202 Greek Sculpture. as late artists of the same epoch. The famous Drunken Faun at Munich, and the Thorn Extractor of the Capitol at Rome, evidently date from this time.* In the works of this third period, art is seen running its usual course. The self-restraint of the best time is visibly thrown off, and a corresponding loss of dignity and ideal beauty follows. More that is individual, less that is divine, appears in the statues ; the faces are less con- ventional, the draperies less beautiful, and the whole art, while retaining an astonishing degree of technical excel- lence, has left behind it the lofty aims and the perfect attainment of such aims which it possessed in the time of Pheidias. 4. Fourth Period, 323—146 B.C. The school of Rhodes occupies the first position in this epoch. Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydorus, a group of Rhodian masters, produced the Laocoon (Fig. 84) of the Vatican, which is said to express physical pain and passion better than any other existing group of statuary. The Laocoon t was said by Pliny to be one block of marble ; if so, we have not the original, as the Laocoon of the Vatican is hewn out of three pieces. The Far- nese Bull, or Toro Farnese, in the Museum at Naples, is another famous work of this period, by Apollonius and Tauriscus, of Tralles in Caria, foreign artists who worked at Rhodes. The subject is the punishment of Dirce, wife of Lycus king of Thebes, by the sons of Antiope for her
- Casts of them are in the Crystal Palace.
f Laocoon, a priest in a temple of Apollo, while sacrificing a bullock, saw two enormous serpents coiling themselves round his two sons. He rushed to their assistance, became entangled in the folds of the serpents, and all there died.
