ON THE SCULPTURE OF THE GREEKS.
Γενοίμαν
ἱν’ ὑλαεν ἐπεστι ποντου
Πρόβλημ’ ἁλικλυστον, ἀκραν
Ὑπο πλακα Σουνιου
Τας ἱερας ὁπως προσει-
ποιμ’ ἁν Ἀθανας.
For the last two thousand years, a few blocks of marble, cut in resemblance of the human body, have formed the almost solitary subject of uniform opinion among all men, and excited, without qualification, the universal admiration of the world. The Romans took them from the Greeks, and were not ashamed to confess themselves overcome by the artists of a nation which they had subdued. In the midst of wars and of triumphs, the nations of Modern Europe treat these marbles as they do cities and provinces—gain possession of them by victories, and cede them by treaties. The ancients who have written concerning them, speak of them, like ourselves, in hyperbolical expressions of enthusiasm; and by the general consent of Greeks, Romans, and Barbarians, these master-pieces of art have been raised to the rank of so many unfailing standards, by a comparison with which alone the excellencies of the productions of nature herself can be duly appreciated and admired. It is yet more wonderful, that though these admirable figures have for some centuries been made the subject of unceasing imitation, they maintain to this hour an undisputed superiority over all the productions of the moderns. We are never weary of asking, by what art they have been produced?—and this problem has never yet been entirely solved. In order to answer it in a satisfactory manner, it is not enough to shew wherein consists the perfection of the ancient statues, and by what rules of execution they have been rendered so perfect as they are; it is necessary to go deeper into the subject, and to examine what may have been the causes of this perfection; that is to say, by what train of actions and opinions the Greeks arrived at the formation and realization of those principles by which it has been produced. To do this well, we must forget our own habits and manners; we must transport ourselves into Greece herself—into the country of a people in every thing which respects the fine arts very different from ourselves; and we must endeavour to determine the nature and the causes of their taste, without allowing ourselves to be seduced by the depravity of our own.
The character of the individual was every thing among the Greeks. They cultivated his moral part, and they perfected his physical part, because his physical and his moral qualities were alike necessary for the purposes of the state. The case is very different among modern nations. What signifies the beauty, or even the virtue of an individual, to the overgrown empires of the west? Removed, as we are, to an inconceivable distance from the Greeks in our appreciation of the model, it is no great wonder that we should have little in common with them on the principles of the imitation. Much difficulty might have been spared us, had the numerous writings of the Greek artists descended to our hands; these, however, have all perished in the lapse of centuries; and a few scattered notices, gathered from the allusions of their poets and philosophers, are all that we have in their room. Among the moderns, on the other hand, systems concerning the theory, as well as the practice, of the arts,—on the essence of the beautiful, on the ideal, and on the principles of imitation,—have been so multiplied, that which ever side we take in any of these very difficult questions, we are sure to meet with abundance of celebrated writers with whom we must contend, and jealous opinions which we must either confute or reconcile.
Those authors who, in treating of the history of the arts, have recognized the superiority of the Greeks over their modern imitators, have generally attributed this superiority to the influences of climate, of religion, of political liberty, of the facility with which the naked figure was studied, and the recompenses with which their artists were distinguished. They have thought that the genius, the physical beauty, and a certain charm of character, which they regard as having been peculiar to the Greeks, were the product of the temperature of their climate. They have said, that the veneration of the Greeks for the statues of their gods, and the majestic ideas of religion, had elevated the imagination of artists above the sphere of
