Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/44

 a third of colossal magnitude, also in bronze, called Athene Promachos, placed between the Propylæa and the Parthenon, and visible from afar off, even to the navigator approaching Peiræus by sea.

It is not, of course, to Perikles that the renown of these splendid productions of art belongs: but the great sculptors and architects by whom they were conceived and executed, belonged to that same period of expanding and stimulating Athenian democracy which called forth a similar creative genius in oratory, in dramatic poetry, and in philosophical speculation. One man especially, of immortal name, — Pheidias, — born a little before the battle of Marathon, was the original mind in whom the sublime ideal conceptions of genuine art appear to have disengaged themselves from that hardness of execution and adherence to a consecrated type, which marked the efforts of his predecessors. He was the great director and superintendent of all those decorative additions whereby Perikles imparted to Athens a majesty such as had never before belonged to any Grecian city: the architects of the Parthenon and the other buildings Iktinus, Kallikrates, Korrebus, Mnesikles, and others worked under his superintendence: and he had, besides, a school of pupils and subordinates to whom the mechanical part of his labors was confided. With all the great additions which Pheidias made to the grandeur of Athens, his last and greatest achievement was out of Athens, the colossal statue of Zeus, in the great temple of Olympia, executed in the years immediately preceding the Peloponnesian war. The effect produced by this stupendous work, sixty feet high, in ivory and gold, embodying in visible majesty some of the grandest conceptions of Grecian poetry and religion, upon the minds of all beholders for many centuries successively, was such as never has been, and probably never will be, equalled in the annals of art, sacred or profane. Considering these prodigious achievements in the field of art only as they bear upon Athenian and Grecian history, they are