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| Fig. 48.—Head of Anytus: Lycosura. |
A great artist, whose date has been disputed, but who is now assigned to the Hellenistic age, Damophon of Messene, is known to us from his actual works. He set up in the shrine of the Mistress (Despoena) at Lycosura in Arcadia a great group of figures consisting of Despoena, Demeter, Artemis and the Titan Anytus. Three colossal heads found on the spot probably belong to the three last-mentioned deities. We illustrate the head of Anytus, with wild disordered hair and turbulent expression (fig. 48). Dr Dörpfeld has argued, on architectural grounds, that shrine and images alike must be given to a later time than the 4th century; and this judgment is now confirmed by inscriptional and other evidence.
In one important direction sculpture certainly made progress. Hitherto Greek sculptors had contented themselves with studying the human body whether in rest or motion, from outside. The dissection of the human body, with a consequent increase in knowledge of anatomy, became usual at Alexandria in the medical school which flourished under the Ptolemies. This improved anatomical knowledge soon reacted upon the art of sculpture. Works such as the Fighter of Agasias in the Louvre (Plate IV. fig. 69), and in a less degree the Apoxyomenus (Plate VI. fig. 79), display a remarkable internal knowledge of the human frame, such as could only come from the habit of dissection. Whether this was really productive of improvement in sculpture may be doubted. But it is impossible to withhold one’s admiration from works which show an astonishing knowledge of the body of man down to its bony framework, and a power and mastery of execution which have never since been surpassed.
With accuracy in the portrayal of men’s bodies goes of necessity a more naturalistic tendency in portraiture. As we have seen, the art of portraiture was at a high ideal level in the Pheidian age; and even in the age of Alexander the Great, notable men were rendered rather according to the idea than the fact. To a base and mechanical naturalism Greek art never at any time descended. But from 300 B.C. onwards we have a marvellous series of portraits which may be termed rather characteristic than ideal, which are very minute in their execution, and delight in laying emphasis on the havoc wrought by time and life on the faces of noteworthy men. Such are the portraits of Demosthenes, of Antisthenes, of Zeno and others, which exist in our galleries. And it was no long step from these actual portraits to the invention of characteristic types to represent the great men of a past generation, such as Homer and Lycurgus, or to form generic images to represent weatherbeaten fishermen or toothless old women.
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| Fig. 49.—Giant from Great Altar: Pergamum. |
Our knowledge of the art of the later Hellenistic age has received a great accession since 1875 through the systematic labours directed by the German Archaeological Institute, which have resulted in recovering the remains of Pergamum, the fortress-city which was the capital of the dynasty of the Philetaeri. Among the ancient Altar of Pergamum. buildings of Pergamum none was more ambitious in scale and striking in execution than the great altar used for sacrifices to Zeus, a monument supposed to be referred to in the phrase of the Apocalypse “where Satan’s throne is.” This altar, like many great sacrificial altars of later Greece, was a vast erection to which one mounted by many steps, and its outside was adorned with a frieze which represented on a gigantic scale, in the style of the 2nd century B.C., the battle between the gods and the giants. This enormous frieze (see Pergamum) is now one of the treasures of the Royal Museums of Berlin, and it cannot fail to impress visitors by the size of the figures, the energy of the action, and the strong vein of sentiment which pervades the whole, giving it a certain air of modernity, though the subject is strange to the Christian world. In early Greek art the giants where they oppose the gods are represented as men armed in full panoply, “in shining armour, holding long spears in their hands,” to use the phrase in which Hesiod describes them. But in the Pergamene frieze the giants are strange compounds, having the heads and bodies of wild and fierce barbarians, sometimes also human legs, but sometimes in the place of legs two long serpents, the heads of which take with the giants themselves a share in the battle. Sometimes also they are winged. The gods appear in the forms which had been gradually made for them in the course of Greek history, but they are usually accompanied by the animals sacred to them in cultus, between which and the serpent-feet of the giants a weird combat goes on. We can conjecture the source whence the Pergamene artist derived the shaggy hair, the fierce expression, the huge muscles of his giants (fig. 49); probably these features came originally from the Galatians, who at the time had settled in Asia Minor, and were spreading the terror of their name and the report of their savage devastations through all Asia Minor. The victory over the giants clearly stands for the victory of Greek civilization over Gallic barbarism; and this meaning is made more emphatic because the gods are obviously inferior in physical force to their opponents, indeed, a large proportion of the divine combatants are goddesses. Yet everywhere the giants are overthrown, writhing in pain on the ground, or transfixed by the weapons of their opponents; everywhere the gods are victorious, yet in the victory retain much of their divine calm. The piecing together of the frieze at Berlin has been a labour of many years; it is now complete, and there is a special museum devoted to it. Some of the groups have become familiar to students from photographs, especially the group which represents Zeus slaying his enemies with thunderbolts, and the group wherein Athena seizes by the hair an overthrown opponent, who is winged, while Victory runs to crown her, and beneath is seen Gaia, the earth-goddess who is the mother of the giants, rising out of the ground, and mourning over her vanquished and tortured children. Another and smaller frieze which also decorated the altar-place gives us scenes from the history of Telephus, who opposed the landing of the army of Agamemnon in Asia Minor and was overthrown by Achilles. This frieze, which is quite fragmentary, is put together by Dr Schneider in the Jahrbuch of the German Archaeological Institute for 1900.
Since the Renaissance Rome has continually produced a crop of works of Greek art of all periods, partly originals brought from Greece by conquering generals, partly copies, such as the group at Rome formerly known as Paetus and Arria, and the overthrown giants and barbarians which came from the elaborate trophy set up by Attalus at Athens, of which copies exist in many museums. A noted work of kindred school is the group of Laocoon and his sons (Plate I. fig. 52), signed by Rhodian sculptors of the 1st century B.C., which has been perhaps more discussed than any work of the Greek chisel, and served as a peg
