Art, Greek; Greek drama -- History and criticism; Mythology, Greek
His Apollo of cedar-wood, which inhabited a temple near the gates of
Thebes, on a rising ground, below which flowed the river Ismenus,
had, according to Pausanias, so close a resemblance to that at
Miletus that it required little skill in one who had seen either of
them to tell what master had designed the other. Still, though of
the same dimensions, while one was of cedar the other was of bronze--
a reproduction one of the other we may believe, but with the
modifications, according to the use of good workmen even so early as
Canachus, due to the difference of the material. For the likeness
between the two statues, it is to be observed, is not the mechanical
likeness of those earlier images represented by the statuette of
Tenea, which spoke, not of the style of one master, but only of the
manufacture of one workshop. In those two images of Canachus--the
Milesian Apollo and the Apollo of the Ismenus--there were
resemblances amid differences; resemblances, as we may understand, in
what was nevertheless peculiar, novel, and even innovating in the
precise conception of the god therein set forth; [247] resemblances
which spoke directly of a single workman, though working freely, of
one hand and one fancy, a likeness in that which could by no means be
truly copied by another; it was the beginning of what we mean by the
style of a master. Together with all the novelty, the innovating and
improving skill, which has made Canachus remembered, an attractive,
old-world, deeply-felt mysticity seems still to cling about what we
read of these early works. That piety, that religiousness of temper,
of which the people of Sicyon had given proof so oddly in their
dealings with those old carvers, Scyllis and Dipoenus, still survives
in the master who was chosen to embody his own novelty of idea and
execution in so sacred a place as the shrine of Apollo at Miletus.
Something still conventional, combined, in these images, with the
effect of great artistic skill, with a palpable beauty and power,
seems to have given them a really imposing religious character.
Escaping from the rigid uniformities of the stricter archaic style,
he is still obedient to certain hieratic influences and traditions;
he is still reserved, self-controlled, composed or even mannered a
little, as in some sacred presence, with the severity and strength of
the early style.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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