Book: Greek Studies: A Series of Essays

W >> Walter Horatio Pater >> Greek Studies: A Series of Essays




The characteristics of Greek art, indeed, in the heroic age, so far
as we can discern them, are those also of Phoenician art, its delight
in metal among the rest, of metal especially as an element in
architecture, the covering of everything with plates of metal. It
was from [218] Phoenicia that the costly material in which early
Greek art delighted actually came--ivory, amber, much of the precious
metals. These the adventurous Phoenician traders brought in return
for the mussel which contained the famous purple, in quest of which
they penetrated far into all the Greek havens. Recent discoveries
present the island of Cyprus, the great source of copper and copper-
work in ancient times, as the special mediator between the art of
Phoenicia and Greece; and in some archaic figures of Aphrodite with
her dove, brought from Cyprus and now in the British Museum--objects
you might think, at first sight, taken from the niches of a French
Gothic cathedral--are some of the beginnings, at least, of Greek
sculpture manifestly under the influence of Phoenician masters. And,
again, mythology is the reflex of characteristic facts. It is
through Cyprus that the religion of Aphrodite comes from Phoenicia to
Greece. Here, in Cyprus, she is connected with some other kindred
elements of mythological tradition, above all with the beautiful old
story of Pygmalion, in which the thoughts of art and love are
connected so closely together. First of all, on the prows of the
Phoenician ships, the tutelary image of Aphrodite Euploea, the
protectress of sailors, comes to Cyprus--to Cythera; it is in this
simplest sense that she is, primarily, Anadyomene.+ And her
connexion [219] with the arts is always an intimate one. In Cyprus
her worship is connected with an architecture, not colossal, but full
of dainty splendour--the art of the shrine-maker, the maker of
reliquaries; the art of the toilet, the toilet of Aphrodite; the
Homeric hymn to Aphrodite is full of all that; delight in which we
have seen to be characteristic of the true Homer.

And now we see why Hephaestus, that crook-backed and uncomely god, is
the husband of Aphrodite. Hephaestus is the god of fire, indeed; as
fire he is flung from heaven by Zeus; and in the marvellous contest
between Achilles and the river Xanthus in the twenty-first book of
the Iliad, he intervenes in favour of the hero, as mere fire against
water. But he soon ceases to be thus generally representative of the
functions of fire, and becomes almost exclusively representative of
one only of its aspects, its function, namely, in regard to early
art; he becomes the patron of smiths, bent with his labour at the
forge, as people had seen such real workers; he is the most perfectly
developed of all the Daedali, Mulcibers, or Cabeiri. That the god of
fire becomes the god of all art, architecture included, so that he
makes the houses of the gods, and is also the husband of Aphrodite,
marks a threefold group of facts; the prominence, first, of a
peculiar kind of art in early Greece, that beautiful metal-work, with
[220] which he is bound and bent; secondly, the connexion of this,
through Aphrodite, with an almost wanton personal splendour; the
connexion, thirdly, of all this with Cyprus and Phoenicia, whence,
literally, Aphrodite comes. Hephaestus is the "spiritual form" of
the Asiatic element in Greek art.

This, then, is the situation which the first period of Greek art
comprehends; a people whose civilisation is still young, delighting,
as the young do, in ornament, in the sensuous beauty of ivory and
gold, in all the lovely productions of skilled fingers. They receive
all this, together with the worship of Aphrodite, by way of Cyprus,
from Phoenicia, from the older, decrepit Eastern civilisation, itself
long since surfeited with that splendour; and they receive it in
frugal quantity, so frugal that their thoughts always go back to the
East, where there is the fulness of it, as to a wonder-land of art.
Received thus in frugal quantity, through many generations, that
world of Asiatic tectonics stimulates the sensuous capacity in them,
accustoms the hand to produce and the eye to appreciate the more
delicately enjoyable qualities of material things. But nowhere in
all this various and exquisite world of design is there as yet any
adequate sense of man himself, nowhere is there an insight into or
power over human form as the expression of human soul. Yet those
arts of design in which that younger people delights [221] have in
them already, as designed work, that spirit of reasonable order, that
expressive congruity in the adaptation of means to ends, of which the
fully developed admirableness of human form is but the consummation--
a consummation already anticipated in the grand and animated figures
of epic poetry, their power of thought, their laughter and tears.
Under the hands of that younger people, as they imitate and pass
largely and freely beyond those older craftsmen, the fire of the
reasonable soul will kindle, little by little, up to the Theseus of
the Parthenon and the Venus of Melos.

