Part 8
Naturally the two interests, one that of becoming more familiar with the products of the “fine intelligence of noble minds,” the other the more abstract one of a more intimate knowledge of the powers and possibilities of one of the fine arts, are inextricably combined. The study of the two sculptors mentioned is particularly interesting owing to the ever-increasing production of sculpture in our own day; and owing to various conditions in modern life, there is a close relationship in many important matters between us and these two masters of days long past. Therefore, whatever can be certainly learned about them will help us to appreciate more truly the work and workers of to-day and to-morrow. Nothing can help more to attain this appreciation and sympathy than the study of the great workers of past ages, even when they may to a casual glance seem to be of somewhat remote interest.
The work of men such as Pheidias and Michael Angelo cannot be considered by any serious student as in fact remote from our time and interests. The study of the Past, particularly that part filled by Greece, becomes every day more and more general and the influence of the Renaissance in Italy upon modern thought and work is seen on every hand; here we come to the first noteworthy fact regarding these two sculptors. It is not going too far to say that all the best Greek sculpture, that is to say, what was produced during the latter half of the fifth century before Christ and the fourth century, was strongly influenced by Pheidias and that his influence shows itself intermittently until the end of the ancient world.
It would of course be too much to claim Pheidias as the originator of all the qualities in sculpture which are apt, nowadays, to be named Pheidian, but as the master who most adequately expressed the ideals held in his time so far as sculpture allowed of their expression, he may be used as the type; and among the varied interests which Michael Angelo and the other students of the Renaissance found in Greek work were several that may properly be called Pheidian.
This influence of Greek work on the Renaissance can hardly be over estimated. It shows itself in many ways and with varying force,—sometimes producing direct imitation of ancient works, then again becoming manifest in new work done with the intention of reviving the spirit of the ancient world. Michael Angelo did not fall under the spell as completely as many of his less vigorously original contemporaries, but it was no more to be entirely avoided by him than one of the laws of nature. Thus with the work of the Greeks directly affecting us to-day in a very similar way to that in which it affected the Italians in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and with the work of the later period, deeply tinctured with the Grecian dye, also influencing us, it becomes deeply interesting to find in what the greatest artists of the two periods were alike and wherein they differed one from the other.
The influence of Pheidias on the art of his race was not so much that of the originator or inventor as it was that of the poet, who gathering the various and unconnected beauties that are felt by all, though less keenly than by him, binds them together by the indefinable power of his genius and gives back to the admiring world not separate things of beauty but a standard of the beautiful and perfect. And this power of genius deals with such finenesses, is so subtle, that oftentimes it is almost beyond the power of words to make clear the manner of its working. As the sensitiveness of the photographic plate is greater than that of the eye, so the trained and perceptive eye notes much that can only with difficulty be expressed by words. The genius is felt, it thrills and vivifies the observer, but it cannot be expounded like a problem in mathematics.
For this reason, we must believe, the few great writers on these matters are oftentimes scoffed at by persons whose eyes have not been trained to see nor their hearts to understand. Not that the scoffers can be blamed for this unhappy sterility of their powers, for in most cases the circumstances of life have not been of that fortunate kind which would enable them to acquire the finer faculties. They are only to be blamed in so far as either through envy or stupidity they refuse to believe that others may be endowed with power which is lacking to them—power dependent upon long and arduous training. It is a curious but familiar phenomenon that the person who will not hesitate an instant to admit that the trained rider or sportsman or oarsman can ride, shoot or row better than he can, will energetically claim for himself as fine-seeing an eye, or a mind as keenly interpretative, as the practised artist or the scholar. That is, he asserts that the exercises of the body need training, but those of eye and brain do not, a theory manifestly absurd.
The genius of Pheidias is so ultimate in its fineness that it needs long training before it can be properly appreciated. If this is doubted, one has but to consider the fact, that among all the numerous references to him and his work which are preserved for us in ancient writers, not one mentions him, as his elder contemporaries Myron, Pythagoras, Kalamis or many others are mentioned, as having been the first to institute any
## particular detail of carving. No new treatment of the hair, no new way
of representing the body, no special scheme of proportion are attributed to him, and yet the absolute consensus of opinion was that he was the unrivalled master of them all. Fashions changed, and a new one, that of making collections, arose, which demanded the satisfaction of individual tastes, but Pheidias’s fame knew no eclipse.
