Sunday, July 11, 2010
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FIVE MASTER SCULPTORS IN GREEK
With limits thus set to our knowledge or rather to the possibility of our acquiring it, we are nevertheless able to make a chronological survey of the masters of Greek stat— nary, thanks to the literary texts, to replicas of more or less certain attribution. Among the many great names celebrated by the literary tradition, we will concentrate here on five: three from the fifth century and two from the fourth.
Myron is the earliest of the creek sculptors whose name is known beyond specialist circles. He was born in Eleutherai, on the borders of Boeotia and Attica, at an unknow date, but it is generally agreed that his main career extends over the second third of the fifth century. He worked in bronze and Pliny tells us even more precisely that he used the alloy known in antiquity as Aegina bronze, while Polyclitus used what was called Delian bronze: ‘Of the same age, and fellow’, pupils, they were rivals even in the choice of material.”
Myron is best known today for his Diskobolos (discus thrower), familiar to us from several replicas of varying degrees of fidelity, but his fame in antiquity seems to have been owed to a very different statue. “He was known above all for his Heifer, praised in many epigrams,” says Pliny, and indeed, despite the loss of a large amount of ancient literature, we still have thirty—seven of those poems. It should be said that animal sculpture in Greece was not at all common, especially after Archaic times, and such an exception was worthy of note. Judging by what the literary tradition tells us, the rest of Myron’s work was divided into two almost equal parts. The texts mention ten statues of gods or heroes; of these, according to Pliny, “Minerva and the satyr marvelling at the pipes” deserved special attention. Divine statuary at this time did not generally represent the gods in action, but here Myron seems to have created a sculptural version of a mythological incident to which Pindar alludes at the same period, and which appears on a number of Attic vases: the invention of the flute (or more precisely the aulos, a clarinet- like instrument) by Athena, and her refusal to let Marsyas carry the instrument away although she herself had thrown it to the ground in distaste. The second group of Myron’s works consisted of seven statues of athletes, comprising the Diskobolos (who is alone in representing a generic subject rather than an individual person) and six likenesses of victors in the games. Ladas, winner of the foot-race at Olympia was the subject of one of these. Two Greek poems tell us that the statue showed him with his mouth open, giving the impression that he was panting. Another was of Timanthes, winner of the pankration or all-in wrestling contest, at Olympia, and in on. Ladas was an Argive, Timanthes was from Kleonae, and their statues stood in the sanctuary at Olympia; of the divine statues, Myron made his Hecate for Aegina, his Apollo for Ephesus, and .his group of Zeus, 4thena and Herakles for the Heraion on Samos. This means that he usually worked outside his native area for patrons of different nationalities.
Polyehtus, according to contradictory sources, was from either Argos or Sicyon, neighbouring cities in the northeast of the Peloponnese. Although Pliny mentions him as a fellow student and rival of Myron, Plato, writing only a few years after his death, associates him with Phidias in a. passage in the Protagoras about finding a teacher of sculpture. No doubt these names are not linked solely because of the sculptors’ fame. Polyclitus, like Myron, worked in bronze, preferring “Delian bronze”, as we have seen, and like Phidsas he had also made his name with chryselephantine statuary, especially his Hera for the Herason at Argos; this was so famous that we know nine ancient texts mentioning it, and it appears on Argive coins. Thematically, the works of Polyclitus (or at least those mentioned in the extant texts) resembled Myron’s corpus in dividing into eight statues of divinities or mythological characters, including the Amazon of Ephesus mentioned above, and about the same number of statues of humans, once again including individual statues of Olympic athletes and generic subjects. The latter group contained two youths playing knuckle-bones, and most famous of all, the Diadonmenos (youth crowning himself) and the Doryphoros (spear carrier), known to us from several replicas. However, the parallel with Myron is incomplete, since so far as we know there is nothing in Myron’s work corresponding to the Doryphorns, who not only represented an athletic type like the Diskobolos and the Diadoumenos, but was also part of a highly original project: it was made to illustrate Polyclitus’s theoretical treatise on the beauty of the human body, his famous Canon, a point to which we shall return.
