Part 5

We have more copies of the well-known Pasquino group of Menelaos or Ajax and Patroclos. There are fragments in the Vatican, and a well-preserved replica in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence (Fig. 36). Here again the extraordinary interest in anatomical forms is shown not only in the strain and twist of the living hero--the invariable twist of all these Rhodian figures--but in the admirable contrast between the vivid living body and the relaxed corpse. This contrasting of physical and mental conditions is a part of the dramatic feeling in later Rhodian art, which has quite abandoned its earlier simplicity and has followed on the lines of _baroque_ extravagance laid down by the second Pergamene school.

Of all the groups the best known and the most instructive is the latest of all, the Laocoon.[86] In this marvellous group we see the full development of the effect of strained agony on the human form, and we see the mature form contrasted both with an active youth’s body and with the semi-inanimate body of the younger boy. When we have removed the restorations and lowered the right arm of Laocoon nearer to his head, we get a perfect group-design unified by the terrible serpent-coils and by the central theme of agony. The torso muscles of Laocoon are fully developed and even exaggerated, though not to the same extent as those of the Pergamene frieze, but the boys’ forms are simpler, and all reflect the basic principles of Rhodian art already enumerated. Pain is shown by the downward sloping eyebrows with sharp interior angles, by the half-closed eyes, wrinkled forehead, and parted lips. The hair is wild, and all the veins of the body stand out sharply. The twist above the waist occurs in all three bodies. It is interesting to notice that even in the Laocoon, the latest work of the most scientific school of Greek sculpture, anatomical accuracy is still lacking. The lower curve of the ribs above the abdomen follows a line impossible in nature, and the left thumb of the elder son is provided with three joints instead of the normal two. Neither the Laocoon nor any one of the other Rhodian groups is perfectly satisfactory to modern taste. There is too much strain, too much agony, too little relief or repose. Every inch of the group is illustrative of pain and passion. Our sense of sympathy is deadened by excessive emphasis and repetition. But in technical skill the group has never been surpassed.

A close parallel to the head of the Laocoon is found in the bearded centaur of the pair made by Aristeas and Papias of Aphrodisias (Fig. 38). Copies of this statue existing in the Capitol and in the Louvre show the despair of the elderly victim of love in the guise of a centaur tormented by a little Eros on his back. The companion figure (Fig. 37) is young and delights in the persuasions of his rider. This group of rather obvious allegory belongs to the Antonine age, but the resemblance to the Laocoon proves a first-century original, which is interesting because it is one of the earliest examples of a corresponding pair of statues clearly designed for house decoration. The growth of ‘cabinet pieces’, as opposed to temple or national dedications, now develops into the whole mass of furniture sculpture in the shape of candelabra, table-legs, consoles, decorative herms, &c., which mark the imperial age.

The school of Rhodes ends in extraordinary brilliance. There is nothing decadent in its technique, nothing paltry in its conceptions. We have seen the very pure and slightly finicky naturalism of the early third century give way to a rather more _baroque_ extravagance in detail, but in neither its earlier nor its later stage did the purest of the Hellenistic schools affect the exaggerations of Alexandria or Pergamon. In Rhodes, at any rate, the steady development of Greek sculpture reached its perfect and logical conclusion. We have seen it start with a great idealism and no technique at all. In the fifth century technique and idealism are almost equally balanced. In the Laocoon the last word of technical perfection is spoken, but there is no idealism at all, only a man and two boys writhing in the grasp of serpents. It is not photographic naturalism, but it is histrionic, artificial, and dead. We cannot believe in the Laocoon as we believe in the Hermes of Praxiteles.

IV

THE MAINLAND SCHOOLS DURING THE HELLENISTIC AGE

While the full tide of artistic development was running in the new societies of Pergamon, Rhodes, and Alexandria, the Greek mainland became a backwater. The rise of the kingdoms meant the decline of the old autonomous city states. Athens in particular fell into the background on account of her uncompromising hostility to the power of Macedonia. In spite of some brief periods of revival, her destiny was for the future rarely in her own hands, and her political subordination seems to have reacted with great rapidity upon her artistic output. She remained for another century after the death of Alexander the home of philosophy, but her art began to revive only after the Roman conquest, in a new form, which will require later consideration. Here at least the Hellenistic age is a period of rapid decadence and decline.

