Part 7
Here, too, we see that different portions of the same work were assigned to different artists, each working out his subjects separately, though all working in agreement, to develop a certain story or series of stories. Such a practice would account for all sorts of varieties of design and execution, and would explain the differences to be observed between the various portions of the sculptures of the Parthenon.
A careful examination of the frieze alone shows that it must have been executed by various artists, so distinct are the different parts as well in execution as in design.
The notion commonly entertained, that Phidias was considered in his age to be vastly superior to all contemporary sculptors, will scarcely bear examination. He undoubtedly surpassed them all in his colossal chryselephantine statues of divinities; though even in this branch of art there was a difference of opinion, and one other artist at least, Polyclitus, was held, in his statue of Hera, to have stood abreast of him. Strabo declares that it excelled in beauty all the works of Phidias. But in other branches of the art the superiority of Phidias was not admitted; and he was, if report be true, repeatedly adjudged a second place in his competitions with his rivals. Alcamenes, Polyclitus, Kalamis, and Ctesilaus were his superiors in their marble statues and representations of mortals, and we hear of no work of his in marble to compete with theirs. Lucian, for instance, in his Dialogue on Statues, praises equally the Venus of Praxiteles, the Sosandra of Kalamis, the Aphrodite of the Gardens by Alcamenes, and the Athena Lemnia and Amazon of Phidias; and out of the special beauties of each he reconstructs an ideal image of the most beautiful woman. From the Cnidian Aphrodite of Praxiteles he takes the head, having no need of the rest of the body (he says), as the figure is not to be nude; and from this head he selects the outlines of the hair, or rather the outline of the forehead where it joins the hair, the forehead, the delicately penciled eyebrows, and the liquid and radiant charm of the eyes. From the Aphrodite of Alcamenes he takes the cheeks and the lower part of the face, and especially the base of the hands, the beautifully proportioned wrists, and the flexile taper fingers. From Phidias he takes the total contour of the face, the softness of the jaw, and the symmetrical nose of the Athena, and the lips and the neck of the Amazon. From the Sosandra of Kalamis he takes her modest grace and her delicate subtle smile, her chastely arranged dress and her easy bearing. Her age and stature, he says, shall be that of the Cnidian Aphrodite, for this is most beautiful in Praxiteles. For her other qualities he draws upon the painters. This opinion of Lucian is particularly interesting and valuable, from the fact that he had studied and practiced the art of sculpture under his uncle, who was a sculptor, and his judgment is therefore of far more value than that of an ordinary connoisseur.
Pliny also relates a story which has a bearing in this connection, of a competition between various celebrated artists, who were contemporaries at this period. The subject was an Amazon. The artists themselves were to be the judges; and it was agreed that the statue should be held to be best which each artist ranked second to his own. The result was that the first prize was adjudged to Polyclitus, the second to Phidias, the third to Ctesilaus, the fourth to Cydon, and the fifth to Phradmon. We may reject the story as a fact, but its very existence proves that the fame of Phidias, great as it was, did not so entirely eclipse that of other artists of his time as we generally suppose. Who of us now would think that Phradmon and Cydon, for example, stood on a level to contend with him, with any chance of other than a disastrous defeat? But it is plain that the ancients did not think so, or this story would not have been invented.
We now come to the question whether Phidias ever worked at all in marble. His renown undoubtedly rested upon his magnificent statues in ivory and gold, and especially upon his Zeus and Athena of the Parthenon, which towered above all his other works. So wonderful was the Zeus, that it was said to have strengthened religion in Greece; and the Athena of the Parthenon was held to be the glory of Athens. The poets and writers celebrate Phidias always as specially the creator of these great chryselephantine works; and though they praise the beauty of his bronze works, and especially of the Athena Lemnia, it is plain that these held a secondary place in public estimation, or at all events did not stand alone and apart as the others did. Thus Propertius says, characterizing the sculptors:—
“Phidiacus signo se Juppiter ornat eburno; Praxitelem propria vindicat arte Lapis; Gloria Lysippi est animosa effingere signa; Exactis Calamis se mihi jactat equis.”