Phidias is perhaps the best known of all the Greek sculptors. (He even featured as a character in a 1918 operetta.) His fame derives from many sources: from his sculpting the Zeus of Olympia, one of the Seven Wonders of the World; from his close friendship with Pericles, whose name is so commonly used to designate the fifth century that on the artistic plane that period might equally well be called “the era of Phidias”; from his important role in the reconstruction of the Acropolis, the finest and largest ensemble of Classical Greek art remaining to us; and for his trial and imprisonment when he was accused of embezzling gold intended for the chryselephantine Athena of the Parthenon. Yet we know very little for certain about this paragon of Greek sculpture, beyond what literary texts tell us. According to Pliny, Phidias began his career as a painter. That is not very surprising, since in the next century Euphranor was known as a practitioner of both arts. Since nothing definite can be said about this master, books on the history of Greek sculpture are very ready to credit him with many anonymous marbles, in particular the decoration of the Parthenon, imagined by many people to be his own work. This idea must be discounted. In fact, in a chapter of his Life of Pedclei devoted to the great building works of Athens, Plutarch says only that “Phidias supervised everything for Pericles, although he had great architects and artists for this work (...); he was in command of all the artists, because he was the friend of Pericles.” Phidias was the episkopos, a term which has given us “episcopal” and related words in modern European languages. In Greek it means someone who, on whatever hierarchical level, is a “super-visor”, one who “over-sees”, and so does not necessarily mean an actual practitioner or one who carries out the work. The illusion that the sculpture of the Parthenon, so well preserved, consists of the great man’s original works and provides us with an opportunity of studying his style at first hand must therefore be relinquished. None of the texts claim it as his, and as was pointed out earlier in this book, however fine architectural sculpture may now appear to us, it was probably beneath the dignity of an artist like Phidias to work on it.
We are therefore left with the statues named by ancient authors. Some two hundred mentions of Phidias have been counted in their writings, but this large number is evidence of his exceptional fame rather than any special productivity on his part. As with Myron and Polyclitus, we know of some twenty statues made by Phidias, but this time they are almost all of gods and goddesses, the most famous in antiquity being the chryselephantine Zeus of Olympia. There were no less than seven Athenas among them, including the statue already mentioned which was made in competition with Aikamenes, and above all (both of them on the Acropolis) the colossal bronze Athena Promachos standing in the open air, and the chryselephantine Athena Parthenos snside the Parthenun. Because of their fame, ancient authors un occasion attempted to descnbe these statues, sometimes at length; Pausanias’s account of the Zeus of Olympia occupies some ninety lines of a recent edition. But for us, the absence of well—attested rephcas reduces most of his works to a name and a few details. The one work about which we know more is the Athena Parthenos, first because Pausanias has left us a detailed description: “[The Athena Parthenos of Phidias] is a statue of ivory and gold; on top of her helmet stands the likeness of the Sphinx, with griffins on each side (...) The statue of Athena is standing, with a chiton falling to her feet; on her breast the head of Medusa is represented in ivory. (The work includes?) a Victory some four cubits in height; in her hand Athena holds a spear; her shield is placed at her feet; near the spear is a dragon, thought to be Erichthonios. The base of the statue shows the birth of Pandora, a story told by Hesiod and other poets.” Plato tells us that while the statue’s face, hands and feet were ivory, the pupils of the eyes were made of marble. Other authors speak of the chasing on the shield, which bore an Amazonomachy on the exterior and a gigantomachy on the interior surface, and of her sandals, whose edges were ornamented with a centauromachy. We also have some definite replicas of the statue, identifiable from the derail provided by these authors. They comprise several statues and statuettes in marble, particularly the Lenormant Athena in the National Museum in Athens, fourteen inches in height, and the “Varvakeion Athena” , measuring over three feet. While these copies may seem iconographically faithful when compared with the textual descriptions, some of them look so ugly (particularly the Varvakeion Athena, although she seems to be the most exact likeness) that one finds oneself hoping that they are not good replicas stylistically. However, the reduction in scale obliterates details which must have given pleasure to viewers in antiquity, like the chasing on the shield and sandals, and quite apart from the theological constraints which obliged Phidias to give his Athena various attributes, the taste of the ancient Greeks may well have differed greatly from our own.
