The Fourth Century, to the Death of Alexander

Athens has this very fine (and not "conserved") head of the portrait of Demosthenes  by Polyeuktos of Athens.  We need a portrait for this period.  Actually, this is early 3rd c. and so late for this post, but never mind.

The Century that must be understood

Until archaeology began in Greece (after Greek independence from Turkey) and the Parthenon sculptures were brought to London by Lord Elgin in the 19th century, Europe's idea of Greek art was based on written sources and on copies found in Italy, most of which were copies of works later than the fifth century.  Thus, the prevalent notion of Classical Greek art was formed more from fourth century than from fifth century examples.  We now call the styles after Athens' fall from political power and before the conquests of Alexander the Great of Macedon LATE CLASSICAL.  Late Classical art both carries further what began in the age of Pericles and anticipates some of the characteristics of Greek art in the subsequent age of the Hellenistic kingdoms (see below).  Some architectural forms attain their classic expression only in the fourth century; for example, fifth-century Greek theaters had not yet achieved a definite architectural form.  The round temple likewise is a fourth-century creation.  In Ionia, it was in the fourth century that the old archaic temples in the great centers were replaced by Ionic temples embodying classical ideals of form.  Athens remained a great center for art although she would never regain political leadership.  Very significantly, Greek architects and sculptors were much sought after by non-Greek patrons on the edges of their world, such as Mausolus of Caria, a satrap in Asia Minor nominally under Persian rule.  Written sources give us lists of statues by famous sculptors and tell us where they were; it is evident that, as in the Middle Ages in Europe, Greek sculptors travelled very extensively to obtain commissions (in the age of Pericles, similarly, they had flocked to Athens).  Fourth-century painters were extremely famous and were praised by later writers much as we extoll Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael.  Late Classical art is personal, in the sense that each artist cultivated his own idiosyncratic style, and it is extremely urbane and secular, compared with that of the fifth century.  The Etruscans and their Latin neighbors, still in thrall to Greek art, attempted the Classical styles with less happy results than they had the Archaic, as the "Mars from Todi" shows.  Their failure shows how extremely sophisticated Late Classical Greek art had become.

[A 365]  Dexileos, his inscription tells us, died in a battle with the Corinthians; that was in 394, and his family presumably ordered his fine grave stele promptly, so we know that we have here Athenian style of the beginning of the fourth century.  The family plot was a prominent one, at the intersection of two roads in the Kerameikos cemetery, a corner lot, and a cast of the Stele of Dexileos dominates the site today (the original is in the Kerameikos Museum).  The figures still have the small-boned proportions of the late fifth century, but the gestures of the men, the rearing of the horse, and, especially, the billowing cape seem routine compared with the figures on the Nike parapet (of course, this is only a grave stele, but it is a very fine, expensive one).  Like the Stele of Dexileos, all fourth-century grave stelai will be in higher relief, until, ca. 320 B.C. (see [A 357]) the figure of the deceased is nearly a statue, and the frame of the stele is a complete aedicule.

[MA 77]  In the fourth century, the western Greeks in Italy produced most of their own fancy red-figured vases, but the Athenians found a new major market in the Crimea, where Greek colonies like Panticapæum (modern Kerch) thrived.  The British Museum pelike with Peleus and Thetis (remember their wedding on the François Vase?), who here is changing into various frightening animals to test Peleus's mettle, is from Rhodes (also rich in the fourth century and later), but so many of the best pieces by fourth-century Athenian vase-painters were found in the Imperial Russian excavations at Kerch a century ago that scholars came to call late Attic red figure "The Kerch Style".  If these vases are any indication (and literary sources tend to bear them out), Greek painting by this time had become free and elaborate, with gracefully draped garments and figures easily represented in every sort of pose, such as that (at upper right) of the nude fleeing Nereid, in twisting three-quarter back view with her fallen cloak whipped around her body.  Whatever may be its shortcomings as decoration of a vessel, the Kerch style is evidence of extreme virtuosity and love of pictorial effects.

