The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  About 470 Delphi and Corinth established quadrennial contests in painting as part of the Pythian and Isthmian games. The art was now sufficiently advanced to enable Panaenus, brother (or nephew) of Pheidias, to make recognizable portraits of the Athenian and Persian generals in his Battle of Marathon. But it still placed all figures in one plane, and made them of one stature; it indicated distance not by a progressive diminution of size and a modeling with light and shade, but by covering more of the lower half of the farther figures with the curves that represented the ground. Towards 440 a vital step forward was taken. Agatharchus, employed by Aeschylus and Sophocles to paint scenery for their plays, perceived the connection between light and shade and distance, and wrote a treatise on perspective as a means of creating theatrical illusion. Anaxagoras and Democritus took up the idea from the scientific angle, and at the end of the century Apollodorus of Athens won the name of skiagraphos, or shadow painter, because he made pictures in chiaroscuro—i.e., in light and shade; hence Pliny spoke of him as “the first to paint objects as they really appeared.”14

  Greek painters never made full use of these discoveries; just as Solon frowned upon the theatrical art as a deception, so the artists seem to have thought it against their honor, or beneath their dignity, to give to a plane surface the appearance of three dimensions. Nevertheless it was through perspective and chiaroscuro that Zeuxis, pupil of Apollodorus, made himself the supreme figure in fifth-century painting. He came from Heracleia (Pontica?) to Athens about 424; and even amid the noise of war his coming was considered an event. He was a “character,” bold and conceited, and he painted with a swashbuckling brush. At the Olympic games he strutted about in a checkered tunic on which his name was embroidered in gold; he could afford it, since he had already acquired “a vast amount of wealth” from his paintings.15 But he worked with the honest care of a great artist, and when Agatharchus boasted of his own speed of execution, Zeuxis said quietly, “I take a long time.”16 He gave away many of his masterpieces, on the ground that no price could do them justice; and cities and kings were happy to receive them.

  He had only one rival in his generation—Parrhasius of Ephesus, almost as great and quite as vain. Parrhasius wore a golden crown on his head, called himself “the prince of painters,” and said that in him the art had reached perfection.17 He did it all in lusty good humor, singing as he painted.18 Gossip said that he had bought a slave and tortured him to study facial expression in pain for a picture of Prometheus;19 but people tell many stories about artists. Like Zeuxis he was a realist; his Runner was portrayed with such verisimilitude that those who beheld it expected the perspiration to fall from the picture, and the athlete to drop from exhaustion. He drew an immense mural of The People of Athens, representing them as implacable and merciful, proud and humble, fierce and timid, fickle and generous—and so faithfully that the Athenian public, we are informed, realized for the first time its own complex and contradictory character.20

  A great rivalry brought him into public competition with Zeuxis. The latter painted some grapes so naturally that birds tried to eat them. The judges were enthusiastic about the picture, and Zeuxis, confident of victory, bade Parrhasius draw aside the curtain that concealed the Ephesian’s painting. But the curtain proved to be a part of the picture, and Zeuxis, having himself been deceived, handsomely acknowledged his defeat. Zeuxis suffered no loss of reputation. At Crotona he agreed to paint a Helen for the temple of Lacinian Hera, on condition that the five loveliest women of the city should pose in the nude for him, so that he might select from each her fairest feature, and combine them all in a second goddess of beauty.21 Penelope, too, found new life under his brush; but he admired more his portrait of an athlete, and wrote under it that men would find it easier to criticize him than to equal him. All Greece enjoyed his conceit, and talked about him as much as of any dramatist, statesmen, or general. Only the prize fighters outdid his fame.

  III. THE MASTERS OF SCULPTURE

  1. Methods

  None the less painting remained slightly alien to the Greek genius, which loved form more than color, and made even the painting of the classic age (if we may judge it from hearsay) a statuesque study in line and design rather than a sensuous seizure of the colors of life. The Hellene delighted rather in sculpture: he filled his home, his temples, and his graves with terracotta statuettes, worshiped his gods with images of stone, and marked the tombs of his departed with stelae reliefs that are among the commonest and most moving products of Greek art. The artisans of the stelae were simple workers who carved by rote, and repeated a thousand times the familiar theme of the quiet parting, with clasped hands, of the living from the dead. But the theme itself is noble enough to bear repetition, for it shows classic restraint at its best, and teaches even a romantic soul that feeling speaks with most power when it lowers its voice. These slabs show us the dead most often in some characteristic occupation of life—a child playing with a hoop, a girl carrying a jar, a warrior proud in his armor, a young woman admiring her jewels, a boy reading a book while his dog lies content but watchful under his chair. Death in these stelae is made natural, and therefore forgivable.

