Greek Studies A Series of Essays 14

Greek Studies A Series of Essays 14

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 goddess--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 mass 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 mass 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 gods'; which thing the Sicyonians obtained

from them, humbly, at a great price." That story too, as we shall

see, illustrates 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

zôdia chrysô diênthismena+--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.

 

Dry and brief as these details may seem, they are the witness to an

active, eager, animated period of inventions and beginnings, in which

the Greek workman triumphs over the first [235] rough mechanical

difficulties which beset him in the endeavour to record what his soul

conceived of the form of priest or athlete then alive upon the earth,

or of the ever-living gods, then already more seldom seen upon it.

Our own fancy must fill up the story of the unrecorded patience of

the workshop, into which we seem to peep through these scanty

notices--the fatigue, the disappointments, the steps repeated, ending

at last in that moment of success, which is all Pausanias records,

somewhat uncertainly.

 

And as this period begins with the chest of Cypselus, so it ends with

a work in some respects similar, also seen and described by

Pausanias--the throne, as he calls it, of the Amyclaean Apollo. It

was the work of a well-known artist, Bathycles of Magnesia, who,

probably about the year 550 B.C., with a company of workmen, came to

the little ancient town of Amyclae, near Sparta, a place full of

traditions of the heroic age. He had been invited thither to perform

a peculiar task--the construction of a throne; not like the throne of

the Olympian Zeus, and others numerous in after times, for a seated

figure, but for the image of the local Apollo; no other than a rude

and very ancient pillar of bronze, thirty cubits high, to which,

Hermes-wise, head, arms, and feet were attached. The thing stood

upright, as on a base, upon a kind of tomb or reliquary, in which,

according to tradition, lay the remains of the young prince [236]

Hyacinth, son of the founder of that place, beloved by Apollo for his

beauty, and accidentally struck dead by him in play, with a quoit.

From the drops of the lad's blood had sprung up the purple flower of

his name, which bears on its petals the letters of the ejaculation of

woe; and in his memory the famous games of Amyclae were celebrated,

beginning about the time of the longest day, when the flowers are

stricken by the sun and begin to fade--a festival marked, amid all

its splendour, with some real melancholy, and serious thought of the

dead. In the midst of the "throne" of Bathycles, this sacred

receptacle, with the strange, half-humanised pillar above it, was to

stand, probably in the open air, within a consecrated enclosure.

Like the chest of Cypselus, the throne was decorated with reliefs of

subjects taken from epic poetry, and it had supporting figures.

Unfortunately, what Pausanias tells us of this monument hardly

enables one to present it to the imagination with any completeness or

certainty; its dimensions he himself was unable exactly to ascertain,

and he does not tell us its material. There are reasons, however,

for supposing that it was of metal; and amid these ambiguities, the

decorations of its base, the grave or altar-tomb of Hyacinth, shine

out clearly, and are also, for the most part, clear in their

significance.

 

"There are wrought upon the altar figures, on the one side of Biris,

on the other of [237] Amphitrite and Poseidon. Near Zeus and Hermes,

in speech with each other, stand Dionysus and Semele, and, beside

her, Ino. Demeter, Kore, and Pluto are also wrought upon it, the

Fates and the Seasons above them, and with them Aphrodite, Athene,

and Artemis. They are conducting Hyacinthus to heaven, with

Polyboea, the sister of Hyacinthus, who died, as is told, while yet a

virgin. . . . Hercules also is figured on the tomb; he too carried to

heaven by Athene and the other gods. The daughters of Thestius also

are upon the altar, and the Seasons again, and the Muses."

 

It was as if many lines of solemn thought had been meant to unite,

about the resting-place of this local Adonis, in imageries full of

some dim promise of immortal life.

 

But it was not so much in care for old idols as in the making of new

ones that Greek art was at this time engaged. This whole first

period of Greek art might, indeed, be called the period of graven

images, and all its workmen sons of Daedalus; for Daedalus is the

mythical, or all but mythical, representative of all those arts which

are combined in the making of lovelier idols than had heretofore been

seen. The old Greek word which is at the root of the name Daedalus,+

the name of a craft rather than a proper name, probably means to work

curiously--all curiously beautiful wood-work is Daedal work; the main

point about the curiously beautiful [238] chamber in which Nausicaa

sleeps, in the Odyssey, being that, like some exquisite Swiss châlet,

it is wrought in wood. But it came about that those workers in wood,

whom Daedalus represents, the early craftsmen of Crete especially,

were chiefly concerned with the making of religious images, like the

carvers of Berchtesgaden and Oberammergau, the sort of daintily

finished images of the objects of public or private devotion which

such workmen would turn out. Wherever there was a wooden idol in any

way fairer than others, finished, perhaps, sometimes, with colour and

gilding, and appropriate real dress, there the hand of Daedalus had

been. That such images were quite detached from pillar or wall, that

they stood free, and were statues in the proper sense, showed that

Greek art was already liberated from its earlier Eastern

associations; such free-standing being apparently unknown in Assyrian

art. And then, the effect of this Daedal skill in them was, that

they came nearer to the proper form of humanity. It is the wonderful

life-likeness of these early images which tradition celebrates in

many anecdotes, showing a very early instinctive turn for, and

delight in naturalism, in the Greek temper. As Cimabue, in his day,

was able to charm men, almost as with illusion, by the simple device

of half-closing the eyelids of his personages, and giving them,

instead of round eyes, eyes that seemed to be in some degree

sentient, and to feel [239] the light; so the marvellous progress in

those Daedal wooden images was, that the eyes were open, so that they

seemed to look,--the feet separated, so that they seemed to walk.

Greek art is thus, almost from the first, essentially distinguished

from the art of Egypt, by an energetic striving after truth in

organic form. In representing the human figure, Egyptian art had

held by mathematical or mechanical proportions exclusively. The

Greek apprehends of it, as the main truth, that it is a living

organism, with freedom of movement, and hence the infinite

possibilities of motion, and of __EXPRESSION__ by motion, with which the

imagination credits the higher sort of Greek sculpture; while the

figures of Egyptian art, graceful as they often are, seem absolutely

incapable of any motion or gesture, other than the one actually

designed. The work of the Greek sculptor, together with its more

real anatomy, becomes full also of human soul.

 

That old, primitive, mystical, first period of Greek religion, with

its profound, though half-conscious, intuitions of spiritual powers

in the natural world, attaching itself not to the worship of visible

human forms, but to relics, to natural or half-natural objects--the

roughly hewn tree, the unwrought stone, the pillar, the holy cone of

Aphrodite in her dimly-lighted cell at Paphos--had passed away. The

second stage in the development of Greek religion had come; a [240]

period in which poet and artist were busily engaged in the work of

incorporating all that might be retained of the vague divinations of

that earlier visionary time, in definite and intelligible human image

and human story. The vague belief, the mysterious custom and

tradition, develope themselves into an elaborately ordered ritual--

into personal gods, imaged in ivory and gold, sitting on beautiful

thrones. Always, wherever a shrine or temple, great or small, is

mentioned, there, we may conclude, was a visible idol, there was

conceived to be the actual dwelling-place of a god. And this

understanding became not less but more definite, as the temple became

larger and more splendid, full of ceremony and servants, like the

abode of an earthly king, and as the sacred presence itself assumed,

little by little, the last beauties and refinements of the visible

human form and __EXPRESSION__.

 

In what we have seen of this first period of Greek art, in all its

curious essays and inventions, we may observe this demand for

beautiful idols increasing in Greece--for sacred images, at first

still rude, and in some degree the holier for their rudeness, but

which yet constitute the beginnings of the religious style,

consummate in the work of Pheidias, uniting the veritable image of

man in the full possession of his reasonable soul, with the true

religious mysticity, the signature there of something from afar. One

by one these [241] new gods of bronze, or marble, or flesh-like

ivory, take their thrones, at this or that famous shrine, like the

images of this period which Pausanias saw in the temple of Here at

Olympia--the throned Seasons, with Themis as the mother of the

Seasons (divine rectitude being still blended, in men's fancies, with

the unchanging physical order of things) and Fortune, and Victory

"having wings," and Kore and Demeter and Dionysus, already visibly

there, around the image of Here herself, seated on a throne; and all

chryselephantine, all in gold and ivory. Novel as these things are,

they still undergo consecration at their first erecting. The figure

of Athene, in her brazen temple at Sparta, the work of Gitiades, who

makes also the image and the hymn, in triple service to the goddess;

and again, that curious story of Dipoenus and Scyllis, brought back

with so much awe to remove the public curse by completing their

sacred task upon the images, show how simply religious the age still

was--that this widespread artistic activity was a religious

enthusiasm also; those early sculptors have still, for their

contemporaries, a divine mission, with some kind of hieratic or

sacred quality in their gift, distinctly felt.