The Peloponnese is in much the same position. The pupils of Lysippos found their best clients abroad, and left no successors of importance at home. The political loss of power was here intensified by a growing poverty. The new wealth which began to pour into Europe as the result of the conquest of Asia went either to Macedonia or to those states which had sent mercenaries to Alexander’s army. The future prosperity of Greece was in the hands of Arcadia, Achaia, and Aetolia rather than Argos, Sparta, and Sikyon. The new states had few artistic traditions, and the old states had no means of gratifying theirs. The inevitable result was a great decline in artistic output as well as in artistic skill. Almost the only sphere left for sculpture was the erection of formal honorary statues to distinguished or wealthy individuals, a type of work which does not beget great art.

The first half of the third century was a period of very good work in portraiture, which is, however, a subject by itself. The Demosthenes of Polyeuctes is dated about 280 B.C., and the statues of Aeschines, Aristotle, and others show the existence of an admirable school of portrait sculptors at this time in Athens. But ideal sculpture shows a sad falling-off. The Themis of Chairestratos (Fig. 40) belongs approximately to this period, and it is marked by a great formality, not only in pose but in the treatment of hair and drapery. The classical period of sculpture in Athens was followed by what we must call an academic period. The foreign schools were developing on lines of naturalism, but at home sculptors tended merely to formalize the work of the fourth-century masters, and to produce statues of mechanical correctness without any vitality at all. We have seen the beginning of this tendency in the drapery system of the followers of Praxiteles. It now affects the whole of Attic sculpture. Old types are adopted again and again, until they become purely mechanical. Drapery styles are similarly used up, and the increasing formality of every department stifles entirely the possibilities of originality. The Hermes of Andros (Fig. 39) is a good example of this kind of crystallization of types. The statue was found in connexion with a tomb, and it is clearly a memorial statue. Its companion was a female figure reproducing exactly the pose and drapery of the draped female figure from Herculaneum at Dresden. The date would seem to be late third century. The Hermes itself is a replica of a type known in the Antinous of the Belvedere and other statues, and is a product of the Praxitelean school, like the Dresden figure. But the influence of Praxiteles is not alone in it. We have a clear use of Lysippic proportions and some Lysippic influence in the head. This eclecticism is an invariable mark of archaistic art. The sculptor, who has no new message of his own to deliver, looks back to antiquity for his types, but does not imitate one statue directly. The only form of originality which he is able to use is originality of combination and selection. Consequently he absorbs details from several artists and produces work which we label Lysippo-Scopaic, or Lysippo-Praxitelean, &c. We have seen how the late fourth-century artists in Asia Minor combined characteristics of Scopas and Praxiteles. The late fourth-century and third-century Attic artists made use of all their predecessors, and produced statues in which we can detect the _disiecta membra_ of half a dozen styles. At the same time we may recognize the general predominance of Praxitelean tradition over that of the other artists and a universal predilection for marble instead of bronze.

One of the most interesting Hellenistic works of the Attic school is the bronze figure from Anticythera,[87] which is still the subject of much dispute. It is a typical piece of eclecticism. The pose and twist of the shoulder and upper part of the torso are Lysippic, while the head is a mixture of Praxiteles and Scopas. The result, as might be expected, is somewhat inharmonious. In shape and profile the head is mainly Praxitelean, and therefore on its discovery it was acclaimed as a Praxitelean original. But looking from the front we at once see the resemblance to the Scopaic Meleager type,[88] with its broad head, slight chin, and fringe of short upright locks like little flames. The head, and indeed the whole statue, is not unlike the bronze athlete of Ephesos,[89] which has the same hair and facial type, together with a similar rather heavy Lysippic body. This heaviness of the torso in both statues shows that the Lysippic ideal is not followed directly, but rather the Attic version of it as used in the Agias of Delphi.[90]

Another Attico-Lysippic figure is preserved for us in a number of replicas, of which the two best known are the Hermes from Atalanta in Athens (Fig. 41) and the Hermes Richelieu in the Louvre. Here again Lysippic proportions are combined with a rather heavier Attic torso in a whole which lacks something of harmony and repose. The work has been referred back to a Lysippic original, but it seems more likely that it is an Attic adaptation of the eclectic school now springing into existence. The Attic grave reliefs give us good information about Attic art down to the end of the fourth century, but Demetrios of Phaleron prohibited them for sumptuary reasons in 309 B.C., and in future we have no such good guide to Attic art. Eclecticism is, however, pretty clear in the later examples which we do possess. The votive reliefs from the Asklepieion throw some light on the third century, but they are not on a sufficiently large scale to be very instructive.