[G 62]  Several of the Classical Greek building types did not reach their full development until the fourth century: the East Greek (Ionian) Ionic Order temple, the Corinthian Order, the round temple, the theater.  The Theater of Dionysos in Athens, in which all the famous plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides where first performed in the fifth century, did not then have the perfect round orchestra, the semi-circular seating, the permanent seating that we associate with "a Greek theater" (the one on the LSU campus is a little more Roman than Greek).  The classic Greek theater is that at Epidauros in the eastern Peloponnesos, which is not earlier than ca. 350 B.C.  The cult of Asklepios, the healing god, whom they regarded as Apollo's son, did not become extremely important (and wealthy) before this time, and Epidauros is its great center, like Olympia for the cult of Zeus.  The word orchestra is Greek for dancing floor; the chorus, beautifully rehearsed, chanted and danced the choruses in Greek dramas, which comment on the significance of the action and dialogue.  Perhaps as early as this theater, a shallow platform, proscenium, was built in from of the tall skénê, or scene building, and scene-paintings gave an appropriate background to the action; they had different kinds of scenes proper to tragedies, satyr plays, and comedies.  The protagonists stood on the proscenium, which is the ancestor of stages such as we have.  The seating area is the cavea, or hollow (for the Greek theater, as distinct from the Roman, was supported in a natural hollow of a hill, not built up from the level ground), divided into cunei, or wedges (remember cuneiform = wedge-shaped writing); to get crowds to their seats and to empty the theater in good time, there was a diazoma 3/5 of the way up, separating the more expensive seats from the cheaper ones.  The Theater at Epidauros is today the site of the very best summer festival of Greek drama, with every seat taken, even though Epidauros is not very easy to get to.  It is famous for its perfect acoustics; from the topmost seats you can not only hear but understand someone speaking, standing in the orchestra.  The Augustan architect, Vitruvius, discusses theater acoustics in one of his Books on architecture; before modern amplification, the science of acoustics was doubly important.  The seating, with the diazoma and the wedge-shaped sections, reminds us of most of our own arenas and theaters; we got it from them, and it is hard to improve upon.

[G 60] [G 61]  The Tholos at Epidauros is not the earliest fourth-century round temple (that is the one at Delphi, ca. 390), but it is the most perfectly realized; some sources say it is by Polykleitos, which is either a mistake or it names a grandson or grand-nephew of the famous fifth-century sculptor.  The restored section drawing in [G 60] is a century old and should be disregarded above the level of the entablature.  In the fifth century, we already saw the establishment of the practice of using a lighter or fancier Order in the interior; now it is standard practice, and the double-decker Doric interior is history.  If we had been able to study the temple at Bassae, we also should have seen the Corinthian Order in a very early form in the fifth century, but even in the fourth century it is hardly seen (see below) as an exterior Order.  The Tholos at Epidauros has a fine Late Classical Doric exterior peristyle and, for the interior Order, a circle of truly elegant Corinthian columns.  Corinthian is not quite a distinct Order; only the column capital is radically different from Ionic; it is not a wholly independent design system.  The ceiling blocks of the Tholos at Epidauros are preserved; in the coffers are wonderfully carved flowers.  Since the basement of the Tholos at Epidauros is a unique feature, and the roof in two stages in the reconstruction is almost certainly incorrect, the first and most essential thing that we notice about round temples is that, roundness aside, they are like rectangular temples: three-step stereobate, peristyle, cella, interior Order; Doric entablature above Doric peristyle; tiled roof (since the peak of a circular roof is in the center, that is where the akroterion is).  Just as round churches will be built for special reasons in Christian architecture, so are round temples in Greek and Roman architecture; they are never the principal temples of a town or sanctuary.  The Temple of Asklepios at Epidauros, of ca. 375 B.C., which you can see in the small plan on the Print near the Tholos, is the principal temple.  In the cella, the Tholos had a black-and-white marble floor laid on concentric walls which are not just deep foundations; openings in them make them a labyrinth with a circular pit at the center (whether in the center of the floor there was a fancy ornament is much more dubious).  We can hardly doubt that this curious arrangement is the key to the purpose that the Tholos served.  Theories abound.  One is that the snakes of Asklepios were kept below the floor of the Tholos.  The Corinthian capitals of the interior Order of the Tholos are regarded as Classic: they no longer look awkward or half bare, their elements are neatly related to each other, and they are far from the excessively drilled, tossed-salad leafy capitals of later periods.  Like the Doric capital, the Corinthian is alike on all four faces, so it is easier to use than Ionic, especially at corners (see the special capitals required on the corners of the Nike Temple and the Erechtheion).  Also from Epidauros, but from the standard temple of Asklepios we have early 4th-century sculptures, including this akroterion of an Aura:

