Book: Greek Studies: A Series of Essays

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




And as this period begins with the chest of Cypselus, so it ends with
a work in some respects similar, also seen and described by
Pausanias--the throne, as he calls it, of the Amyclaean Apollo. It
was the work of a well-known artist, Bathycles of Magnesia, who,
probably about the year 550 B.C., with a company of workmen, came to
the little ancient town of Amyclae, near Sparta, a place full of
traditions of the heroic age. He had been invited thither to perform
a peculiar task--the construction of a throne; not like the throne of
the Olympian Zeus, and others numerous in after times, for a seated
figure, but for the image of the local Apollo; no other than a rude
and very ancient pillar of bronze, thirty cubits high, to which,
Hermes-wise, head, arms, and feet were attached. The thing stood
upright, as on a base, upon a kind of tomb or reliquary, in which,
according to tradition, lay the remains of the young prince [236]
Hyacinth, son of the founder of that place, beloved by Apollo for his
beauty, and accidentally struck dead by him in play, with a quoit.
From the drops of the lad's blood had sprung up the purple flower of
his name, which bears on its petals the letters of the ejaculation of
woe; and in his memory the famous games of Amyclae were celebrated,
beginning about the time of the longest day, when the flowers are
stricken by the sun and begin to fade--a festival marked, amid all
its splendour, with some real melancholy, and serious thought of the
dead. In the midst of the "throne" of Bathycles, this sacred
receptacle, with the strange, half-humanised pillar above it, was to
stand, probably in the open air, within a consecrated enclosure.
Like the chest of Cypselus, the throne was decorated with reliefs of
subjects taken from epic poetry, and it had supporting figures.
Unfortunately, what Pausanias tells us of this monument hardly
enables one to present it to the imagination with any completeness or
certainty; its dimensions he himself was unable exactly to ascertain,
and he does not tell us its material. There are reasons, however,
for supposing that it was of metal; and amid these ambiguities, the
decorations of its base, the grave or altar-tomb of Hyacinth, shine
out clearly, and are also, for the most part, clear in their
significance.

"There are wrought upon the altar figures, on the one side of Biris,
on the other of [237] Amphitrite and Poseidon. Near Zeus and Hermes,
in speech with each other, stand Dionysus and Semele, and, beside
her, Ino. Demeter, Kore, and Pluto are also wrought upon it, the
Fates and the Seasons above them, and with them Aphrodite, Athene,
and Artemis. They are conducting Hyacinthus to heaven, with
Polyboea, the sister of Hyacinthus, who died, as is told, while yet a
virgin. . . . Hercules also is figured on the tomb; he too carried to
heaven by Athene and the other gods. The daughters of Thestius also
are upon the altar, and the Seasons again, and the Muses."

It was as if many lines of solemn thought had been meant to unite,
about the resting-place of this local Adonis, in imageries full of
some dim promise of immortal life.

But it was not so much in care for old idols as in the making of new
ones that Greek art was at this time engaged. This whole first
period of Greek art might, indeed, be called the period of graven
images, and all its workmen sons of Daedalus; for Daedalus is the
mythical, or all but mythical, representative of all those arts which
are combined in the making of lovelier idols than had heretofore been
seen. The old Greek word which is at the root of the name Daedalus,+
the name of a craft rather than a proper name, probably means to work
curiously--all curiously beautiful wood-work is Daedal work; the main
point about the curiously beautiful [238] chamber in which Nausicaa
sleeps, in the Odyssey, being that, like some exquisite Swiss chalet,
it is wrought in wood. But it came about that those workers in wood,
whom Daedalus represents, the early craftsmen of Crete especially,
were chiefly concerned with the making of religious images, like the
carvers of Berchtesgaden and Oberammergau, the sort of daintily
finished images of the objects of public or private devotion which
such workmen would turn out. Wherever there was a wooden idol in any
way fairer than others, finished, perhaps, sometimes, with colour and
gilding, and appropriate real dress, there the hand of Daedalus had
been. That such images were quite detached from pillar or wall, that
they stood free, and were statues in the proper sense, showed that
Greek art was already liberated from its earlier Eastern
associations; such free-standing being apparently unknown in Assyrian
art. And then, the effect of this Daedal skill in them was, that
they came nearer to the proper form of humanity. It is the wonderful
life-likeness of these early images which tradition celebrates in
many anecdotes, showing a very early instinctive turn for, and
delight in naturalism, in the Greek temper. As Cimabue, in his day,
was able to charm men, almost as with illusion, by the simple device
of half-closing the eyelids of his personages, and giving them,
instead of round eyes, eyes that seemed to be in some degree
sentient, and to feel [239] the light; so the marvellous progress in
those Daedal wooden images was, that the eyes were open, so that they
seemed to look,--the feet separated, so that they seemed to walk.
Greek art is thus, almost from the first, essentially distinguished
from the art of Egypt, by an energetic striving after truth in
organic form. In representing the human figure, Egyptian art had
held by mathematical or mechanical proportions exclusively. The
Greek apprehends of it, as the main truth, that it is a living
organism, with freedom of movement, and hence the infinite
possibilities of motion, and of expression by motion, with which the
imagination credits the higher sort of Greek sculpture; while the
figures of Egyptian art, graceful as they often are, seem absolutely
incapable of any motion or gesture, other than the one actually
designed. The work of the Greek sculptor, together with its more
real anatomy, becomes full also of human soul.

