Page:Greek Buildings Represented by Fragments in the British Museum (1908).djvu/114

 98 THE PARTHENON AND ITS SCULPTURES. Fig. 85. — Lyre from Frieze. sculptures " were in antiquity of little account as compared with the temple statues and bronzes of Phidias. Why then did Aristotle in a passage quoted by Visconti call Phidias a wise stonecutter? And may we not take this to be an allusion to the sculptures of the Parthenon? As to the frieze, the more I have studied it, the more I see that as a matter of design it is less sculpture than relief painting, if I may make use of such a term. The method of composi- tion, the rhythm of the lines, the heraldic pattern made by the horses' legs, the rapid sweep of the forms, have the closest affinity with vase-paint- ing. (Fig. 80.) The frieze must have been cut from drawings made, " swift as a hawk's flight," on the marble slabs set together like a long roll of canvas — bold brush drawings putting down the forms like a herald and not by " outlines." To speak of models for such work, either small or big, is beside the point. The relief is all chisel work and chisel thought, not " a marble model of a clay model." The drawing (and Phidias was a painter) was the master's. For the rest a pattern panel or two struck off by such a " stonecutter," with inconceivable rapidity, some touches and talks — that is all that was required. All this need only fill the chinks of time, while the ivory statue and the pediments were in progress. On the production of the frieze hear Ruskin : " A great sculptor uses his tool exactly as a painter his pencil, and you may recognise the decision of his thought and the glow of his temper no less in the workmanship than in the design. . . . The sculptor [now] thinks in clay instead of marble, and loses his instinctive sense of the proper treatment of a brittle sub- stance." On the Parthenon frieze the horses are in low relief, " yet by mere drawing you see the sculptor has got them to appear to recede in due order, and by a soft rounding of the flesh surfaces and modulation of the veins, he has taken away the look of flatness. He has drawn the eyes and nostrils with dark incision, careful as the finest touch of a painter's Fig. 86. A Vessel.