Part 7
Kresilas, we can well understand, might have shown us Pericles the warrior, or Pericles the orator, or Pericles the lover of philosophy and the arts, and in doing so might have given a more striking impression of one or more of the special qualities by which his contemporaries were impressed. Instead of this he succeeded in setting before us the complex of all these qualities, and many more, that formed Pericles the man. The helmet lifted back from the face reminds us of his military career but does not force this on our attention.[29] The expression of the face is not in the least dreamy but is thoughtful and grave; an expression which, considering his life and friends, must have been habitual when he was in repose. It should not be forgotten that the attitudes assumed by the body when at rest show the presence or lack of inborn grace and dignity, and the expression of the face when in repose is an index to the mental nature. The expression of the eyes is open; the gaze is steady; the brow is undisturbed. The impression given by the eyes is of clear, highly developed intelligence. In the mouth which, as pointed out above, is the most indicative single feature in portrait sculpture, may be seen even more markedly than in the eyes, the man’s character. It is a very noticeable mouth, with full and softly modelled lips, lips such as usually suggest a weak and sensuous character. But this mouth is neither insignificant nor weak. Its great sensitiveness passes into firmness in the closure of the lips and the strong jaw, and shows itself not as that of an ungoverned and libitudinous nature, but of a reserved and, in the best way, sensitive quality. It is a mouth that implies vigour but not self-will; the mouth of a very sensitive and appreciative, but not a sensual man.
Besides the character of eyes and mouth, the treatment of the whole head must be studied in order to understand what the critic meant when he wrote that this work made a noble man still nobler. The treatment is broad. The minor and accidental details are disregarded that the general effect may be clearer. The curling hair of head and beard, for instance, is not tossed about in disordered masses, as so often in later works, but is conventionalised. The artist realised that he could not imitate hair, and consequently sought for the best graphic symbol by which to suggest curls. In the modelling of the face he chose an expression of quietness and not one of any fitful, momentary emotion; and by not representing any slight irregularities of surface or structure, he emphasised and made more inevitably noticeable that expression which was most completely indicative of the man’s essential nature. He has given us not alone Pericles the leader of the state, nor Pericles the patron of the fine arts, nor Pericles the impassioned orator, but the Pericles of history, the embodiment of all the best qualities bred in Athens.
It must not be thought that the Pericles head alone exhibits the qualities of both artist and sitter which I have attempted to suggest. In their various ways the portraits of Sophocles, Euripides, Demosthenes, the so-called Menander (Plate XLV), Periander (Plate XLVI) and many another famous Greek show similar æsthetic feeling.
It was but a short time after the death of Pericles that the intellectual conditions of Greece underwent a great change. Beliefs that, heretofore, had been universally held by the Greeks began to be questioned, and the conditions of state-craft passed into a new phase. The rise and fall of the Macedonian power was of lasting effect on the Greek character. Alexander exhibits the type, which became common again in the Renaissance, of the selfish despot who maintained his power by having the money to maintain his personal influence. His thoughts were set chiefly on his own personal glory as expressed in his empire. He tried, but unsuccessfully, to make his court the centre of the artistic life of the day. He was not a patron of the arts but of artists. To Lysippus alone was granted the right to carve his portrait. No natural development of the arts was possible under such conditions.
The granting of such a monopoly to Lysippus shows that Alexander was merely interested in producing on posterity a good effect so far as his portraits could help him to do so. Copies of some of these portraits exist. They are fine in many ways and, to a high degree, lifelike, but they and other similar works of the epoch lack the quietness and repose of the works of earlier times. There is a melodramatic feeling in the looser treatment of the hair, and, oftentimes, an attempt to give a superhuman expression to the face.
These qualities, as critics have often noticed, are to be found in all the forms of art of the time, so far as we now have the means of judging. Even in architecture there is a noticeable change. Stone is not laid so carefully, the cutting of details is coarser and mouldings are heavier; masses are less finely proportioned and the effects of light and shade are made more definite and striking. The miniature portraits on gems and coins show the same characteristics as the large busts, and the mere fact of putting portraits of contemporary rulers on the coinage shows that the relation of the individual to the state had changed and that, on the one hand, the desire for personal fame was spreading over the world—a desire which became still more marked in the Roman and Renaissance epochs; while on the other the worship of rulers, introduced from the Orient, had firmly entrenched itself. In fact, these Hellenistic portraits are not simple. While the technique is still Greek, there is something else in them than the desire of the artist to show the sitter as he appeared to his contemporaries, even in a rightly idealised manner,—they manifest the desire of the sitter to be admired.
