Art, Greek; Greek drama -- History and criticism; Mythology, Greek
the grace and power of well-nigh the maturity of Greek art. The
blending of interests, of artistic alliances, is certainly
delightful.
Polycleitus, the other famous name of this period, and with a fame
justified by work we may still study, at least in its immediate
derivatives, had also tried his hand with success in such subjects.
In the Astragalizontes, for instance, well known to antiquity in
countless reproductions, he had treated an incident of the every-day
life of every age, which Plato sketches by the way.
[293] Myron, by patience of genius, had mastered the secret of the
expression of movement, had plucked out the very heart of its
mystery. Polycleitus, on the other hand, is above all the master of
rest, of the expression of rest after toil, in the victorious and
crowned athlete, Diadumenus. In many slightly varying forms, marble
versions of the original in bronze of Delos, the Diadumenus,
indifferently, mechanically, is binding round his head a ribbon or
fillet. In the Vaison copy at the British Museum it was of silver.
That simple fillet is, in fact, a diadem, a crown, and he assumes it
as a victor; but, as I said, mechanically, and, prize in hand, might
be asking himself whether after all it had been worth while. For the
active beauty of the Agonistes of which Myron's art is full, we have
here, then, the passive beauty of the victor. But the later
incident, the realisation of rest, is actually in affinity with a
certain earliness, so to call it, in the temper and work of
Polycleitus. He is already something of a reactionary; or pauses,
rather, to enjoy, to convey enjoyably to others, the full savour of a
particular moment in the development of his craft, the moment of the
perfecting of restful form, before the mere consciousness of
technical mastery in delineation urges forward the art of sculpture
to a bewildering infinitude of motion. In opposition to the ease,
the freedom, of others, his aim is, by a voluntary restraint in the
exercise of such technical mastery, [294] to achieve nothing less
than the impeccable, within certain narrow limits. He still
hesitates, is self-exacting, seems even to have checked a growing
readiness of hand in the artists about him. He was renowned as a
graver, found much to do with the chisel, introducing many a fine
after-thought, when the rough-casting of his work was over. He
studied human form under such conditions as would bring out its
natural features, its static laws, in their entirety, their harmony;
and in an academic work, so to speak, no longer to be clearly
identified in what may be derivations from it, he claimed to have
fixed the canon, the common measure, of perfect man. Yet with
Polycleitus certainly the measure of man was not yet "the measure of
an angel," but still only that of mortal youth; of youth, however, in
that scrupulous and uncontaminate purity of form which recommended
itself even to the Greeks as befitting messengers from the gods, if
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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