Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/378

Rh 356 AKCH^OLOGY [CLASSICAL tlienon. which is a head of the god so singularly powerful in type that we are tempted to believe it to be a copy from the head of the statue of Phidias, appealing to the analogy of the coins of Argus with what is accepted as a copy of the head of the figure of Hera by Polycletus. Among the existing examples of Greek sculpture there is only one which claims to be a direct work of Phidias, and that is one of the two colossal marble statues on the Monte Cavallo at Rome, inscribed respectively &quot;opus Phidise&quot; and &quot;opus Praxitelis&quot; (Clarac,3/^ee de Sculpture,])}. 812 A, No. 2043). Grand as both are, the marking of the pupils of the eyes and the treatment of the armour prove them to have been executed in Roman times, probably as copies of celebrated statues. The originals must clearly have been the work of one master, and the inscriptions being thus wrong in ascribing them to two, must be held as worthless. On the Sculptures other hand, we possess in the sculptures of the Parthenon pf the Par- a large series of works in marble at least designed or modelled by Phidias, and executed under his immediate care, if not in many cases finished by his own hands. These sculptures consist of figures in the round from the pedi ments, the metopes in high relief, and the frieze in low flat relief. The statues of the pediments have suffered most, and that mainly from two causes the antipathies or necessi ties of the early Christians, who converted the temple into a church ; and the fatal explosion produced by the falling of a shell among the powder stored in it dining the Venetian bombardment under Morosini, 1687. The extent of the mischief on this occasion is known from the drawings pre viously made of the temple as it stood, 1674, by Carrey, an artist in the employment of the French ambassador at the Porte. In 1805, Lord Elgin, then British ambassador at the Porte, removed all the sculptures that could be removed with safety to the building, shipped them to London, where, after a long dispute as to their merits, they at last, in 1815, found a permanent resting-place in the British Museum. (For a narrative of these proceedings, but especially for an exhaustive work on the Parthenon, see Michaelis, Der Parthenon, Leipsic, 1871 ; the sculptures are best engraved in Museum Marbles,vol. vi. ; the fragments in Athens, in Laborde, Le Parthenon, pis. 26-28). The subject of the eastern pediment was the birth of Athene; of the western, her contest with Poseidon for supremacy over Attica; but beyond the simple statement of Pausanias to this effect, we have no ancient record to enable us to identify the personages before whom these events took place. Hence the many different names which have been proposed from time to time for the surviving figures, especially for those of the eastern pediment, from which all the principal statues had disappeared before Carrey s time. Assuming, however, with the most recent authority (E. Petersen, Die Kunst des Pheidias, 1874), that the birth of Athene took place in Olympus, and that the deities assembled at the birth of Aphrodite, as represented by Phidias on the base of the statue at Olympia, were the recognised Olympians of his time, we obtain, beginning from Helios on the left, Dionysus, Demeter, and Core, Iris [Apollo, Artemis, Hephaestus, Athene, Zeus, Hera, Poseidon], Nike [Ares, Hermes], Hestia, Peitho, Aphrodite, and Selene, those in brackets being missing. The western pediment has suffered a much harder fate, though the difficulty of recalling the lines of the original composition is less, owing to the preservation of drawings made by Carrey before the bombardment which destroyed it. The metopes were ninety-two in number; those of the east and west only remain on the building, but have suffered severely from malicious destruction. Those of the north side, which survived the explosion, remain in Athens in bad condition; those of the south were removed by Lord Elgin, with the exception of one now in the Louvre and some fragments in Copenhagen. The subject a favourite one in the decoration of Greek architecture was a combat between Centaurs and Lapithre. Traces of red colour were found on the ground of the relief and of green on the draperies. The armour had been attached in metal, as is proved by the existing holes for that purpose. Dif ferences in style as well as in execution prove the variety of hands employed in the work, though everywhere is apparent the oneness of design which bespeaks the oversee ing master. The variety of hands is equally manifest in the frieze, but here it takes the form of insufficiency of execu tion, which no doubt arose from the difficulty of super vising work which had to be done up on the building. The subject of the frieze is a long festal procession, in which, though every variety of movement of horse and foot, of young and old, of men and women, perhaps of gods and goddesses, is introduced, the calm dignity of national pride and the knowledge of national worth reign supreme. Its entire length is 524 feet, its height from the ground 40 feet, its relief very low and flat. About two-thirds of it is preserved, nearly the half being in the British Museum. As to the procession itself, there are two opinions : either it is the procession with which it was usual to accompany annually the newly-made robe for Athene Polias, or it is the procession in which the victors at the Panathenaic games advanced to the Parthenon to receive their prizes and to attend a sacrifice in honour of Victory. The mantle of Phidias fell on his pupil Alcamenes Alcam (Pausanias, v. 10, 8), an Athenian, or, as others said, a Lemnian, the lofty conception in his figures of deities being highly praised (Quintilian, xii. 10, 8), while in point of gracefulness in womanly forms he appears to have excelled his master. His most celebrated work was a statue of Aphrodite for her temple, lv /o^rot?, of which, however, the merit of the last touch was ascribed to Phidias (Pliny, xxxvi. 5, 16). Her cheeks, hands, and fingers were specially admired; but as to the attitude and general effect we have no information, and are not justified in accepting the Aphrodite of Melus in the Louvre as a copy of it, much less the original work. How far he may have been possessed of the power of creating new ideal types is not expressly recorded, except in the instance of his statue of a triple Hecate, probably such as we know her in later works. On the other hand, there was doubt less scope for extending the new influence of Phidias in such types as those of ^Esculapius, Hephaestus, and Ares, and it has been conjectured that in his statues of these deities he succeeded in infusing the spirit of his master. Scarcely less famous was another pupil of Phidias, Snccesso Agoracritus of Parus, who so far identified himself with of phidit the master s style that two marble statues of deities by him were sometimes ascribed to Phidias. The one was a figure of Nemesis in Rhamnus; the other, a statue of Rhea in the Metroon at Athens (Pausanias, i. 3, 5). From his hand were also the bronze statues of Athene Itonia and of Zeus, in the temple of that goddess between Alal- comena3 and Coronea (Pausanias, ix. 34, 1). Next we have Colotes and Thrasymedes of Parus, both of whom occasionally aspired to retain the chryselephantine technique of the master; and finally, Theocosmus of Megara. How far the immediate successors of Phidias remained, whatever their peculiarities or eccentricities, still faithful to the general sentiment and manner of the mastei*, merely varying but always preserving essentially the theme struck by him, cannot be ascertained, unless we take the sculptures of the temple of Athene Nike at Athens, or of the Erech- theum, as typical examples of their work. And indeed they are well calculated to produce the impression of having been executed during the lull which must have followed his great impulse. (For the relief on the frieze