The tendencies of the time were all towards exactness of representation of existing forms, and this was soon attained. Perhaps it would have been reached even sooner had it not been for certain interests which held the sculptors partially to the old-time aims. One such conservative influence is shown in the work of Silanion, who became famous for his portraits of persons dead long before his day. Such work, if it was to satisfy a large public, and this was what it aimed at and succeeded in doing, had to be of a broad, general and unemphasized character, for the nature and appearance of persons known only by tradition is necessarily more vaguely and variously observed, less easily and surely grasped, than that of the living. Hence, if Silanion had made portraits that suggested strongly what seemed to him the most vital characteristic of the person represented, he would probably have found that many of his contemporaries considered some very different characteristic the most essential. To please the many it was needful for his work to embody only those ideas that were generally accepted. Such work cannot be realistic in the sense of attracting attention to detailed peculiarities.
Greek portraiture became rapidly more and more prosaically realistic. But even in its last stages, when Greek artists were still employed by Greek patrons, the realism is generally restrained. The old conventionalism and typifying of the model is gone, and there is greater frankness in the rendering of special peculiarities of hair or skin; but the work is generally quiet and dignified, calm in expression and reposeful in action. The artist puts before us not the type and idea suggested by the man, nor, except in special cases, the man’s own desire regarding his appearance, but the real daily aspect of the man, dressed up not at all, treated in accordance with the essential rules of sculpture as a fine art.
That there were, however, some artists who amused themselves and a thoughtless public with portraits that were vulgarly realistic—realistic, that is, in the representation of ugly and unessential details—is shown by what we know of Demetrius of Alopeke. He is noted solely for his successful rendering of ugliness. But there was too much cultivated taste in what remained of the Greek world, and too much vigour and good sense in the growing Roman world, for such work to become popular. To see realism developing in a strong and healthy manner, we must turn to Rome where, though the actual carving was done, with few exceptions probably, by Greek workers, still the character of the work itself was controlled by Roman ideas (Plate XLVII).
[Illustration: PLATE XLVIII.]
The dry, matter of fact quality of Roman portraiture as opposed to the more imaginative work of the Greeks, has long been recognised. Its direct and unadorned presentation of the human face is noted by the most careless observer and is to most people pleasing. It makes them feel at ease; they have the sensation of being with real people; it does not demand of them a mental effort to analyse the appearance before them in order to understand it. But notwithstanding the facility with which one derives very definite, and it may be lasting, impressions from these Roman busts, they are by no means as simple and artless as they seem at first sight to be. They are the product of complex influences and a highly developed art and are as difficult to understand and properly appreciate as are the earlier Greek ones.
We may illustrate what has been said by glancing a moment at a portrait of an unknown old man[30] (Plate XLVIII). This is a superb example of Roman portraiture of the time of the Republic. It cannot lay claim to any beauty of form or feature; it is uncompromisingly homely. Nevertheless it has a certain fascination for the beholder. The sculptor was a great master. The way in which he has rendered the signs of old age in the withered neck, the irregular wrinkles of the brow, and the uneven mouth is magnificent. It is realism of a perfect kind, for the evidence of the wear and tear of life is subdued by and made minor to the splendid and enduring vigour of the mind and character behind the cheerful old face. What an old age! The sap may be running slow, the body may show the blows dealt by life, but the stiff, short hair is still thick, the head is still held upright and forward. It is a face of a clean-living, plain-thinking man, one who had “held both hands before the fires of life,” and seems to scarcely suppress a smile at the thought that any one should want the portrait of his old face.
Roman art, as a whole, was practical and uninspired, and far from imaginative. In large measure it served either to answer some definite practical end or to satisfy (as in the decoration of palaces) the Roman taste for grandeur and display. It shows the influence of a less full-hearted and unquestioning religious inspiration than that which had such marked effect on the early art of Greece and again in the Renaissance. The work of all the various branches of art produced in the Roman territory before the importation of Greek artists was of the rudest. It was necessary to employ Etruscans to decorate the temple of the Capitoline Jove and until the first century before Christ the artistic product of Rome seems to have been scanty. The energies of the people were expended in war and colonisation. They were essentially a commercial race. The existence of their city was derived from and depended on their control of foreign trade. The first necessity of such a city was to master the business of political organisation and not to cultivate the tastes that minister to affluence and ease. Pride of race and the acquisition of great wealth were results of the transformation of the small republic into the great empire, and with pride and money came luxury, and the arts, with the desire for portraits.
