Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/373

SECOND PERIOD.] ARCHAEOLOGY 351 of reputation which was perhaps only surpassed by that of Athens, and, owing to the political collapse of the island, was never obscured by the inferiority of later schools. His works, which appear to have been mostly of bronze, con sisted of large compositions as well as of single statues of gods and heroes. After Onatas we have Anaxagoras, who was employed by the united Greek states to execute the bronze statue of Zeus (15 feet high) for Olyinpia, in com memoration of the battle of Platseae. On the same occa sion the Greeks dedicated two other works of art a bronze statue of Poseidon (10| feet high) for his temple on the Isthmus; and a golden tripod, standing on a bronze support formed of three serpents, for the entrance of the temple at Delphi. In both cases the names of the artists are unrecorded, and probably it will not be wrong to assume that they also were of ^Egina. The golden tripod was melted down during the Phocian war but the sup port remained in situ till the time of Constantine, by whose orders it was removed to Constantinople and placed in the Hippodrome, where it still stands. In 1855 the earth which had accumulated round its base was removed by C. T. Newton, and the names of the Greek states inscribed on it revealed. (Newton, Travels in the Levant, ii. p. 25. For the discussion raised on the antiquity of this monument, see Friederichs, Bausteine. i. p. 64.) In Athens we find in this period Endoeus, of whom the scanty records permit us to know almost nothing, and Antenor, the author of a bronze group representing the Tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogiton, and erected in the Agora at the foot of the Acropolis. That these figures were executed shortly after the incident which they were intended to commemorate, 550 B.C., is very probable. It is recorded that Xerxes carried them off to Susa in 480 B.C., and that they were restored to Athens by Alexander, or Seleucus, or Antiochus. In the meantime, to repair the loss, two sculptors, Critius and Nesiotes, were employed to re place the gi oup (Pausanias, i. 8, 5 ; Arrian, Expcd. Alex. iii. 16, 7 ; vii. 19, 2 ; Pliny, xxxiv. 19, 70). Whether the new sculptors were expected to reproduce the composition and the style of the lost figures as, for example, Onatas did in replacing the figure of the black Demeter at Phigalia cannot be ascertained. On the other hand, if the two marble statues in the museum of Naples (Mus. Borbon., viii. pis. 7, 8) have been rightly described as copies of the new group, and if it is right to conjecture that the group represented on certain tetra drachms of Athens, and, we may add, on a Panathenaic prize vase in the British Museum, was copied from the older group, on the ground that they were executed about the time when it was recovered from Susa, and therefore probably to commemorate that event, this much at least will be clear, that the composition of both groups was very much the same. On the other hand, the frequency with which statues and groups of statues of various kinds occur on the late tetradrachms of Athens, would equally perhaps require to be explained on the same hypothesis of a restoration, and for this we are not prepared. With respect to the marble statues just mentioned, it is to be observed that the expression of physical energy in them, side by side with a spareness and sinewiness, recalls the characteristic of Myron, and accordingly may be better ascribed to the later artist Critius, than to his predecessor Antenor. As comparable in many respects with one of the statues in Naples we give fig. 3. At Pvhegium, in lower Italy, the mantle of Clearchus had fallen on Pythagoras, unless it be true, as is also stated, that he had received his instruction from an otherwise unknown artist, Euchirus of Corinth. A list of the sculptures by Pythagoras (Overbcck, Antilx Schriftquellen, t.-i*. Pythag.) shows that he worked exclusively in bronze, th at his subjects, with the exception of a group of Europa on the bull, in Tarentum, consisted of male figures, and these of a kind in which either a strongly-pronounced FIG. 3. Bronze statuette. Brit. Mus. From the collection of the late SIY Woodhouse, Corfu. mxiscular action, or a marked capacity for it, must have been expressed. The most famous of them Avas his statuo of Philoctetes at Syracuse, of which the epigram writers declared that the expression of pain in it was such as to move the spectator. To disprove the conjecture that the pain might have been expressed in the face alone, there is a gem in the Berlin Museum (Overbeck, Gesch. d. Griech. Plastik, 2d, fig. 42) bearing what there is little doubt is a copy from the statue, from which Philoctetes appears to be suffering contortion through every limb from the wound in his foot as he tries to walk. And this, it may be added, while itself an accurate observation of the effect of such a wound, is an admirable illustration of the talent of Pythagoras for strained, and, what is more, a concentrated straining of, muscular action. From a statement of Pliny, it appears that he was the first to express the veins and sinews of the human form, and from Diogenes Laertius wo gather that he was the first to apply rhythmus and sym metry to his figures. The precise meaning of these latter words it is difficult to understand, with nothing better before us than a gem copy of one of the artist s works. It will not, however, be far wrong if we take them to refer to that concentration of the entire action of the body upon one point which has been recognised in the figure of Philoctetes, and which we assume to have been the key to the composition of his groups. This interpretation is further in harmony with the statement of Pliny, seeing that an artistic purpose of this kind could not be carried out without the studious expression of veins and sinews (Brunn, Gesch. d. Griech. Kunstler, i. p. 132). We have seen how few of the existing monuments can Existing be traced even conjecturally to the artists of this early scul P tures - period, whose names and praises have been handed down to us. Monuments of sculpture there are, manifestly assignable to this period, and some of them worthy of the fame of a great master. But whether the men who executed them were unhonoured in their tune, or whether from the insufficiency of our literary records names well known in antiquity may have escaped us, cr whether, in fact, the best of these works at least may really have come

from the hands of men otherwise well known, remains un-