The Ludovisi Ares
(Page 71)
Vatican, Rome
Menelaus and Patroclus
Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence
As we look upon the “Niobe,” we feel at once that so dramatic a theme would have made no appeal to the generation before Scopas. But we must also feel that the fourth century has struck a new note—a note, moreover, to which marble can respond. But what is most wonderful is the magnificent reserve, the perfect moderation, with which the artist has expressed emotions that had been considered beyond the range of the art. The sculptor has not sacrificed that harmony and repose which he regards as essential to the idea of the beautiful.
The group usually called the “Menelaus and Patroclus” displays in equal degree this balance between the expression of deep emotion and the perfect moderation which the Greeks regarded as the hall-mark of the truly beautiful. The limitations incidental to marble as a medium for emotional expression are borne in mind. There is no effort to force the note of pathos.
The Age of Praxiteles (360 B.c.-325 b.c.)
If Scopas may be regarded as the first Greek to realise that marble and bronze could express the more passionate intensity of feeling which naturally followed the increasing importance of the individual and the individual’s thoughts and emotions, his successor, Praxiteles, must be associated with the second great characteristic of fourth-century sculpture—its lyrical appeal. Greek sculpture had been epic. It had concerned itself with the heroic myths of the race. But as art became every year less a matter of communal concern, it began to voice the growing self-assertion of the individual Greek. In other words, sculpture became lyric.
Almost any fourth-century work would illustrate what we mean, but a beautiful practical example is furnished from the history of Attic sepulchral sculpture.
Any visitor to Athens will remember the numerous dedicatory reliefs, chapels and memorial stelæ still to be seen in situ in the Ceramicus, the cemetery near the Dipylon Gate. Reconstructing the scene at the time of Praxiteles, we must imagine the roads leading from the principal city gates as flanked with such sculptured memorials of the dead. The Sacred Way to Eleusis, for instance, became a favourite site.
To-day the Ceramicus is in ruins, but its monuments still present some of the finest examples of original Hellenic sculpture extant. There is the famous “Relief of Dexileus.” It depicts with magnificent vigour an Athenian cavalry-man, triumphing over a prostrate foe. Dexileus died in the war which Athens waged unsuccessfully with the Corinthians, so the monument dates from about 394 b.c., the time when the youthful Scopas was at work upon the pedimental groups at Tegea. The beautiful work often called the “Death of Socrates” is only a few years earlier in date. The connection with Socrates is, of course, apocryphal, the subject really being an Athenian pouring a libation. At the other side is the wife, absorbed as was the wont of Athenian wives in some domestic interest—her dress, or her jewellery. The third figure is a young slave holding the vessel filled with wine.