That old, primitive, mystical, first period of Greek religion, with
its profound, though half-conscious, intuitions of spiritual powers
in the natural world, attaching itself not to the worship of visible
human forms, but to relics, to natural or half-natural objects--the
roughly hewn tree, the unwrought stone, the pillar, the holy cone of
Aphrodite in her dimly-lighted cell at Paphos--had passed away. The
second stage in the development of Greek religion had come; a [240]
period in which poet and artist were busily engaged in the work of
incorporating all that might be retained of the vague divinations of
that earlier visionary time, in definite and intelligible human image
and human story. The vague belief, the mysterious custom and
tradition, develope themselves into an elaborately ordered ritual--
into personal gods, imaged in ivory and gold, sitting on beautiful
thrones. Always, wherever a shrine or temple, great or small, is
mentioned, there, we may conclude, was a visible idol, there was
conceived to be the actual dwelling-place of a god. And this
understanding became not less but more definite, as the temple became
larger and more splendid, full of ceremony and servants, like the
abode of an earthly king, and as the sacred presence itself assumed,
little by little, the last beauties and refinements of the visible
human form and expression.

In what we have seen of this first period of Greek art, in all its
curious essays and inventions, we may observe this demand for
beautiful idols increasing in Greece--for sacred images, at first
still rude, and in some degree the holier for their rudeness, but
which yet constitute the beginnings of the religious style,
consummate in the work of Pheidias, uniting the veritable image of
man in the full possession of his reasonable soul, with the true
religious mysticity, the signature there of something from afar. One
by one these [241] new gods of bronze, or marble, or flesh-like
ivory, take their thrones, at this or that famous shrine, like the
images of this period which Pausanias saw in the temple of Here at
Olympia--the throned Seasons, with Themis as the mother of the
Seasons (divine rectitude being still blended, in men's fancies, with
the unchanging physical order of things) and Fortune, and Victory
"having wings," and Kore and Demeter and Dionysus, already visibly
there, around the image of Here herself, seated on a throne; and all
chryselephantine, all in gold and ivory. Novel as these things are,
they still undergo consecration at their first erecting. The figure
of Athene, in her brazen temple at Sparta, the work of Gitiades, who
makes also the image and the hymn, in triple service to the goddess;
and again, that curious story of Dipoenus and Scyllis, brought back
with so much awe to remove the public curse by completing their
sacred task upon the images, show how simply religious the age still
was--that this widespread artistic activity was a religious
enthusiasm also; those early sculptors have still, for their
contemporaries, a divine mission, with some kind of hieratic or
sacred quality in their gift, distinctly felt.

The development of the artist, in the proper sense, out of the mere
craftsman, effected in the first division of this period, is now
complete; and, in close connexion with that busy graving of religious
images, which occupies its second [242] division, we come to
something like real personalities, to men with individual
characteristics--such men as Ageladas of Argos, Callon and Onatas of
Aegina, and Canachus of Sicyon. Mere fragment as our information
concerning these early masters is at the best, it is at least
unmistakeably information about men with personal differences of
temper and talent, of their motives, of what we call style. We have
come to a sort of art which is no longer broadly characteristic of a
general period, one whose products we might have looked at without
its occurring to us to ask concerning the artist, his antecedents,
and his school. We have to do now with types of art, fully impressed
with the subjectivity, the intimacies of the artist.

