The Glory That Was Greece: a survey of Hellenic culture and civilisationStobart, J. C. (John Clarke)
History
The Glory That Was Greece: a survey of Hellenic culture and civilisation
Stobart, J. C. (John Clarke)
Art, Greek; Greece -- Civilization -- To 146 B.C.
The third is Lysippus of Sicyon, an extraordinarily prolific artist, of
whose style we may form a very clear conception, although we have no
originals. Athletic types were his favourite work, and his favourite
technique was bronze-casting. His discovery was the added grace and
beauty which could result from decreasing the proportion of the head to
the body. Wherever we find small curly heads very lightly poised upon a
strong, vigorous body we may trace the influence of Lysippus. His most
famous statue was the young athlete scraping off the oil from his arm
with the strigil. The emperor Tiberius fell in love with this
“Apoxyomenus,” as it is called, and removed it from the front of the
baths of Agrippa to his own bed-chamber, but the people of Rome raised
such an outcry that he had to restore it. Modern critics have shown that
our “Apoxyomenus”[88] is not a faithful copy of this statue. On the
other hand, the “Agias” recently discovered at Delphi[89] is a
contemporary marble copy of a bronze by Lysippus, and gives us a very
fine example of his style. Lysippus was also the sculptor-in-ordinary to
Alexander the Great, and we may trace to Lysippean originals all the
numerous portraits of the Macedonian conqueror. Lysippus was a theorist
as well as a practical sculptor, and, like Polycleitus, produced his own
theoretical “Canon” of sculptural proportions. He was (with
[Illustration: PLATE LXXII. THE “LUDOVISI” ARES
_Anderson_]
the possible exception of the Devil) the first professed impressionist,
for Pliny records a saying of his: “Other sculptors had represented men
as they were, while he portrayed them as they appeared to be.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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