Ancient History & Civilisation

V. PRAXITELES

The sculptural masterpiece of the period was the great mausoleum dedicated to King Mausolus of Halicarnassus. Nominally a satrap of Persia, Mausolus had extended his personal sway over Caria and parts of Ionia and Lycia, and had used his rich revenues to build a fleet and beautify his capital. When he died (353), his devoted sister and wife, Artemisia, held a famous oratorical contest in his honor, and summoned the best artists of Greece to collaborate upon a tomb that should be a fitting memorial to his genius. She was a queen by nature as well as by marriage; when the Rhodians took advantage of the King’s death to invade Caria, she defeated them by clever strategy, captured their fleet and their capital, and soon brought the rich merchants to terms.32 But her grief over the death of Mausolus weakened her, and she died two years after him, before she could see the completed monument that was to give a word to every Western tongue. Slowly Scopas, Leochares, Bryaxis, and Timotheus raised a rectangular tomb of white marble slabs over a base of bricks, covered it with a pyramidal roof, and adorned it with thirty-six columns and a wealth of statuary and reliefs. A statue of Mausolus,* calm and strong, was found among the ruins of Halicarnassus by the English in 1857. Still more finished in workmanship is a frieze* showing again the struggle of Greeks and Amazons. These men, women, and horses are among the chefs-d’oeuvres of the world’s bas-reliefs. The Amazons are not masculine females built for battle; they are women of a voluptuous beauty that should have tempted the Greeks to something gentler than war. The Mausoleum took its place, with the third temple at Ephesus, among the Seven Wonders of the World.

In many respects sculpture now reached its apogee. It lacked the stimulus of religion, and fell short of the majestic power of the Parthenon pediments; but it took a new inspiration from feminine grace, and achieved a loveliness never equaled before or since. The fifth century had modeled nude men and draped women; the fourth preferred to carve nude women and clothed men. The fifth century had idealized its types, and had cast or chiseled the harassed life of man into an emotionless repose; the fourth century tried to realize in stone something of human individuality andfeeling. In male statuary the head and face took on more importance, the body less; the study of character replaced the idolatry of muscle; portraits in stone became the fashion for any subject who could pay. The body abandoned its stiff, straight pose, and leaned at ease upon a stick or tree; and the surface was modeled to let in the living play of light and shade. Anxious for realism, Lysistratus of Sicyon, apparently first among the Greeks, fitted a plaster mold upon the subject’s face, and made a preliminary cast.33

The representation of sensuous beauty and grace came to perfection in Praxiteles. All the world knows that he courted Phryne, and gave a lasting form to her loveliness, but no one knows when he was born or when he died. He was both the son and father of sculptors named Cephisodotus, so that we picture him as the climax of a family tradition of patient artistry. He worked in bronze as well as marble, and won such repute that a dozen cities competed for his services. About 360 Cos commissioned him to carve anAphrodite; with Phryne’s help he did, but the Coans were scandalized to find the goddess quite nude. Praxiteles mollified them by making another Aphrodite, clothed, while Cnidus bought the first. King Nicomedes of Bithynia offered to pay the heavy public debt of the city in return for the statue, but Cnidus preferred immortality. Tourists came from every nook of the Mediterranean to see the work; critics pronounced it the finest statue yet made in Greece, and gossip said that men had been stirred to amorous frenzy by viewing it.*34

As Cnidus achieved fame through the Aphrodite, so the little town of Thespiae in Boeotia, birthplace of Phryne, attracted travelers because Phryne had dedicated there a marble Eros by Praxiteles. For she had asked of him, as a proof of his love, the most beautiful of the works in his studio. He wished to leave the choice to her; but Phryne, hoping to discover his own estimate, ran to him one day with news that his studio was on fire; whereupon he cried out, “I am lost if my Satyr and my Eros are burned.”35Phryne chose the Eros, and gave it to her native town. Eros, once the creator god of Hesiod, became in Praxiteles’ conception a delicate and dreamy youth, symbolizing the power of love to capture the soul; he had not yet become the mischievous and sportive Cupid of Hellenistic and Roman art.

Presumably the Satyr of the Capitoline Museum in Rome, known to us as Hawthorne’s Marble Faun, is a copy of the work that Praxiteles preferred to his Eros. Some have thought that a torso in the Louvre is part of the original itself.36 The satyr is represented as a well-formed and happy lad, whose only animal element is his long and pointed ears. He is resting lazily against a tree trunk, with one foot crossed behind the other. Seldom has marble conveyed so fully the sense of idle ease; all the charming carelessness of boyhood is in the relaxed limbs and trustful face. Perhaps the limbs are too rounded and soft; Praxiteles looked too long at Phryne to be able to model a man. The Apollo Sauroctonus—Apollo the Lizard-Killer—is so feminine that we are half inclined to class him with the hermaphrodites that abound in Hellenistic statuary.

Pausanias remarks with regrettable brevity that among the statues in the Heraeum at Olympia was “a stone Hermes carrying Dionysus as a babe, by Praxiteles.”37 German excavators digging on the site in 1877 crowned their labors by finding this figure, buried under centuries of rubbish and clay. Descriptions, photographs, and casts miss the quality of the work; one must stand before it in the little museum at Olympia, and clandestinely pass the fingers over its surface, to realize the smooth and living texture of this marble flesh. The messenger god has been entrusted with the task of rescuing the infant Dionysus from the jealousy of Hera, and taking him to the nymphs who are to rear him in secret. Hermes pauses on the way, leans against a tree, and holds up a cluster of grapes before the child. The infant is crudely done, as if the inspiration of the artist had been exhausted on the older god. The right arm of the Hermes is gone, and parts of the legs have been restored; the remainder is apparently as it came from the sculptor’s hand. The firm limbs and broad chest show a healthy physical development; the head is in itself a masterpiece, with its aristocratic shapeliness, its chiseled refinement of features, and its curly hair; and the right foot is perfect where perfection in statuary is rare. Antiquity considered this a minor work; we may judge from this the artistic wealth of the age.

Another passage in Pausanias38 describes a marble group set up by Praxiteles in Mantinea. Excavation has found the base alone, bearing the figures of three Muses, carved probably by the pupils rather than by the master. If we put together the references in extant Greek writings to statues by Praxiteles, we find some forty major works;39 and these were doubtless but a part of his abundant production. We miss in the remains the sublimity and strength, the dignity and reverence of Pheidias; the gods have made way for Phryne, and the great issues of national life have been put aside for private love. But no sculptor has ever surpassed the sureness of Praxiteles’ technique, the almost miraculous power to pour into hard stone ease and grace and the tenderest sentiment, sensuous delight and woodland joyousness. Pheidias was Doric, Praxiteles is Ionic; in him again we have a premonition of that cultural conquest of Europe which was to follow Alexander’s victories.

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