Among these freer and stronger personalities emerging thus about the
beginning of the fifth century before Christ--about the period of the
Persian war--the name to which most of this sort of personal quality
attaches, and which is therefore very interesting, is the name of
Canachus of Sicyon, who seems to have comprehended in himself all the
various attainments in art which had been gradually developed in the
schools of his native city--carver in wood, sculptor, brass-cutter,
and toreutes; by toreutice+ being meant the whole art of statuary in
metals, and in their combination with other materials. At last we
seem to see an actual person at work, and to some degree can follow,
with natural curiosity, [243] the motions of his spirit and his hand.
We seem to discern in all we know of his productions the results of
individual apprehension--the results, as well as the limitations, of
an individual talent.

It is impossible to date exactly the chief period of the activity of
Canachus. That the great image of Apollo, which he made for the
Milesians, was carried away to Ecbatana by the Persian army, is
stated by Pausanias; but there is a doubt whether this was under
Xerxes, as Pausanias says, in the year 479 B.C., or twenty years
earlier, under Darius. So important a work as this colossal image of
Apollo, for so great a shrine as the Didymaeum, was probably the task
of his maturity; and his career may, therefore, be regarded as having
begun, at any rate, prior to the year 479 B.C., and the end of the
Persian invasion the event which may be said to close this period of
art. On the whole, the chief period of his activity is thought to
have fallen earlier, and to have occupied the last forty years of the
previous century; and he would thus have flourished, as we say, about
fifty years before the manhood of Pheidias, as Mino of Fiesole fifty
years before the manhood of Michelangelo.

His chief works were an Aphrodite, wrought for the Sicyonians in
ivory and gold; that Apollo of bronze carried away by the Persians,
and restored to its place about the year B.C. 350; and a reproduction
of the same work in cedar-wood [244], for the sanctuary of Apollo of
the Ismenus, at Thebes. The primitive Greek worship, as we may trace
it in Homer, presents already, on a minor scale, all the essential
characteristics of the most elaborate Greek worship of after times--
the sacred enclosure, the incense and other offerings, the prayer of
the priest, the shrine itself--a small one, roofed in by the priest
with green boughs, not unlike a wayside chapel in modern times, and
understood to be the dwelling-place of the divine person--within,
almost certainly, an idol, with its own sacred apparel, a visible
form, little more than symbolical perhaps, like the sacred pillar for
which Bathycles made his throne at Amyclae, but, if an actual image,
certainly a rude one.

That primitive worship, traceable in almost all these particulars,
even in the first book of the Iliad, had given place, before the time
of Canachus at Sicyon, to a more elaborate ritual and a more
completely designed image-work; and a little bronze statue,
discovered on the site of Tenea, where Apollo was the chief object of
worship,* the best representative of many similar marble figures--
those of Thera and Orchomenus, for instance--is supposed to represent
Apollo as this still early age conceived him--youthful, naked,
muscular, and with the germ of the Greek profile, but formally
smiling, and with a formal diadem or fillet, over the long hair which
[245] shows him to be no mortal athlete. The hands, like the feet,
excellently modelled, are here extended downwards at the sides; but
in some similar figures the hands are lifted, and held straight
outwards, with the palms upturned. The Apollo of Canachus also had
the hands thus raised, and on the open palm of the right hand was
placed a stag, while with the left he grasped the bow. Pliny says
that the stag was an automaton, with a mechanical device for setting
it in motion, a detail which hints, at least, at the subtlety of
workmanship with which those ancient critics, who had opportunity of
knowing, credited this early artist. Of this work itself nothing
remains, but we possess perhaps some imitations of it. It is
probably this most sacred possession of the place which the coins of
Miletus display from various points of view, though, of course, only
on the smallest scale. But a little bronze figure in the British
Museum, with the stag in the right hand, and in the closed left hand
the hollow where the bow has passed, is thought to have been derived
from it; and its points of style are still further illustrated by a
marble head of similar character, also preserved in the British
Museum, which has many marks of having been copied in marble from an
original in bronze. A really ancient work, or only archaic, it
certainly expresses, together with all that careful patience and
hardness of workmanship which is characteristic of an early age, a
certain Apolline [246] strength--a pride and dignity in the features,
so steadily composed, below the stiff, archaic arrangement of the
long, fillet-bound locks. It is the exact expression of that midway
position, between an involved, archaic stiffness and the free play of
individual talent, which is attributed to Canachus by the ancients.