The works of these three great fifth—century sculptors have a number of points in common. It is a very different matter when we come to Praxiteles who, says Pliny the Elder, flourished (he was at the peak of his career) at the time of the 104th Olympiad, around BG. This information is confirmed by Pansansas, who situates him “in the third generation after Alkamenes”. There is no doubt of his great fame or the fame of some of his works: among the texts of antiquity mentioning him which have been preserved, several distinctly emphasize his renown, and the considerable number of those texts — a hundred and ten is further proof. Yet it is still not easy to write a monograph on Praxiteles. His biographical details are very few: he was an Athenian and seems to have been the son of a celebrated sculptor, Kephisodotos, known to us as the author of a statue of peace carrying the infant Ploutos (wealth); but we do not know his dates of birth and death, and therefore how long he lived, something that would have been interesting in view of the exceptionally large number of his works. One anecdote is mentioned several times in literary texts, and may be of significance with regard to his choice of artistic themes. He was the lover of the courtesan Phryne, who came from Thespiae in Boeotsa, and was famous for the unusual way in which she was acquitted in a trial for impiety. Accused by one of her lovers, she was defended by another, the orator Hypereides, who, feeling his own eloquence was not carrying the day, found it more effective to denude his client before her judges. It is interesting to note that unlike Phidias, who preferred the love of boys (it was said that his lover Pantarehes had been the model for one of the eight statues ornamenting the throne of Zeus at Olympia), Praxiteles, sculptor of the famous nude Aphrodite of Knidos, was a lover of women.
We do not know much about the works of Praxiteles either. The texts suggest that like many famous sculptors, Praxiteles had worked in places very far apart, including Megara, Mantinea, Athens and Knidos, a fact confirmed by bases bearing the inscription “Praxiteles made this”, which have been found during excavations in places as far apart as Athens, Leuctra and Olbia, although some of them may have borne replicas as originals (this, as we shall see, seems to have been the case with the famous Hermes of Olympia). However, although the geographical dispersal of statues by Praxiteles is well established, their chronological order is not clear to us, and scholars can only argue from similarities in trying to place them in order. Again, a systematic collating of the ancient texts allows us to compile a list of his works, but very few of them can be definitely identified from replicas. Of those few, the most important are the Apollo Sauroetonos, identifiable by its unusual subject, and three statues which, luckily for us, turn out to be major works. These are the Aphrodite of Knidos, which “features so prominently in the first rank of works not only by Praxiteles but in the whole world,” writes Pliny, “that many people have made the voyage to Knidos to see her”, and two male statues known to have been the sculptor’s own favourites from an anecdote told by Pausanias: “Phryne asked him to give his most beautiful work; as he was her lover, he promised, but would not tell her which he thought the most beautiful. Phryne’s servant came to tell Praxiteles that fire had broken out in his house, but all was not destroyed. The sculptor asked whether the fire had seized upon the Satyr or the Eros (...) and therefore Phryne took the Eros.” According to another author, she dedicated it at Thespiae. But the replicas of most of the other statues mentioned in the texts are of doubtful attribution, since it is very difficult to distinguish retrospectively between the style of Praxiteles, known to us only indirectly, and that of his contemporaries or imitators, who must have come quite close to it. For instance, it is tempting but unwise to take the famous “Diana of Gabii” in the Louvre, showing the goddess fastening a cloak on her shoulder, for a copy of the Artemis Brauronia on the Acropolis of Athens, to whom women made votive offerings of garments after coming safely through childbirth. The Hermes of Olympia also has a place in this attempt to find replicas which will allow us to visualize what the texts describe. Nineteenth—century German archaeologists excavating at the temple of Hera dug up a slightly mutilated marble statue which must have been seven feet high when intact, showing an athlete holding a very small boy in his left arm. In his description of the sanctuary at Olympia Pausanias remarks on the presence “in the Heraion of a marble Hermes carrying the infant Dionysos, the art (techne) of Praxiteles”. The description and statue agree so perfectly that the first scholars to study it took it for an original, but careful examination of the workmanship has now forced us to admit that it is a copy. Although rigorous archaeological standards demand that we exercise restraint in making claims about the number of original works for which there are well—attested replicas, many specialists go to the other extreme. They not only persist in searching for replicas of all the works mentioned in the texts, but also attribute to Praxiteles statues of which the texts say nothing at all; for instance, the wholly anonymous Marathon Ephebe has been attributed to him. All the same, it is legitimate to study both the texts and the reliable replicas with a view to distinguishing certain characteristics of Praxitelean statuary.
