from the more clearly defined

and self-asserted Hellenic influence. Homer himself witnesses to the

intercourse, through early, adventurous commerce, as in the bright

and animated picture with which [217] the history of Herodotus

begins, between the Greeks and Eastern countries. We may, perhaps,

forget sometimes, thinking over the greatness of its place in the

history of civilisation, how small a country Greece really was; how

short the distances upwards, from island to island, to the coast of

Asia, so that we can hardly make a sharp separation between Asia and

Greece, nor deny, besides great and palpable acts of importation, all

sorts of impalpable Asiatic influences, by way alike of attraction

and repulsion, upon Greek manners and taste. Homer, as we saw, was

right in making Troy essentially a Greek city, with inhabitants

superior in all culture to their kinsmen on the Western shore, and

perhaps proportionally weaker on the practical or moral side, and

with an element of languid Ionian voluptuousness in them, typified by

the cedar and gold of the chamber of Paris--an element which the

austere, more strictly European influence of the Dorian Apollo will

one day correct in all genuine Greeks. The Aegean, with its islands,

is, then, a bond of union, not a barrier; and we must think of

Greece, as has been rightly said, as its whole continuous shore.

 

The characteristics of Greek art, indeed, in the heroic age, so far

as we can discern them, are those also of Phoenician art, its delight

in metal among the rest, of metal especially as an element in

architecture, the covering of everything with plates of metal. It

was from [218] Phoenicia that the costly material in which early

Greek art delighted actually came--ivory, amber, much of the precious

metals. These the adventurous Phoenician traders brought in return

for the mussel which contained the famous purple, in quest of which

they penetrated far into all the Greek havens. Recent discoveries

present the island of Cyprus, the great source of copper and copper-

work in ancient times, as the special mediator between the art of

Phoenicia and Greece; and in some archaic figures of Aphrodite with

her dove, brought from Cyprus and now in the British Museum--objects

you might think, at first sight, taken from the niches of a French

Gothic cathedral--are some of the beginnings, at least, of Greek

sculpture manifestly under the influence of Phoenician masters. And,

again, mythology is the reflex of characteristic facts. It is

through Cyprus that the religion of Aphrodite comes from Phoenicia to

Greece. Here, in Cyprus, she is connected with some other kindred

elements of mythological tradition, above all with the beautiful old

story of Pygmalion, in which the thoughts of art and love are

connected so closely together. First of all, on the prows of the

Phoenician ships, the tutelary image of Aphrodite Euploea, the

protectress of sailors, comes to Cyprus--to Cythera; it is in this

simplest sense that she is, primarily, Anadyomene.+ And her

connexion [219] with the arts is always an intimate one. In Cyprus

her worship is connected with an architecture, not colossal, but full

of dainty splendour--the art of the shrine-maker, the maker of

reliquaries; the art of the toilet, the toilet of Aphrodite; the

Homeric hymn to Aphrodite is full of all that; delight in which we

have seen to be characteristic of the true Homer.

 

And now we see why Hephaestus, that crook-backed and uncomely god, is

the husband of Aphrodite. Hephaestus is the god of fire, indeed; as

fire he is flung from heaven by Zeus; and in the marvellous contest

between Achilles and the river Xanthus in the twenty-first book of

the Iliad, he intervenes in favour of the hero, as mere fire against

water. But he soon ceases to be thus generally representative of the

functions of fire, and becomes almost exclusively representative of

one only of its aspects, its function, namely, in regard to early

art; he becomes the patron of smiths, bent with his labour at the

forge, as people had seen such real workers; he is the most perfectly

developed of all the Daedali, Mulcibers, or Cabeiri. That the god of

fire becomes the god of all art, architecture included, so that he

makes the houses of the gods, and is also the husband of Aphrodite,

marks a threefold group of facts; the prominence, first, of a

peculiar kind of art in early Greece, that beautiful metal-work, with

[220] which he is bound and bent; secondly, the connexion of this,

through Aphrodite, with an almost wanton personal splendour; the

connexion, thirdly, of all this with Cyprus and Phoenicia, whence,

literally, Aphrodite comes. Hephaestus is the "spiritual form" of

the Asiatic element in Greek art.

 

This, then, is the situation which the first period of Greek art

comprehends; a people whose civilisation is still young, delighting,

as the young do, in ornament, in the sensuous beauty of ivory and

gold, in all the lovely productions of skilled fingers. They receive

all this, together with the worship of Aphrodite, by way of Cyprus,

from Phoenicia, from the older, decrepit Eastern civilisation, itself

long since surfeited with that splendour; and they receive it in

frugal quantity, so frugal that their thoughts always go back to the

East, where there is the fulness of it, as to a wonder-land of art.

Received thus in frugal quantity, through many generations, that

world of Asiatic tectonics stimulates the sensuous capacity in them,

accustoms the hand to produce and the eye to appreciate the more

delicately enjoyable qualities of material things. But nowhere in

all this various and exquisite world of design is there as yet any

adequate sense of man himself, nowhere is there an insight into or

power over human form as the __EXPRESSION__ of human soul. Yet those

arts of design in which that younger people delights [221] have in

them already, as designed work, that spirit of reasonable order, that

expressive congruity in the adaptation of means to ends, of which the

fully developed admirableness of human form is but the consummation--

a consummation already anticipated in the grand and animated figures

of epic poetry, their power of thought, their laughter and tears.

Under the hands of that younger people, as they imitate and pass

largely and freely beyond those older craftsmen, the fire of the

reasonable soul will kindle, little by little, up to the Theseus of

the Parthenon and the Venus of Melos.

 

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 Japanese 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 associating 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 workmanship 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 Japan. 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 Japan 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 illustrations of a

classical 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 technê 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 empaiô, "to strike in, stamp."

(Liddell and Scott.)

 

210. +The names are etymological--chalkos, argyros, and chrysos

signify, respectively, brass (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 anadyô, "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 craftsmanship, 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 noble human forms, quite worthily

clothed--amid scenery as poetic as Titian's. If shapes of

colourless stone did come into that background, it was as the

undraped human form comes into some of Titian'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] hepatizôn 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 nobility 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 shield of

Achilles, of a kind and amount of __EXPRESSION__ in feature and gesture

certainly beyond the compass 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 Assyrian

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 goddesses 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 pass 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 fashion; 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 butterfly 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.