  More complex, and supreme in their kind, are the sculptural reliefs of this age. In one of them Orpheus bids a lingering farewell to Eurydice, whom Hermes has reclaimed for the nether world;22 in another Demeter gives to Triptolemus the golden grain by which he is to establish agriculture in Greece; here some of the coloring still adheres to the stone, and suggests the warmth and brilliance of Greek relief in the Golden Age.23 Still more beautiful is The Birth of Aphrodite, carved on one side of the “Ludovisi Throne”* by an unknown sculptor of presumably Ionian training. Two goddesses are raising Aphrodite from the sea; her thin wet garment clings to her form and reveals it in all the splendor of maturity; the head is semi-Asiatic, but the drapery of the attendant deities, and the soft grace of their pose, bear the stamp of the sensitive Greek eye and hand. On another side of the “throne” a nude girl plays the double flute. On a third side a veiled woman prepares her lamp for the evening; perhaps the face and garments here are even nearer to perfection than on the central piece.

  The advance of the fifth-century sculptor upon his forebears is impressive. Frontality is abandoned, foreshortening deepens perspective, stillness gives place to movement, rigidity to life. Indeed, when Greek statuary breaks through the old conventions and shows man in action, it is an artistic revolution; rarely before, in Egypt or the Near East, or in pre-Marathon Greece, has any sculpture in the round been caught in action. These developments owe much to the freshened vitality and buoyancy of Greek life after Salamis, and more to the patient study of motile anatomy by master and apprentice through many generations. “Is it not by modeling your works on living beings,” asks Socrates, sculptor and philosopher, “that you make your statues appear alive? . . . And as our different attitudes cause the play of certain muscles of our body, upwards or downwards, so that some are contracted and some stretched, some wrung and some relaxed, is it not by expressing these efforts that you give greater truth and verisimilitude to your works?”24 The Periclean sculptor is interested in every feature of the body—in the abdomen as much as the face, in the marvelous play of the elastic flesh over the moving framework of the bones, in the swelling of muscles, tendons, and veins, in the endless wonders of the structure and action of hands and ears and feet; and he is fascinated by the difficulty of molding the extremities. He does not often use models to pose for him in a studio; for the most part he is content to watch the men stripped and active in the palaestra or on the athletic field, and the women solemnly marching in the religious processions, or naturally absorbed in their domestic tasks. It is for this reason, and not through modesty, that he centers his studies of anatomy upon the male, and in his portraits of women substitutes the refinements of drapery for anatomical detail—though he makes the drapery as transparent as he dares. Tired of the stiff skirts of Egypt and archaic Greece he loves to show feminine robes agit
ated by a breeze, for here again he catches the quality of motion and life.

  He uses almost any workable material that comes to his hand—wood, ivory, bone, terra cotta, limestone, marble, silver, gold; sometimes, as in the chryselephantine statues of Pheidias, he uses gold on the raiment and ivory for the flesh. In the Peloponnesus bronze is the sculptor’s favorite material, for he admires its dark tints as well adapted to represent the bodies of men tanned by nudity under the sun; and—not knowing the rapacity of man—he dreams that it is more durable than stone. In Ionia and Attica he prefers marble; its difficulty stimulates him, its firmness lets him chisel it safely, its translucent smoothness seems designed to convey the rosy color and delicate texture of a woman’s skin. Near Athens the sculptor discovers the marble of Mt. Pentelicus, and observes how its iron content mellows with time and weather into a vein of gold glowing through the stone; and with the obstinate patience that is half of genius he slowly carves the quarries into living statuary. When he works in bronze the fifth-century sculptor uses the method of hollow casting by the process of cire perdu, or lost wax: i.e., he makes a model in plaster or clay, overlaps it with a thin coat of “wax, covers it all with a mold of plaster or clay perforated at many points, and places the figure in a furnace whose heat melts the wax, which runs out through the holes; then he pours molten bronze into the mold at the top till the metal fills all the space before occupied by the wax; he cools the figure, removes the outer mold, and files and polishes, lacquers or paints or gilds, the bronze into the final form. If he prefers marble he begins with the unshaped block, unaided by any system of pointing;* he works freehand, and for the most part guides himself by the eye instead of by instruments;25 blow by blow he removes the superfluous until the perfection that he has conceived takes shape in the stone, and, in Aristotle’s phrase, matter becomes form.