The ideal aim of Greek sculpture, as of all other art, is to deal,
indeed, with the deepest elements of man's nature and destiny, to
command and express these, but to deal with them in a manner, and
with a kind of expression, as clear and graceful and simple, if it
may be, as that of the Japanese flower-painter. And what the student
of Greek sculpture has to cultivate generally in himself is the
capacity for appreciating the expression of thought in outward form,
the constant habit of associating sense with soul, of tracing what we
call expression to its sources. But, concurrently with this, he must
also cultivate, all along, a not less equally constant appreciation
of intelligent workmanship in work, and of design in things designed,
of the rational control of matter everywhere. From many sources he
may feed this sense of intelligence [222] and design in the
productions of the minor crafts, above all in the various and
exquisite art of Japan. Carrying a delicacy like that of nature
itself into every form of imitation, reproduction, and combination--
leaf and flower, fish and bird, reed and water--and failing only when
it touches the sacred human form, that art of Japan is not so unlike
the earliest stages of Greek art as might at first sight be supposed.
We have here, and in no mere fragments, the spectacle of a universal
application to the instruments of daily life of fitness and beauty,
in a temper still unsophisticated, as also unelevated, by the
divination of the spirit of man. And at least the student must
always remember that Greek art was throughout a much richer and
warmer thing, at once with more shadows, and more of a dim
magnificence in its surroundings, than the illustrations of a
classical dictionary might induce him to think. Some of the ancient
temples of Greece were as rich in aesthetic curiosities as a famous
modern museum. That Asiatic poikilia,+ that spirit of minute and
curious loveliness, follows the bolder imaginative efforts of Greek
art all through its history, and one can hardly be too careful in
keeping up the sense of this daintiness of execution through the
entire course of its development. It is not only that the minute
object of art, the tiny vase-painting, intaglio, coin, or cameo,
often reduces into the palm of the hand lines grander than those of
[223] many a life-sized or colossal figure; but there is also a sense
in which it may be said that the Venus of Melos, for instance, is but
a supremely well-executed object of vertu, in the most limited sense
of the term. Those solemn images of the temple of Theseus are a
perfect embodiment of the human ideal, of the reasonable soul and of
a spiritual world; they are also the best made things of their kind,
as an urn or a cup is well made.

A perfect, many-sided development of tectonic crafts, a state such as
the art of some nations has ended in, becomes for the Greeks a mere
opportunity, a mere starting-ground for their imaginative presentment
of man, moral and inspired. A world of material splendour, moulded
clay, beaten gold, polished stone;--the informing, reasonable soul
entering into that, reclaiming the metal and stone and clay, till
they are as full of living breath as the real warm body itself; the
presence of those two elements is continuous throughout the fortunes
of Greek art after the heroic age, and the constant right estimate of
their action and reaction, from period to period, its true
philosophy.

NOTES

192. +The related Greek noun techne is defined as follows: "art,
skill, regular method of making a thing." (Liddell and Scott.)

193. *Il. xviii.468-608.

193. *Od. vii.37-132.

197. +Transliteration: porpas te gnamptas th' helikas, kalukas te kai
hormous. Translation: "delicate brooches, spriralled bracelets,
rosettes, and necklaces." Homer, Iliad 18.400.

201. +Empaestik derives from the verb empaio, "to strike in, stamp."
(Liddell and Scott.)

210. +The names are etymological--chalkos, argyros, and chrysos
signify, respectively, brass (or copper), silver, and gold.

216. +Transliteration: poikilia. Liddell and Scott definition:
"embroidery . . . (metaph.) cunning." The metaphorical sense is the
one Pater invokes.

218. +Euploea . . . Anadyomene. Euploea means "fair voyage";
Anadyomene, a participial form derived from the verb anadyo, "to
rise, esp. from the sea," (Liddell-Scott) may be rendered "she who
emerges from the sea."

222. +Transliteration: poikilia. Liddell and Scott definition:
"embroidery . . . (metaph.) cunning." The metaphorical sense is the
one Pater invokes.



BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
II: THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES

[224] CRITICS of Greek sculpture have often spoken of it as if it had
been always work in colourless stone, against an almost colourless
background. Its real background, as I have tried to show, was a
world of exquisite craftsmanship, touching the minutest details of
daily life with splendour and skill, in close correspondence with a
peculiarly animated development of human existence--the energetic
movement and stir of typically noble human forms, quite worthily
clothed--amid scenery as poetic as Titian's. If shapes of
colourless stone did come into that background, it was as the
undraped human form comes into some of Titian's pictures, only to
cool and solemnise its splendour; the work of the Greek sculptor
being seldom in quite colourless stone, nor always or chiefly in
fastidiously selected marble even, but often in richly toned metal
(this or that sculptor preferring some special variety of the bronze
he worked in, such as the [225] hepatizon or liver-coloured bronze,
or the bright golden alloy of Corinth), and in its consummate
products chryselephantine,--work in gold and ivory, on a core of
cedar. Pheidias, in the Olympian Zeus, in the Athene of the
Parthenon, fulfils what that primitive, heroic goldsmiths' age, dimly
discerned in Homer, already delighted in; and the celebrated work of
which I have first to speak now, and with which Greek sculpture
emerges from that half-mythical age and becomes in a certain sense
historical, is a link in that goldsmiths' or chryselephantine
tradition, carrying us forwards to the work of Pheidias, backwards to
the elaborate Asiatic furniture of the chamber of Paris.

When Pausanias visited Olympia, towards the end of the second century
after Christ, he beheld, among other precious objects in the temple
of Here, a splendidly wrought treasure-chest of cedar-wood, in which,
according to a legend, quick as usual with the true human colouring,
the mother of Cypselus had hidden him, when a child, from the enmity
of her family, the Bacchiadae, then the nobility of Corinth. The
child, named Cypselus after this incident (Cypsele being a Corinthian
word for chest), became tyrant of Corinth, and his grateful
descendants, as it was said, offered the beautiful old chest to the
temple of Here, as a memorial of his preservation. That would have
been not long after the year 625 B.C. So much for the [226] story
which Pausanias heard--but inherent probability, and some points of
detail in his description, tend to fix the origin of the chest at a
date at least somewhat later; and as Herodotus, telling the story of
the concealment of Cypselus, does not mention the dedication of the
chest at Olympia at all, it may perhaps have been only one of many
later imitations of antique art. But, whatever its date, Pausanias
certainly saw the thing, and has left a long description of it, and
we may trust his judgment at least as to its archaic style. We have
here, then, something plainly visible at a comparatively recent date,
something quite different from those perhaps wholly mythical objects
described in Homer,--an object which seemed to so experienced an
observer as Pausanias an actual work of earliest Greek art.
Relatively to later Greek art, it may have seemed to him, what the
ancient bronze doors with their Scripture histories, which we may
still see in the south transept of the cathedral of Pisa, are to
later Italian art.

Pausanias tells us nothing as to its size, nor directly as to its
shape. It may, for anything he says, have been oval, but it was
probably rectangular, with a broad front and two narrow sides,
standing, as the maker of it had designed, against the wall; for, in
enumerating the various subjects wrought upon it, in five rows one
above another, he seems to proceed, beginning at the bottom on the
right-hand side, along the front [227] from right to left, and then
back again, through the second row from left to right, and,
alternating thus, upwards to the last subject, at the top, on the
left-hand side.

The subjects represented, most of which had their legends attached in
difficult archaic writing, were taken freely, though probably with a
leading idea, out of various poetic cycles, as treated in the works
of those so-called cyclic poets, who continued the Homeric tradition.
Pausanias speaks, as Homer does in his description of the shield of
Achilles, of a kind and amount of expression in feature and gesture
certainly beyond the compass of any early art, and we may believe we
have in these touches only what the visitor heard from enthusiastic
exegetae, the interpreters or sacristans; though any one who has seen
the Bayeux tapestry, for instance, must recognise the pathos and
energy of which, when really prompted by genius, even the earliest
hand is capable. Some ingenious attempts have been made to restore
the grouping of the scenes, with a certain formal expansion or
balancing of subjects, their figures and dimensions, in true Assyrian
manner, on the front and sides. We notice some fine emblematic
figures, the germs of great artistic motives in after times, already
playing their parts there,--Death, and Sleep, and Night. "There was
a woman supporting on her right arm a white child sleeping; and on
the other arm she held a dark child, as if asleep; [228] and they lay
with their feet crossed. And the inscription shows, what might be
understood without it, that they are Death and Sleep, and Night, the
nurse of both of them."

