The Farnese Hercules
National Museum, Naples
The Followers of Lysippus
Putting aside then for the moment the characteristics which distinguish the art of Hellenistic Greece from that of the earlier age, let us fix our attention upon the long series of works which owe their inspiration to the great sculptors of the fourth century. Nowhere can any affinity with the works of Phidias and the other fifth-century masters be detected. The men of Hellenistic Greece were entirely out of sympathy with the ideals of Periclean Athens. But they could realize the emotions aroused by Scopas, with his insistence upon the struggles of the individual soul. They could seek to express for themselves the feminine graces of Praxiteles. Above all they realized the value of the more strenuous ideals embodied in the sculpture of Lysippus.
The “Farnese Hercules” affords a striking instance of the effect of the Hellenistic outlook upon a theme which had been closely identified with a Hellenic sculptor of the first order. Lysippus had done for Hercules what Praxiteles had done for Hermes. He fixed the type. The “Farnese Hercules,” however, is the work of the Athenian sculptor, Glycon, and dates from the first century b.c. Glycon has chosen the moment when the hero, worn out by his labours, stands with every muscle relaxed, resting. The keynote of his statue is to be found in
“The spreading shoulders, muscular and broad,
The whole a mass of swelling sinews.”
To the imagination of the Athenian of the age of Lysippus, this would have appeared forced. The muscularity of the hero would have struck him as excessive. Lysippus indeed satisfied the craving for a deeper naturalism, which arose from a surfeit of the sensuous idealism of Praxiteles. But his judgment would have avoided the pitfall of excessive realism which distinguishes Glycon’s conception of Hercules from that which any fourth-century Athenian would have formed.
A less significant example but in some respects an even more interesting one, is to be found in the magnificent nude, the “Cerigotto Bronze,” recovered, near the island after which it is named, about the year 1900. This derives its importance from the fact that it is a bronze original and not the work of a Roman copyist as so many Hellenistic marbles are.
The story of its romantic recovery would alone ensure this bronze becoming historic.
“A thousand years it lay in the sea
With a treasure wrecked from Thessaly.
Deep it lay ’mid the coiled sea-wrack.”
The second chapter in its history opened when a party of sponge-fishers happened upon what they found to be the wreckage of an ancient vessel which had run upon the rocks to the east of the island of Cerigotto and sunk in thirty fathoms of water. The cargo had evidently been the property of a dealer in antiques, the wreck probably dating from the second century b.c. A considerable portion of the cargo was brought to the surface.