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CHAP. II

The plastic idea

§ 34. Fundamental characteristics of Hellenic Art.

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If it be asked what are the qualities most apparent in the best work of the Greeks, the answer will be-perfection in external form, combined with an indescribable inner repose and dignity. Now both these qualities depend upon the fact that the artist was in all cases working towards a very clearly realised conception of his themes. These were always of general interest, and had been constituted as substantial objects of thought long before he took them in hand. His selection of the plastic form as his vehicle of artistic expression was not accidental (see § 62), but followed naturally from his desire to give the utmost definiteness of shape to these distinctly formed conceptions. 'Inner repose and dignity' characterise his productions, because they are the work of a Greek, endowed with all the intellectual and moral equipment of his race; their perfection of form follows therefrom as a necessary artistic corollary.

§ 35. The underlying idea of Greek Sculpture-Hellas in opposition to the non-Hellenic.

Our task here is first to draw out these intellectual and ethical elements which composed, as it were, a grand underlying idea in Greek sculpture and made it the expression of the national mind, and next to show how this idea was wrought out in detail. It may at the outset surprise some readers to hear of a 'grand underlying idea' in Greek sculpture. Such ideas they would recognise at once in mediæval art, where the sublime themes of Judgment and Bliss and Condemnation, the drama of Redemption, the sacred history of the whole Creation, are unfolded in moving scenes before the spectator. But in Greek art, they would say — apart of course from questions of sculpturesque beauty — what is

there? Single figures for the most part, either at rest or fighting, acting again and again the well-worn rôles of heroes in contest with Centaurs or Amazons, or else majestically posed or enthroned with nothing in the world to do or care about! Where, it may be asked, do we find in Greek art the manifestation of any great common idea, the movement of a living mass with one heart and one passion? It is true that the Greeks, as sculptors and lovers of clear-cut, definite form, preferred to concentrate what they desired to express in one or two figures, rather than to diffuse the interest of their theme over a vast space of wall or roof, as was the manner of the mediæval painter. But a theme the Greeks had, and a noble one—as noble in its way as that which filled his mind who sketched the Prophets and Sybils on the vault of the Sistine. For this theme was Hellas; Hellas as a whole and all that it meant to the Greeks and to the world; Hellas as the realm of light and order, first won, then rescued and guarded, from the powers of darkness and disorder that surrounded it on every side. To understand this is to receive quite a new view of these familiar contending heroes and placid rulers of earth and sky. The first were creating and defending a social order that alone made light and reason and beauty possible to the world, the others in their serenity represented the triumph of the Hellenic ideal when the conflict was over and victory secure. If the same scenes, the same personages, are portrayed over and over again with what may at first seem wearisome iteration, it is because the great cause they represent is for ever present to the mind of both artist and public. The primary conception of Greek as opposed to barbarian, though it did not exist in Homer's day, was recognised by Thucydides as a result of the national development, and appears in all its strength in the writings of Attic philosophers and orators,

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CHAP. II Hellas against the non-Hellenic

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and this conception - Hellas against the non - Hellenic – formed the fundamental theme of Greek monumental art.

§ 36. 'Hellas,' in the celestial, the legendary, the
historical spheres.

There was, to begin with, a 'Hellas' in heaven, where the Olympian régime of light and order had been founded on the ruin of the older and darker Saturnian powers, and afterIwards had to be defended and rescued from the lawless attacks of the Titans and Giants, born of the ancient brood. On earth in the legendary days, so it was believed, the heroes, Heracles, Theseus, Bellerophon, issue of the gods, had slowly evolved a settled civic life from the chaos of a world the prey of monsters and robbers. To hold the conquest thus won they and their descendants had to stand together in battle against successive assaults of the nonHellenic powers of darkness and disorder. The Amazons were anti-social, opposed to family life, and Theseus beat them back from the Attica he had won and ruled. The Centaurs are personifications of mountain streams — the constant foes of the cultivator of the plain at the foot of hills seamed with watercourses. Like the streams in spring, down come the Centaurs from their caves and rocks on the peaceful haunts of men, striking great blows with stocks and stones, and must be met and vanquished by the Lapith sword. Then, later, the sons of the heroes join in conflict with the ever-watchful Oriental foemen of the Hellenic name in the war against Troy; again, and now in the full light of history, the contest is renewed upon Grecian soil against the embattled might of the East at Marathon and at Platæa; a memory of the bygone struggles still stirred the army of revenge that marched with Alexander of Macedon against the then broken Oriental

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powers. And if this was the final victory of Greek light and reason and beauty over the dark and hostile East, other foes from another point were at hand to make Hellas conscious of herself and all she had to defend. About 280 B.C. a swarm of barbarian Gauls burst into Northern Greece, overran Macedonia and Thessaly, turned the defence of Thermopylæ and menaced the seats of Hellenic civilisation in the South. But again, as at Marathon, the gods descended to protect their chosen homes, and divine hands, it was rumoured, hurled back the assailants from the Delphic shrine. Finally, a little later, successive Gallic hordes threaten the Greek cities in Asia Minor, and Attalus and Eumenes of Pergamon stand forth in defence of Hellenic civilisation and break the power of the barbarians.

§ 37. Ideal representation in Art of the contests of Hellas against the non-Hellenic.

To the Greek, who was as familiar with his gods as with his fellow-citizens, these struggles, poetical, legendary, historical, were all the same. In his idealising vein he would make the fight of Zeus against the Giants just as real as the battle of Eumenes against the Gauls, and Achilles and Alexander of Macedon were to him twin heroes in their work and in their glory. All were incidents in the eternal and ever-renewed contest of light and darkness, order and violence, and the incidents of the fights against the Centaurs and Amazons are used to cover references to the historical struggle of Hellas against Persia. This deep underlying idea is for ever finding expression in some one or other of these forms. The victory over Persia inspired indirectly all the monumental works of the culminating period of Greek sculpture, yet we may look in vain for direct historical representations of it in the plastic art. There was

CHAP. II

The Conflict in Art

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indeed a grand wall-picture in the Stoa Poikilé at Athens representing the battle of Marathon, painted by Micon and Panænus a generation after the event, but in sculpture the reference is always indirect, through some contest of Greeks and Trojans (as on the temple at Ægina) or of heroes against Centaurs and Amazons (as on the Parthenon, the temple of Zeus at Olympia and many a great shrine besides). The well-known figure of the Apollo Belvidere has been supposed to portray the god in the act of issuing forth from Delphi to defend in person his hallowed shrine against the Gauls. Attalus of Pergamon celebrates his victory by more or less matter-of-fact figures of contending and dying barbarians, remains of which have come down to us, but Eumenes his successor goes back to the old ideal style, and the whole grand series of monumental compositions, the glory of Hellenic art, closes with the splendid frieze from Pergamon (in the Berlin Museum) perhaps the most grandiloquent utterance of all sculpture, in which the monarch records his defeat of the Gauls under the figure of the old traditional overthrow of the invading Giants by the Olympian powers.

§ 38. Concentration of the interest of these contests in typical Protagonists.

In this way the Greeks, through these recognised subjects or 'stock themes' of sculpture, symbolised a contest of eternal principles, that was as vital to them as the conceptions of medieval theology to the frescoists of Italy.

True to the feeling for concentration already mentioned, and true too, as we shall see, to the genius of the sculptor's art, they personify these contending principles in a few individual protagonists. The battle is always going on between chosen individuals, a Hellene or Hellenic god or

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