The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (32 page)

This girls’ costume was the familiar dress of the goddess Artemis (or Diana) as huntress.

At Sparta, freer than Athens in such matters, by the fifth and fourth centuries
B.C.
women, in training to be fit mothers of Spartan soldiers, were competing naked before men. “Gymnastic,” the Greek word for athletics, meant literally “exercises performed naked.” During the most popular events, wrestling and pankration, it would have been hard to keep a decent cover. In Sparta, though not elsewhere, women did wrestle, but there is no record of women boxers anywhere in Greece. Salacious rumors reported girls wrestling with boys on the island of Chios in the third century
A.D
. Plato in his
Laws
required physical training for women. He rejected wrestling and pankration but favored racing and fencing provided girls over thirteen wore “appropriate dress.” At Olympia women were not admitted as spectators to men’s athletic meets. Pausanias records that any woman caught at the games would be thrown from the cliffs of Mount Typaeum. Pericles declared in his funeral speech that the greatest glory of a woman was to not be talked about by men, whether in praise or blame. It seems that women’s races were organized only for “virgins,” and marriage (usually at about eighteen) ended a woman’s athletic career.

While athletic contests displayed ample models of the mature male body, there was not the same opportunity to observe the female body. Praxiteles (born c.390
B.C.
) was called the “inventor” of the female nude for his Aphrodite of Cnidus (c.370
B.C.
, known only through copies), of legendary beauty. Before him the male ideal had shaped sculptors’ figures of the female. When Zeuxis (c.400
B.C.
) set about painting a Helen for the Temple of Hera, for models he asked the people of Kroton to show him their most beautiful virgins. Instead they took him to the gymnasium, showed him the boys exercising there, and said he could surely imagine the beauty of their sisters. Earlier sculptors and painters seem not to have worked from models in a studio but from watching athletes at exercise. Not to be put off, Zeuxis insisted on a proper female model. The public council came to his aid. “He did not believe he could find in one body all the things he looked for in beauty,” Cicero later recounted, and so selected five maidens.

The Egyptian contrast can remind us that naturalistic art was not inevitable. But art that aimed to copy nature would dominate Rome, the Renaissance,
and modern Western Europe. In the tradition of Myron, Phidias, and Praxiteles, it expressed a new attitude, too, toward the artist himself. Still, as we shall see, copying “nature” was not the same as copying the distinctive features of one individual. The artist’s signature began to appear on works of sculpture. No longer a mere craftsman trying to do better what others had already done, he was in a competitive personal quest. The beauty of the natural living body was his unattainable ideal. Even before the subjects of Greek nudes were distinguished and their models identified, the artists began to be individualized.

The Greeks of course had to imagine an “inventor” of the art of sculpture, and they called him Daedalus. The legendary craftsman (c.690
B.C.
) had been born in Athens, but was plagued by a nephew who invented the saw and the potter’s wheel and threatened to excel him in skill. The jealous Daedalus threw him down to his death from the Acropolis, and was forced to leave the city. In Crete Daedalus’s ingenuity made him famous. To confine the Minotaur, he devised the Labyrinth, and then, to prevent his leaving Crete, King Minos used the Labyrinth to imprison Daedalus and his son Icarus. To escape, Daedalus made wings with wax and feathers that carried him all the way to Sicily, and so he became the first man to fly. But, in the familiar story, when Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax on his wings melted, and he drowned in the part of the Aegean that came to be called the Icarian Sea. After his escape, Daedalus continued his miraculous craftsmanship, becoming the inventor of sculpture.

There probably was a sculptor named Daedalus (c.650
B.C.
) who came from Crete. Wooden cult images, Pausanias reported, had been called
dae-dala
(“wonders of craftsmanship”), and the real Daedalus may have fashioned these into recognizable human forms. “Being the first to give them open eyes, and parted legs, and outstretched arms,” Diodorus Siculus, the Greek historian of the first century
B.C.
, recounted, “he justly won the admiration of men; for before his time statues were made with closed eyes and hands hanging down and cleaving to their sides.” Other archaic sculptors, disciples of Daedalus, came to be known as the Daedalids, who were said to be the first sculptors in marble.

