GREEK ART 



As in early handicraft, so in sculp- 

 ture, we find an Ionic school work- 

 ing largely in the Aegean islands 

 and known to us from works dedi- 

 cated at Delos, but also active at 

 Athens ; and on the other hand a 

 Dorian school which worked in the 

 Peloponnese where Sparta was 

 then still an art-centre and in the 

 western colonies. 



Sculpture soon became associa- 

 ted with religious architecture, the 

 continuous frieze above the column 

 of the Greek temple and the 

 " metopes," or square slabs filling 

 what had been empty spaces 

 between the beam-ends of wooden 

 buildings, gave golden opportuni- 

 ties for work in high or low relief ; 

 the triangular pediment presented 

 a fresh problem, which the Greek 

 was not slow to solve. In an 

 early attempt made in Athens, 

 Heracles is shown wrestling with 

 Triton. 



The material was a soft, calcare- 

 ous tufa, which was covered by a 

 thick layer of paint red, blue and 

 green. This work belongs to the 

 6th century, during which the 

 Peisistratid tyrants made Athens 

 a great art-centre, attracting from 

 both Ionia and the Peloponnese, 

 especially the former, the best 

 talent of the time. 



Athenian Vase Fainting 



Other foci of artistic develop- 

 ment were the sanctuaries of Delphi 

 and Olympia, which rulers, states 

 and individuals from E. and W. 

 filled with their offerings ; and the 

 advance towards technical mastery 

 had made great strides even before 

 the Persian wars (490-479 B.C.), 

 which raised the national conscious- 

 ness of the Greek to the most in- 

 tense pitch, and was followed by 

 the attainment, within a few 

 decades, of the highest artistic per- 

 fection. In particular, the Athenian 

 vase-painters showed a marvellous 

 fertility of imagination, combined 

 with great delicacy in line-drawing 

 and skill in adapting their com- 

 positions to a curved surface. 

 Euphronius, Duris and Hieron are 

 the most famous, but many of the 

 finest vases are unsigned. 



The severity of the earlier works 

 of this time, such as the bronze 

 charioteer dedicated at Delphi by 

 a Syracusan prince or the pediment 

 of the temple of Aphaia at Aegina 

 soon gives way to the marvellous 

 freedom of the discus-thrower of 

 Myron. The so-called canon of 

 Polyclitus represented the frame 

 of the human athlete in its perfect 

 type ; and the sculptures of the Par- 

 thenon, though we cannot trace in 

 them the hand of Pheidias himself, 

 to whom -was entrusted the general 

 supervision of the decoration of the 

 temple and the carving in gold and 



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ivory of the statue of Athena, of 

 which a reduced copy was found 

 at Athens, reveal both by design 

 and execution a group of craftsmen 

 of unsurpassed cunning. 



Naturally much less is known of 

 the painting of the same period in 

 which Polygnotus was the most 

 famous name ; but we can perhaps 

 form some idea of the style of his 

 great frescoes of the fall of Troy 

 and the under world, both at 

 Delphi, from Athenian vase paint- 

 ings. At Olympia, the great temple 

 of Zeus, with its pediments, belongs 

 to the earlier half of the 5th cen- 

 tury; the statue of the god was 

 the work of Pheidias, but we have 

 no material for an adequate re- 

 construction of it. 



Developments of the 4th Century 



The great war which devastated 

 Greece in the closing decades of 

 the 5th century B.C., to some extent 

 severed the intimate association 

 of art with national life ; it also 

 affected the distribution of the 

 national wealth, and led to a 

 lowering of religious conceptions 

 and of political standards. Thus in 

 the 4th century we find in the 

 finest works not so much an 

 embodiment of ideals as a refine- 

 ment of the artist's individual con- 

 ception of beauty ; moreover, the 

 execution of the earlier period, 

 masterly as it was, was surpassed 

 by that of the great sculptors of 

 the new time. 