[Illustration: PLATE LII.]
Besides this subtle quality in his genius, this weaving of the various beautiful threads spun by others into one consummate stuff, there are other qualities that render his work difficult to appreciate. One is that the ideals both of religion and of life were very different from those of to-day, so that we have to lay aside all preconceived notions and at first regard him as children who wonder but do not understand. This is the hardest task the student ever has to master, to free himself from the bonds of the conventions, beliefs and circumstances common to his own day and study the work of another time with (so far as he can accomplish it) an understanding sympathy with the conventions, beliefs and circumstances belonging to those other days. Still a further difficulty lies in the fact that there does not exist in the world one single work of which we can say: this is truly and completely by Pheidias. The marble figures from the Parthenon show his quality in many respects clearly but these we know were worked upon by assistants. Other works by him exist in copies, but for the most part these copies can be shown to be bad and should be used as evidence only with the utmost care. Yet, notwithstanding these difficulties, the image that we have of him is, it can scarcely be doubted, clearly defined in the main outlines.
How different is all this in the case of Michael Angelo! Here our embarrassment is of a character diametrically opposed and comes from the fact that we are so burdened with details about his life and work that the really important matters are partially obscured by trivialities. Contemporaries and fellow-workmen wrote his life; his letters and poems have been preserved; documents of all sorts regarding his works exist, and the works themselves are where they can be easily seen.
Beyond all these aids to our knowledge of the man we have, again, the more vital one that the age in which he lived is almost as well understood as our own, and many of the greater currents of thought and
## action were but little different to those of the present time. Unlike
the Pheidian time, but like to-day, his was not a period when governments deeply believed in the protection of their Gods nor one in which the individual was scarcely considered except as a detail of the state, nor when portrait statues were almost unknown. Conquest for the love of gain, and commonwealths subdued to one will, were the rule. The truly Greek period in the development of Italy, the time of the blossoming of Venice, of Siena, of Florence had given way to the Alexandrian epoch. Though the idea that the will of the masses should govern the state was fortunately not yet formulated, the development of individualism was well under way, and instead of men governing their lives by general ideals they all sought to raise themselves on the shoulders of their less fortunate brothers to enjoy a little while the glory of a special and peculiar fame. Hence called as he was to lend his power to the satisfaction of such desires as these, Michael Angelo’s work was in many cases, in those, that is, where he was working for a master other than his own instinct, tinged with a character utterly out of accord with that of Pheidias, and yet curiously enough even in these works there are signs of a strong undercurrent of feeling which would have bound him and Pheidias together as the most sympathetic friends, thus showing that at bottom art is not governed by circumstance of time or place.
There were however certain very important aspects in which life as Michael Angelo saw it in Italy, and particularly in Florence, was curiously similar to what it was in Athens in the fifth century B.C. The climate and general appearance of the two countries is even now not unlike, and it must have been much less so in the time when the hills of Greece were so forest-grown that Pan and the nymphs could really live in comfort there, and before modern improvements had eradicated many of the individual peculiarities of Italy. Then too the habits of the cultivated classes were similar. Under very different forms the principles of education seem to have been the same. The schooling shown in Castiglione’s Cortegiano is like that given the Grecian youth. It was an education which comprised, both in Greece and in Italy, music, drawing, a knowledge of the thought and actions of past generations and a mastery of all those exercises that conduced to self-defence or to the more perfect development of the body. Similar training naturally taught the men of these two worlds to see life in very similar ways, and although the teachings of the Catholic Church were very different from those of the Greek religion in regard to the relations between men and women, yet life and instinct were stronger than the holy teachings, and in this point too the simplicity and naturalness of the Greek found its counterpart in Italy.
