Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/32

 study of these statues is very instructive in making clear to us the paths which sculptors had to follow in their progress from the stiffness and conventions of early periods to the ease and amplitude of classic perfection. As for the friezes from the temple of Apollo Epicurius, near Phigalia, they too are in the British Museum. Thus brought into immediate propinquity with the marbles from the Parthenon, with which they are almost cotemporarycontemporary [sic], they afford us some curious information. They show us what the art of Phidias and Alcamenes became when those sculptors had to work in what we should call "the provinces;" how much they preserved and how much they lost of their complete excellence when employed upon buildings erected at less cost and with less care than those of the capital. So far as the composition is concerned, the consummate facility and the natural verve of the master who supplied the sketches and models is never absent, but the execution, which must have been left to local artists, betrays their inferiority by its inequalities and general weakness. The same may be said of the figures with which Alcamenes and Pæonius ornamented the pediments and metopes of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Even before the discoveries at Ægina and Phigalia, the results of the French expedition to the Morea and the beautiful fragments of sculpture brought to the Louvre from the banks of the Alphæus, had given us reason to suspect this inferiority of provincial art, and the excavations recently undertaken by Germany, after an interval of about half a century of inaction, have finally removed all doubts. Neither the statues nor the bas-reliefs, nor any other part of the decoration of the temple at Olympia, possess the nobility and purity which distinguish the great buildings on the Athenian acropolis. They show abundant power and science, but also perceptible inequalities, and certain signs of that exaggerated objectivity which we now call realism. Each fresh discovery helps us to comprehend, not without a certain sense of surprise, how much freedom and variety Greek art possessed during its best time. There is none of that dull uniformity which, with other races, distinguishes most of the works of a single epoch, none of the tyranny of a single master or school, none of the narrowness of mere formulæ.