Chapter VI The Hellenistic Sculpture of Greece (300 b.c. To 50 b.c.)
“The wren can soar as high as the eagle—once lodged upon the shoulders of the king of the skies.” So men say. But the high gods only smile. They know that emotions must arise and thoughts be nourished in hearts and minds great enough to contain them, if they are to live in ethereal depths. The sculptor or the painter, with the wings of the wren, must be content to flutter nearer to the flowers.
In this truth lies the key which unlocks the mystery of the sculpture of Hellenistic Greece, one of the most elusive problems in the history of art. Before any marble of this age we feel we are face to face with the work of lesser spirits—men who cannot boast of the eagle wings of their brothers of the fourth and fifth centuries. Few can recall the name of a single Greek sculptor of the later age. There is certainly no Scopas, no Praxiteles, no Lysippus. Yet the mere enumeration of the “Farnese Hercules,” the “Belvedere Apollo,” the “Venus of Milo,” and the “Venus of Medici,” witnesses to craftsmen of the highest technical skill. What the sculpture of Hellenistic Greece lacks is the passionate enthusiasm for emotional and intellectual beauty which impressed the personality of such a man as Praxiteles upon his age, and made him not only a sculptor of note but a cosmic force. Praxiteles found sculptural expression for new loves and new hates. This is the power which creates a school. It is the absence of men possessed of this faculty, together with the absence of the new loves and hates themselves, which the historian of Hellenistic Greek sculpture must explain.
But, first of all, terms require definition. “Hellenistic Greece” connotes both a period and a locality. In point of time, it roughly includes from 300 b.c., when the immediate influence of Lysippus was removed, to, say, 50 b.c., when Rome realized her task of ruling the Western world. In point of place, the sculpture of Hellenistic Greece is to be sharply distinguished from that of Rhodes, Pergamus, and Alexandria. This is the more important, as the term Hellenistic is properly applicable to all these schools. Moreover, there are many characteristics common both to the Hellenistic sculpture of Greece itself and the art of the various States of the Alexandrian empire. Neither Rhodes nor Pergamus, for instance, gave rise to masterful spirits of the type which directed the course of Hellenic art during the fourth and fifth centuries. Both Pergamus and Rhodes, however, were centres which had never encountered the full tide of Hellenic civilisation.
It was not hard to correlate political and social circumstances which had no counterpart in fourth- and fifth-century Greece with the characteristics which distinguished the “Dying Gaul” and the “Laocoon” from the sculptures of Praxiteles and Scopas. But in Greece, during the post-Alexandrian age, the problem is far more complicated. The old methods of life and thought lingered on. The difference between “Hellenic” and “Hellenistic” is far more intangible than it is in countries where the Greek city-state system had never taken root. It is true that even in Greece the peculiar political and social conditions which gave rise to Hellenic sculpture passed away. But, once developed, the body of ideas which arose from them continued to influence the sculptor and the public to whom he appealed.