![The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War] - Читать Любимую Русскую Полную Книгу 👉 Read-E-Book.com](/uploads/posts/books/4/4/2/4/the-historians-history-of-the-world-03-greece-to-the-peloponnesian-war-download.jpg)
The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]». Краткое содержание книги:
From first to last Greece thought thus. Many a time in the Odyssey, Ulysses and Telemachus fancy that they see a god when they unexpectedly encounter a tall and beautiful man; and the cold and severe Aristotle writes: “If amongst mortals any were born resembling the images of the gods, the rest of mankind would agree in swearing to them an eternal obedience.” Simonides, without going so far, made beauty the second of the four conditions necessary to happiness, and Isocrates said: “Virtue is so honoured only because it is moral beauty.” It was because he was the most beautiful of the ephebi that Sophocles was charged, after Salamis, with the task of leading the chorus which sung the hymn of victory; and it is said Phidias engraved on the finger of Zeus at Olympia: “Pantarces is beautiful”—a sacrilege which might have exposed him to great danger. We no longer possess this inscription, but we find a similar one on a painted vase, where Victory is offering a crown to a handsome ephebus. The gods themselves had the reputation of being sensible of this advantage, which had procured many mortals the honour of their love. At Ægium Jupiter desired that his priests should be chosen from among the young men who had carried off the prize for beauty; for this merit Ganymede was snatched up to heaven, that he might serve as cup-bearer to the gods, and Apollo admitted into his sanctuary the statue of Phryne, the most admired of the courtesans of Greece. It is notorious how Hyperides saved the beautiful hetæra from a capital charge, when she was standing before the judges, by simply tearing away at an appropriate moment the veil which hid her beauty. The recollection of these facts serves to explain the divine honours paid to Antinoüs by the most Grecian of the Roman emperors; but they also show how much this worship of beauty, of which the Greeks had made a religion and from which Plato was to weave a theory, went to form the artists, and, to a certain extent, the philosophers of Greece. Did not Plato utter words whence has been legitimately derived the famous saying that Beauty is the splendour of goodness? The jurisconsults of the Roman empire called themselves the priests of law; Phidias and Polyclitus might have styled themselves the priests of the beautiful; and this trait suffices to mark the difference between the two civilisations, the Greek and the Roman. Beauty is the perpetual aspiration of the French spirit which seeks it in everything, in the great spectacles of nature or in the works of famous writers and artists.
Amongst the statues of which the ancients were most proud, are some which amaze us by their colossal height, and others which shock our taste by the diversity of the colours and materials employed. The Egyptians treated their Pharaohs and their gods in a similar fashion, as did the Persians their kings, the Athenians the people or the senate personified, and we ourselves do the same to translate certain ideas: the Saint Borromeo of Lake Maggiore and the Liberty of New York are colossi. Executed to be seen from afar, they strike the eye by their mass, and are the expression in stone of elevated sentiments: of holiness, patriotism, or independence. On the promontory where they are placed between earth and heaven they appear as the very genius of the people which erected them, a shining witness of their gratitude, and the figurative representation of their inmost thought.
Apollo
(From a Statue now in the Museum at Naples)
The art of colossal sculpture was at the service of the gods, and was in its place in or near their temples. It was the same with the chryselephantine sculpture, and for the same reasons. The most celebrated of these sculptures and those which from ancient descriptions we know the best, were the Athene of the Parthenon and the Zeus of Olympia.
Reaching with her pedestal to a height of fifteen metres (about 49 ft.), Minerva stood erect, enveloped in a talaric tunic, the dress of virgins. In one hand she held a Victory, in the other the spear round which the serpent Erichthonius was coiled. The draperies were of gold, the naked parts of ivory, the head of Medusa, on the Ægis, in silver, the eyes being of precious stones.
How did this Minerva, which was seen by Julian as late as the fourth century of our era, finally perish? The Christians have been charged with this, but the accusation should be brought against her wealth. So much gold could not escape the barbarians, whoever they were, whether invaders from the north, needy princes, or ordinary thieves. The pillage of the Parthenon had already begun in the time of Isocrates and the Athene of Julian must have been only a ruin.
Phidias was also summoned to Olympia. The treasures accumulated in the temple from the offerings of all Greece, permitted him to execute a work which surpassed that of the Parthenon. On a throne of cedar wood, inlaid with gold and ivory, ebony, and precious stones, and covered with bas-reliefs and paintings, Zeus was majestically seated. His thick hair and beard were of gold; of gold and ivory was the Victory he carried in his right hand, in token that his will was always triumphant; of gold, too, mingled with other metals was the royal sceptre surmounted by an eagle, which he held in his left hand. On the head was the crown of olive leaves, which was given to the victors in the games, but, as was fitting, that of the god was gold, as well as his sandals and his mantle, which revealed his naked breast in ivory. His visage had the virile beauty proper to the father of gods and men; his tranquil gaze was indeed that of the all-powerful whom no passion stirs and behind whose broad forehead should reside the vast intelligence of the orderer of worlds. Placed at the back of the naos, at the point where the trend of the architectural lines attracted the gaze, the statue, fifteen or sixteen metres (49 or 52 ft.) high, seemed still more colossal than it was.
Minerva
(From a Greek vase)
The Olympian Jupiter shared the fate of the Minerva of the Parthenon; he was too rich for an age grown too barbarous and beliefs too hostile. It is said that in 393 Theodosius had it transported to Constantinople, where it perished some years later in one of the great conflagrations that so often visited the new capital of the Empire; it is not likely that it was so long respected. Already in the second century Lucian laughs at this “honest fellow, the exterminator of giants, who remained seated so quietly while brigands shaved his golden hair.”
Other towns besides Athens and Olympia had chryselephantine statues. Costly materials were used for the Juno at Argos, the Æsculapius of Epidaurus, and others.
Phidias did not confine himself to representing gods, that is to say to making colossi; with his own hands, or more often through those who worked under his direction, he lavished less divine sculpture on the frieze, the metopes, and the double pediment of the temple, the figures of which, as seen from below, do not appear to be of more than ordinary height. Those which he chiselled on Minerva’s shield and on her sandals, were still smaller. The magnificent fragments which remain to us from the two pediments, Demeter and Core, Iris and Cephisus, the Charities or Fates, the Hercules or Theseus, are the works of his school and we may say of his mind. In spite of their mutilations, these marbles, like those of the Victory untying her sandal, may be ranged beside, if not above, the most glorious creations of Renaissance sculpture in the purity of the style and the calm serenity of the figures, which neither have their limbs twisted in violent action nor their brows overcharged with thought, as happened when statuary strove to rival painting. What a puissant life is in these divinities tranquilly seated in the pediments, and how calm on their fiery horses are the riders in the Panathenaic procession! Later on the school of grace and voluptuousness will appear, with an Athenian, Praxiteles, as its chief; still later, passion will agitate the marble: then the decay of art begins—such a drama as the “Farnese bull”[46] depicts may not fittingly be presented in stone.