 

The development of the artist, in the proper sense, out of the mere

craftsman, effected in the first division of this period, is now

complete; and, in close connexion with that busy graving of religious

images, which occupies its second [242] division, we come to

something like real personalities, to men with individual

characteristics--such men as Ageladas of Argos, Callon and Onatas of

Aegina, and Canachus of Sicyon. Mere fragment as our information

concerning these early masters is at the best, it is at least

unmistakeably information about men with personal differences of

temper and talent, of their motives, of what we call style. We have

come to a sort of art which is no longer broadly characteristic of a

general period, one whose products we might have looked at without

its occurring to us to ask concerning the artist, his antecedents,

and his school. We have to do now with types of art, fully impressed

with the subjectivity, the intimacies of the artist.

 

Among these freer and stronger personalities emerging thus about the

beginning of the fifth century before Christ--about the period of the

Persian war--the name to which most of this sort of personal quality

attaches, and which is therefore very interesting, is the name of

Canachus of Sicyon, who seems to have comprehended in himself all the

various attainments in art which had been gradually developed in the

schools of his native city--carver in wood, sculptor, brass-cutter,

and toreutes; by toreuticê+ being meant the whole art of statuary in

metals, and in their combination with other materials. At last we

seem to see an actual person at work, and to some degree can follow,

with natural curiosity, [243] the motions of his spirit and his hand.

We seem to discern in all we know of his productions the results of

individual apprehension--the results, as well as the limitations, of

an individual talent.

 

It is impossible to date exactly the chief period of the activity of

Canachus. That the great image of Apollo, which he made for the

Milesians, was carried away to Ecbatana by the Persian army, is

stated by Pausanias; but there is a doubt whether this was under

Xerxes, as Pausanias says, in the year 479 B.C., or twenty years

earlier, under Darius. So important a work as this colossal image of

Apollo, for so great a shrine as the Didymaeum, was probably the task

of his maturity; and his career may, therefore, be regarded as having

begun, at any rate, prior to the year 479 B.C., and the end of the

Persian invasion the event which may be said to close this period of

art. On the whole, the chief period of his activity is thought to

have fallen earlier, and to have occupied the last forty years of the

previous century; and he would thus have flourished, as we say, about

fifty years before the manhood of Pheidias, as Mino of Fiesole fifty

years before the manhood of Michelangelo.

 

His chief works were an Aphrodite, wrought for the Sicyonians in

ivory and gold; that Apollo of bronze carried away by the Persians,

and restored to its place about the year B.C. 350; and a reproduction

of the same work in cedar-wood [244], for the sanctuary of Apollo of

the Ismenus, at Thebes. The primitive Greek worship, as we may trace

it in Homer, presents already, on a minor scale, all the essential

characteristics of the most elaborate Greek worship of after times--

the sacred enclosure, the incense and other offerings, the prayer of

the priest, the shrine itself--a small one, roofed in by the priest

with green boughs, not unlike a wayside chapel in modern times, and

understood to be the dwelling-place of the divine person--within,

almost certainly, an idol, with its own sacred apparel, a visible

form, little more than symbolical perhaps, like the sacred pillar for

which Bathycles made his throne at Amyclae, but, if an actual image,

certainly a rude one.

 