In Greece at all times professions tended to run in one family, and we have already seen examples of families of sculptors, such as that of Praxiteles, in which the craft was handed down from father to son for generations. The Hellenistic age is full of evidence for this phenomenon in Athens and elsewhere. Rhodes in particular gives us detailed families of sculptors, since we are better provided with inscriptions in Rhodes than in other centres. In Hellenistic Athens two such families are worthy of notice. Polykles, whom we may call Polykles I, had two sons, Timokles and Timarchides I; the latter had two sons, Polykles II and Dionysios; and Polykles II had a son, Timarchides II. These are known to us from literature or from inscriptions, and they cover more or less the second century B.C. It is a question to which member of the house we are to ascribe the very famous bronze Hermaphrodite mentioned by Pliny,[91] or whether it should be referred to an earlier artist of the same name in the fourth century.[92] A further question is involved in the identification of the Hermaphrodite, since it is commonly assumed that the Sleeping Hermaphrodite (Fig. 42), far the most famous type now extant in numerous copies, must have had a marble and not a bronze original. The statue of Polykles is identified with the Berlin Hermaphrodite[93] by those who would give him a fourth-century date; with a bronze in Epinal[94] by those who associate him with Hellenistic art. The Berlin Hermaphrodite is of Praxitelean type; the Epinal bronze resembles rather what we have called the Pergamene type of the Turning Satyr and the Aphrodite Kallipygos. The question is a difficult one, but we may safely exclude Polykles II. Timarchides I, his father, and Dionysios, his brother, worked on statues of a marked academic tendency. The C. Ofellius of Delos was the work of his brother, a statue of purely mechanical taste. This Polykles is not likely to have originated a great and famous statue. Polykles I worked as early as 200, a much better period for original work. He is a more likely candidate for the authorship of the type, if we suppose it to have resembled either the Epinal bronze or the Sleeping Hermaphrodite. On _a priori_ grounds of its great popularity one would distinctly prefer to connect the latter with the statue mentioned by Pliny. It is true that it looks like a marble statue and not a bronze one, but a marble replica which served as the prototype for marble copies is by no means an impossible suggestion. But this Sleeping Hermaphrodite is a work of distinctly Pergamene tendency, intended to bring out the artist’s skill in the rendering of soft sensual forms. It would seem to belong to an earlier date than 200 or even 250. The Epinal bronze implies a similar date, and therefore we are left with a double difficulty. The best Polykles for our purpose seems to be fifty years too late for either of the types we require. We are, therefore, driven to suppose an intermediate Polykles about 270 B.C. In any case we must infer a reaction of Pergamene influence on the academic art of third-century Athens, but it was a solitary example which seems to have left no heritage to later artists.

The sculptor family best known to us from inscriptions is that of Eucheir and Euboulides. We know of at least two representatives of each name, Eucheir I about 220, Euboulides I about 190, Eucheir II about 160, and Euboulides II thirty years later. The first Euboulides made a statue of Chrysophis, the second Eucheir athletes and warriors, and a marble Hermes at Pheneos. The second Euboulides is more important, for he was the author of a great monument outside the Dipylon Gate, considerable fragments of which have been recovered.

These fragments are our main evidence for the art of Athens in the second half of the second century B.C., and they show us that the academic art of the second half of the third century has followed out its natural development. The figures of Victory (Fig. 43) and Athena (Fig. 44), which have partially survived, are grandiose without being noble or effective. There is a distinct attempt to absorb some of the exaggerated idealism of the second Pergamene school; there is also an effort to recover some of the simplicity and grandeur of Pheidias; but the result is a staid and rather mechanical classicism, which is made only a little more obvious by the larger size of the figures. The Athena head, with its straightforward gaze, archaistic hair, large, wide-open eyes, and round, heavy chin is distinctly Pheidian; the Victory in rapid movement with head turned to the side is more affected by Pergamene art. Her drapery shows a curious combination of naturalism and formalism in the folds at the girdle; each individual set of folds is well studied from nature; but the repetition of a similar set right round the body is purely mechanical. The group is a good example of the limitations of the Attic artist at the end of his development. The next century sees a totally different activity.

In the Peloponnese we have a great gap after the pupils of Lysippos, a gap devoid of any evidence either literary or monumental. During the whole of the third century it would be difficult to point to any Peloponnesian art on a scale deserving of attention. But the second century opens with a name of some importance, Damophon of Messene. We are in the rare and fortunate position of possessing undoubted originals from his hand in the great group of Lycosura. These are practically our sole monumental evidence for the Hellenistic art of the Peloponnese.[95] The date of Damophon is now established by inscriptions for the first half of the second century B.C., and a number of his works are more or less attested by coin-types. He had a considerable vogue in the last generation before the Roman conquest, and his leading position is evidenced by the commission he received to restore the Olympian Zeus. It may have been his hand which touched up and restored the corner figures of the west pediment of the temple.

