III. SCULPTURE

Never has statuary been more abundant than in the Hellenistic age. Temples and palaces, homes and streets, gardens and parks were crowded with it; every phase of human life, and many aspects of the plant and animal world, were represented in it; portrait busts immortalized for a moment dead heroes and living celebrities; at last even abstractions like Fortune, Peace, Calumny, or the Nick of Time, became concrete in stone. Eutychides of Sicyon, a pupil of Lysippus, molded for Antioch a famous Tyche, or Fortune, to serve as the incarnation of the city’s soul and hope. The sons of Praxiteles—Timachus and Cephisodotus—carried on the refined tradition of Athenian sculpture; and in the Peloponnesus Damophon of Messene scaled the heights of fame with a colossal group ofDemeter, Persephone, and Artemis. But most of the new sculptors followed the line of least starvation to the palaces and courts of Greco-Oriental magnates and kings.

Rhodes, in the third century, developed a school of sculpture characteristically its own. There were a hundred colossal statues in the island, any one of which, says Pliny,¹⁴ would have made a city famous. The greatest of them was the bronze colossus of the sun-god Helios, set up in successive blocks by Chares of Lindus about 280. Chares, says a naive tradition, committed suicide when the cost seriously exceeded his estimate; and Laches, also of Lindus, completed the work. It did not bestride the harbor, but rose near it to a height of one hundred and five feet. Its dimensions might suggest that Rhodian taste ran to display and size; but perhaps the Rhodians proposed to use it as a lighthouse and a symbol. If we may believe a poem in The Greek Anthology,¹⁵ the statue held a light aloft, and symbolized the freedom that Rhodes enjoyed—a curious anticipation of a famous statue in a modern port.* It was, of course, included among the Seven Wonders of the World. “This statue,” Pliny reports,

was thrown down by an earthquake fifty-six years after it was erected. Few men can clasp the thumb in their arms, and its fingers are larger than most statues. When the limbs are broken asunder vast caverns are seen yawning in the interior. Within it, too, are to be seen large masses of rock by whose weight the artist steadied it while in process of erection. It is said that it was twelve years in the making, and that three hundred talents were spent upon it—a sum raised from the engines of war abandoned by Demetrius after his futile siege.*¹⁶

Almost as famous in history was another product of the Rhodian school, the Laocoön. Pliny saw it in the palace of the Emperor Titus; it was found in the ruins of the Baths of Titus in A.D. 1506, and is almost certainly the original work of Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, who carved it out of two blocks of marble in the second or first century B.C.¹⁸ Its discovery stirred Renaissance Italy and profoundly impressed Michelangelo, who tried, without success, to restore the lost right arm of the central figure.†Laocoön was a Trojan priest who, when the Greeks sent the wooden horse to Troy, advised against receiving it, saying (says Virgil), Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes—“I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts.”¹⁹ To punish his wisdom Athena, who favored the Greeks, commissioned two serpents to kill him. They seized first upon his two sons, seeing which Laocoön rushed to their aid, only to be caught in the coils; in the end all three were crushed, and died from the venom of the fangs. The sculptors took the liberty assumed by Virgil (and, in the Philoctetes, by Sophocles) to describe pain vigorously, but the result does not accord with the natural repose of stone. In literature, and usually in life, pain passes; in the Laocöon the cry of agony has been given an unnatural permanence, and the spectator is not so moved as by Demeter’s silent grief.‡ What nevertheless evokes our admiration is the mastery of design and technique; the musculature is exaggerated, but the old priest’s limbs, and the bodies of his sons, are molded with dignity and restraint. Perhaps if we had known the story before seeing the group we should have been as impressed as Pliny, who thought this the greatest achievement of ancient plastic art.²⁰

