Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/223

This page needs to be proofread.

Greek Sculpture. 193 cannot be doubted that he exercised control over them. The chryselephantine statue of Athena, within the temple, which must have been a magnificent work of art, was certainly from his own hand. This, and the colossal chryselephantine statue of Zeus for the Temple of Olympia, were his most famous works : the former was an ideal im- personation of calmness and wisdom — of which the colossal marble figure of the Pallas of Velletri, in the Louvre, is supposed to be a late Roman copy, — and the latter, now only known to us from copies on coins, was a realization of Homer's description of Zeus, " shaking his ambrosial locks, and making Olympus tremble at his nod" — and an embodiment of the national idea of the supreme God, instinct with power tempered by mercy, — a human form divine of such surpassing beauty, that it became henceforth the type of masculine perfection. The principal pupils of Pheidias were Alcamenes, Agora- critus, and Colotes. They first executed a group of statues for the western pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, and many statues of gods. That of Hephaestus at Athens was especially admired, because the lameness characteristic of the god was indicated without loss of dignity to the figure. The famous Venus of Melos, in the Louvre, found in 1820 in the island of Melos, is thought to be a copy after Alcamenes. In this exquisite female figure, human maturity and beauty are combined with divine majesty and self- sufficiency. The most famous work of Agoracritus was his marble statue of Nemesis at Rhamnus ; and that of Colotes, a statue of Athena at Elis. At Argos, in the Peloponnesus, a school arose, second only in importance to that of Athens, the ruling spirit of which was Polycletus of Sicyon, a fellow-pupil of Pheidias EHA O