Religion and Art in Ancient GreeceGardner, Ernest Arthur
Religion
Religion and Art in Ancient Greece
Gardner, Ernest Arthur
Art and religion -- Greece; Art, Greek; Greece -- Religion; Mythology, Classical, in art
of Argos, made by the chief Argive master Polyclitus, is the great
goddess of the city, just as Athena is of Athens. She was represented as
the bride of Zeus, who annually renewed her maidenhood at the great
Argive festival of the divine marriage; and we cannot doubt that
Polyclitus expressed in this statue, which was hardly less famous than
the masterpieces of Phidias, all the essential features of the great
religious ideals that underlay this primitive rite. His Hera had neither
the warlike nor the intellectual and spiritual characteristics of the
Attic Athena; but she was the goddess of womanly grace and beauty in the
bride, and embodied that perfection of physical form which Argive art
sought also in its athletic figures, and which was in a sense a part of
the religion that found expression in the great athletic games. Some
gods--Apollo, for example--seem in fifth-century statues to have a more
individual character. Just as in earlier times the name Apollo serves to
cover a multitude of statues of which some may be meant to represent
individual men, so even in the age of Phidias we sometimes meet with a
figure of athletic type or of youthful beauty as to which it is possible
to doubt whether it is an Apollo; this may be partly the result of the
great popularity of the type in all ages of Greek sculpture which led to
its more rapid development and earlier individualisation. But the Apollo
of this period is never the mere dreamy youth of later time; it has been
well said that he is the god who, in the mythical athletic contest,
could surpass Hermes in the foot-race and Ares in boxing; the embodiment
of all-round physical and intellectual excellence, the combination of
music and gymnastic, which again brings us back to a national Hellenic
ideal. Throughout the representations of the gods in the art of the
fifth century we find the same essential character. They embody in
themselves the expression, by means of the most perfect physical forms,
of the qualities attributed to the god himself, or given by him to his
worshippers. They are no impersonal abstraction of these qualities, but
are real and living beings, in whom these qualities exist to a degree
impossible for a mere mortal. But, on the other hand, they have nothing
of the passions and emotions, the weaknesses and imperfections of mortal
nature. In this they are inconsistent, perhaps, with that Homeric
presentment of the gods which the greatest artists consciously set
before themselves. But we cannot wonder that an age of such clear and
lofty intellectual and moral perceptions should have rejected what it
felt to be unworthy in the current notions of the gods, and should have
selected only what it felt to be truly divine. Art did not, however,
remain very long upon its highest level of religious feeling; but in
Greece, by a fortunate coincidence, the age of the greatest religious
ideals was also that of the highest perfection of physical type in art
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