Part 6

The Aphrodite of Melos[97] has attained a somewhat undeserved position as one of the world’s masterpieces of sculpture. Splendid piece of work as it is, it has most of the faults of its period. Much controversy has raged even over the actual facts of the discovery of this statue, but there appears to be no reason to doubt that the inscribed base, which was found with it and brought perhaps later to Paris, is part of it, and contains the true record of its author ...sandros from Antioch on the Maeander.[98] This base has been lost, but drawings and statements exist to show that it fitted the actual base. The missing fragment had a rectangular hole on the upper surface, in which some additional attribute was fitted. The restoration of this missing piece of the base with its hole disposes of the theories occasionally ventilated that the statue was one of a pair. The hole is not the socket for fastening a statue, nor will it hold one of the small herms which were found with the Aphrodite. Its true significance has been pointed out by Furtwängler by analogy with several other statues and designs, including one from Melos and one actual copy of the Aphrodite herself. It served for the fastening of a slender column or stele on which the goddess rested her left elbow. A beautiful little fourth-century bronze in Dresden shows a similar motive. The restoration of the figure is now easy. With her right hand the goddess held or was about to hold her drapery to prevent it from slipping; her left elbow rested on the pillar, and her left hand, palm upwards, held an apple. This hand holding the apple was actually found with the statue, and undoubtedly belongs to it, as well as a piece of the upper left arm. The other hand found at the same time is alien and on a larger scale. The position of the hand, palm upwards, is certified by the unworked back, which would be invisible. The apple of course is a frequent symbol of Aphrodite, and particularly appropriate in the island to which it gave its name.

The Aphrodite was found in a niche or exedra, which was dedicated by one Bacchios with a second-century inscription. The base inscription of ...sandros, whose name we may guess to have been Agesandros, is also second century, and therefore we cannot hesitate to accept a date about 180–160 B.C. for the Aphrodite, especially as its style and technique are indubitably of that period. The pose may be described as reminiscent of Lysippos with its opposing lines of shoulders and hips and twist of the body above the waist. The head-type is Scopaic, but only Scopaic at second-hand, since the influence of Pergamon is much clearer. If we compare the head with the head of the girl in Berlin from Pergamon,[99] or with the Pergamon Hermaphrodite in Constantinople,[100] we see an identical treatment of hair, identical head-shape, and the same type of features in almost every detail. The drapery is interesting for yet another source of inspiration. Its division into flattish panels separated by groups of deeply-cut waving folds is in the manner of Pheidias and the late fifth century, while the naturalistic little detail on the right hip, where the lower folds are caught up and radiate from a single point, is thoroughly Hellenistic.

The style of the statue as well as its technique is clear proof of its date. The attitude of the goddess has no discernible motive. There is no reason why she should be half naked, or why she should twist her body round so violently from the hips. There is no explanation why her drapery should stay up at all in so insecure a position, or why her left foot should be raised higher than her right. But if we compare for a moment the Melian Aphrodite with the Capuan Venus in Naples (Fig. 50), a statue in a nearly identical position, all these points are explained. The Capuan Venus is half naked, because she is admiring her beauty in the mirror of the shield of Ares. She is twisted so as to look at herself in the shield and yet display her body to the spectator--in itself a Hellenistic device. Her drapery is held up, because the shield-edge holds it against her left hip; her foot is raised, because it rests on Ares’ helmet and thereby gives better support to the shield. The attitude of the Melian goddess is clumsy and stiff, because it has no motive; that of the Capuan is graceful and effective, because its motive is clear.

Now it is noteworthy that the many examples of this type in our possession are all copies of the Capuan and not of the Melian figure. This is clear from the direction of the drapery folds, which differs in the Melian from all the other figures. The history of the type is thereby made clear. It was an early Hellenistic or late fourth-century statue of the Armed Aphrodite, possibly the cult statue, which appears in identical pose on coins of Corinth. Itself a typical _genre_ adaptation of a very early myth, it at once gained favour and was much copied, especially in Roman times. The Melian goddess was a second-century Hellenistic copy, but not a mere copy, rather an adaptation of the earlier prototype to a figure more suitable for Melos itself. Unfortunately the artist was unable to make the pose suit his new scheme properly. We get another adaptation in the Augustan age in the shape of the Victory of Brescia inscribing a roll of the dead on the shield,[101] and finally, in the second century and later, we get a crowd of copies much closer to the original, of which the Capuan Venus is the best.

