CHAPTER VII.

LATER GREEK ARCHITECTS.

The first architect as well as artist of decided merit who arose to historic distinction at the beginning of the later Attic school, or that which followed immediately upon the school of Phidias, and one of the first to treat the Corinthian idea, then flowering into favor with originality and artistic skill, was the deserving and accomplished Scopas. Reference has already been made to this artist in connection with the temple of Diana at Ephesus, for which, it is said, he furnished the most beautiful of all the numerous columns with which that temple was enriched. This statement is made without prejudice to the great Praxiteles, who was contemporaneous with Scopas, and who excelled him as a statuary, if he did not compete with him as an architect.

A mistake of Pliny, which assigned Scopas to an earlier age, has finally been corrected, and it has been settled that the period when he exercised his art was between the years 395 and 350 B.C. Scopas was a native of Paros, a subject island of Athens, and sprung from a family which for several generations before his advent into the world had practised the plastic arts. His descendants also walked in the same artistic paths of life for many generations. Like Polycletus, with whom he is most favorably compared, the architectural side of his career was greatly eclipsed by that which displayed his genius as a sculptor.

His statues were numerous, and fortunately many of them still exist scattered in various European museums and galleries. Among such of his works considered the most interesting is the well-known series of figures representing the destruction of the sons and daughters of Niobe. In the time of Pliny these statues stood in the temple of Apollo Socianus at Rome, and it was then a question whether they were the works of Scopas or Praxiteles. In fact, many of the former’s finest efforts have been attributed to the latter artist. Of this group Schlegel says: “In the group of Niobe there is the most perfect expression of terror and pity. The upturned looks of the mother, and mouth half open in supplication, seem to accuse the invisible wrath of Heaven. The daughter clinging in the agonies of death to the bosom of her mother, in her infantile innocence can have no other fear than for herself; the innate impulse of self-preservation was never represented in a manner more tender or affecting. Can there on the other hand be exhibited to the senses a more beautiful image of self-devoting, heroic magnanimity than Niobe, as she bends her body forward that, if possible, she may alone received the destructive bolt? Pride and repugnance are melted down in the most ardent maternal love. The more than earthly dignity of the features is the less disfigured by pain, as from the quick repetition of the shocks she appears, as in the fable, to have become insensible and motionless. Before this figure, twice transformed into stone, and yet so inimitably animated—before this line of demarcation of all human suffering the most callous beholder is dissolved in tears.”

Another highly esteemed work of Scopas, which Pliny says stood in the shrine of Cneius Domitius in the Flaminian circus in Rome, represented Achilles conducted to the island of Leuce by the divinities of the sea. It consisted of figures of Neptune, Thetis and Achilles surrounded by Nereids sitting on dolphins and other large fish, and attended by Tritons and sea monsters. In the opinion of Pliny, these figures alone would have been sufficient to have immortalized the artist, even if they had cost the labor of his entire life.

His statues of Venus, are, after all, perhaps the most remarkable of his works in sculpture. One of these statues, if not the original, is supposed to have been the prototype of one of the most celebrated and beautiful portrayals of that charming deity in the world to-day. Another to which Pliny gives particular prominence was that in which the goddess is presented nude and which was found in the temple of Brutus Callaicus in Rome. This statue, he adds, “would have conferred renown upon any other city, but at Rome the immense number of works of art and the bustle of daily life in a great city distracted the attention of men.” It is probably this work of art, which is thought by some to have been superior to that by Praxiteles, which, with some modifications, is credited with being the model after which Cleomenes fashioned the celebrated Venus de Medicis. Pausanias and Pliny mention also other portrayals of Venus by Scopas, but it is left to Waagen and some other critics to ascribe the celebrated statue of Aphrodite, in the Louvre in Paris, and known as the Venus de Milo, to this great sculptor and architect.

It is foreign to the purpose, however, to devote too much space to this side of the art life of Scopas, but in treating of his connection with the magnificent mausoleum which Artemesia erected at Halicarnassus, to her husband, Mausolus, king of Caria, it will be argued doubtless that the work of this artist on that famous mortuary monument, which ranked as one of the seven winders of the world, was more in the line of a decorative sculptor than of an architect.

In this undertaking Scopas was associated with three other architectural sculptors—namely, Bryaxis, Timotheus and Leocarus—all of whom were Athenians. Each took as his special work the decoration of one side of the building, Scopas choosing the east or principal façade. The north and south sides had a width of about sixty-three feet; the east and west were not quite so wide.

Before outlining further the principal characteristics of the building, it is only fair to say that the professional architects to whom is due the credit for the plan of the structure were Phileus, an Ionian whose name Vitruvius spells in a variety of ways, and Satyrus, whose native city is not given, but who, according to the same authority, wrote a description of the mausoleum. Phileus was also an author on architecture, having written a volume on the Ionic temple of Athene Polias at Priene, of which he was the designer, and which was one of the most renowned buildings in Asia Minor, and a treatise on the mausoleum, which was also located in that part of the globe. As for Satyrus, whatever may have been the other public buildings of which he was the architect, there is no record.

The mausoleum had a total height of one hundred and forty feet, and in general appearance combined orientalism in tomb-structure with the perfections of Grecian architectural grace and elegance. The tomb was contained within a rectangular substructure. Above was an Ionic peristyle temple with nine columns on each side and eleven at the ends. The frieze was elaborately carved and decorated, and the roof, which was pyramidal in form, gave the oriental cast to the entire building. At the apex of the roof was a colossal marble quadriga, in which a statue of the deceased king Mausolus appeared. It is said that in the sculptures and carvings of the different sides the respective artists strove to rival each other, and that although queen Artemesia died before the tomb was finished the four artists were so interested and absorbed in their work that they determined to complete it at their own risk.

Up to the twelfth century after the Christian era this grand tomb stood in a fairly good state of preservation, but soon after fell to pieces, and was used from that time as a quarry by the Knights of St. John, from which they took stone for the castles they built on the site of the old Greek Acropolis. Later still much of the marble was taken to repair their fortifications, and it is even said to make lime, showing to what ignominious uses the very greatest of architectural glories may finally come. However, some of the carvings have been redeemed from the fortification walls and unearthed from other places in Budrun, the modern Halicarnassus, to find a final resting place, let it be hoped, in the British Museum. These rescued pieces of marble, of which there are perhaps sufficient to reconstruct a quarter of the whole frieze, though they are not continuous, are pronounced by competent judges to be specimens of the work of the different artists, but there is no means of determining which of them, if any, came from the chisel of Scopas.

The temple of Athene Alea at Tegea in Arcadia, often a sanctuary for fugitives from Sparta, was an architectural creation of Scopas, which it would appear belonged to him exclusively. Of all the temples in the Peloponnesus this is said by Pausanias to have been the largest as well as the most magnificent. That observant traveller, however, must have been carried away somewhat by his enthusiasm over its architectural attractions in ascribing to it such great size, as its dimensions were not more than one hundred and sixty-four by seventy feet, being very much smaller than other Grecian temples.

The temple which Scopas built was not the first to the goddess to occupy the same site, but followed a very much more ancient one, which was destroyed by fire in the year 394 B.C. The tendency to introduce the Corinthian order, which followed after the Peloponnesian wars, and which continued to grow as Greece became more and more intermixed with Roman ideas, is here early displayed. The columnar arrangement of the temple was unusual; for the outside the Ionic style was used, there being six columns at each end and fourteen on the sides; but on the inside the Doric order was employed surmounted by the Corinthian. Both pediments of the building were sculptured by Scopas or from his designs under his immediate supervision. The pediment over the front portico portrayed the chase of the Calydonian boar, and that in the rear the battle of Telephus with Achilles; both being, according to Pausanias, very animated compositions. The statue of the goddess Athene Alea, contained in the cell, was carried off by the Emperor Augustus and placed at the entrance of his new forum in Rome. Some fragments of the pedimental sculptures have been discovered and placed in the British Museum.

To Scopas, in co-operation with Praxiteles, is also attributed the graceful and beautiful Choragic monument of Lysicrates, at one time called “the lantern of Demosthenes,” from the mistaken supposition that the great orator used it as a study—a very strange use when it is remembered that the little structure possessed neither doors nor windows. In its day this monument was the pride of the street of Tripods, and it still stands one of the best preserved evidences of the taste and skill of its designers.

In this monument the Corinthian style of decoration is displayed in its perfection of grace, better, perhaps, than in any other structure of that early time which is known to us. Stuart describes it as follows: “The colonnade was constructed in the following manner: six equal panels of white [Pentelic] marble, placed contiguous to each other on a circular plan, formed a continued cylindrical wall, which of course was divided from top to bottom into six equal parts by the junctures of the panels. These columns projected somewhat more than half their diameters from the surface of the cylindrical wall, and the wall entirely closed up the intercolumination. Over this was placed the entablature and the cupola, in neither of which any aperture was made, so that there was no admission to the inside of this monument, and it was quite dark.”

The “flower,” or crowning ornament of the monument, was a particularly graceful and beautiful arrangement of acanthus leaves and volutes, and the roof was worked out with great delicacy and originality in the form of a thatch of laurel leaves and Vitruvian scrolls. If there was any apportionment of the work on this monument between Scopas and Praxiteles, it would be interesting to know what it was.

Of the other architectural sculptors associated with Scopas in the adornment of the tomb of Mausolus none is mentioned as having had any other connection with architecture in a similar way, but all were statuaries of distinction and high merit, who executed works in marble or bronze, or both, that gave them prominence in their art. Among other works by Bryaxis were five colossal statues in the island of Rhodes, of which the celebrated “colossus of Rhodes,” however, was not one, and also a statue of Apollo, which was destined for the temple of Daphnis near Antiochus. The story is related that Julian the Apostate wished to render to this figure peculiar worship and homage, but was prevented from so doing by a miraculous destruction of the temple and statue by fire. Clement of Alexandria asserts that Bryaxis was the artist of many works ascribed to Phidias.

As to the share which Timotheus took in the decoration of the mausoleum there is dispute among the Greek authorities, some ascribing his work to Praxiteles; but there does not seem to be any just foundation for the supposition that the sculpturing on the south side of the tomb was by any other hand than that of Timotheus. As one of the great statuaries of the later Attic school he was also among the most prominent, his figure of Artemis being deemed worthy to be placed by the side of the Apollo of Scopas, and the Latona of Praxiteles in the temple which Augustus erected to Apollo on the Palatine. Other statues of conspicuous merit are also ascribed to him by Pausanias and Pliny.

Leochares, the last of the quartette, was also inferior only to Scopas and Praxiteles in his school of art. He was particularly skilful with portrait-statues, the most successful of which were those of Philip of Macedon, Alexander his son, Amyntas, Olympias and Eurydice, all of which were made of ivory and gold, and were placed in the Phillippeion, a circular building in the Altis at Olympia, erected by Philip in celebration of his victory at Chæroneia. But the _chef d’œuvre_ of Leochares was a bronze statue of the rape of Ganymede. Pliny says of this work that the eagle seemed to be sensible of what he was carrying and to whom he was bearing the treasure, taking care not to hurt the boy through his dress with his talons. The original statue was frequently copied both in marble and on gems, several of which copies are still extant: one in the Museo Pio-Clementino, another in the library of St. Mark in Venice, and still another figures in Stuart’s Athens, as an alto-relievo found among the ruins of Thessalonica.

[Illustration: Decoration]