The progress toward a freer, more natural portrayal of the human body was unmistakable. But it was not matched by comparable progress in knowledge of human anatomy. The classic Greeks did not consider the study of anatomy a proper end in itself. They knew the human body from the outside, from gymnasiums and athletic festivals, but did not dissect. From the sixth century, the postures of
kouroi
became more natural and more accurate anatomically in an ever more vital portrayal of the living body in movement. And across this mountain-fractured land the development again was remarkably uniform. It is much easier to date the figures than to localize them. Sculptors, like architects, were much in demand
across Greece, and signatures from all over intermingle, transcending politics in the community of art.

The dominant Panhellenic theme is increasing naturalism. Comparing the
kouroi
from decade to decade shows the head becoming more rounded, arms more subtly shaped, buttocks acquiring their characteristic slight hollow, and legs more accurately curving. The ear ceases to be schematized on one plane, and instead is scrupulously modeled into its lobe, its tragus, and antitragus. Unfortunately the noses are usually missing today, but eyes gradually reveal the roundness of the eyeball, the recess at the inner corner, and finally the lachrymal caruncle, a small fleshy excrescence. A comparable increasing precision appears in the modeling of hair, mouth, collarbone, chest, abdomen, shoulder blades, and feet.

The whole figure becomes more alive as stance becomes relaxed and the rigid symmetry of posture disappears. The heel is lifted, the arms raised, the head turned. Besides the familiar
kouroi
, there appear sculptured monuments in varied shapes and sizes. Designed to fit into pediments, metopes, and friezes of buildings are figures reclining and moving, striding, flying, running, falling. Greek sculpture in the great age must have been still more varied than what we can see today. Their favored sculptural material was bronze. In the early seventh century solid casting had been displaced by hollow casting. Bronze freed the sculptor to uplift limbs and tempted him to new postures. But in late antiquity, when marble statues were burned in lime-kilns, bronze statues were melted for their metal, leaving our picture of ancient sculpture sketchy and accidental.

The quest of Greek sculptors reached a spectacular climax in the fifth century
B.C.
, when the stiff Egyptian figure had been miraculously transformed. A new artistic freedom had come with the exhilarating Greek defeat of the Persians at Marathon (490
B.C.
) and Salamis (480
B.C.
). In philosophy, too, we see a new sense of flux and a search for ways of describing change. Heraclitus (flourished c.500
B.C.
) was opposing Thales’ single imperishable substance with his notion of endless flux. Pythagoras saw flux in the transmigration of souls, and he envisaged rhythm and proportion everywhere. Parmenides and Zeno found new ways to separate Being from Becoming. The new interest in mechanics suggested a new internal relation among parts of the body in motion.

Nudes now included females. A new subtlety came even into the rendering of drapery, which became a hallmark of Greek sculpture in the Great Age. The body took freer gestures and motions, illustrated in the familiar discus thrower of Myron (flourished c.460–440
B.C.
). This was the age of Phidias (500
B.C.
), who sculpted three statues of Athena for the Acropolis, supervised the frieze of the Parthenon, and made the colossal ivory-and-gold Zeus at Olympia. From Praxiteles in the next century (born at Athens,
c.390
B.C.
) we luckily have one surviving original, the celebrated Hermes with the infant Dionysus (found at Olympia, 1877).

Athletic victory statues were ideal types. While sculptors might distinguish between the physique of a runner and that of a boxer, they still would not portray the features of a particular victor. Interested in man in general, they did not leave us individualized portraits of the memorable figures. When gods were revered in ideal human form the same physical type represented man and gods equally. Athenians, fearing a “cult of personality,” ostracized (487–417
B.C.
) individuals who threatened to become tyrants, even if they had only found ways to include their likeness in a public monument. Among the reasons for Phidias’s exile, we have seen, was the accusation that he had portrayed himself on the shield of Athena on the Acropolis.