  His subjects range from gods to animals, but they must all be physically admirable; he has no use for weaklings, for intellectuals, for abnormal types, or for old women or men. He does well with the horse, but indifferently with other animals. He does better with women, and some of his anonymous masterpieces, like the meditative young lady holding her robe on her breast in the Athens Museum, achieve a quiet loveliness that does not lend itself to words. He is at his best with athletes, for these he admires without stint, and can observe without hindrance; now and then he exaggerates their prowess, and crosses their abdomens with incredible muscles; but despite this fault he can cast bronzes like that found in the sea near Anticythera, and alternatively named an Ephebos, or a Perseus whose hand once held Medusa’s snake-haired head. Sometimes he catches a youth or a girl absorbed in some simple and spontaneous action, like the boy drawing a thorn from his foot.* But his country’s mythology is still the leading inspiration of his art. That terrible conflict between philosophy and religion which runs through the thought of the fifth century does not show yet on the monuments; here the gods are still supreme; and if they are dying they are nobly transmuted into the poetry of art. Does the sculptor who shapes in bronze the powerful Zeus of Artemisium† really believe that he is modeling the Law of the World? Does the artist who carves the gentle and sorrowful Dionysus of the Delphi Museum know, in the depths of his inarticulate understanding, that Dionysus has been shot down by the arrows of philosophy, and that the traditional features of Dionysus’ successor, Christ, are already previsioned in this head?

  2. Schools

  If Greek sculpture achieved so much in the fifth century, it was in part because each sculptor belonged to a school, and had his place in a long lineage of masters and pupils carrying on the skills of their art, checking the extravagances of independent individualities, encouraging their specific abilities, disciplining them with a sturdy grounding in the technology and achievements of the past, and forming them, through this interplay of talent and law, into a greater art than often comes to genius isolated and unruled. Great artists are more frequently the culmination of a tradition than its overthrow; and though rebels are the necessary variants in the natural history of art, it is only when their new line has been steadied with heredity and chastened with time that it generates supreme personalities.

  Five schools performed this function in Periclean Greece: those of Rhegium, Sicyon, Argos, Aegina, and Attica. About 496 another Pythagoras of Samos settled at Rhegium, cast a Philoctetes that won him Mediterranean fame, and put into the faces of his statues such signs of passion, pain, and age as shocked all Greek sculptors till those of the Hellenistic period decided to imitate him. At Sicyon Canachus and his brother Aristocles carried on the work begun a century earlier by Dipoenus and Scyllis of Crete-Callon and Onatas brought distinction to Aegina by their skill with bronze; perhaps it was they who made the Aegina pediments. At Argos Ageladas organized the transmission of sculptural technique in a school that reached its apex in Polycleitus.