So Quinctilian says of him: “Phidias tamen diis quam hominibus efficiendis melior artifex traditur—in ebore vero longe citra æmulum, vel si nihil nisi Minervam Athenis aut Olympium in Elide Jovem fecisset” (lib. xii. ch. 10). But no writer anywhere near this period—even within five centuries of it—ever mentions a marble figure by Phidias, or celebrates him in any way as a sculptor in this material.
In the evidence given before a committee of the House of Commons upon the Elgin collection of marbles, previous to the purchase of them by the nation, Richard Payne Knight and William Wilkins gave it as their opinion that these works were not by Phidias, and that he was not a worker in marble. This statement has been rejected by the author of the work on the Elgin and Phigaleian Marbles, in the Library of Entertaining Knowledge, as entirely without foundation. In this conclusion it must be admitted that he follows the opinion generally entertained at the present day, and repeated by nearly every modern writer. Visconti, to whom he refers as refuting satisfactorily the notion of Knight and Wilkins, thus argues the question: “If it were imagined that Phidias devoted himself to the toreutic art, and that he employed in his works only ivory and metals, this opinion would be confuted by Aristotle, who distinguishes this great artist by the appellation of σοφὸς λιθουργός—a skillful sculptor in marble—in opposition to Polyclitus, whom he styles simply a statuary, ἀνδριαντοποιός, since the latter scarcely ever employed his talents except in bronze. In fact, several marble statues of Phidias were known to Pliny, who might even have seen some of them at Rome, since they had been removed to this city; and the most famous work of Alcamenes, the Venus of the Gardens, had only, as it was said, acquired so high a degree of perfection because Phidias, his master, had himself taken pleasure in finishing with his own hand his beautiful statue in marble.”
An examination into these statements will show, not only that not one of them is well founded, but that the authorities on which they profess to stand will not at all sustain them. Visconti’s mind is in a nebulous state as to the whole question, and he confounds things which have no relation to each other. The first mistake he makes is in confusing the toreutic art with the art of making statues in ivory and gold. I am aware that M. Quatremere de Quincy, in his treatise on chryselephantine statues, constantly uses these two terms as equivalent; but in so doing he is admitted by all persons who have critically studied the matter to be entirely incorrect. The toreutic art was the art of the engraver, the chaser, the damascener, the embosser. It might be employed, and undoubtedly was employed, by Phidias in decorating part of his statue, as it might be applied to a bronze statue, or to any metal surface or slab; but it was not the art of making statues in any material. Visconti’s next proposition is, that by the term σοφὸς λιθουργός Aristotle meant to indicate a worker in marble as distinguished from an ἀνδριαντοποιός, who was a statuary in bronze, and to show that Phidias worked in marble, while Polyclitus worked only or chiefly in bronze. Neither of these statements can be supported; and it is impossible that Aristotle could have meant to make them. In the first place, λιθουργός does not mean a worker in marble; λιθουργική and λιθοτριβική were specially the art of cutting and polishing gems and precious stones; and a λιθουργός was a lapidary in relief or intaglio,[6] not a sculptor of marble statues. Again, ἀνδριαντοποιός does not mean a sculptor in bronze as distinguished from a sculptor in marble, but merely a maker of statues, of athletes or heroes, in any material, whether in wood, bronze, marble, gold, or ivory.
