14 THE FINE ARTS. 
figure. The athlete first directed attention to a closer study of nature, 
and artists exerted themselves to celebrate distinguished combatants by 
portraits and statues: the perfection thus attained was of course transferred 
to the representations of gods and heroes. Here also the best works were 
executed in relief; and we find in the figures of the gods on the dedicatory 
craters and tripods spirited representations of the human form. These 
figures already exhibit both character and expression. Nevertheless the 
type originally adopted was departed from only by degrees. The pious 
regard for ancient usage was extended even to the material; though gra- 
dually the practice was introduced of putting a head or arms of marble, 
ivory, or gold upon the wooden body, until at last they went so far as to 
employ the art of casting in metals for the representation of the deities 
in their temples. 
During this period the gods were represented as sitting enthroned, or in 
some other quiet and fixed posture; no attempt is made to charm; the 
limbs are powerful, the expression stiff and grave, and the colossal statues 
of the gods frequently have smaller inferior deities, which indicate their 
character, or other sacred objects, placed upon their outstretched hand. 
Of a precisely similar character were the mythological groups which 
served to adorn the gable fields, the friezes, metopes, and acroteria of the 
temples; and these ornaments had reference either to the deity to whom 
the temple was dedicated or to the family legends of the dedicator. The 
sculptures on the temples of Aigina, of Selinuntize, and from the ruins of 
Xanthus may be considered as forming the limits of this period. The 
sculptures discovered in the year 1823 near the middle temple of the 
acropolis of Selinuntiee, and now in Palermo, are metopes of a Doric temple, 
wrought in tufaceous limestone, and are 4 feet 94 inches high, and 3 feet 
63 inches broad; they belong to the very earliest period of art. They 
exhibit traces of having been painted, as is everywhere observed in the 
architecture of Selinuntiz. One of these metopes, which we have copied in 
pl. 1, jig. 12, represents Hercules carrying off the captured Cercopes sus- 
pended from a pole. Hercules is naked; yet there are traces which show 
that on the body was fastened a lion’s skin of gilded bronze. Another 
- metope found there represents Perseus with the cap and winged shoes of 
Hermes, Athene in the peplus, and Medusa with Pegasus. From other 
sculptures of a frieze in the cella, as of a goddess transfixing a warrior, the 
torso of a dying warrior, &c., we have selected the mask of a figure 
( fig. 6). 
The Aginetan sculptures were discovered by several Germans, Danes, 
and Englishmen in the year 1811; they were restored by Thorwaldsen and 
transported to Munich, where a separate apartment was appropriated 
to them in the Glyptothek. They formed two corresponding groups in 
the fields of the two gables of the temple of Athene in A’gina; the 
western group is the most complete, although the figures of the eastern 
group are somewhat better executed and of a larger size. Athene heads 
the combat of the Aacidee or Atginetic heroes against Troy: in the western 
group, the battle is around the body of Patroclus; and in the eastern 
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