In the first place, there is the considerable number of his works; almost fifty of them, over twice as many as we know Myron, Polyclitus or Phidias to have made. But this leads to speculation about the circumstances of their creation. Is this abundance owed to longevity, facility, the many commissions brought by his fame, or is it the product of a new and (to our minds) more modern approach to art, one that impelled the artist to work even without a commission, as we have seen occurred with Polyclitus’s Canon, and perhaps even with Myron’s Diskobolos? Although these questions cannot be answered for certain, there is much in favour of the last hypothesis, that Praxiteles often worked without a commission. First, there are the anecdotes. In the story just quoted, of Phryne and how she caused the sculptor to believe his house was on fire, it is unlikely that he would have kept both the Satyr and the Eros there at the same time if they already had definite destinations. Similarly, the Aphrodite of Knidos cannot have been made on commission, for Pliny explains that “he had made two statues, (one naked) and the other clothed, and sold them at the same time”, the first to the people of Knidos and the second to the people of Kos, who thought the clothed version more decorous. Then there is the recurrence of the same subjects, perhaps reflecting the sculptor’s personal taste rather than commissions: we know of five Aphrodites, two or three statues of Eros — although his cult was too insignificant in Greece to require many images — and two statues of Phryne, his mistress.
Praxiteles’s independence of commission must have affected his choice of subjects. At first sight his themes do not seem very different from those of the three masters of the previous century, divided as they are between statues of divinities and statues of humans in proportions of about two-thirds to one-third, but Praxiteles must have chosen his own subjects more frequently. In several cases there is no indication in literary texts that a work was made on commission, or even for a precise destination, and such a tendency towards a personal choice of subject matter was in the air at the time anyway. When the painter Zeuxss was irritated to hear that the public had praised “the oddity of the concept” of his picture of a centaur family rather than “the skill of its execution”, he did not deny that the “unusual nature of the subject” broke with the earlier tradition of centauromachies. Nor can one be far wrong in supposing that Phryne’s lover took pleasure in creating statues of her, or as was claimed in antiquity, used her as a model for the Aphrodite of Knidos.
The Aphrodite illustrates a third point, or rather a novelty in the art of Praxitcles: the presentation of the statues is different. The female body, traditionally shown in long garments (although in the fifth century the new method of depicting “wet drapery” indicated the shape beneath them), could now be displayed naked. If the Venus of Arles in the Louvre (set up there and completed by Gsrardon under Louis XIV in the taste of the period) is really a replica of the Aphrodite of Thespiae, about which we know nothing but the fact of its existence, it seems that the goddess was bare—breasted, but in any case the Aphrodite of Knidos is entirely nude, whence the shocked reaction of the people of Kos. This liking for female nudes in statuary may also be echoed in the more youthful male bodies now depicted. Statues such as the Satyr, the Eros or the Apollo Sauroctonos, barely pubescent, seem as much like women as grown men. Positions change too; judging by the replicas, the Eros and the Sauroctonos have one arm raised, like the Hermes of Olympia, and the body leans over in a curve, unlike the more erect stance and greater stability of statues like the Doryphoros. This sideways bend of the hip partly explains another novelty; with her left hand, the Aphrodite of Knidos was laying her clothes on a vase placed at her feet, and similarly a tree trunk stood beside the Eros of Thespiae. The Satyr was also resting his elbow on a tree trunk, while the Sauroctonos leans his weight on the tree up which the lizard is running, a tree which is taller than he is. Not only, then, did such items sketch in the decor so often absent from statuary (in these cases suggesting a rural setting or a bathroom), but most important of all, they provided the support necessary when the statue’s centre of graviti was out of line with the vertical.