His Apollo of cedar-wood, which inhabited a temple near the gates of
Thebes, on a rising ground, below which flowed the river Ismenus,
had, according to Pausanias, so close a resemblance to that at
Miletus that it required little skill in one who had seen either of
them to tell what master had designed the other. Still, though of
the same dimensions, while one was of cedar the other was of bronze--
a reproduction one of the other we may believe, but with the
modifications, according to the use of good workmen even so early as
Canachus, due to the difference of the material. For the likeness
between the two statues, it is to be observed, is not the mechanical
likeness of those earlier images represented by the statuette of
Tenea, which spoke, not of the style of one master, but only of the
manufacture of one workshop. In those two images of Canachus--the
Milesian Apollo and the Apollo of the Ismenus--there were
resemblances amid differences; resemblances, as we may understand, in
what was nevertheless peculiar, novel, and even innovating in the
precise conception of the god therein set forth; [247] resemblances
which spoke directly of a single workman, though working freely, of
one hand and one fancy, a likeness in that which could by no means be
truly copied by another; it was the beginning of what we mean by the
style of a master. Together with all the novelty, the innovating and
improving skill, which has made Canachus remembered, an attractive,
old-world, deeply-felt mysticity seems still to cling about what we
read of these early works. That piety, that religiousness of temper,
of which the people of Sicyon had given proof so oddly in their
dealings with those old carvers, Scyllis and Dipoenus, still survives
in the master who was chosen to embody his own novelty of idea and
execution in so sacred a place as the shrine of Apollo at Miletus.
Something still conventional, combined, in these images, with the
effect of great artistic skill, with a palpable beauty and power,
seems to have given them a really imposing religious character.
Escaping from the rigid uniformities of the stricter archaic style,
he is still obedient to certain hieratic influences and traditions;
he is still reserved, self-controlled, composed or even mannered a
little, as in some sacred presence, with the severity and strength of
the early style.

But there are certain notices which seem to show that he had his
purely poetical motives also, as befitted his age; motives which
prompted works of mere fancy, like his Muse [248] with the Lyre,
symbolising the chromatic style of music; Aristocles his brother, and
Ageladas of Argos executing each another statue to symbolise the two
other orders of music. The Riding Boys, of which Pliny speaks, like
the mechanical stag on the hand of Apollo, which he also describes,
were perhaps mechanical toys, as Benvenuto Cellini made toys. In the
Beardless Aesculapius, again--the image of the god of healing, not
merely as the son of Apollo, but as one ever young--it is the poetry
of sculpture that we see.

This poetic feeling, and the piety of temper so deeply impressed upon
his images of Apollo, seem to have been combined in his
chryselephantine Aphrodite, as we see it very distinctly in
Pausanias, enthroned with an apple in one hand and a poppy in the
other, and with the sphere, or polos, about the head, in its quaint
little temple or chapel at Sicyon, with the hierokepis, or holy
garden, about it. This is what Canachus has to give us instead of
the strange, symbolical cone, with the lights burning around it, in
its dark cell--the form under which Aphrodite was worshipped at her
famous shrine of Paphos.

"A woman to keep it fair," Pausanias tells us, "who may go in to no
man, and a virgin called the water-bearer, who holds her priesthood
for a year, are alone permitted to enter the sacred place. All
others may gaze upon the [249] goddess and offer their prayers from
the doorway. The seated image is the work of Canachus of Sicyon. It
is wrought in ivory and gold, bearing a sphere on the head, and
having in the one hand a poppy and in the other an apple. They offer
to her the thighs of all victims excepting swine, burning them upon
sticks of juniper, together with leaves of lad's-love, a herb found
in the enclosure without, and nowhere else in the world. Its leaves
are smaller than those of the beech and larger than the ilex; in form
they are like an oak-leaf, and in colour resemble most the leaves of
the poplar, one side dusky, the other white."

That is a place one would certainly have liked to see. So real it
seems!--the seated image, the people gazing through the doorway, the
fragrant odour. Must it not still be in secret keeping somewhere?--
we are almost tempted to ask; maintained by some few solitary
worshippers, surviving from age to age, among the villagers of
Achaia.