[Illustration: PLATE XLIX.]
Pliny tells of portraits made of wax, owned by the various families, which were carried in funeral processions,—how these were considered as belonging to the house and in case of the sale of the latter passed with it to the new owner; such portraits as these would, like the earlier Egyptian ones, tend to the purest realism of external appearance. He mentions also the muniment rooms filled with records of ancestors. Stress was laid on the actions of the illustrious dead in order that the ensuing generations might be stirred to ambitious effort. Very different is this from the Grecian sinking of the individual in the state. Roman tombstones exhibit the same pride in great deeds and the same interest in details. They are entirely different from the Greek grave monuments. The Greek gives the name of the deceased, and sometimes a greeting to the living wayfarer who may pass by and note the tomb; or, sometimes he inscribed a plaintive verse—the expression of a broken heart—but nothing more. How old were the dead? What had they done? No one now can tell. Their course was run and the restless curiosity of later ages must remain unsatisfied. On Roman tombstones all this is very different. They tell us the age and family of the deceased, their occupation, what offices they had held and their age even to days. In the cases where a portrait of the dead person is added, it is treated in no general and typical way; but the individual is set before us with unsparing accuracy.
This interest in the events of each individual life led to the chief difference between Roman and Greek portrait busts. The Roman thought of the great men of his country as the persons who had done such and such things rather than as the leaders of such and such policies. Consequently, the Roman portraits suggest activity and not repose,—action and not thought. The idea embodied in the bust is not of a placid and meditative but of a positive and active cast. The portraitist seems almost always to represent his sitters at the moment when they were accomplishing the great deed that brought them fame. The eyes are made expressive by being distinctly focussed, and this expression is emphasised by the treatment of the brow, which oftentimes is more or less wrinkled or contracted in a way that suggests vigorous, passing, mental action. In many cases the ball of the eye is cut so as to produce a strong shadow and thus to suggest the pupil. This also makes the fixed look more intense, but unless the light is exactly right it is apt to produce an unpleasant appearance.
That an artist should do this shows the desire for dramatic, restless effects. The treatment of the lips and the part of the face about the mouth also suggests an expression not typical of any general trend of thought so much as of some momentary and strong emotion. Then the way the head is set on the neck and turns sharply to one side or the other can be understood only by supposing that the artist represented the sitter as he appeared when employed on some one active and characteristic piece of work. There is, for instance, in Corbulo none of the Greek treatment of the individual as a type, but everything is done to make more prominent the individualities of the man. And just as the Pericles is not alone in its class, so too the Corbulo is matched by many others, such as the Julius Cæsar, the Augustus, Caracalla or Antoninus Pius (Plate XLIX).
[Illustration: PLATE L.]
As one looks at these Roman portraits one frequently feels that the persons are on the point of moving. But notwithstanding this quality of life which has led to their being called realistic, the best of them are no more merely superficial in their realism than the best Greek busts. Neither class is vulgarly realistic and imitative solely in the external, but both depend for their effect on the correct comprehension and presentation of actual phenomena of form and facial expression. The different effect they produce is due to the fact that the Greek desired an expression of the inner man, the man as he was to himself, while the Roman desired the expression of the man as he showed himself to others. Putting the case concisely, and remembering that such conciseness does not express the completest truth, we may say that one was the portrait of man as a thinker, the other of man as a doer.
In the foregoing explanation of the nature of Roman portraits, no account has been taken of the numerous beautiful busts of children and women that were carved by the sculptors of the Eternal City. At first sight these seem to contradict the contention that the almost universal intention of the Roman sculptor was to make a portrait of a single sharply defined phase of his sitter’s personality. They seem to be done rather in accordance with Greek taste; but closer study will reveal that they are not truly Greek,—that their real nature is Roman and their seeming Grecian spirit is an illusion due to accident and not to intention.