It is easy to see that the power exerted by these various influences on the art of sculpture was very great, more so even than on the sister art of painting, for it is on the realisation of what constitutes a fine body, on the equal simplicity of treatment of the woman’s form and the man’s, and the knowledge of what ideas can be best interpreted in terms of form, that the art of sculpture depends. Art is but the translation of emotion, and each particular art has a particular way of accomplishing the translation; and in this, painting and sculpture are more closely connected than any two other arts, so much so that sculptors in the two greatest periods—the Greek and the Renaissance—rarely considered their work as finished until the power of colour had been used to heighten the effect, and often practised the two arts coincidently. But during these two periods the limits imposed by the materials of the various arts were clearly recognised and closely adhered to, and in the best sculpture of the Renaissance there is no more attempt to represent landscape or other purely colour effects than in the Parthenon. Sometimes, however, as in the drapery of the Moses or the modelling of the Pietà in St. Peter’s, Michael Angelo does seem to overstep the limits of sculpture and to seek for effects which could be more simply and much more intelligibly given in painting than in stone; effects that need the manifold devices of light and shade and colour which are at the disposal of the painter rather than the sculptor.
This is, however, a rare weakness in the works of Michael Angelo, and one that apparently never entered those of Pheidias. One reason for this is that the art of painting was more completely comprehended in Italy than in Greece, and the Italian artists, more commonly than the Grecian, practised both arts. Hence, great painter as well as great sculptor, endowed with a readiness of hand, such as scarcely any other artist ever had, to reproduce whatever his mind imaged, it is no wonder that Michael Angelo at times went beyond the bounds of one art and seemed magically to interfuse the beauties of both of them. It would have been a greater wonder had he not done so. It was not a sign of his weakness so much as of his strength, of the inability of any one art to satisfy the artist’s desire and ideal. In this greater complexity, which shows at times in the detail of his work, Michael Angelo differed from Pheidias, but, almost invariably, the two artists, while differing in their feeling for line, or gesture, or substance, treat the human figure and its accessories in the same way. In both one sees a distinct and necessary dwelling on the nude.
[Illustration: PLATE LIII.]
Where the human figure is chosen as the object of a work of art, there are but two chief means by which to represent the emotions it contains, one the expression of the face, one the action of the body as a whole. It is in the representation of the face, the most palpable index of the emotions, that painting, with its power over almost infinitesimal lights and shades, finds fullest scope for its power, while it is in the greater lines of the frame and the larger gestures that sculpture satisfies herself. So it is that in the sculptural work of both Michael Angelo and Pheidias one finds drapery treated not, as was distinctly the case in the statues of Praxiteles, for its own special beauty apart from the whole work, but as a means of emphasising the beauty of the body whose details it hid.
Look at the group of three women from the western pediment of the Parthenon, or the Lemnian Athena, or the Caryatids of the Erechtheum (Plate LII)—for these are utterly Pheidian in character even if not by the master himself—or the figures on the frieze of the Parthenon (Plate LVII) or the Hegeso relief. In all these the drapery ripples over the shoulders and breasts, breaking in great falls around the waist and legs to disappear and fade away in little curling waves around the feet, not hiding the soft details of the figure underneath but serving rather as a frame to emphasise the beauties and set them in true relation to the surroundings. That there was any ethical need of hiding the figure would have seemed the height of absurdity to the Greek or the Italian. Out of the dark it comes and back to the dark it goes in this Adamite condition, so why should the artist not use it so if it serves his purpose?
Thus it has been used in all times when there was a vital art, and such times have been distinguished for greater sanity of thought and health of body than when art was governed by mediæval fanaticisms. Michael Angelo’s figures are as distinguished for this quality as are those shaped by the Grecian chisel. His feeling for the value of the nude is so strong that he can hardly suffer the drapery at all. The Moses, the Madonnas, the Medici Princes are to all intents in large measure undraped. Considered as draped figures they distinctly lack the temperance and quiet nobility of the Greek figures, for the reason that although his feeling towards the relation of draped and nude parts is the same, Michael Angelo does not attain his end in as consummate a way. He makes too sharp a distinction between the parts that are really draped, the parts that are but seem not to be, and the nude. But in one point of this same nature the two artists are completely alike. They both regarded the human figure from the purely artistic point of view as a means to suggest certain ideas. The religious meaning, the question as to its sanctity or unhallowedness, no more occurred to them than to question the advisability of warming themselves before the fire when they were cold because there were fires in Hell. They were completely natural.
