The Charioteer (Bronze)
Delphi Museum
National Museum, Naples
Still the stiffness and conventionality of the archaic period died hard. Even in the works of Myron, whose reputation was established by the middle of the fifth century, there are still traces of archaic treatment, as in the hair. But in such a statue as his “Discobolus,” with its truthfulness to nature, its rhythmic grace of design and its triumphant mastery over all technical difficulties, we can realise how far the sculpture of his age was ahead of the best work possible fifty years earlier.
The mention of Myron, the earliest artist to benefit by the freeing of the plastic arts from the shackles of conventionalism, brings us upon one of the prime problems of Greek sculpture. Practically, the history of Greek sculpture depends upon the connections which can be established between the art and three leading ideals. The difficulty of really understanding it depends upon the distance we moderns have progressed—pardon us the term—from those three dominating ideas.
“How we jabber about the Greeks! What do we understand of their art, the soul of which is the passion for naked male beauty?” So says Nietzsche. And he proceeds to point out that for this very reason the Greeks had a perspective altogether different from our own. Nothing can be truer; nor can anything be more certain than that this truth must be realised absolutely by all who would penetrate beyond the outer courts of the temple of Hellenic sculpture. But though we cannot look at a Greek statue with the understanding of a Hellene, though classic sculpture is, as it were, written in an alien tongue, the historian can readily enumerate the influences by which the art was fostered, and the ideals which it sought to embody.
The first was a civic pride so intense that no Greek of the best period hesitated to sacrifice all individual considerations for the sake of the common weal. To the true Hellene, life was life in the Greek city-state.
The second was a realisation of the extent and limit of human powers so complete that it left little room for the idea of the extra-mundane God which Christian nations have found so satisfying. The immediate consequence was a religious tolerance so complete that we Christians, who are apt to estimate religious fervour by proselytising energy, too often regard it as proceeding from a mere poetical philosophy.
The third was a love, amounting to worship, for the human physical frame—for the actual bone, flesh and muscle, which make the man.
Every Greek statue owes its greatness to the intensity of the artist’s attachment to one or other of these dominating beliefs. The Panathenaic frieze on the Parthenon was, primarily, the result of the first; the great temple statues of Zeus, Hera, Athena and Asclepius represent the fruits of the second; the glorious series of athletic statues by Hellenic sculptors of every period witness to the potency of the third.
Like most ultimate problems, the puzzle goes back to a question of morality. To-day, virtue is personal, morality is practically a bargain between man and man and between the individual creature and his Creator. We cannot easily realise the position of the fifth-century Hellene, whose moral sense did not depend upon the promptings of an individual conscience, but upon the influence of an unwritten, but unbending, civil code. There was not one such code in Greece, but a hundred and fifty. Each city-state had its own fixed ideals. Greatly as these differed, all agreed that the interests of the individual were as nothing compared with those of the city. And to this all added as the second great commandment, “Thou shalt love thy body as thyself.” To-day, we appoint Degeneration Commissions. In Greece they went to the root of the matter and made a well-proportioned and strong body a prime condition of citizenship. In Sparta every child was submitted to the inspection of the heads of the tribe, whose task it was to decide if any bodily weakness or deformity was present or seemed likely to develop. If so, the verdict was death. At seven the Spartan boy left home and entered the state schools, his life, until he reached manhood at thirty, being a continual round of exercises, athletic and military. And so it was with the fairer sex. The one end of the education and training of a Spartan woman was to give birth to perfectly-proportioned sons. Each girl attended the public gymnasium. Nor were these customs peculiar to Sparta. The maidens of the Greek world had their athletic festivals, under the guardianship of the goddess Hera. A typical example, the Heræa of Elis, was celebrated once in every Olympiad, and was presided over by the sixteen matrons who had woven the sacred peplos of the goddess. The principal solemnity was the race of the maidens in the Olympic stadium. The course, however, was much shorter than that of the Olympian games, in fact a sixth part. The girls were divided into three classes according to age, their prize being the garland of wild olive awarded at Olympia. The victors were allowed to set up statues of honour, and a marble copy of one of these bronzes, often called “The Spartan Girl,” has come down to us. The forearms have been wrongly restored, but the statue evidently represents a maiden of about sixteen years of age at the starting-point, waiting for the signal. She is clad in the short linen chiton, reaching to the knees.
But to return to the main thread of our argument. The Spartan system was not singular but typical. It is true that no other Greek state called upon its parents to expose their halt, maimed, and blind weaklings on the wild slopes of Mount Taygetus. So drastic a method was only necessary where military considerations were paramount. But every Greek city relied upon the physical fitness of its citizens, and any Greek commander might confidently have followed the example of the officer who stripped the rich robes and jewels from his Persian captives and exposed their unmanly limbs to his company. “Such plunder as this,” he cried, “and such bodies as those!”
The Hellenic belief in the prime importance of physical fitness and the worship of bodily beauty to which it gave rise explain why the school of “Athletic” sculptors, who first shook off the chains which had hampered the progress of the plastic arts, made such an immediate impression. These men appealed to more than the sense of physical beauty. They touched a chord in the Greek heart which was in a very true sense “religious.” An Athenian of the time of Pericles must have inspired Mr. Arthur Balfour when in answer to the query “What do you mean by a beautiful soul?” he replied, “Well, to tell you the truth, my dear lady, I mean a beautiful body.”
The mythological religion of Greece had retarded, as we have seen, the progress of the sculptor. In its early stages the art, of course, owed much to its position as a handmaiden of religion. The first artists found the priests, and still more those making dedicatory offerings at the shrines of the great gods, their chief patrons. When, however, the craftsmen proved the possibility of not only a truthful but even an ideal representation of nature, and were ready to discard the meaningless conventionalities of the earlier stage, these religious influences proved a bar rather than an aid to progress. When a city desired to erect a new statue in its chief temple, it offered the commission, not to the daring innovator, but to one of the old school, or at least to an artist who was willing to confine his experiments to other classes of subjects.