Busts of children or women made to show character in action could never resemble the Roman busts of men. The qualities that make the character of men are non-existent, or at least undeveloped, in the child, and in the woman take another form. The Greek by his generalising and typifying process which brought about the production of placid figures was led to express chiefly those qualities which produce similar effects in all faces. The Roman, though searching for active expression still noted in the child as the most beautiful and characteristic qualities, softness, roundness and breadth of modelling, and the dignity of infantine demeanour. Hence the Roman heads of children have a somewhat Greek look, but in every part, as for example the hair, where stress can be laid on accidental and purely individual appearance, this is done (Plate L). The Greek appearance was inherent in the object; the most suggestive symbol to express curled or straight locks was sought, but to carve hair in all its fairness of strand, in all its waving masses or its fantasticalities of fashion, was not the aim of the sculptor. In Roman work the hair is scarcely ever conventionalised in a Grecian manner but shows the fashion of the day. Usually, the head is not symmetrically placed, but is turned to one side or the other, implying that the child’s attention was attracted to some special object.
The same points are to be noted in the portraits of women. In their faces as in children’s the beauty and softness of feature led to something like a Greek breadth of modelling, but the hair and the action of the head are purely Roman (Plate LI).
[Illustration: PLATE LI.]
The Florentine portraits show these same characteristics. Among them also the children and women seem at first glance to be Grecian or Venetian in character, but, when looked at more closely, one sees that those features which are not mere copies of nature but which show artistic intention are not Venetian, nor Greek, in character, but Roman. Yet another class of Florentine monuments which are at first sight misleading in the same way are the recumbent statues on tombs. In these the Greek quality of quietness and repose is very marked and is due to the artist being called upon to represent faces modelled by the stilling touch of death and no longer to be thought of as showing active forces. But even in these figures the intense actuality of feature, the lack of conventionalising and typifying, is noticeable. In fact there is little doubt that oftentimes the artist did his work not from sketches of the living model but from a death mask.
If now we consider from a more general point of view this art of portraiture and its relationship to times and peoples, certain things become clear. Portraiture may be due, as in Egypt, to some religious motive, but this is uncommon. Where it develops as an art, simply for its æsthetic value, we note that it becomes a general practice only as ideal and imaginative work loses ground. While the Greeks never, in a certain sense, showed much imagination in their sculpture, it is unquestionable that towards the end of the fifth century B.C., when portraiture becomes prominent, the idealising and religious works decrease and deteriorate. The same truth holds good in Italy during the Renaissance, when much more imagination was shown than in Greece.[31] Portraiture is due to a family interest in its own members or to a people’s interest in an individual. It is not practised (for artists such as Silanion are not true _portraitists_) by the artist to please himself.
But whatever may be the interests, private or public, that call for portraiture, the art becomes common only in times of centralisation, times when large fortunes, and hence great power, are possessed by individuals. Furthermore, no matter who may be the persons represented (setting aside women and children) it is not possible to carve or paint them except in one of two ways, as an embodiment of thought, or as an embodiment of action. The former method appealed to Greeks and Venetians,—the latter better pleased the Romans and Florentines. Both are realistic because both strive to show in one way or another actually existent forms and expressions. It depends on each man’s natural temperament which will give him most satisfaction. Other methods are frequently adopted in the modern struggle for originality, but it is safe to say that they will exert little influence on the development of art, for, while they may be clever devices, while they make certain effective features particularly prominent, they are still unsatisfactory because they produce at best but a partial likeness. If it be granted that there are but two great methods of portraiture, there is yet no reason to fear that dulness will ensue. The interest excited by the individual man comes from the character shown.
There are just double as many portraits, potentially, as there are individuals, and the interest of portraiture lies in what the artist makes us comprehend of the nature of the man. Too often the public is deceived into thinking that the work of handicraftsmen, with little or no power of reading and understanding character, is to be judged as true portraiture. Such work may be decorative in chiaroscuro, it may be pleasant as colour; but the mere drawing of a face, even if what is called a good likeness is produced, is not portraiture. It is but the outer husk and dead wrapping hiding the vital germ within.
II. PHEIDIAS AND MICHAEL ANGELO
Different as were the lives and works of the two sculptors whose names are more familiar to us than those of any others, there were, nevertheless, many circumstances of closely related character that affected their careers. But apart from such circumstances the consideration of even those influences which were absolutely different in the one case and in the other, exhibits clearly some of the broader laws of the art practised by them both. In truth, it is the art rather than the individual style of the sculptors that is worth study, for the art is a language, the works but the expression of single ideas; the one is a perpetual and constantly varying power, the other but separate thoughts expressed.