The great group of Lycosura represented Demeter and Kore enthroned between standing figures of Artemis and a Titan Anytos. It survives in three heads and numerous fragments of limbs and drapery, and its conjectural restoration has been recently undertaken (Fig. 45). The discovery of a coin representing the group on its reverse goes far to justify the proposed design.[96]

The group is interesting from many points of view, but mainly from the flood of light which it throws on the methods of Peloponnesian sculpture at the very close of its development. It thus forms a complementary picture to the remains of the monument of Euboulides in Athens. Damophon, like Euboulides, underwent the influence of Pergamon. The colossal scale of his group and the wild hair of his giant Anytos (Fig. 46) demonstrate the influence of the altar frieze. Damophon also went back to Pheidias for inspiration. He must have absorbed many lessons from his work at Olympia. The seated group of his goddesses is reminiscent of the two figures next to ‘Theseus’ in the west pediment of the Parthenon. The simple wide-eyed grave expression of his Demeter head goes back to the fifth-century ideal, while his Artemis (Fig. 47) wears the melon-coiffure associated with the school of Praxiteles. The attitudes of Artemis and Anytos are Lysippic. Here we have every evidence of academic eclecticism. The same feature is borne out by three coins which reproduce the statues of Damophon. His Asklepios at Aigion gives us a fourth-century type. He copied the Laphria of Patras for Messene. His Herakles in the guise of an Idaean Dactyl at Megalopolis seems to have been a variant of the now fashionable herm figures and to copy a Hermerakles type known by numerous extant examples.

Damophon’s style then was academic and eclectic, borrowing from all sources of inspiration and in general using up over again well-known groups and poses. His execution is even more interesting for its extraordinary inequality. His heads are on the whole very good. The Demeter is a dull piece of work, but both the Anytos and the Artemis show some fancy and some power of original expression. The girl is demure and cheerful, the giant benevolent and rather sly. But when we come to examine the execution of the fragments of the bodies and limbs which survive at Lycosura, we find a very hasty and poor technical ability. The arms and legs are nearly shapeless. They are colossal, but practically formal in design, and details of muscles and sinews are almost entirely omitted. The drapery makes some effort to follow Pheidian designs, but it is poorly carved and without effect. Only in one direction does the artist show any skill, and that is in the great embroidered veil (Fig. 48) worn by Despoina. This is an extraordinary _tour de force_, not for its sculptural effect, which is purely formal, but for the reproduction of a complicated embroidered design in very low relief. A border of tassels with bands of design about it and large embroidered figures of Victory above the bands is rendered with consummate art. We have a frieze of sea-monsters, nymphs, and Erotes according to a common Hellenistic design, a curious local dance of beast figures in human dress, a dance paralleled by some small terra-cotta figures found in the same shrine, and the larger figures of Victory above carrying candelabra.

It is interesting to see the total want of proportion in the artist’s mind, who could devote so much time and originality to a comparatively unimportant piece of decoration, while treating the main lines of his drapery with carelessness and monotony. It is probable that we have here a procedure to be noticed in the Demeter of Cnidos--a head done with great care and placed on a torso of inferior execution. While Damophon worked the heads of all the figures and the drapery of Despoina, he must have left the rest of his group to a band of journeymen assistants. We know from inscriptions that Damophon had two sons, Xenophilos and another whose name is lost. It is, therefore, possible that Xenophilos and Straton, the Argive sculptors, were his sons. Their subjects were similar, and their Asklepios, as shown on a coin, is identical with Damophon’s.

Thus Greek sculpture on the mainland came to a somewhat inglorious and academic conclusion with the Roman conquest in 146 B.C. We may examine one more centre of artistic work before leaving it, since it forms a link between Greece and Ionia, between the declining schools of the mainland and the vigorous art of Pergamon and Rhodes.

Melos has left us several Hellenistic statues of interest. The Aphrodite of the Louvre and the Poseidon in Athens are their most important representatives. The Poseidon (Fig. 49) is a typical work of histrionic _bravura_ under the influence of the second Pergamene school. He stands in a defiant and dramatic attitude as if summoning his adversaries to combat, and his burly hair and beard recall the giants of the altar. But an eclectic taste is visible here also. His pose is Lysippic, and his restrained torso owes more to Rhodes than Pergamon. Melos is a meeting-point of trade-routes, in which many artistic currents must have come together.