That primitive worship, traceable in almost all these particulars,

even in the first book of the Iliad, had given place, before the time

of Canachus at Sicyon, to a more elaborate ritual and a more

completely designed image-work; and a little bronze statue,

discovered on the site of Tenea, where Apollo was the chief object of

worship,* the best representative of many similar marble figures--

those of Thera and Orchomenus, for instance--is supposed to represent

Apollo as this still early age conceived him--youthful, naked,

muscular, and with the germ of the Greek profile, but formally

smiling, and with a formal diadem or fillet, over the long hair which

[245] shows him to be no mortal athlete. The hands, like the feet,

excellently modelled, are here extended downwards at the sides; but

in some similar figures the hands are lifted, and held straight

outwards, with the palms upturned. The Apollo of Canachus also had

the hands thus raised, and on the open palm of the right hand was

placed a stag, while with the left he grasped the bow. Pliny says

that the stag was an automaton, with a mechanical device for setting

it in motion, a detail which hints, at least, at the subtlety of

workmanship with which those ancient critics, who had opportunity of

knowing, credited this early artist. Of this work itself nothing

remains, but we possess perhaps some imitations of it. It is

probably this most sacred possession of the place which the coins of

Miletus display from various points of view, though, of course, only

on the smallest scale. But a little bronze figure in the British

Museum, with the stag in the right hand, and in the closed left hand

the hollow where the bow has passed, is thought to have been derived

from it; and its points of style are still further illustrated by a

marble head of similar character, also preserved in the British

Museum, which has many marks of having been copied in marble from an

original in bronze. A really ancient work, or only archaic, it

certainly expresses, together with all that careful patience and

hardness of workmanship which is characteristic of an early age, a

certain Apolline [246] strength--a pride and dignity in the features,

so steadily composed, below the stiff, archaic arrangement of the

long, fillet-bound locks. It is the exact __EXPRESSION__ of that midway

position, between an involved, archaic stiffness and the free play of

individual talent, which is attributed to Canachus by the ancients.

 

His Apollo of cedar-wood, which inhabited a temple near the gates of

Thebes, on a rising ground, below which flowed the river Ismenus,

had, according to Pausanias, so close a resemblance to that at

Miletus that it required little skill in one who had seen either of

them to tell what master had designed the other. Still, though of

the same dimensions, while one was of cedar the other was of bronze--

a reproduction one of the other we may believe, but with the

modifications, according to the use of good workmen even so early as

Canachus, due to the difference of the material. For the likeness

between the two statues, it is to be observed, is not the mechanical

likeness of those earlier images represented by the statuette of

Tenea, which spoke, not of the style of one master, but only of the

manufacture of one workshop. In those two images of Canachus--the

Milesian Apollo and the Apollo of the Ismenus--there were

resemblances amid differences; resemblances, as we may understand, in

what was nevertheless peculiar, novel, and even innovating in the

precise conception of the god therein set forth; [247] resemblances

which spoke directly of a single workman, though working freely, of

one hand and one fancy, a likeness in that which could by no means be

truly copied by another; it was the beginning of what we mean by the

style of a master. Together with all the novelty, the innovating and

improving skill, which has made Canachus remembered, an attractive,

old-world, deeply-felt mysticity seems still to cling about what we

read of these early works. That piety, that religiousness of temper,

of which the people of Sicyon had given proof so oddly in their

dealings with those old carvers, Scyllis and Dipoenus, still survives

in the master who was chosen to embody his own novelty of idea and

execution in so sacred a place as the shrine of Apollo at Miletus.

Something still conventional, combined, in these images, with the

effect of great artistic skill, with a palpable beauty and power,

seems to have given them a really imposing religious character.

Escaping from the rigid uniformities of the stricter archaic style,

he is still obedient to certain hieratic influences and traditions;

he is still reserved, self-controlled, composed or even mannered a

little, as in some sacred presence, with the severity and strength of

the early style.

 

But there are certain notices which seem to show that he had his

purely poetical motives also, as befitted his age; motives which

prompted works of mere fancy, like his Muse [248] with the Lyre,

symbolising the chromatic style of music; Aristocles his brother, and

Ageladas of Argos executing each another statue to symbolise the two

other orders of music. The Riding Boys, of which Pliny speaks, like

the mechanical stag on the hand of Apollo, which he also describes,

were perhaps mechanical toys, as Benvenuto Cellini made toys. In the

Beardless Aesculapius, again--the image of the god of healing, not

merely as the son of Apollo, but as one ever young--it is the poetry

of sculpture that we see.

 

This poetic feeling, and the piety of temper so deeply impressed upon

his images of Apollo, seem to have been combined in his

chryselephantine Aphrodite, as we see it very distinctly in

Pausanias, enthroned with an apple in one hand and a poppy in the

other, and with the sphere, or polos, about the head, in its quaint

little temple or chapel at Sicyon, with the hierokêpis, or holy

garden, about it. This is what Canachus has to give us instead of

the strange, symbolical cone, with the lights burning around it, in

its dark cell--the form under which Aphrodite was worshipped at her

famous shrine of Paphos.

 

"A woman to keep it fair," Pausanias tells us, "who may go in to no

man, and a virgin called the water-bearer, who holds her priesthood

for a year, are alone permitted to enter the sacred place. All

others may gaze upon the [249] goddess and offer their prayers from

the doorway. The seated image is the work of Canachus of Sicyon. It

is wrought in ivory and gold, bearing a sphere on the head, and

having in the one hand a poppy and in the other an apple. They offer

to her the thighs of all victims excepting swine, burning them upon

sticks of juniper, together with leaves of lad's-love, a herb found