Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/745

 SCULPTURE 719 Greece and her colonies a series of works which became the models of form for their countrymen as well as for all succeeding sculp- tors. Statuary was at this time almost exclu- sively public, and the chief sculptors, Hegias, Pythagoras of Rbegium, Calamis, Ageladas, Phidias, Agoracritus and Alcamenes, both pu- pils of Phidias, Myron, and Polycletus, are known mainly by their statues of gods and heroes and their historical groups for the tem- ples, porticoes, theatres, and gymnasia, built from the spoils of war or the profits of new- ly developing commerce. Of these Phidias, Myron, and Polycletus, all scholars of Ageladas of Argos, were the most famous, and their works exhibited the dignity and almost pas- sionless tranquillity of mind characteristic of a heroic age, and of the lofty purposes for which its artists labored. Phidias of Athens, whose name is associated with the noblest architec- tural monuments and sculptures of the splendid era of Pericles, is generally placed at the head of all the sculptors of antiquity in the qualities of sublimity and severe beauty, his works bear- ing the same relation to those of subsequent stages of the art that the dramas of ^Eschylus do to the more polished productions of Sopho- cles or Euripides. His chryselephantine statues of Athena and the Olympian Zeus, the most celebrated of the kind ever made, exist only in the descriptions of ancient authors ; but in the Elgin marbles, executed under his direction and in part perhaps by himself, as has been generally supposed, we fortunately have splen- did and characteristic specimens of his genius. (See ELGIN MARBLES, and PHIDIAS.) The Phi- galian marbles in the British museum and the casts of the sculptured fragments from the temple of Theseus, in the same institution, are also in the style of Phidias or his school. Myron, who worked chiefly in bronze, was a great master of expression, and, from the fre- quent and honorable mention of him by classi- cal authors, must have been one of the most esteemed sculptors of antiquity. He was cele- brated for his figures of animals, but the dis- cobolus or quoit player, of which the palazzo Massimi in Rome and the British museum possess copies, is the only work by which he is now known. Polycletus, the head of the Argive school, as Phidias was of that of Athens, rivalled his great contemporary in every de- partment of his art, except the representations of gods, in which Phidias was never equalled. He even gained a victory over him in the rep- resentation of an Amazon. His statues of ath- letes were considered the perfection of man- ly beauty, and a youthful doryphorus (spear bearer) was so accurately proportioned as to be a standing model for sculptors. Toward the close of the Peloponnesian war a change took place in the habits and feelings of the Athe- nian people, under the influence of which a new school of statuary was developed. The people, spoiled by luxury and craving the pleasures and excitements which the prosperity of the 730 VOL. xiv. 46 age of Pericles had opened to them, regarded the severe forms of the older masters with even less patience than the austere virtues of the generation which had driven the Persians out of Greece. The sculptors, giving a reflex of the time in their productions, instead of the grand and sublime, cultivated the soft, the graceful, and the flowing, and aimed at an ex- pression of stronger passion and more dramatic action. Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, the favor- ite subjects of the Phidian era, gave place to such deities as Venus, Bacchus, and Amor; and with the departure of the older gods de- parted also the serene and composed majesty which had marked the representations of them. The great sculptors of this period of refine- ment or sensuous beauty, which begins about 400, were Scopas, Praxiteles, and Lysippus, by whom the art was brought to almost absolute perfection in respect to gracefulness of form and expression and technical qualities. Sco- pas excelled in single figures and groups, com- bining strength of expression with grace, rath- er than in architectural sculpture. The cele- brated group of Niobe and her children in the museum at Florence is attributed to him. The Venus Victrix of the Louvre, called also the Venus of Milo, was formerly also considered his work, but may more reasonably be regard- ed as a remnant of the sublime style developed under Phidias. The slab from the mausoleum of Halicarnassus, representing the battle of the Amazons, now in the British museum, is undoubtedly from his hand. Praxiteles was almost unrivalled as a sculptor of the female figure, and his statue of the Cnidian Aphro- dite, modelled from the courtesan Phryne, was a masterpiece of sensual charms. This work is said to have been the first instance in which any artist had ventured to represent the god- dess entirely divested of drapery, and the new ideal thus formed was frequently imitated by succeeding sculptors. It is doubtful whether any copies of it are in existence, although the Venus of the Vatican and that of the museo Pio Clementino are supposed to be such. The works of these two artists were executed chiefly in Parian marble, a material which now came into general use for single figures or groups, while the costly chryselephantine statues, and those made of wood and stone, called acroliths, gradually disappear. While Scopas and Praxi- teles represented what is known as the later Attic school, Lysippus of Sicyon carried out the principles of the Argive school of Poly- cletus by representing the human form and athletic power in the highest perfection. * He paid great attention to details, and by a care- ful imitation of nature gave a realistic charac- ter to his productions, under the influence of which portrait statues began to take the place of ideal creations. He appears to have worked only in bronze, and was the favorite sculptor of Alexander the Great, whose statues he had the exclusive privilege of making. The com- mencement of the fourth and last period in