Art, Greek; Greek drama -- History and criticism; Mythology, Greek
In what we have seen of this first period of Greek art, in all its
curious essays and inventions, we may observe this demand for
beautiful idols increasing in Greece--for sacred images, at first
still rude, and in some degree the holier for their rudeness, but
which yet constitute the beginnings of the religious style,
consummate in the work of Pheidias, uniting the veritable image of
man in the full possession of his reasonable soul, with the true
religious mysticity, the signature there of something from afar. One
by one these [241] new gods of bronze, or marble, or flesh-like
ivory, take their thrones, at this or that famous shrine, like the
images of this period which Pausanias saw in the temple of Here at
Olympia--the throned Seasons, with Themis as the mother of the
Seasons (divine rectitude being still blended, in men's fancies, with
the unchanging physical order of things) and Fortune, and Victory
"having wings," and Kore and Demeter and Dionysus, already visibly
there, around the image of Here herself, seated on a throne; and all
chryselephantine, all in gold and ivory. Novel as these things are,
they still undergo consecration at their first erecting. The figure
of Athene, in her brazen temple at Sparta, the work of Gitiades, who
makes also the image and the hymn, in triple service to the goddess;
and again, that curious story of Dipoenus and Scyllis, brought back
with so much awe to remove the public curse by completing their
sacred task upon the images, show how simply religious the age still
was--that this widespread artistic activity was a religious
enthusiasm also; those early sculptors have still, for their
contemporaries, a divine mission, with some kind of hieratic or
sacred quality in their gift, distinctly felt.
The development of the artist, in the proper sense, out of the mere
craftsman, effected in the first division of this period, is now
complete; and, in close connexion with that busy graving of religious
images, which occupies its second [242] division, we come to
something like real personalities, to men with individual
characteristics--such men as Ageladas of Argos, Callon and Onatas of
Aegina, and Canachus of Sicyon. Mere fragment as our information
concerning these early masters is at the best, it is at least
unmistakeably information about men with personal differences of
temper and talent, of their motives, of what we call style. We have
come to a sort of art which is no longer broadly characteristic of a
general period, one whose products we might have looked at without
its occurring to us to ask concerning the artist, his antecedents,
and his school. We have to do now with types of art, fully impressed
with the subjectivity, the intimacies of the artist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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