Now, when we remember that Phidias was celebrated not only for his colossal works, but also for his skill as an engraver, embosser, and damascener—in a word, for his skill in the toreutic art, which Pliny tells us was developed by him and perfected by Polyclitus, as well as for his minutely elaborated representations of flies, cicadæ, fishes, and bees—the meaning of Aristotle in applying to him the title of λιθουργός is clear. He was a λιθουργός in the exact meaning of that term, and a very skillful one. Aristotle is equally correct in applying the term ἀνδριαντοποιός, maker of athletes and heroes, to Polyclitus; for that great artist had won the highest fame of his age for statues of this kind, and established the laws of proportion in his Diadumenos and Doryphoros. If, however, as Visconti imagines, Aristotle meant to indicate that Phidias was a worker in marble, while Polyclitus was not, he is clearly wrong; for we know that Polyclitus executed various and celebrated statues in marble, whereas, as we shall see, we have no clear proof that Phidias ever did. Still further, if Aristotle intended to distinguish Phidias from Polyclitus by saying that the one was a skillful λιθουργός, and the other was not, he is again quite wrong, whether he meant by that term to indicate a toreutic artist or, as Visconti thinks, a marble worker; for Polyclitus was even more skilled than Phidias in both these arts. Again, if he meant to distinguish the one artist from the other as a maker of ἀγάλματα, or statues of divinities, he is wrong; for the chryselephantine Hera of Polyclitus rivaled the Athena of Phidias. The plain fact is that Aristotle did not mean to distinguish one of these great artists from the other in any such way. He is perfectly right in the terms he applies to each; but he did not say, nor could he have intended to say, that one was a σοφὸς λιθουργός or an ἀνδριαντοποιός, and the other was not—since, as we know, both of them were λιθουργοί and ἀνδριαντοποιοί, and he must have known it.
Stress has also been laid by some writers on the fact that Phidias is called a γλυφεύς by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and that Tzetzes speaks of him as ἀνδριάντας χαλκουργῶν καὶ γλύφων τε καὶ ξέων, and that Hesychius uses the phrase Φειδίαι λιθοξόοι. These phrases, even were they inconsistent with the view here taken, would be of very little consequence if standing by themselves, as the earliest of these writers flourished some six hundred years, and the latest some nine hundred years, after Phidias; but taken in connection with the words of Aristotle, they may perhaps have some little weight. What is a γλυφεύς, then? Why, simply an engraver and a chiseler. And what does Tzetzes mean by ἀνδριάντας χαλκουργῶν καὶ γλύφων τε καὶ ξέων? Why, that Phidias made statues of heroes and athletes in brass, and that he was a chiseler and engraver. The words γλυφή and γλαφή in Greek, and _scalptura_ and _sculptura_ in Latin, though originally they signified generically cutting figures out of every solid material, were afterwards specifically applied to intagli and camei, and are the art of the cœlator, or τορευτής, or more properly, perhaps, restricted to the cutting and engraving of precious stones.
The next statement of Visconti is that several marble statues by Phidias were known to Pliny, and that the Aphrodite of Alcamenes acquired its perfection because Phidias himself finished it. As to the latter branch of this statement nothing more need be said. It is evidently one of those idle traditions which are not worth considering. But let us see what Pliny actually says. In his account of Phidias he does not even pretend to state, as an accredited fact, that Phidias ever worked in marble. In the chapter devoted to sculptors in marble he says, “_It is said_, that _even_ Phidias worked in marble” (et ipsum Phidiam _tradunt_ scalpsisse marmora) “and that there is a Venus by him at Rome, in the buildings of Octavia, of extraordinary beauty; but _what is certain is_” (quod certum est) “that he was the master of Alcamenes, many of whose works are on the sacred temples, and whose celebrated Venus, called ἐν κήποις, is outside the walls. Phidias _is said_” (dicitur) “to have put the finishing touches to this.” Pliny, therefore, by no means asserts that Phidias ever executed anything in marble; he merely says that there is a rumor or tradition to that effect; but he absolutely states as an established fact that Alcamenes was his pupil, and executed the beautiful statue of Aphrodite; and he then goes on to say, as another tradition, that Phidias assisted him in finishing it. Here he clearly distinguishes between fact and tradition, and his language shows that he placed no reliance on the latter. He does not even pretend to have seen the statue of Venus, supposed to be by Phidias, in the buildings of Octavia; and it is evident, from the turn of his sentence, that, gossiping and credulous as he generally was, he gave no credence to this rumor.
The whole argument of Visconti thus falls to the ground with the facts by which he attempts to support it.
There remain for us to consider the marble statues ascribed to Phidias by Pausanias, which are as follows: 1st, The Nemesis at Rhamnus; 2d, The Hermes at the entrance of the Ismenium at Thebes; 3d, The Aphrodite Urania at Athens, near the Ceramicus.