We possess an original by Praxi- 

 teles in the Hermes at Olympia 

 in which the treatment of flesh 

 and drapery, alike at once in its 

 realism and its grace, is inimit- 

 able. We can only rely on copies 

 for his more famous works the 

 Satyr and the Aphrodite of Cnidus ; 

 his contemporary Scopas, who ex- 

 celled in the rendering of passion, 

 must be judged by the heads from 

 the pediment designed by him for 

 a temple at Tegea in Arcadia. 



The athletic school of Sicyon pro- 

 duced its master in Lysippus. of 

 whose Apoxyomenos (an athlete 

 scraping himself with a strigil) there 

 is a copy in the Vatican which is 

 more slender in its scheme of pro- 

 portions than the Canon of Poly- 

 clitus. Lysippus was also a master 

 of portrait sculpture, which now at 

 length, in the hands of Silanion and 

 others, attained individual realism 

 (a fine example is the portrait of 

 Demosthenes, by Polyeuctus). He 

 was commissioned to reproduce the 

 features of Alexander the Great, 

 which we recognize in many works, 

 including the head of a marble 

 statue found at Gyrene after the 

 Italian occupation of Cyrenaica in 

 1912. Alexander also employed 

 the greatest of Greek painters, 

 Apelles, who, with his rival Proto- 



GREEK ART 



genes, succeeded to the places occu- 

 pied at the beginning of the 4th 

 century by Zeuxis and Parrhasius. 

 These are, however, no more than 

 names to us. The use of colour in 

 connexion with sculpture is illus- 

 trated by the magnificent series 

 of sarcophagi discovered at Sidon, 

 one of which represents Alexander 

 in battle and the chase. 



In the Hellenistic age which fol- 

 lowed the death of Alexander, art 

 was affected by the changed social 

 and political conditions. The 

 monarchies which arose from the 

 ruins of Alexander's empire, and 

 such communities, e.g. Rhodes, as 

 enjoyed a measure of freedom un- 

 der their protection, enlisted the 

 services of the greater artists for 

 the erection and adornment of their 

 public monuments. The famous 

 Colossus of Rhodes, which fulfilled 

 the function of a lighthouse, was 

 the work of Chares, a pupil of 

 Lysippus. The Victory of Samo- 

 thrace, a colossal statue of the 

 goddess standing on the prow of a 

 ship, which is now in the Louvre, 

 commemorated a naval victory 

 won by Demetrius Poliorcetes in 

 306 B.C. The Fortune of Antioch, 

 an early example of the personifi- 

 cations popular in this period, is 

 represented by a statuette in the 

 Vatican : it was the work of Euty- 

 chides of Sicyon, another pupil of 

 Lysippus. 



Art in Pergamum 



The kings of Pergamum were the 

 chief patrons of art in the Hellen- 

 istic age. Their victories over the 

 Gaulish invaders of the 3rd cen- 

 tury B.C. were commemorated 

 both by a series of life-sized statues 

 and groups, some of which survive 

 in originals and copies, the most 

 famous being the Dying Gaul of 

 the Capitoline Museum, Rome, and 

 also by a number of smaller groups 

 representing the combats of gods 

 and giants, Athenians and Ama- 

 zons, Athenians and Persians, and 

 Pergamenes and Gauls, regarded as 

 typical of the struggle between 

 Greek and barbarian. The Apollo 

 of the Belvedere, now in the Vati- 

 can, an antique copy of a bronze 

 Greek original, assigned by some 

 to the 4th century, perhaps rather 

 commemorates the repulse of the 

 Gauls from Delphi in 279 B.C. 



Above all, the great altar erected 

 on the Acropolis of Pergamum, 

 probably by Eumenes II (197-169 

 B.C.) is decorated with a frie/e 

 in high relief depicting the battle 

 of the gods and giants, in which 

 a new art, distinguished by 

 dramatic force and technical bra- 

 vura, is brilliantly represented. A 

 school of artists which flourished 

 at Rhodes in the century preceding 

 the Christian era has left us the 