But what is most noticeable is, as I have already said, that this
work, like the chamber of Paris, like the Zeus of Pheidias, is
chryselephantine, its main fabric cedar, and the figures upon it
partly of ivory, partly of gold,* but (and this is the most peculiar
characteristic of its style) partly wrought out of the wood of the
chest itself. And, as we read the description, we can hardly help
distributing in fancy gold and ivory, respectively, to their
appropriate functions in the representation. The cup of Dionysus,
and the wings of certain horses there, Pausanias himself tells us
were golden. Were not the apples of the Hesperides, the necklace of
Eriphyle, the bridles, the armour, the unsheathed sword in the hand
of Amphiaraus, also of gold? Were not the other children, like the
white image of Sleep, especially the naked child Alcmaeon, of ivory?
with Alcestis and Helen, and that one of the Dioscuri whose beard was
still ungrown? Were not ivory and gold, again, combined in the
throne of Hercules, and in the three goddesses conducted before
Paris?

The "chest of Cypselus" fitly introduces the first historical period
of Greek art, a period [229] coming down to about the year 560 B.C.,
and the government of Pisistratus at Athens; a period of tyrants like
Cypselus and Pisistratus himself, men of strong, sometimes
unscrupulous individuality, but often also acute and cultivated
patrons of the arts. It begins with a series of inventions, one here
and another there,--inventions still for the most part technical, but
which are attached to single names; for, with the growth of art, the
influence of individuals, gifted for the opening of new ways, more
and more defines itself; and the school, open to all comers, from
which in turn the disciples may pass to all parts of Greece, takes
the place of the family, in which the knowledge of art descends as a
tradition from father to son, or of the mere trade-guild. Of these
early industries we know little but the stray notices of Pausanias,
often ambiguous, always of doubtful credibility. What we do see,
through these imperfect notices, is a real period of animated
artistic activity, richly rewarded. Byzes of Naxos, for instance, is
recorded as having first adopted the plan of sawing marble into thin
plates for use on the roofs of temples instead of tiles; and that his
name has come down to us at all, testifies to the impression this
fair white surface made on its first spectators. Various islands of
the Aegean become each the source of some new artistic device. It is
a period still under the reign of Hephaestus, delighting, above all,
in magnificent [230] metal-work. "The Samians," says Herodotus, "out
of a tenth part of their profits--a sum of six talents--caused a
mixing vessel of bronze to be made, after the Argolic fashion; around
it are projections of griffins' heads; and they dedicated it in the
temple of Here, placing beneath it three colossal figures of bronze,
seven cubits in height, leaning upon their knees." That was in the
thirty-seventh Olympiad, and may be regarded as characteristic of the
age. For the popular imagination, a kind of glamour, some mysterious
connexion of the thing with human fortunes, still attaches to the
curious product of artistic hands, to the ring of Polycrates, for
instance, with its early specimen of engraved smaragdus, as to the
mythical necklace of Harmonia. Pheidon of Argos first makes coined
money, and the obelisci--the old nail-shaped iron money, now disused-
-are hung up in the temple of Here; for, even thus early, the temples
are in the way of becoming museums. Names like those of Eucheir and
Eugrammus, who were said to have taken the art of baking clay vases
from Samos to Etruria, have still a legendary air, yet may be real
surnames; as in the case of Smilis, whose name is derived from a
graver's tool, and who made the ancient image of Here at Samos.
Corinth--mater statuariae--becomes a great nursery of art at an early
time. Some time before the twenty-ninth Olympiad, Butades of Sicyon,
the potter, settled there. The record of [231] early inventions in
Greece is sometimes fondly coloured with human sentiment or incident.
It is on the butterfly wing of such an incident--the love-sick
daughter of the artist, who outlines on the wall the profile of her
lover as he sleeps in the lamplight, to keep by her in absence--that
the name of Butades the potter has come down to us. The father fills
up the outline, long preserved, it was believed, in the Nymphaeum at
Corinth, and hence the art of modelling from the life in clay. He
learns, further, a way of colouring his clay red, and fixes his masks
along the temple eaves.

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
zodia chryso dienthismena+--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.

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