We have already seen that the Nemesis at Rhamnus was not the work of Phidias, but of Agoracritos; that Pausanias disagrees with other authorities in attributing it to Phidias; and that the name of Agoracritos was inscribed upon it as its author. This, therefore, must be rejected.
In the next place, as to the marble Hermes at the entrance to the Ismenium. This statue, as we have seen, was a decorative entrance statue standing before the temple; and its pendant, Athena, according to Pausanias, was the work of Scopas, who died a century later. The one pedestal could scarcely be left unoccupied for a century, yet this must have been the case if Pausanias is right; and for reasons which have already been given, this statue is, to say the least, not without very grave doubts. No other author speaks of it, and it rests solely on the authority of Pausanias, who lived more than six centuries after Phidias.
There remains, then, the Aphrodite Urania. Pausanias is the sole authority for considering this statue the work of Phidias; and as, being in marble, it would be the only one ascribed to him upon which there are not either the gravest doubts as to his authorship or the clearest indications that he was not the author, we should accept it with caution. Can we trust Pausanias? He certainly does not agree with other writers as to the authorship of various statues. The statue of Athena at Elis, attributed by him to Phidias, Pliny says is by Kolotes. The Mother of the Gods, said by him to be a work of Phidias, is, according to Pliny, the work of Agoracritos. The Æsculapius at Epidaurus, given by him to Thrasymedes, is given by Athenagoras to Phidias. In respect of the Nemesis, he is clearly mistaken. Pausanias wrote long after Pliny, when facts were still more obscured by time. Tradition changes names; transmutes facts, and tends always to give great names to nameless works. He was a traveler in Greece in the age of Marcus Aurelius, when the arts, even in Rome, were in their decline; and he only reports what he sees and hears. He does not pretend to be a critic or a connoisseur in art. He was not one; and his accounts of the great statues in Greece are singularly dry and meagre. He would naturally be told who was the author of this, that, and the other statue that he saw; and he seems to have taken common report without a question, just as a traveler in Rome without particular knowledge or interest in art would accept the authorship of the Colossi in the Quirinal, and without hesitation follow the tradition and ascribe them in his book to Phidias and Praxiteles. If he were always accurate in these matters, or if he had ever shown any critical doubts about the authorship of any work, a statement by him on such a subject would be entitled to more consideration; but as it is, in view of the facts that no other author before him has ascribed the Aphrodite Urania to Phidias, and that if it be by him it is his only marble work of which we have any clear testimony, little faith can be placed in the statement by Pausanias. Add to this that no contemporary of Phidias, and no writer anywhere near his age, has ever spoken of any marble work of his, and I think we must reject this statue as we have rejected the others.
In estimating the value of any such statements as to the authorship of statues, we must keep in mind the fact that it was not only not the custom for the ancient Greek sculptors to inscribe their names on their own statues, but it was not ordinarily permitted to them to do so on any public work; and undoubtedly it was for this reason that Phidias himself made his own likeness as well as the portrait of Pericles on the shield of the Athena, to indicate that the work was done by him while Pericles had the administration of affairs at Athens. In the same way Batrachus and Saurus, two Lacedæmonian artists who built the temples inclosed in the Portico of Octavia, being prohibited from inscribing their names on the walls, adopted the device of sculpturing on the spirals of the columns a lizard and a frog, which their names signified,—thus punning in marble, to perpetuate their names as architects of the temples. So also Myron is said to have inscribed his name on the thigh of his Discobolos in such minute characters as to be visible only on the closest inspection. In the case of some of the great statues, the names of the authors were exceptionally allowed to be inscribed after their deaths; and this was probably the case with the Zeus of Phidias. Ordinarily no such practice was permitted. Such being the case, the authorship of Greek statues at the time of Pausanias would rest entirely upon tradition—and tradition is little to be trusted.
Besides, what adds to the difficulty is that it was the custom in later times to put the names of ancient sculptors on works not made by them, to give them a higher value; it is of this practice that Phædrus speaks in one of his Fables:—
“Æsopi nomen sicubi interposuero Cui reddidi jampridem quidquid debui Auctoritatis esse scito gratia; Ut quidem artifices nostro faciunt sæculo Qui pretium operibus majus inveniunt, novo Si marmore adscripsere Praxitelem suo Trito Myronem argento.”
Of the statues which now exist, there are only some thirty on which names are inscribed, and these are certainly for the most part, if not entirely, apocryphal. The name of Phidias, together with that of Ammonius, for instance, appears on a monkey in basalt in the Capitol at Rome; that of Praxiteles on a draped figure in the Louvre; and that of Lysippus on a marble Hercules in the Pitti Gallery at Florence—not one of which is of the least value as a work of art. So, on the torso of the Belvidere is the name of Apollonius; on the Farnese Hercules that of Glycon; on the Gladiator of the Louvre that of Agasias the Ephesian, son of Dositheos—though these names are not mentioned by any writers of antiquity. No authority can be granted to these inscriptions, and possibly the very fact that these names are on the statues is an indication that they are copies; all have ἐποίει. D’Hancarville and Dallaway make a distinction between ἐποίει and ἐποίησεν,—the former, according to them, signifying a copy, and the latter an original work. On the Nemesis at Rhamnus was the inscription, ΑΓΟΡΑΚΡΙΤΟΣ ΠΑΡΙΟΣ ΕΠΟΙΗΣΕΝ; and this would seem to confirm their notion. On the Zeus of Phidias, also, was the inscription, ΦΕΙΔΙΑΣ ΧΑΡΜΙΔΟΥ ΥΙΟΣ ΑΘΗΝΑΙΟΣ Μ’ ΕΠΟΙΗΣΕΝ.
I do not recall, however, a single statue which has come down to us on which the word ἐποίησεν occurs, except an interesting and coarsely executed relief in the British Museum, representing the deification of Homer. Where there is any inscription it is ἐποίει; but it is an exceedingly rare exception that any ancient statue has a name inscribed on it. Almost all, if not all, the statues having names of the artists are of a late date, and probably most of them as late as the time of Hadrian. It was he who revived the art of sculpture; and during his reign a great number of copies, more or less good, were made of the famous statues of antiquity; but unfortunately there has not come down to us a single accredited statue by any of the great sculptors of antiquity.
There are only two other authorities, so far as I am aware, who mention or make any allusion to marble work by Phidias; these must be considered. Seneca, nearly five hundred years after the death of Phidias, says of him, “Not only did Phidias know how to make a statue in ivory, but he also made them in bronze.” Thus far he speaks absolutely; he then continues hypothetically, “If you had given him marble, or even a viler material, he would have made the best thing out of it that could be made.”[7] This is considered by the author of the work on the Elgin and Phigaleian Marbles an important statement in confirmation of Pliny. In reality it contains nothing but a simple hypothetical expression of belief that if you had given Phidias a piece of marble he would have made something excellent out of it. Does any one doubt this? Seneca states as a fact only that Phidias really _did_ work in ivory and bronze; and it is plain that he knew no work of Phidias in marble, or he never would have expressed a purely hypothetical opinion on such a matter.
The other authority which has been evoked in favor of the theory that Phidias worked in marble is that of Valerius Maximus, who states that there existed a tradition that he desired to execute the Athena of the Parthenon in marble, but that the Athenians would not permit him to do so: “Iidem Phidiam _tulerunt_ quamdiu is marmore potius quam ebore Minervam fieri debere dicebat, quod diutius nitor esset mansurus; sed ut adjecit et vilius tacere jusserunt.” (Lib. i. c. i., Externa 7.)
There is no authority for this tradition. It comes up five hundred years after the death of Phidias, and is manifestly absurd. Phidias had identified himself and his fame with his great chryselephantine and bronze works. He knew too well his own power, and his mastery over these arts, to wish to make the Athena in any other material than that in which it was made. But suppose he did so advise the Athenians, his advice was not accepted. The statue was not made of marble. Perhaps also he proposed to them to give it to Alcamenes, Agoracritos, or Polyclitus. What sort of value can be given to a statement like this appearing suddenly and solely in one writer five hundred years after the Athena was made? If we are to accept such traditions as this, we may as well “gape and swallow” any _gobemouche_. Let us have at once a life of Shakespeare written in Leipzig, or any other foreign country at least as far away as that.