  Coming from Sicyon, Polycleitus made himself popular in Argos by designing for its temple of Hera, about 422, a gold and ivory statue of the matron goddess, which the age ranked second only to the chryselephantine immensities of Pheidias.* At Ephesus he joined in a competition with Pheidias, Cresilas, and Phradmon to make an Amazon for the temple of Artemis; the four artists were made judges of the result; each, the story goes, named his own work best, Polycleitus’ second best; and the prize was given to the Sicyonian.†27 But Polycleitus loved athletes more than women or gods. In the famous Diadumenos (of which the best surviving copy is in the Athens Museum) he chose for representation that moment in which the victor binds about his head the fillet over which the judges are to place the laurel wreath. The chest and abdomen are too muscular for belief, but the body is vividly posed upon one foot, and the features are a definition of classic regularity. Regularity was the fetish of Polycleitus; it was his life aim to find and establish a canon or rule for the correct proportion of every part in a statue; he was the Pythagoras of sculpture, seeking a divine mathematics of symmetry and form. The dimensions of any part of a perfect body, he thought, should bear a given ratio to the dimensions of any one part, say the index finger. The Polycleitan canon called for a round head, broad shoulders, stocky torso, wide hips, and short legs, making all in all a figure rather of strength than of grace. The sculptor was so fond of his canon that he wrote a treatise to expound it, and molded a statue to illustrate it. Probably this was the Doryphoros, or Spear Bearer, of which the Naples Museum has a Roman copy; here again is the brachycephalic head, the powerful shoulders, the short trunk, the corrugated musculature overflowing the groin. Lovelier is the Westmacott Ephebos of the British Museum, where the lad has feelings as well as muscles, and seems lost in a gentle meditation on something else than his own strength. Through these figures the canon of Polycleitus became for a time a law to the sculptors of the Peloponnesus; it influenced even Pheidias, and ruled till Praxiteles overthrew it with that rival canon of tall, slim elegance which survived through Rome into the statuary of Christian Europe.

  Myron mediated between the Peloponnesian and the Attic schools. Born at Eleutherae, living at Athens, and (says Pliny28) studying for a while with Ageladas, he learned to unite Peloponnesian masculinity with Ionian grace. What he added to all the schools was motion: he saw the athlete not, like Polycleitus, before or after the contest, but in it; and realized his vision so well in bronze that no other sculptor in history has rivaled him in portraying the male body in action. About 470 he cast the most famous of athletic statues—the Discobolos or Discus Thrower.* The wonder of the male frame is here complete: the body carefully studied in all those movements of muscle, tendon, and bone that are involved in the action; the legs and arms and trunk bent to give the fullest force to the throw; the face not distorted with effort, but calm in the confidence of ability; the head not heavy or brutal, but that of a man of blood and refinement, who could write books if he would condescend. This chef-d’oeuvre was only one of Myron’s achievements; his contemporaries valued it, but ranked even more highly his Athena and Marsyas† and his Ladas. Athena
here is too lovely for the purpose; no one could guess that this demure virgin is watching with calm content the flaying of the defeated flutist. Myron’s Marsyas is George Bernard Shaw caught in an unseemly but eloquent pose; he has played for the last time, and is about to die; but he will not die without a speech. Ladas was an athlete who succumbed to the exhaustion of victory; Myron portrayed him so realistically that an old Greek, seeing the statue, cried out: “Like as thou wert in life, O Ladas, breathing forth thy panting soul, such hath Myron wrought thee in bronze, stamping on all thy body thine eagerness for the victor’s crown.” And of Myron’s Heifer the Greeks said that it could do everything but moo.29

  The Attic or Athenian school added to the Peloponnesians and to Myron what woman gives to man—beauty, tenderness, delicacy, and grace; and because in doing this it still retained a masculine element of strength, it reached a height that sculpture may never attain again. Calamis was still a little archaic, and Nesiotes and Critius, in casting a second group of Tyrannicides, did not free themselves from the rigid simplicity of the sixth century; Lucian warns orators not to behave like such lifeless figures. But when, about 423, Paeonius of Thracian Mende, after studying sculpture at Athens, made for the Messenians a Nike, or Victory, he touched heights of grace and loveliness that no Greek would reach again until Praxiteles; and not even Praxiteles would surpass the flow of this drapery, or the ecstasy of this motion.*

  3. Pheidias

  From 447 to 438 Pheidias and his aides were absorbed in carving the statues and reliefs of the Parthenon. As Plato was first a dramatist and then became a dramatic philosopher, so Pheidias was first a painter and then became a pictorial sculptor. He was the son of a painter, and studied for a while under Polygnotus; from him, presumably, he learned design and composition, and the grouping of figures for a total effect; from him, it may be, he acquired that “grand style” which made him the greatest sculptor in Greece. But painting did not satisfy him; he needed more dimensions. He took up sculpture, and perhaps studied the bronze technique of Ageladas. Patiently he made himself master of every branch of his art.