History of Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture. J. S. Memes
Exquisitely delicate in the minute, in the grand, the style is bold, vigorous, and flowing. Their author, to use the language of antiquity, united the three characteristics of truth, grandeur, and minute refinement; exhibiting majesty, gravity, breadth, and magnificence of composition, with a practice scrupulous in detail, and truth of individual representation, yet in the handling rapid, broad, and firm. This harmonious assemblage of qualities, in themselves dissimilar, in their results the same, gives to the productions of this master an ease, a grace, a vitality, resembling more the spontaneous overflowings of inspiration than the laborious offspring of thought and science.
The attentive study of the remaining labours of Phidias, and, fortunately for the arts of Britain, their final abiding place is with us, will supply a criterion by which to estimate the principles of the beautiful in execution, and of the ideal in imitative art, as exercised among the Greeks in the most splendid period of their refinement, and will prove guides by which we may emulate, perhaps, equal, our masters.
In all that merely meets the eye, the marbles of the Parthenon display the finest keeping, with the general nobleness of their intellectual character. But the execution is perfect, simply because the composition is so. It comes not forward as an independent merit. Its exquisite mechanism operates without intruding. Unseen and unfelt amid the intelligence it conveys, it is finally noticed as an harmonious element of a perfect whole, and only then calls forth an especial admiration. The finish is high, and even delicate, because the extreme beauty and correctness of the design required to be rendered with corresponding elegance and ease. The chiselling is at once detailed and vigorous, harmonizing with attitudes and expressions full of vivacity, natural grace, and dignity. The touch is broad, the forms decided—the marking deep and firm, according with and increasing the general grandeur and conception. The style of design, indeed, is, in the strictest acceptation, learned, the parts being pronounced with a decision and truth unequalled, we are almost inclined to say, in any other remain of antiquity.
The ideal of Phidias is derived entirely from nature, as the true ideal of art must ever be. Much has been said respecting the import of this term among the ancients; and the words their writers have employed in speaking of this very master, have been construed into meanings not only inconsistent with, but subversive of, the principles of genuine excellence. If, by the divine archetypes which he is reported to have followed, be implied, that he copied after ideas not existing in nature—living and tangible nature, the breathing works before us attest, that whether ancients or moderns, these critics speak with more zeal than knowledge. In the Elgin marbles, every conception deeply participates of human sentiment and action, so intimately does the representation belong to reality, that every form seems, by the touch of enchantment, to have become marble in the very energies of its natural life. This happy effect of truth, however, does not arise from the imitation of common, that is, of imperfect types; neither is nature the only real object of art, viewed through any medium of fancy, nor imitated according to conventional or imaginative principles. The artist has only looked abroad upon all existence, refining partial conceptions and limited modes by the unerring and collected harmonies of the whole. The true ideal, then—the ideal of Grecian sculpture, as beheld in these its sublimest productions, is but the embodied union of whatever of beauty and perfection still lingers among the forms of nature viewed universally—free from individuality or accident. Truth is thus the primary constituent of the ideal. Beauty is the perfect expression of this truth, agreeably to the most unblemished and purest models which general nature presents. In this union of collective excellence and individual verisimilitude, the mind feels, and at once acknowledges, a power of awakening and reflecting its own truest, best sympathies. These principles are unfolded in their purest elements; and the modes of accomplishing this union distinctly traceable by careful observation on the style of Phidias. The forms are, in the first place, composed with the most correct, but unostentatious science; hence the freedom of their movements, the ease of their attitudes, seeming to possess the same capabilities of momentary action as the living models. In this anatomical knowledge, too, as actually displayed, there is a truly admirable simplicity: the bones and muscles are, indeed, pronounced with a firmness rare in antique sculpture, whence chiefly arises the wonderful elasticity of the figures. All this is unaccompanied with the slightest exaggeration; the divisions being few, and masses large, the eye runs sweetly along the general forms, yet finds wherewithal to be delighted in resting upon details. This absence, or rather this unobtrusiveness, of all pomp of art, throws over the whole an air of reality and of unsophisticated nature. But with these essential qualities of merely imitative art, are united perfect symmetry, the most harmonious contours, grand composition, the most refined taste, and noble expression. This causes every figure to respire an heroic and elevated character. Hence, we perceive, that to base ideal upon imitative art—to address the imagination by grandeur of design and perfection of form, while he appealed to the judgment by fidelity of detail and correctness of resemblance—have formed the objects of this great sculptor. The relations under which truth and imagination produce results at once grand and interesting, he has carefully studied and successfully rendered. Hence, while the general composition breathes the loftiest spirit of ideal or possible excellence, the means by which the sentiment is rendered are received from individual nature, expressed simply, and without artifice. In this happy and unobtrusive union of nature and imagination, in this continually remounting, without convention or ostentation, to the eternal sources of natural truth and beauty, Phidias displays the real sublimity of art, and stands unrivalled among the masters of the ancient world.
CHAPTER IV.
The progressive change in sculpture, from a style of severe and simple majesty, to one of more studied elegance and softer character, already noticed as having commenced even in the lifetime of Phidias, received its full developement under those masters who adorned the beginning of the Macedonian empire. Various political and moral causes, without decline of talent, might have contributed to this change, which is not even so great, while it corresponds with, the contemporary revolutions which, from similar origin, took place in manners and literature, in the opinions and usages of the times. The annals of no nation, also, can boast a distinguished succession of names, eminent in the exercises of the very highest genius. Sublimity is, in its own nature, a more simple sentiment than beauty, and the sources whence it springs infinitely more limited. If, then, we find the true sublime in Grecian sculpture confined to almost the age and the labour of one man, is this to be wondered at, when the same is the case, not only in their poetry, an art far more abundant in resources, but in the poetical literature of every people? The sculptors, then, who followed the era of Pericles to the death of Alexander, can be called inferior to Phidias, only in the same sense as the poets who succeeded will be termed inferior to Homer. In both instances, the change was but the application of principles which in their essence could not vary, the subjects requiring a modification of certain distinguishing qualities.
But an opinion opposite to this is more commonly entertained, namely, that not till the improvements of Praxiteles and Lysippus, was ancient art perfectly free from the rude and harsh of that early taste. A glance, however, either to the Greek historians, or especially to the remaining labours of Phidias himself, is more than sufficient to show how utterly without foundation is this censure; and that no other man has united in his style more of the highest excellences. It is, in fact, this union which truly constitutes beauty in sculpture, whose sources of pleasing and of moving, being new, and derived only from the essential elements of design, form, and expression, admit of separation or imperfection with peculiar disadvantage. If we examine the Elgin Marbles in regard to those qualities considered as especial constituents of the beautiful, we shall find how slight indeed could be succeeding additions. More seductive grace, an air more elaborately refined, may have been given to the female statues of Praxiteles; but for that perfect beauty, which arises from including the essentials of excellence in the most liberal proportion, we search successfully in the labours of Phidias alone.
The views now taken of Grecian sculpture, in which we have divided the subject into three schools, are thus proved to be correct. Two of these have already been examined; the old school, which brought material art almost to perfection, retaining only a degree of constraint, but wanting the expression