The mask, the hallmark of the Greek theater, expressed the classic preference for ideal types and the fear of personal uniqueness. Except for a few early experiments, masks plainly representing the features of specific individuals do not appear until the Great Age of Greek sculpture is past.

Still, the Greeks found one sculptor whose work expressed their ideal. Polyclitus was said to be “the only man who has embodied art itself in a work of art.” A “sculptor’s sculptor,” he became the undisputed legislator for his art. While Vitruvius’s “orders” of classic architecture were only Roman afterthoughts about Greek works in earlier centuries, Polyclitus was himself a great Greek sculptor and his “canon” was a product of Greek sculpture’s Great Age, the mid-fifth century
B.C.
It was as if Vitruvius had designed and built the Parthenon, and then written the specifications in a treatise on architecture.

Polyclitus’s bronze figure of a nude male athlete, the
Doryphoros
, or Spear Bearer, came to be called the “canon” (the measure). In the Roman centuries this became the best-known, most influential Greek statue, with the power of a legendary archetype.

Polyclitus came from Argos, the rival of Sparta in the Peloponnesus. Pupil of the great Ageladas, who was the teacher of both Myron and Phidias, he became the leading sculptor of the Age of Pericles, a prolific sculptor of athletic victors, and the paragon of the classic style. He won a famous competition against Phidias and others for the statue of an Amazon at Ephesus. His spectacular gold-and-ivory statue of the goddess Hera for her temple at Argos was praised by Strabo as even more beautiful, although slightly smaller, than Phidias’s Olympian Zeus.

His
Doryphoros
survives only in Roman copies and copies of copies. And we have only a few phrases from Polyclitus’s definitive treatise on sculpture, also called the “canon,” which provided conundrums for archaeologists to
match the mysteries of classical beauty. Was his statue shaped to conform to the principles of his treatise or was his treatise written about the statue? We cannot know. But belief in his rules for making a beautiful statue persisted. Pliny the Elder (
A.D
. 23–79), the versatile Roman encyclopedist, four centuries after Polyclitus still credited him with “perfecting” the science of sculpture in metal, just as Phidias “had opened up its possibilities.” “Polyclitus … made a statue which artists call the ‘Canon’ and from which they derive the basic forms of their art, as if from some kind of law.” Polyclitus’s often repeated axiom was that “perfection arises through many numbers.” Even if a sculptor deviated only slightly in each of his measures, he warned, in the end these could add up to a large error.

The canon, too, could protect the sculptor from the fickle public taste. A cautionary tale, still repeated seven centuries after Polyclitus’s death, explained:

The unmistakable Greek classic style may be a product of its mathematically prescribed proportions.

The ancient Greeks had long associated measure with beauty. “Measure and commensurability,” wrote Plato in the
Philebus
, “are everywhere identifiable with beauty and excellence.” This notion, the heart of Polyclitus’s canon, Aristotle himself traced back to Pythagoras’s discovery that “the qualities of numbers exist in a musical scale [
harmonia
], in the heavens, and in many other things.” If the sounds of an octave could be expressed in harmonious proportions, why not also the harmony of the whole universe? The surviving fragments of Polyclitus’s treatise, finding sculptural beauty in numbers, add his bit to the Pythagorean tradition. When Vitruvius, centuries later, expounded his own famous system of proportions, we have seen that his
symmetria
for the architectural orders plainly drew on a sculptural canon.

That Polyclitus probably worked by his own canon we know from repeated complaints that his statues were too much alike, “almost all composed after the same pattern.” Lysippus (flourished 328
B.C.
), the greatest sculptor of the Age of Alexander the Great, became famous for his slenderized variations from Polyclitus’s canon. A native of Sikyon, near Polyclitus’s
birthplace, Lysippus was reputed to have made some fifteen hundred statues, more than any other artist of his time. Still none of his original works has survived. His many portraits of Alexander the Great, beginning when Alexander was only a boy, were said to record the development of both a great artist and a great subject.