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
It is true that these early images attributed to Daedalus showed already
a considerable advance on the shapeless or roughly shaped stocks or
stones that had served as the most primitive objects of worship; but it
was their resemblance to these rather than their difference from them
that impressed the imagination of Pausanias. He appreciated them not so
much as examples of an art that promised much for the future, but rather
as linked with the past by the tradition of an immemorial sanctity. We
find, in fact, that the rude early images remained the centres of state
cult and official worship, as well as of popular veneration, long after
the art of sculpture had become capable of providing their worshippers
with more adequate embodiments of the gods they represented. It was the
early image of Athena, not the Athena Parthenos by Phidias, that was
annually washed in the sea, and for which the peplos was woven by the
chosen women of Athens. The connection between art and religion is, in
such a case, reduced to narrow limits; but, on the other hand, we hear
of many instances where new statues of the gods were made as temple
statues, to be the chief objects of worship and centres of cult. And
this was sometimes done with the official sanction of the gods
themselves, as expressed through the oracle of Delphi.
The sanctity of the old image was sometimes transferred to the new one;
a striking example of this is seen in the case of Artemis Brauronia on
the Athenian Acropolis. It had been the custom for the garments
presented to the goddess by her worshippers to be placed upon her
primitive statue; and when a new and worthier representation of the
goddess was placed in the temple in the fourth century, we are informed
by inscriptions that dedicated garments were sometimes hung upon it,
even though it was a statue from the hand of Praxiteles. It sometimes
happened that the old and the new statues stood side by side in the same
temple, or in adjacent temples, and they seem then to exemplify the two
kinds of idolatry--the literal and the imaginative--the one being the
actual subject of the rites ceremonially observed, and the other being
the visible presentment of the deity, and helping the worshipper to
concentrate his prayers and aspirations. Here the art of the sculptor
had the fullest scope, and it is in such cases that he could, as
Quintilian said of Phidias, "make some addition to the received
religion."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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