Many other Greek centers had flourishing schools of sculpture in this underestimated age. Alexandria turned over its soil and its buildings too often in the long course of its history to preserve the works that Greek artists made for the Ptolemies. The sole important survivor is the serene Nileof the Vatican, humorously supported by sixteen water babies symbolizing the sixteen cubits of the river’s annual rise. At Sidon Greek sculpture cut for unknown dignitaries a series of sarcophagi of which the best, misnamed the Sarcophagus of Alexander, is the pride of the Constantinople Museum. Its carving is equal, on a smaller scale, to that of the Parthenon frieze; the figures are handsome and well proportioned; the action is vigorous but clear, and the soft tints that still cling to the stone exemplify the aid that Greek painting gave to Greek sculpture. At Tralles, in Caria, about 150 B.C., Apollonius and Tauriscus cast for Rhodes a colossal bronze group now known as the Farnese Bull: two handsome youths are lashing the lovely Dirce to the horns of a wild bull, because she has ill-treated their mother Antiope—who looks on in repulsively calm satisfaction.*At Pergamum Greek sculptors cast in bronze several battle groups, which Attalus first dedicated in his capital to celebrate his repulse of the Gauls. To express the debt which all Greek culture felt to Athens, and perhaps to spread his fame, Attalus presented marble replicas of these figures to be set up on the Athenian Acropolis. Fragmentary marble copies have survived in The Dying Gaul of the Capitoline Museum, in the miscalled Paetus and Arria†—a Gaul who, preferring death to capture, kills first his wife and then himself—and in several smaller pieces now scattered through Egypt and Europe. Perhaps to the same group belongs a Dead Amazon,‡impeccably molded in every detail except the incredibly perfect breasts. These figures show a classic restraint in the expression of emotion; the conquered men suffer the extremes of pain and grief, but die without opera; and the conquerors have allowed the artists to portray the virtues, as well as the defeat, of their enemies. There is no sign here of any falling off in power of conception, accuracy of anatomical observation, or skill and patience of technique. Almost as perfect is the great relief that ran along the base of the Altar of Zeus on the Acropolis of Pergamum, and told again the story of the war between the gods and the giants—presumably a modest allegory for Pergamenes and Gauls. The work is overcrowded, and sometimes theatrically violent; but some figures stand out as in the best tradition of Greek art. The headless Zeus is carved with the strength of Scopas, and the goddess Hecate is a lyric of grace and beauty amid the terror and carnage of war.

The age was rich in now anonymous masterpieces that almost call the roll of the major gods. The majestic Head of Zeus found at Otricoli, and the Ludovisi Hera now in the Museo delle Terme so pleased the young Goethe that he took casts of them with him to Germany as, so to speak, the authentic autographs of Jove and Juno. The once acclaimed Apollo Belvedere* is academically cold and lifeless; and yet, two centuries ago, it set Winckelmann aflame.²¹ A world away from this smooth weakling is the Farnese Heracles, copied by Glycon of Athens from an original attributed to Lysippus—all muscle in the overdone body, all weariness, kindliness, and wonder in the face—as if power was asking itself its never answered question: what should be its goal? Of Aphrodite the age had representatives only less numerous than her devotees; several of these statues have survived, mostly through Roman copies. The Aphrodite of Melos—the Venus de Milo of the Louvre—is apparently an original Greek work of the second century B.C.It was found on the island of Melos in 1820, near a pedestal fragment bearing the letters—sandros; perhaps Agesander of Antioch carved this modest nudity. The face is not as delicately fair as that which forms the symbol of this volume, but the figure itself is a poem of that health whose natural flower is beauty; the wasp waist finds no encouragement in this full body and these sturdy hips. Not so near perfection, but still pleasant to the eye, are the Capitoline Venus and the Venus de Medici.† Candidly and disarmingly sensual is the Venus Callipyge, or Venus of the Lovely Buttocks,‡ who drapes her charms to reveal them, and turns to admire her nates in the pool. More impressive than any of these is the superb Nike, or Victory of Samothrace, found there in 1863, and now the sculptural masterpiece of the Louvre.§ The goddess of victory is shown as if alighting in full flight upon the prow of a swiftly moving ship and leading the vessel on to attack; her great wings seem to pull the craft along in the face of the breeze that confuses her robes. Again the Greek conception of woman as no mere delicacy, but as a strong mother, dominates the work; this is not the frail and passing beauty of youth, but the lifelong call of the woman to the man to lift himself up to achievement, as if the artist had wished to illustrate the last lines of Goethe’s Faust. The civilization that could conceive and carve this figure was yet far from dead.

The gods were not the chief interest of the sculptors who brightened the evening of Greek art. These men looked upon Olympus as a quarry of subjects, and no more. When that quarry had been worn down by repetition they turned to the earth and took delight in representing the wisdom and loveliness, the strangeness and absurdities of human life. They carved or cast impressive heads of Homer, Euripides, and Socrates. They made a number of smooth and delicate Hermaphrodites, whose equivocal beauty arrests the eye in the Archeological Museum at Constantinople, or the Borghese Gallery in Rome, or the Louvre. Children offered refreshingly natural poses, like the boy who removes a thorn from his foot, and another who struggles with a goose,* and—finest of this class—the trustful Praying Youth attributed to Lysippus’ pupil Boëthus.† Or the sculptors went to the woods and depicted sylvan sprites like the Barberini Faun of Munich, or hilarious satyrs like the Drunken Silenus of the Naples Museum. And here and there, with jolly frequency, they inserted among their figures the rosy cheeks and impish pranks of the god of love.