In spite of many obscurities, it may be said that what we know, and
what we do not know, of Canachus illustrates the amount and sort of
knowledge we possess about the artists of the period which he best
represents. A naivete--a freshness, an early-aged simplicity and
sincerity--that, we may believe, had we their works before us, would
be for us their chief aesthetic charm. Cicero remarked that, in
contrast with [250] the works of the next generation of sculptors,
there was a stiffness in the statues of Canachus which made them seem
untrue to nature--"Canachi signa rigidiora esse quam ut imitentur
veritatem." But Cicero belongs to an age surfeited with artistic
licence, and likely enough to undervalue the severity of the early
masters, the great motive struggling still with the minute and rigid
hand. So the critics of the last century ignored, or underrated, the
works of the earlier Tuscan sculptors. In what Cicero calls
"rigidity" of Canachus, combined with what we seem to see of his
poetry of conception, his freshness, his solemnity, we may understand
no really repellent hardness, but only that earnest patience of
labour, the expression of which is constant in all the best work of
an early time, in the David of Verrocchio, for instance, and in the
early Flemish painters, as it is natural and becoming in youth
itself. The very touch of the struggling hand was upon the work; but
with the interest, the half-repressed animation of a great promise,
fulfilled, as we now see, in the magnificent growth of Greek
sculpture in the succeeding age; which, however, for those earlier
workmen, meant the loins girt and the half-folded wings not yet quite
at home in the air, with a gravity, a discretion and reserve, the
charm of which, if felt in quiet, is hardly less than that of the
wealth and fulness of final mastery.

NOTES

228. *Chrysoun is the word Pausanias uses, of the cup in the hand of
Dionysus--the wood was plated with gold. Liddell and Scott definition
of the adjective chryseos: "golden, of gold, inlaid with gold."

233. *Pausanias, in recording the invention of casting, uses the word
echoneusanto, but does not tell us whether the model was of wax, as in
the later process; which, however, is believed to have been the
case. For an animated account of the modern process:--the core of
plaister roughly presenting the designed form; the modelling of the
waxen surface thereon, like the skin upon the muscles, with all its
delicate touches--vein and eyebrow; the hardening of the plaister
envelope, layer over layer, upon this delicately finished model; the
melting of the way by heat, leaving behind it in its place the
finished design in vacuo, which the molten stream of metal
subsequently fills; released finally, after cooling, from core and
envelope--see Fortnum's Handbook of Bronzes, Chapter II.

+Liddell and Scott definition of the noun chone and the verb chonnymi:
"a melting-pit, a mould to cast in. . . . to throw or heap up . . .
to cover with a mound of earth, bury."

234. +Transliteration: kedrou zodia chryso dienthismena. Pater's
translation: "Figures of cedar-wood, partly incrusted with gold."
The root verb anthizo means "to strew with flowers...and so, to dye
with colours." (Liddell and Scott.) Pausanias, Description of
Greece, Book VI, Chapter 19, Section 12. Pausaniae Graeciae Descriptio,
3 vols. F. Spiro. Leipzig, Teubner. 1903.

237. +Daidaleos means "cunningly or curiously wrought"; it is derived
from the verb daidallo, "to work cunningly, work with curious
art...." (Liddell and Scott.)

242. +The verb toreuo means "to bore through . . . to work in relief
. . . to chase." (Liddell and Scott.)

244. *Now preserved at Munich.



THE MARBLES OF AEGINA

[251] I HAVE dwelt the more emphatically upon the purely sensuous
aspects of early Greek art, on the beauty and charm of its mere
material and workmanship, the grace of hand in it, its
chryselephantine character, because the direction of all the more
general criticism since Lessing has been, somewhat one-sidedly,
towards the ideal or abstract element in Greek art, towards what we
may call its philosophical aspect. And, indeed, this philosophical
element, a tendency to the realisation of a certain inward, abstract,
intellectual ideal, is also at work in Greek art--a tendency which,
if that chryselephantine influence is called Ionian, may rightly be
called the Dorian, or, in reference to its broader scope, the
European influence; and this European influence or tendency is really
towards the impression of an order, a sanity, a proportion in all
work, which shall reflect the inward order of human reason, now fully
conscious of itself,--towards a sort of art in which the record and
delineation of humanity, as active in the wide, inward world of [252]
its passion and thought, has become more or less definitely the aim
of all artistic handicraft.

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