Assistance from a support was even more necessary when the statue was made not of bronze but of marble. This was another innovation introduced by Praxiteles; he broke with the usual hierarchy of materials. He does not seem to have worked in chryselephantine; on the other hand, to mention only his most famous works, the Sauroctonos was bronze but the Eros of Thespsae and the Aphrodite of Knidos were marble. Hence the opinion of Pliny: “Praxiteles was most successful and made his name in marble; however, he did make very fine works in bronze.” Diodorus suggests a reason for this success: “He incorporated the feelings of the soul to the highest degree in works of marble.” Furthermore, painting, probably with encaustic, added a further attraction to marble, and one which Praxiteles liked: “When he was asked,” says Pliny again, “which of his works he thought the best”, he said: ‘Those upon which Nikias worked.’ so much did he value that artist’s painting”. It should be added that Nskias was not just an ordinary assistant, but one of the great Athenian painters of the fourth century.
Lysippos, a native of Sicyon, a large city in the region of Corinth, is chronologically the last great name in Classical sculpture, one might even say in Greek sculpture, for although we do not know his dates of birth and death, he was a contemporary of Alexander the Great.
This fact in itself gives him a special place, since he was the court sculptor to Alexander, just as Apelles was the court painter. The evidence of the texts of antiquity agrees on this point: “For preference, Alexander liked to be painted by Apelles and to have his statue made by Lysippos,” writes Cicero. This “preference” becomes exclusivity in several other authors, including Horace, who said that “Alexander issued an edict forbidding anyone but Apelles to paint him, and anyone but Lysippos to cast him in bronze.” The reason, according to Plutarch, was that Lysippos faithfully reproduced the king’s features; but in any case we have here a sculptor figuring as official court artist, a new post which almost certainly did not exist in the small democratic and oligarchic cities of Classical Greece but which was made possible, in Alexander’s time, by the advent of a Hellenic monarchy. As a matter of fact Pliny tells us that “he made many statues of Alexander, including one of Alexander as a child”, and makes particular mention, confirmed by other authors, of the Lion Hunt of Delphi and the “turrna Alexandri” (the “Squadron of Alexander”), “for which he made statues that were perfect likenesses of all the king’s friends”. He also created a statue of Hephaistion, who was to Alexander what Patroclus was to Achilles.
However, the entire career of Lysippos covered more than the eleven years of Alexander’s conquests. He was so prolific that Pliny rightly or wrongly credits him with fifteen hundred works. Among those known to us by name are nine statues of divinities, including an Eros at Thespiae which might suggest a wish to compete with Praxiteles; several statues of Herakles; and various other portraits besides those of Alexander and his followers. Especially interesting is the Apoxymenos (athlete scraping himself with a strigil). In representing a type rather than an individual he is in the tradition of the Diskobolos of Myron and the Doryphoros of Polyclsrus. Also interesting for its novelty and strangeness is the Kairos (opportunity): a boy with wings and winged feet shown running, his hair abundant on the front of his head, but bald behind, a razor in his right hand and scales in his left. “By making a statue of opportunity,” comments Himerius (in about AD 350), “Lysippos was explaining its nature in images.”
It is no easier for us to get an idea of Lysippos’s style than of that of earlier sculptors. No originals have been preserved; replicas present the usual problems, apart from the “Thessahans” of Delphi which, unusually, seem to be marble copies dating from the same period as the original consecrated at Pharsalus; and then there is the imprecision of the descriptive terms used to describe his artistic style. He was held in high regard in antiquity for his strict observance of symmetria, his constantia and his e1egsntia, hut these words are too general to be of use to us now. One point at least is clear: “He made heads smaller than his predecessors, and bodies shmmer and leaner, so that his statues would look taller and more graceful”, writes Pliny. Indeed, whereas the head of the Doryphoros, representing the Canon of Polyclirus, is one-seventh of the entire body, the Apoxymenos (or at least the replica of the Apoxymenos in the Vatican), which must have been a kind of rival Canon of Lyssppos, is much less stocky, this rime with proportions of one to eight. Finally, although this cannot be verified, Pliny credits Lysippos with a view of great importance for the whole concept of artistic creation: he is said to have adopted a precept of the painter Eupompos who, on bring asked which of his predecessors he had taken as model, pointed to the crowd and said that one should imitate nature itself, not another artist.
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