58 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF VICTOR STATUES AT OLYMPIA. 
not because of their increasing the honor accorded to the victor, but 
rather because they honored his egotism.! | 
ANICONIC STATUES. 
Accordingly, since only victors who had won three or more contests 
at Olympia could set up iconic statues, the great majority of statues 
there represented some ideal type of common applicability, in which 
there was no attempt to show the individual features of this or that 
victor, but rather the typical athlete of muscular build. The older 
statues were merely variations of a few types which were held to be 
appropriate to the purpose. In.process of time these few types in their 
treatment of details gradually approached truth to nature; this was 
especially characteristic of the Peloponnesian schools, which adopted 
the Doryphoros of Polykleitos as their norm of proportions. Statues 
of victors were the stock subject of the closely related schools of Argos 
and Sikyon.2 Doubtless, as E. A. Gardner says,? there existed at 
Olympia itself a school of subordinate artists, who filled the regular 
demand for victor statues. However, some of these statues, especially 
those of the fifth and fourth centuries B. C., as we see them 1n originals 
and in Roman copies, and read the zsthetic judgments of them in 
Greek writers, were real works of art. 
ESTHETIC JUDGMENTS OF CLASSICAL WRITERS: 
The literary evidence for Greek sculpture is, for the most part, very 
unsatisfactory. “Though classical writers were uncritical and not fond 
of analysis, still they have left us some useful opinions about works of 
sculpture and painting. ‘The history and criticism of sculpture began 
in Greece, in the fourth century B. C., with the Peripatetics. Aristotle, 
whose observations on painting and sculpture were slight, did not de- 
spise the “‘mimetic”’ arts as did the Socrates of Plato. Inthe Rhetoric® 
he speaks of the beautiful bodies of youths who trained as pentathletes, 
since the varied exercises of the pentathlon madethem so. We havea 
similar opinion expressed by Xenophon in what is, perhaps, the most 
— 

1On this subject, see the recent essay by W. H. Goodyear, Lessing’s Essay on the Laocoon 
and its Influence on the Criticism of Art and Literature, Brooklyn Museum Quarterly, Oct. 
1917, pp. 228-9. 
Thus we have Polykleitos of Argos and Patrokles, perhaps his brother; Naukydes of Argos 
and Daidalos of Sikyon, sons of Patrokles; the younger Polykleitos—who called himself an Argive— 
the brother of Naukydes; Alypos of Sikyon, the pupil of Naukydes; etc. Statues of all these 
sculptors except Patrokles are known to have stood in Olympia. 3Hbk.?, p. 254. 
4His criticism of painting occurs in Poet., 1448a, 5, 1450a, 26, and Polit., V, 1340a, 35. In £th,. 
VI, 1141a, 10, he says that Pheidias and Polykleitos were masters in marble and bronze respec- 
tively. For a discussion of Aristotle’s zsthetics of painting and sculpture, see M. Carroll, in 
Publ. of Geo. Washington University, Philol. and Lit. Series, I, 1 (Nov., 1905), pp. 1-10; and for 
both Aristotle and Plato on art, see Kalkman, 50stes Berl. Winckelmannsprogr., 1890 (Proport. 
des Gesichts), pp. 3 f. and notes. 
®T, 5, 1361b; Oppian, Kyneget., I, 89-90, speaks of the similarly well-developed bodies of hunters. 