The history of the Melian Aphrodite throws much light on the Hellenistic art of the mainland and its neighbouring islands. We see its artists bankrupt of new ideas, and able only to adapt older conceptions to new requirements with a series of eclectic modifications. The Aphrodite is a close parallel to the monuments of Damophon and Euboulides, although its artist is admittedly a better sculptor. All three show a poverty of new ideas, but a strong reaction against the excesses of the later Pergamene school. They are, therefore, forced to look backward and make up new conceptions out of a medley of older details. It is of the utmost importance that we should remember this state of mind when we come to deal with Greco-Roman art.

V

GRECO-ROMAN SCULPTURE

We have now completed our survey of Greek sculpture on the mainland, and in connexion with the eastern kingdoms which Greece absorbed as conqueror. We have yet one other aspect to consider: Greek sculpture in connexion with the Roman world of the west, by which Greece was conquered. ‘Conquered Greece led her conqueror captive,’ and while Greek civilization as a whole strongly modified the Italic civilization by which it was overthrown, Greek art in particular established its mastery over the inartistic nation which supplanted it. We have many accounts of how Roman connoisseurs filled their galleries with Greek statues. Mummius, Aemilius Paulus, Verres, Cicero, Sulla, Asinius Pollio, were all robbers or purchasers of Greek sculpture, and by the time of Pompey and Caesar the great market for Greek sculpture was in Rome. The demand exceeded the supply of antique marbles, enormous as the supply must have been, for the systematic plundering of the great shrines belongs to a later date. And as the Roman noble could not be accommodated with originals, he had to content himself with copies. Doubtless few of the collectors could tell the difference. Rhodes continued to turn out original sculpture until the time of Augustus, but Pergamon and Alexandria had long sunk into decay. It was, therefore, the opportunity for a new school of artists to arise in Athens, an opportunity which was promptly taken. Athens and Delos, Ephesos, and later Aphrodisias, became great centres of the new industry, which was primarily commercial. There was no longer any talk of idealism or of votive offerings to deities. The necessity was to turn out quantities of work suitable to the Roman taste.

Greco-Roman sculpture falls into three clear divisions. There are copies pure and simple like the Delian Diadumenos, a straightforward replica of the masterpiece of Polykleitos; there are adaptations of earlier work like those turned out by the school of Pasiteles and Arcesilaos; and there are, finally, new works, mostly in relief, which have been termed Neo-Attic, and which represent a new artistic development based on an elegant and artificial archaism. Athens is the centre of all this art, and she thus recovers in the first century B.C. the position which she had lost for so long.

The direct copies of this age need not be considered here. Direct copying from the antique as distinguished from adaptation is a new feature very eloquent of the poverty of original ideas both in the buyer and seller of statues. But it is important to realize that the Roman market made sculpture for the first time a really paying business, and therefore saved it from the possibility of extinction. Had it not been for the new Attic school of sculptors, who sprang up in the two preceding generations, it is hard to see how Augustus could have secured the workmen for his great Roman buildings, which formed the basis of a fresh artistic development in Roman imperial sculpture. The copies of this period are the best and most faithful which we possess. They have still some vitality of their own, and are not the dead and soulless caricatures produced by a later age.

But in addition to their copying work the latest generation of Attic artists busied themselves with free adaptations from the antique on lines laid down by contemporary art. These productions are to be distinguished both from purely archaistic works, which copy the style as well as the poses of ancient sculpture, and from works like the Aphrodite of Melos, which make a wide selection from ancient styles and poses. Statues such as the Farnese Herakles of Glycon,[102] the Apollo Belvedere,[103] or the Artemis of Versailles,[104] are not eclectic at all; they are older types taken over and translated into modern style. They show less originality than the Melian goddess, because there is no real change of pose or of meaning. An old statue is simply worked out with a new technique. Thus the Farnese Herakles gives a Hellenistic rendering of a statue by Lysippos, while the Apollo Belvedere is perhaps a new version of a work by Leochares. The former attempts to render the massive strength of the hero by immense exaggeration of muscular development in a style worse than anything perpetrated at Pergamon. The latter attempts to outdo the elegance of its original by an ultra-refinement of surface in every direction, and by an affected stage-pose and gesture. In both cases we see the effect of commercialism on art, for the artist no longer works on his own high standard of achievement. He is bound by the tastes of the patrons for whom he caters, and the uneducated Roman buyer liked to see strength shown by mighty muscles and refinement by daintiness of gesture. Both the Herakles of Glycon and the Apollo Belvedere are fine pieces of sculpture, but as works of art they are little short of abominable. We have no evidence about the original of the Artemis of Versailles, a statue of somewhat similar type to the Apollo. We may notice how the little fold of drapery above the left knee is turned up without any justification simply for the purpose of displaying the outline of the leg. The Medici Venus in Florence[105] is an adaptation of the later version of the Praxitelean nude Aphrodite, the Capitoline rather than the Cnidian type. It is also an Attic work of this period, finely executed, but adding a yet further degradation to the Capitoline version by the additional elegance of its gestures.

