Greek Sculpture. Edmund von Mach
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attention, and his ever alert vision would overplay the work’s true purpose.
How fully the Greeks appreciated these details is perhaps best illustrated in the draperies of their statues, which always appear real without being correct. Nobody has yet been able to demonstrate from the statues the accuracy of this theory on ancient costumes gleaned from the study of literary descriptions and vase paintings. The painters often attained a fairly accurate rendering of the garment, the sculptors never. They not only took great liberties with those pieces of drapery they represented, but even omitted entire garments. A statue of Sophokles, now in the Lateran Museum, for instance, is represented as wearing only the outer costume or overcoat, while it is well known from literature that gentlemen never appeared in public in quite so scanty attire. With one or two exceptions, the warriors from the pediments of the temple of Aegina, are completely nude; they have gone into battle with helmets on their heads and shields on their arms, but without a single piece of fabric. The Greeks never entered battle in this way, either at the time the marbles were carved, or at the time the statues commemorate, or at any other time. Such a partial or complete omission of the cloth can hardly be explained as the unconscious reproduction of a mental image; while the actual treatment of the drapery, as it appears, for instance, in the Nike of Paionios or on the Parthenon frieze (Illustration 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12), probably is more or less unconscious. Many modern writers use the word “elimination” in speaking of Greek drapery; but this is a mistake, because elimination implies the studied omission of details, and cannot account either for the omission of entire garments or the unconscious treatment of actually sculptured costumes.
The eclecticism in Greek drapery may be called one of the devices or “conventions” of Greek sculpture, and may serve to prove that such conventions do not hold good for all times. When Greenough[7] carved his large statue of George Washington in the national Capitol, he omitted the drapery on the upper part of the body, obviously with the intention of drawing the observer’s attention away from the dress to the person who wearing it. In this respect he clearly followed the practices of the Greeks, in particular the pattern set by Phidias in his colossal Zeus in Olympia. The Greeks might omit drapery with impunity, for they were as a race intensely fond of the nude. Greenough, imitating them in the face of pronounced racial and religious prejudices against the nude, committed the unpardonable mistake of copying not the spirit of a past art but its accidental expression. Instead of accomplishing his end by omitting the drapery, he achieved the opposite, for the cloth is “conspicuous by its very absence.”
The same considerate spirit which prompted the Greeks to deviate from nature in representing drapery shows itself also in their treatment of rocks, trees, and the like in marble reliefs. Marble is rock, and nothing is easier than to reproduce the rock accurately, so that the result is not only a picture of the rock, but really a second piece of rock. If this had been done, for instance, on the marble base from Mantinea, the contrast between the actual rock and the representation of Apollo sitting on it would have deprived the god of all semblance of reality. Similar observations may be made with the trees on the frieze of the Athena-Nike temple in Athens, or the stepping-stones on the frieze of the Parthenon.
These instances suffice to show the general attitude of the Greek sculptors towards the public. The public – and of course artists belong to the public – are not automatic inspection machines, but rather human beings, complex and inconsistent creatures. Entitled to consideration, they received it at the hands of the ancient artists.
Moreover, the Greeks gladly gave it; to them, making allowances for the frailties of human nature was not an irksome duty but a welcome privilege that enabled them to introduce into their art a human element of great variety and inexhaustible possibilities.
Kouros, Agrigente, c. 500–480 B. C. Marble, h: 104 cm.Archaeological Museum, Agrigente.
The Kritios Boy, Acropolis, Athens, c. 480–470 B. C. Marble, h: 116 cm. Acropolis Museum, Athens.
Head of a Blond Youth, c. 485 B. C. Marble, h: 25 cm. Acropolis Museum, Athens.
Kore 680, Acropolis, Athens, c. 530–520 B. C. Marble, h: 114 cm. Acropolis Museum, Athens.
The Artist and his Public
The personal influence of the Greek artists upon their communities was great, although it is not often touched upon in ancient literature. This influence was due to the artists feeling themselves one with the public. They rarely, if ever, believed themselves set apart as a class, distinct from the laymen. Such a view, however, has often since prevailed. When Michelangelo carved the tombs of the Medici and therein gave a mystic expression to his ideas of liberty, these thoughts were to him exclusively his own – too high, too good to be shared by the common populace – and yet they were the very thoughts in which this populace began to delight. When an artist’s genius grapples with the unexpressed phantoms of new ideas, and after patient meditation realises them on canvas or in stone to the extent of transforming the haziness of the notions into appealing clarity, he may indeed be forgiven if he takes a too exalted view of his achievements and believes that he and his fellow-artists are of nobler timbre than the general public.
Such a view is erroneous and contrary observations anyone can make. For instance, it is not rare for two men, under widely different conditions and far apart, to discover an original idea simultaneously; even more often it occurs that several people are concurrently engaged in the solution of identical problems. One might say then, that the idea is the active force, urgently clamouring for expression; the artists – poet, sculptor, painter, sage – are willing tools. The thoughts themselves are products of past and present intellectual life, the artists’ and laymen’s common inheritance. Mistaken is the belief that only the man possessing refined skills of expression can receive this inheritance; on the contrary, he is often the very one who by his neglect of an education and his thoughtless application to manual dexterity forfeits his birthright.
The world of thoughts with which we come in contact today is vastly greater than at any other time. In antiquity an Aristotle could without presumption claim to be master of everything, and even in the sixteenth century of our era Scaliger[8] could enjoy a similar reputation; today this is out of the question for anyone. Thoughts and intelligence representing property of the community have multiplied at such a tremendous rate that no one lifetime suffices to comprehend it all. Coupled with this increase in the world of thoughts, it seems the individual has developed the ability to master them even without finding visible or audible expressions. Ruskin once said he could imagine the time when the human race would have advanced so far that it could realise noble thoughts currently expressed in art without art. Humanity has already made a tremendous step in this direction. Religious thoughts in many denominations are independent of pictorial aids. The Roman Church still clings to them, as does the Lutheran, and to some extent the Protestant Episcopal; but denominations owing their origin to more recent centuries have entirely discarded them. No examples taken from religious practices are altogether fair, because too much sentiment is involved and too little unbiased human nature. But, even after due assumptions, the progress from the Roman Church, conservatively adhering to the traditions of the past, to the modern Protestant churches is too striking not to serve as an illustration that the human race has grown to realise – that is, to possess thoughts never expressed.
Kore 685, Acropolis, Athens, c. 500–490 B. C. Marble, h: 122 cm. Acropolis Museum, Athens.
Whatever vistas these considerations may open for the future no individual today, and certainly not humanity as a whole, has attained the state of mind prophesied by Ruskin. If true today, this was infinitely more so of the people in Greece in antiquity. Their world of thoughts was simple; even their philosophers, whose teachings are admired today, shared this blessing of comparative simplicity; and the fundamental ideas contained in the great Greek tragedies are far removed from confusing complexity. According to their own
Horatio Greenough (1805–1852): American Neo-classical sculptor. He made a large statue of Georges Washington commissioned by the Congress of the United States in 1832. Not conformed to the American taste, his classical style caused much controversy. This statue is now displayed in the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.
Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558): Italian humanist, physician and scholar. Known for his scientific and philosophical writings, he published two major texts: