Part 9

We may frankly concede that the grandeur of this work, the generousness of it, can only be understood when one fully grasps the fact that a Greek temple was, what the Christian’s is not, the house of the Lord. In it but few and most private services were performed,—no processions, no crowds of more or less attentive worshippers, no expounding of the word, nothing whatever of that sort. The temple was the sacred dwelling place of the deity, and the curious no more thought of entering it than of opening uninvited their fellow-citizen’s door. It was a free gift to the God and not to be thought of as a source of satisfaction to the builders except in the same way as it pleases a lover to have his mistress accept some gift at his hands. This feeling is repeated frequently in Pindar and in other poets inspired by the ‘golden muse.’ So it was that, flushed with the excitement of a great cause nobly won, the Greeks turned the full force of their keen, glad energy to works that showed their own greatness by manifesting with the sharpness of full understanding the form of their ideals.

In our day, animated by so different interests and ambitions, it is hard to sympathise with this natural idealistic work done in Athens, and it is perhaps even harder to understand why it was that Pheidias and the other artists were not called on to erect portrait statues of the great leaders of the war as were the artists of the Renaissance. There is mention of a statue to Miltiades, and this is all. The reason becomes clear immediately we consider well what were the fundamental principles of conduct as taught by the poets, who were in those days in large measure the formulators of public opinion. Pindar is as clear-spoken about this as need be, and he but repeats what one finds in the fragments that are preserved of Solon’s writings and of other earlier writers. He tells us that what is natural is best and that the deed done without the deity is best left unspoken (Olym. IX), and again (Nem. I) that each of us has his special power and we must earnestly endeavour according as Nature shows the way. This is to be the moral of our

## action, while that of our thought is that man is as nothing (Nem. VI),

ephemeral creature naught knowing what he is or what he may be, nothing but a mirage-dream (Pyth. VIII).

[Illustration: PLATE LIV.]

Under the spell of such stern teaching as this it is no wonder that Pheidias was not employed, as was Michael Angelo, in depicting for an inquiring posterity the outer husk of the protagonist of his day. Nor was it merely when he was called on to decorate Athens with his accomplished powers that Pheidias found guiding principles of this stern sort, but even in his other great work, the Olympian Zeus, he was governed in the same way. By the Greek, victory in the games was no more to be aspired to without the help of the Gods than was victory in battle, and it was not praise for the winner but gratitude to the Gods that was mete when Nike laid the ‘golden crown’ upon the athlete’s brow. For it is the Gods who, as Pindar sings, guard the deep-breasted plain of Sparta and grant success in the great games. Fame is to be sought but it is to be the fame of honourable deeds (Pyth. VIII), but even this is of less value than happiness and only he who has won both has attained the acme of bliss (Pyth. I). Such men are almost unknown, for the soul of honour is tarnished by lust of gain (Nem. IX). Thus were the athletes in that “age of heroic prize-men” taught that physical power was of value, but only as it was a stepping-stone to moral purity. No portraits of such youths as these unless the Gods marked them as their own with the triple crown. The deep-delved researches of epigraphist and excavator show us how rare was that event.

Called upon to embody for the chosen youth of Greece their idea and image of the guardian deity who meted out unquestioned justice to their strife, Pheidias had to depict as it were a masculine counterpart to the Goddess who made Athens her own. That he was as successful in the one task as in the other is instantly apparent to one who notes the quality of the praise bestowed upon his work by the highly trained critics of the classic period. None speak of his figures as they do of Myron’s, for instance, as deceiving the beholder by their realism. There is no question as to the mastery over the material as with Kalamis and Pythagoras,—no suggestion of conventionalism as with Polykleitos, none of overrefinement as with Praxiteles,—but all agree that his works were such nobly adequate representations of the divine beings that they added a new glory to the religion of which they were the perfected expression.

Still another noteworthy peculiarity of this religion in its effect on his work remains to be mentioned. Both he and Michael Angelo had at different times now mere mortals, now deities, to represent. In the case of the Attic master this led to a greater unity of performance than was possible with the Florentine. Between the dwellers on Olympus and those on the broad-bosomed Earth there was to Pheidias’s mind only a difference in degree, whereas to the believer in the Roman doctrines there was no real similarity between the heavenly hosts and the inhabitants of this vale of tears; and where such was suggested, it was so as a symbol, not as a representation. To the Greek the Gods were merely his grander, nobler, more powerful brethren, blessed with the same virtues and troubled by similar faults, differing principally from the dwellers on earth by usually escaping the results due to giving way to passion. Even they were not blessed with absolute immunity and freedom of action. Zeus himself was subject to Fate, but in the main the Gods, at least in their outward form, were but more beautiful men and women. Hence when called upon to carve the most noble being whom he could imagine, and equally when carving ideal youths and maidens on the Parthenon, he could only carve the same forms he saw about him every day idealised by his imagination. Whichever branch of his art he followed trained him for the other.

That such conditions and beliefs as these were very different from those under which Michael Angelo had to work needs no elaborate exposition. How different they were in their effect on the art of Pheidias and the happiness of the period for such an artist becomes clearer the more one studies. There is still another point to consider, however,—what might be called a more practical one than the influences of religion, and in this regard, too, Pheidias was the more favoured. I refer to the political conditions of the time, and the relations of Pheidias to his employers.

The lack of original documents makes it impossible for us to follow the course led by Pheidias from its fortunate rise to its unhappy close, but that in most ways he was much to be envied by Michael Angelo cannot be questioned. Athens was at the height of her prosperity; freed from foreign or internal foes, she was at liberty to pursue her ends as occasion demanded or as consideration showed was best. It was a time of thanksgiving and hope. No such condition of government as this was known to Michael Angelo, nor did his country have the advantage of being led by as high-minded a statesman, and probably as wise a one, as ever lived. So long as Pericles was leader of the state, Pheidias was his friend and helper. Here was no worry for the artist, no change of master, no blighting of cherished hopes, all which ills were suffered by Michael Angelo; on the contrary, existence in the midst of a most highly cultivated community—a community moved by a common search after ideal ends, a community which must have been a constant inspiration to the sculptor to equal the expectations it had of him. With the rise of mob rule brought on by the momentary successes won by certain demagogues came the downfall of Pericles and in his train Pheidias. But his great work was finished then. He had nothing to fear when he laid aside his chisel, and fortunately he was not left long to mourn the fast vanishing nobility of his city and race. The time of calm self-confidence had passed and the time of trouble was threatening. Only a short time elapsed before the tide of disaster engulfed the whole country, and if we would seek a counterpart to the worn and restless spirit that sometimes appears in Michael Angelo’s work, we can find it in the later Greek masters—even Praxiteles shows traces of it. But it is not mere likenesses we are in search of, so much as explanations and the clarification of certain phenomena of art.

The effect of these conditions of life and thought on Pheidias was more strong than on other sculptors of the time because the greater sensitiveness and impressibility of his nature rendered him a more encompassing recipient for ideas and feelings than most of his contemporaries. But the qualities that show in his work with especial sharpness are found diffused throughout all the work of the period, and there is one very noticeable characteristic of this work which distinguishes it markedly from the work produced by Michael Angelo’s fellow-workmen. It is the emphasis laid on youth. Donatello, Verrocchio, Desiderio and many others often represented youthful figures; but the representation of youth and early manhood could scarcely be said to distinguish the work of the Florentine from other epochs, yet this is exactly what can be said of the product of the early Greek and

## particularly the Attic School.

Look at the statues of youths and maidens, the never-fading ghosts of past days, which the Attic chisel carved and the Attic soil has preserved for us. Look at the young Apollos and their not less glorious brethren, the athletes. Look at the guardians above the temple porches—incarnations of youthful vigour even when the bearded head or matronly form give sign of elder years. Look at the vases “with brede of marble men and maidens overwrought.” Finally look well at the statues of God and Goddess—even these have youth eternal moulded in their full, strong figures.

And it is pleasant to reflect that it is not the sculptor’s art alone which found satisfaction in thus dwelling on the most beautiful forms of human life, but the painters and the poets too immortalise the entrancing splendours of the youthful form. Greek art of this time presents us with the indubitable evidence of a belief, rooted deep as life itself, that the everlasting joy of completest beauty was to be found in the well-conditioned body of youth or maiden. What a degradation the ascetic interpretation of the Holy Writ brought in the art of the Renaissance! Many youthful figures do we find there, but they were chosen as much for the sake of the quaintness of extremely youthful forms as for the beauty inherent in vigorous development. The place of the fine-drawn, well-groomed figures of the Greek youths and maidens is taken by jolly, pot-bellied babies. Over the altars and among the graves they scramble, and up the marble columns, to launch themselves, heedless as screaming swallows, over the groined ceiling. From North to South and across Italy from Sea to Sea this breed of fascinating babies spread—their father the Church, their mother the great human heart of the Italian race. And then, dulling the pleasant impression that such figures make upon the mind, we are met on all sides by haggard figures of men and women expressive only of a bitter ardour to seek salvation by pain.

The wanness of Botticelli, the pain and trouble of Michael Angelo, the mere ordinarily healthy look of Ghirlandaio, these are what take the place of the deep-breasted, broad-shouldered, strong-pulsed, magnificent Greeks—some repetition among these latter, ’tis true, but marvellous in their vigour and constancy and impulsiveness. Or what poets can the Medicean time show who sing of ideals and principles in the same full-throated, calm, incisive way as Pindar or Sophocles sang them? We have instead a scornful wrath or playful fancy. The deity is no longer friendly but terrible, and dainty mistresses usurp the place of the God-compelling Aphrodite. The momentary, not the eternal, is the interest of the day.

[Illustration: PLATE LV.]

Some there were, Greek in spirit and in deed: Dante in part of his later work, so far as a Catholic could be. The Vita Nuova in its heart-broken passion, the Convito in its complexity, are purely Italian, but passages of the Divine Comedy and the Letters might be the work of one of the Attic dramatists, so intense are they, so cool, so assertive of the power of right over wrong. But an artist much more Greek than Dante and one who is often, but very mistakenly, thought to resemble Michael Angelo, was Tintoretto. His was a Greek sense of form, his was a Greek sense of beauty, and his was a completely and absolutely Greek sense of what constituted true portraiture. There were others too of this group, but they are rare and far between; men who seem to have been born two thousand years too late, or else just in time to save the world from a worship of what was mentally warped and physically unsound.

When one considers that the art of sculpture has found its chief employment in the service of religion, it becomes plain why living among a people whose religion led to asceticism, even though the age was largely sceptical, Michael Angelo should impress his work with a feeling quite opposed to that found in the works of Pheidias. Scepticism there was in ancient Greece too, but not strong enough to free Pheidias entirely from the bonds of the religion to which he was from infancy accustomed. Furthermore, a scepticism that found much fuel for its flames in the misconduct of the Vicar of Christ and his less powerful imitators would have a very dissimilar effect on the mind from that which was based on true mental development. The one was the natural sloughing of the skin, the other the amputation of a diseased member.

The conditions at Rome had more effect on the formation of character in those days than anything else, and they cannot have seemed much less rotten to Michael Angelo than to Hildebrand five hundred years earlier. The feeling that Christ was essentially the man of sorrows, which affected the early artists, had passed from men’s minds, and in regard to his comeliness there was nothing to prevent an artist working in a Greek spirit; but employed though Michael Angelo was by the Popes, they used him by no means always on religious work.

And Michael Angelo also suffered, as Pheidias did not, from having many masters. These were causes to destroy any Pheidian-like unity in Michael Angelo’s work, but causes much more potent to work him injury were the characters of the men for whom he worked, prince as well as Pope. It was, doubtless, in many respects fortunate for a young artist to have the freedom of the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, but while Lorenzo might help such a man as Michael Angelo at the beginning of his career, he was hardly the man to inspire his more mature years. At any rate he died while Michael Angelo was still young, and thenceforth the latter worked for men with whom he can have had but little sympathy. Men of great energy they were, but with the exception of Alexander VI, in the main corrupt or stupid. To work for such men under any circumstances must have been trying, but when one thinks of their refusal to allow Michael Angelo to work as he saw fit, one does not wonder that at times he was nervously irritable.

Obviously such a life would have been trying to a man of more ordinary clay than Michael Angelo, but to him, endowed, as he was, with enormous powers of mental application and sensitive as only poets are, it must at times have been little less than torture. He knew that the golden age of his country had passed. He saw Florence humbled and Rome sacked. The statesmen were men of mean ambition and the clergy men of lax morals. Nothing could stop the degeneration. Political reformers and saintly enthusiasts had matched themselves against the ever-increasing debasement of Italy, and one after another they had all been overcome. From the days of the doubtful reforms of Crescentius or Cola da Rienzi through the period of the passionate recalling of Christ by Francis of Assisi to the time of bitter invective of Savonarola, reformers had given their lives in the attempt to save their beloved Italy from the error of her ways, and all had failed. It was not a time for hope but for sorrow, and it needed a firm belief in the Divine Word to save one from despair—or at least discontent.

It is from his sonnets and letters rather than from his sculpture that we can obtain a view of Michael Angelo’s thoughts and feelings. Not that the latter does not show certain moods of the artist very clearly, but, as in the Pietà, it is more ideal than personal, more the expression of dreams than of his actual experience. In the sonnets, on the other hand, he gives vent to his own innermost feelings. In them we find frequent expression of deep despair, but bitterly as he grieved for the death of Savonarola, there is no evidence that he thereat lost faith in humanity. It may well have been his admiration of Vittoria Colonna that saved him from misanthropy. As his intercourse with her was undoubtedly the purest joy and her death the keenest sorrow of his later years, so there may have been some similarly sweetening influence during the summer of his life. The knowledge of his career that we possess is great, but it does not tell us this. It is for our purposes, perhaps for all, better that this should be so. At least it makes it easier to compare him with Pheidias, of whose life we have no such details whatever.

Such were some of the general conditions affecting the point of view of these two men. The effect they had on particular work becomes evident with the study of the separate monuments. One point is, to begin with, very noticeable. It is that of the eight works by Pheidias mentioned distinctly by ancient writers seven are representations of deities, and the eighth of an ideal being. There can be no question that he made other works, but that these alone were preserved by tradition certainly affords safe grounds for the deduction that his genius was most congenially employed and most fully displayed in such work. In the case of Michael Angelo, while we know of work like the statue of Julius or the Battle Cartoon (not to mention his youthful efforts) that have nothing to do with religion, yet his mind also turned to religious subjects and his greatest works are entirely of this character.

Curiously enough it is when employed on subjects drawn from the ancient world that Michael Angelo is most unlike the great Greek. His Pietà, the Madonna of Bruges (Plate LIII) and Victor (Plate LIV) are more Pheidian than his Bacchus (National Museum, Florence; Plate LV) or his Eros (South Kensington Museum; Plate LVI). These are Greek of a kind, but they are Alexandrian rather than Pheidian. They are as foreign to any conceptions of the fifth century as they are to those of the Catholic Church. The drunken, tottering Bacchus is as different from the early conception of the God, who was thought of almost more as the sunshine that makes the grape than as the juice itself, as the shrinking and self-conscious Venus of the Capitol is from the Venus of Cnidos. In his sensuality the Bacchus is un-Pheidian and in the humour introduced in the group by the presence of his companion he is equally so. Humour was not lacking to the Athenian, as the drama shows, but the fields of sculpture and painting were not considered the proper place for its display.

In still another point is the statue of Bacchus comparable not to the early but to the late Greek work, and that is in the realism of the modelling and the action of the figure. Such modelling bears no relation to the broad treatment of Pheidias. The latter shows no such _morbidezza_, nor would he have dwelt on the repulsive unsteadiness of the pose. Whoever it was that carved the famous Borghese Anacreon, and it was some contemporary of Pheidias, shows us how the earlier Greek artist felt towards drunkenness. The figure is under the influence of his much-sung God Dionysos, but he is shown in attitude of mental ecstasy not of physical uncontrol. What stamps the Bacchus and the Eros (and much of his other work) as non-Greek is a lack not exactly of beauty, but of delicacy and refinement, of charm. But each of these characteristics that differentiates Michael Angelo’s work from that of the Greek stamps it as a work of the Renaissance. The pleasure in technical excellence, the realism and the representation of unpleasantness are all qualities that recur over and over again in the work of this vigorous, capable, unflinching, unbelieving period.

Similar un-Pheidian qualities show in the figure of Eros in London, which if not by Michael Angelo, is at least made entirely in his spirit. The same realism of modelling is seen in the treatment of the head and face, the same choice of an action inexpressive of the deepest meaning of the figure. It is still less Pheidian in the vividness and intentness of the action and expression which are not explained by the figure itself, but the meaning of which is left to the imagination of the beholder to discover. Dramatic quality of this sort is rarely found in Pheidian work. The statues carved in that time were self-explanatory. Single figures were often represented as intent or as full of movement as the Eros, but their action is not motived by something outside themselves. Hence they do not puzzle the beholder. The Anacreon, the Discobolus need no explanation, but Michael Angelo’s Eros needs to be grouped (at least in imagination) with some other figure before it can be understood. It is like Myron’s Marsyas, splendid and suggestive but incomplete.[32] Separate figures of the Parthenon pediments are as dramatic as the Eros, but then they form part of a group and as such their meaning was perfectly clear.

An instance is found in one of the group of Gods on the eastern end of the frieze of the Parthenon (Plate LVII). The figure is commonly called Ares. He is seated forward on his throne, and holds one raised knee between his clasped hands. Such an attitude, so lacking in grandeur, so suggestive of restlessness, is well suited to the fiery God of Battles and shows how free and ungoverned by conventions Pheidias could be. The group as a whole is a perfect expression of the power of the master, to be simple as a child in this treatment of the Olympians and yet never to fail to produce work of supreme beauty.

[Illustration: PLATE LVI.]