The Torso Belvedere (Fig. 52) is another Attic work of great technical ability. Its prototype is unknown, and considerable controversy exists about its meaning and correct restoration. It is a seated figure with head and upper torso turned sharply towards its left, a position which suggests a Lysippic original. The massive musculature of the torso recalls Glycon’s Herakles, but the influence here is more Rhodian than Pergamene. One of the most popular suggestions[106] for its restoration makes it a Polyphemos shading his eyes with one hand, as he looks out for Galatea, and holding a club in the other. A similar type is known from wall paintings. No agreement on this point has, however, been reached.

Works of this quality of technique, even if uninspired by high artistic feeling, show how greatly the Attic school has improved since the days of Euboulides. In sculpture the skill of the workman depends largely on the popularity of, and demand for, his work. The new vogue of sculpture soon produced a high standard of technical efficiency. But if Greco-Roman art remained wholly and unalterably Greek, Greece itself was not allowed the monopoly of its production. During the early years of the first century two Greek artists transferred their business to Rome itself, and initiated thereby a new school of Hellenistic sculpture. These were Pasiteles and Arcesilaos, names of high importance for Greek art.

Pasiteles was an artist of great versatility and scientific attainments. He wrote a work on Greek art in five books, which served as a primary authority for Pliny.[107] He was a goldsmith and a metal worker, and his range of sculptural subjects was very wide. He is known to have paid special attention to the sculpture of animals, and it is recorded that he studied a lion from life at the Roman docks. He seems also to have been the originator of a device, which did much to injure the later development of marble sculpture.[108] Bronze workers had always had to prepare clay models usually finished in wax after the invention of the _cire perdue_ process; metal workers of all kinds had need of the same preparation; but in marble sculpture the use of models had hitherto been confined to pedimental designs or similar productions prepared by great artists and worked out by masons. The effect on architectural sculpture had usually been unfortunate. It is expressly told us of Pasiteles that he always made use of clay models for all his work, that is, including his marble sculpture. It was, no doubt, inevitable in a commercial age, where copies were in great request, and where several replicas were made of the one original, that the use of clay models designed by the master and copied in marble by pupils and workmen should become general. The ultimate results of such a procedure were destructive to the whole art; for workshops came to possess a stock of models and to turn out machine-made copies on demand. The finished statue became merely the work of masons untouched by the original master, who devoted himself entirely to the preparation of models and designs. The sculptor’s workshop instead of being a studio degenerated into a factory. No doubt Pasiteles himself was an artist who did much original work, but in the hands of his pupils and followers statue-making was a mere trade. Unfortunately the works of his school, which survive for us, are almost wholly these mechanical and commercial by-products. The works of real fancy and charm have almost wholly disappeared. Many of the Hellenistic reliefs, especially those of the Palazzo Spada type, are to be attributed to the Greek sculptors in Rome. These show an elegance and a dainty affectation quite in keeping with the spirit of the age. The group of Appiades (Fig. 51) by Stephanos,[109] a pupil of Pasiteles, has been recognized in the group of three nude girls holding up a water-pot, now in the Louvre.[110] The Three Graces are also a conception of this age. Neat competent work of a decorative type seems to sum up the original achievements of this school, which fall more or less in line with the Neo-Attic reliefs shortly to be considered.

But most of our remains of the school of Pasiteles belong to a different class of statue, best illustrated by the athlete of Stephanos, Pasiteles’ pupil, in the Villa Albani (Fig. 53). All periods of art which are bankrupt in new ideas tend to be archaistic; the Greco-Roman school looked backwards for all its inspiration; but while Neo-Attics found their models in Ionian art of the sixth century, the pupils of Pasiteles studied their larger sculpture mainly in the light of the early fifth-century Argive school. The athlete of Stephanos shows the proportions, the stiff pose, and the surface treatment of the pre-Polykleitan types of Ageladas. He is comparable with the Ligourio bronze[111] or the Acropolis ephebe[112] of Kritios for all his Lysippic slenderness and later expression. The type was immensely popular and may have originated with Pasiteles himself. We have it in single examples and combined in groups, as in the Orestes and Electra of Naples,[113] where the companion figure is female, or in the Ildefonso group[114] where it is combined with another male statue. All these figures are copied from early fifth-century art, though the signs of eclectic archaism are sufficiently clear. If we examine the so-called Electra of Naples, we see an archaic early fifth-century head together with a pose approaching the Praxitelean, transparent drapery of the style of Alkamenes, and a low girdle and uncovered shoulder reminiscent of Pergamon. The group of Menelaos,[115] a pupil of Stephanos, in the Terme Museum, is a less archaic-looking and a more satisfactory work. Fifth century in detail, in style it reminds us rather of the fourth-century grave reliefs. To the same period, or perhaps a later one, belongs the idea of grouping well-known statues originally separate. Thus we have in the Capitol a group of the Melian Venus with the Ares Borghese.[116] This actual group, however, belongs to a much later time.