In regard to the lack of complexity and to the greater repose, it may be admitted that Pheidias has the advantage over Michael Angelo whose works, true index as they are of his character, suffered from the time in which he lived—his character suffered and hence his work. His was a time of scepticism and hence of worry. The tranquillity that marked the Greek mind was rarely found in his day. Aretino was planting the destructive roots of modern journalism, and except, in a way marked by strong affectation, at certain courts, one would have had to go far to find Platonic Symposia or Olympic gatherings. The cloudy brow of Michael Angelo himself as well as of many of his figures is a sign how the perplexity of the times preyed upon the sculptor and in turn affected not only the chief motive of many of his works but also their very details.
And, if we admit the truth, this worry and perturbation is more natural to us than is the Greek grace and calm which, to those who do not understand the time, seems unnatural and forced. It was not so, however. The Greek was never forced, but though he felt intensely, he considered that the possession and exercise of control over emotion was as much to be desired as the power which found expression in beating back barbarian hordes. The tenderness of Greek friendships is proverbial, but the whole tone of Greek tragedy is of passion held in check,—carried in the heart rather than worn on the face. Slaves and servants gave way to noisy grief, but not their masters. A Greek of the Periclean age could scarcely have understood the worn, wearied, soul-troubled look of the Pensieroso. It was not that the Greek was unimpassioned, but he never let his passions govern him. He guided them as a rider guides a restive horse—as the youths on the Parthenon guide theirs—calming and soothing them lest the animal become the master and break away from the chosen path.
This difference in the character of the two races was due largely to religion, which had the most marked effect on the work produced in the two countries. One is apt to think, when one sees the limitless mass of churches, decorated by painter and sculptor, in Italy, and the unending array of lesser works of distinctly religious intent, that no art could be more religious than that of Italy. But just as in the conduct of individuals it is the spirit rather than the form of action that is the true index to their character, so in art it is the feeling the work shows, and not merely its outer form, which indicates its true nature and value. Now not merely in the number of religious works was Greece in the Periclean days as distinguished as ever Italy was, but she was far more noteworthy, in that her religion was a much more vital impulse than that of Italy. This is certainly true of the Periclean as opposed to the Medicean age.
In the light of present knowledge the circumstances that led to these conditions are discernible. Like every innocent race the Greeks had a firm belief in the Gods, beings developed in their minds by very varied influences, and for the most part not of a character to serve as guides to ideal conduct after the race had once gained the capacity for using its mind in a logical way. One or two of these beings were, however, as noble as any such conceptions at any time. This power to use the mind rationally was not yet a national possession when Pheidias grew up. It was just becoming so. The development of the mind, the strength of it, was there, but for a few decades circumstances turned the thoughts of the people away from philosophic consideration to more ecstatic modes in which old conceptions were clung to with passionate fondness and made more beautiful, but a change of belief was the work of a following generation.
These circumstances were chiefly a consequence of the Persian Wars. Greece was threatened with destruction. Athens was harried, and the glories of the Acropolis were razed to the ground. Phœnix-like they disappeared in fire to have an image of themselves more splendid in its youth and vigour rise as a light to all the world. But though the barbarian had for a moment seemed master of the situation, the Greeks had, with the active help of the Gods, been the final victors and it was in the service of thanks to their divine helpers that Pheidias found his chief employment. It was only in the very early years of the Renaissance that the Italians experienced any such miracles as those which Pheidias’s elder contemporaries had known—as, for instance, at the battle of Ravenna—and the effect on them then was much the same as it had been on the Greeks. It was the actual presence of the Gods at critical moments that stirred the Greeks. In Athens Athena’s snake led them to safety, at Salamis the Aiakidoi inspired the heroes with their battlecry, and Pan himself urged the weary messenger over the mountain passes. The Greeks no more doubted that their victory was due to assistance lent them by the Gods than that there had been a war. One event was as real to them as the other, so it was natural for them, as soon as their hearths were once more lit, to render thanks to their Divinities by raising images of them on all sides, that they might never forget them, and by building for the houses of their Gods as beautiful temples as could by any possible means be made.