2. Sculpture

The Greek settlement of western Asia, and the opening of Egypt to Greek trade towards 660 B.C., allowed Near Eastern and Egyptian forms and methods of statuary to enter Ionia and European Greece. About 580 two Cretan sculptors, Dipoenus and Scyllis, accepted commissions at Sicyon and Argos, and left behind them there not only statues but pupils; from this period dates a vigorous school of sculpture in the Peloponnese. The art had many purposes: it commemorated the dead first with simple pillars, then with herms whose head alone was carved, then with forms completely chiseled in the round, or with funeral-stelae reliefs; it made statues of victorious athletes, first as types, later as individuals; and it was encouraged by the lively imagination of Greek faith to make countless images of the gods.

Until the sixth century its material was most frequently wood. We hear a great deal of the chest of Cypselus, dictator of Corinth. According to Pausanias, it was made of cedar, inlaid with ivory and gold, and adorned with complicated carvings. As wealth increased, wooden statues might be covered, in whole or part, by precious materials; indeed it was thus that Pheidias made his chryselephantine (i.e., gold and ivory) statues of Athene Parthenos and the Olympian Zeus. Bronze rivaled stone as sculptural material to the end of classical art. Few ancient bronzes have survived the temptation to melt them down, but we may judge from the perhaps too ministerial Charioteer of the Delphi Museum (ca. 490) how near to perfection the art of hollow casting had been carried since Rhoecus and Theodorus of Samos had introduced it into Greece. The most famous group in Athenian statuary, the Tyrannicides (Harmodius and Aristogeiton), was cast in bronze by Antenor at Athens shortly after the expulsion of Hippias. Many forms of soft stone were used before the sculptors of Greece undertook to mold harder varieties with hammer and chisel; but once they had learned the art they almost denuded Naxos and Paros of marble. In the archaic period (1100-490) the figures were often painted; but towards the end of that age it was found that a better effect could be secured, in representing the delicate skin of women, by leaving the polished marble without artificial tint.

The Greeks of Ionia were the first to discover the uses of drapery as a sculptural element. Egypt and the Near East had left the clothing rigid—a vast stone apron nullifying the living form; but in sixth-century Greece the sculptors introduced folds into the drapery, and used the garment to reveal that ultimate source and norm of beauty, the healthy human body. Nevertheless the Egypto-Asiatic influence remained so strong that in most archaic Greek sculpture the figure is heavy, graceless, and stiff; the legs are strained even, in repose; the arms hang helpless at the sides; the eyes have the almond form, and occasionally an Oriental slant; the face is stereotyped, immobile, passionless. Greek statuary, in this period, accepted the Egyptian rule of frontality—i.e., the figure was made to be seen only from the front, and so rigidly bisymmetrical that a vertical line would pass through the nose, mouth, navel, and genitals with never a right or left deviation, and no flexure of either motion or rest. Perhaps convention was responsible for this dull rigidity: the law of the Greek games forbade a victor to set up a portrait statue of himself unless he had won all contests in the pentathlon; only then, the Greeks argued, would he achieve the harmonious physical development that would merit individual modeling.⁵⁷ For this reason, and perhaps because, as in Egypt, religious convention before the fifth century governed the representation of the gods, the Greek sculptor confined himself to a few poses and types, and devoted himself to their mastery.

Two types above all won his study: the youth, or kouros, nearly nude, slightly advancing the left leg, with arms at the side or partly extended, fists closed, countenance quiet and stern; and the kore, or maiden, carefully coiffured, modestly posed and draped, one hand gathering up the robe, the other offering some gift to the gods. History till lately called the kouroi “Apollos,” but they were more probably athletes or funerary monuments. The most famous of the type is the Apollo of Tenea; the largest, the Apollo of Sunium; the most pretentious, the Throne of Apollo at Amyclae, near Sparta. One of the finest is the small Strangford Apollo in the British Museum; finer still is the Choiseul-Gouffier Apollo, a Roman copy of an early fifth-century original.⁵⁸ To at least the male eye the korai are more pleasing: their bodies are gracefully slender, their faces are softened with a Mona Lisa smile, their drapery begins to escape the stiffness of convention; some of them, like those in the Athens Museum would be called masterpieces in any other land;⁵⁹ one of them, which we may call the Kore of Chios,* is a masterpiece even in Greece. In them the sensuous Ionian touch breaks through the Egyptian immobility and Dorian austerity of the “Apollos.” Archermus of Chios created another type, or followed lost models, in the Nike, or Victory, of Delos; out of this would come the lovely Nike of Paeonius at Olympia, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and, in Christian art, the winged figures of cherubim.⁶⁰ Near Miletus unknown sculptors carved a series of draped and seated females for the temple of the Branchidae, figures powerful but crude, dignified but ponderous, profound but dead.†

Sculpture in relief was so old that a pretty legend could undertake to describe its origin. A lass of Corinth drew upon a wall the outline of the shadow that the lamplight cast of her lover’s head. Her father Butades, a potter, filled in the outline with clay, pressed the form to hardness, took it down, and baked it; so, Pliny assures us, bas-relief was born.⁶¹ The art became even more important than sculpture in the adornment of temples and graves. Already in 520 Aristocles made a funeral relief of Aristion, which is one of the many treasures of the Athens Museum.

Since reliefs were nearly always painted, sculpture, relief, and painting were allied arts, usually handmaids to architecture; and most artists were skilled in all four forms. Temple moldings, friezes, metopes, and pediment backgrounds were usually painted, while the main structure was ordinarily left in the natural color of the stone. Of painting as a separate art we have only negligible remains from Greece; but we know through passages in the poets that panel painting, with colors mixed in melted wax, was already practiced in the days of Anacreon.⁶² Painting was the last great art to develop in Greece, and the last to die.

All in all, the sixth century failed to rise, in any Greek art except architecture, to the boldness of conception or the perfection of form attained in the same age by Greek philosophy and poetry. Perhaps artistic patronage was slow to develop in an aristocracy still rural and poor, or in a business class too young to have graduated from wealth to taste. Nevertheless the age of the dictators was a period of stimulation and improvement in every Greek art—above all, under Peisistratus and Hippias in Athens. Towards the end of this period the old rigidity of sculpture began to thaw, the rule of frontality was broken down; legs began to move, arms to leave the side, hands to open up, faces to take on feeling and character, bodies to bend in a variety of poses revealing new studies in anatomy and action. This revolution in sculpture, this animation of stone with life, became a major event in Greek history; the escape from frontality was one of the signal accomplishments of Greece. Egyptian and Oriental influences were set aside, and Greek art became Greek.