Arcesilaos was another well-known sculptor of the age, a friend of Pompey and Caesar. The Venus Genetrix of the Louvre[117] was made for the House of the Julii. It bears its fifth-century origin clearly stamped on its style. Arcesilaos also was a great provider of clay models, which he sold outright to workshops for manufacturing purposes, so that a finished statue might have never been seen by the artist responsible for its design. A series of herms in the Terme Museum[118] show a strong archaistic tendency towards fifth-century models, but bear also in details of pose and drapery the clear stamp of the Greco-Roman age. Statues of this type were intended for the decoration of Roman palaces. They are no longer self-sufficing works of art, but are subject to the general demands of artistic decoration.

This brings us to the third division of Greco-Roman sculpture, in reality its most original contribution to the history of Greek art: the Neo-Attic reliefs,[119] all of which are primarily decorative in their purpose. The works with which we have hitherto dealt--the Apollo Belvedere, the Torso Belvedere, or the Venus Genetrix--have all been eclectic in style, and consequently have lacked the sense of harmony or uniformity, which is one of the conditions of great sculpture. The same criticism applies to all the sculpture of the mainland in the Hellenistic age. On the other hand the schools of Pergamon, Rhodes, and Alexandria attained a uniformity of style, and consequently were enabled to produce masterpieces of art. Their works can be attributed to a school, because they contain common elements of style and technique based on a common theory of art. This community of purpose has been wholly lacking in the works of Euboulides, Damophon, and the Melian artists, and only partially felt in the works of Pasiteles and Arcesilaos. All these artists were individualists selecting and combining at their own will and pleasure. The Neo-Attic artists are quite different. Their names are immaterial, because their works all bear the impress of precisely the same style. There is no chance of mistaking a Neo-Attic work; its origin is clear in every line. These reliefs represent the last true school of Greek sculpture, the last monuments in which a common line of development can be studied unaffected by individual idiosyncrasies. They are strongly archaistic, but in spite of this they are essentially modern. They neither copy the antique exactly, nor adapt it to existing modes as the followers of Pasiteles did. They rather invent a new mode and a new style in art, but they make use of archaic technical details for its expression. Their art is essentially artificial and symbolic, so that they represent a reaction against the academic classicism of the period; but it is also meticulous in detail, so that it can merit no reproach of a loose impressionism. The Neo-Attic artists of the first century B.C. are really the pre-Raphaelites of Greek art, and Rossetti and Burne-Jones are the nearest parallel to them in later art history.

Their reliefs are all decorative in purpose, for the adornment of altars, candelabra, fountains, well-heads, or wall-panels; and therefore they are not unnaturally attracted by the most decorative of all the archaic schools, the late Ionian or Attic-Ionian art of the end of the sixth century. They make use also of later models, of the Victories of the Balustrade, of Scopaic Maenads, of Praxitelean satyrs, but all the models which they adopt are treated in a uniform style, a new style of exaggerated daintiness of pose and gesture accompanied by an archaistic formality of drapery and modelling. In this detail they contrast strongly with the realism of the pre-Raphaelites. Their daintiness and formality are derived from Ionian models, but reproduced in a wholly different setting.

The vase of Sosibios in the Louvre[120] reproduces some of their favourite types, which occur over and over again in the decorative art of the early empire. The flute-playing satyr, the dancing maenad, the armed dancer, and all the other types are reproduced in every variety of combination, but in identical form. The Neo-Attic sculptors were content with the elaboration of a few types which they combined at pleasure. They never attempted more intricate groups than their variant of the two Victories with a bull from the Acropolis Balustrade. Usually they merely group single figures in long rows without any connexion in thought. Nothing could bring out more clearly their essential poverty of ideas and the purely commercial character of their art. The designs are like so many stencil patterns which can be applied to any form of monument.