[G 55]  The interior diameter of the Choregic Monument of Lysikrates in Athens is only six feet, and we are not even sure that it had a door.  Even if it had, it is not a real temple but a special kind of monument, in this instance made in the shape of a round temple.  A real round temple, honorary in intent, was just being built at Olympia, the Philippeion.  A choregic monument was honorary.  The choregos (literally, "chorus leader") was the wealthy Athenian who paid for the rehearsal of the chorus in a trilogy of dramas prepared for the quadrennial festival in the Theater of Dionysos in Athens, just as a Broadway "angel" does or a corporate sponsor nowadays.  The choregos of the winning trilogy had the privilege of erecting, on public ground but at his own expense, a choregic monument.  The plays that Lysikrates sponsored won in 334 B.C., so we have a dated monument.  This monument is the only known use of Corinthian on the exterior until rather late in the Hellenistic Period (hence "hardly" above).  That isn't the only interesting thing about it.  The coloristic, illusionistic use of materials ties in with the more pictorial and illusionistic qualities of sculpture in the Late Classical fourth century, not to mention the stories of trompe l'oeil that we read in descriptions of lost paintings.  Whether they would really fool us, or anyone, doesn't matter; that such stories are told of this period is significant.  The tall square base is made of poros (not "porous") limestone, creamy tan and relatively rough.  The tiny three-step stereobate, the 3/5-round columns, the entablature (its tiny frieze has the story of Dionysos and the Tyrrhenian pirates, which we last saw in Exekias's cup), and the roof with its ornament are made of the nearly white Pentelic marble.  The curved slabs between the 3/5-round columns are made of blue-gray Hymettian (from Mt. Hymettos) marble, which the Athenians then and now usually employ for more utilitarian applications, because it is not so white, and it has veins, but the curved slabs with tripods in relief at the level of the Corinthian capitals are again white Pentelic.  What did the architect intend?  From a distance in the right light you can imagine that the Hymettian panels are a wall in shadow a foot or two behind the columns, which then seem full round; the frieze of tripods then will be a cella-wall frieze like the Panathenaic procession on the Parthenon cella wall.  The illusion works even today, when the Pentelic applied columns are less white than they once were and weathering has rendered all the edges less crisp.  This sort of architectural trompe l'oeil is new.  The leafy form at the peak of the roof (which is carved to look like marble tiles but is really one piece) is more than an akroterion; it supported the great bronze victory tripod.  In fact, the monument that we possess is really just an elaborate support for the tripod.  The Choregic Monument still stands in the old neighborhood on the south slope of the Acropolis in the Street of the Tripods.

[A 218]  We have emphasized the importance of the Archaic temples of Ionia.  One of them, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos, burned down in 356 B.C. (authors say it was on the night that Alexander the Great was born, which coincided with an eclipse; even if so much coincidence is hard to swallow, the tale would not have arisen unless the year was right), and its rebuilding began immediately.  For this reason, sculpture from the new temple is dated in the third quarter of the fourth century.  The new Artemision had a similar plan (dipteral, with a deep pronaos, on a tall stereobate), was just as large (> 350 feet long), but was designed in a Classical form of the East Greek (original) Ionic Order, with a plinth under each column base and with dentils (as on the Mausoleum, [MG 220]) instead of the Attic Ionic frieze (which we just saw on the Lysikrates Monument) in the entablature.  The Archaic Artemision had had column drums with reliefs on them at the front of the temple (fragments from these Archaic reliefs are in the British Museum), and so has the Classical Artemision, but, like the Ionic capitals, the new reliefs are up to date in style--and in mood.  The reason that the best preserved sculptured drum [A 218] is often labelled "possibly by Skopas" is wishful thinking; we read that Skopas did one of them and hope we've won the lottery, because he was a famous sculptor.  We don't need a name, however, to appreciate the sculpture.  It probably represents the story of Alcestis (see the play, Alcestis, by Euripides); the wingèd youth is Thanatos (Death), the figure with a caduceus (Greek kerykeion) is Hermes as Psychopompos (Guide of Souls).  Even if you agree with scholars who suggest a different interpretation, the elegiac mood is the same; it is created by the style of the figures themselves.  Late Classical art often has a romantic mood.  The figure proportions are different from those of the fifth century, too, compact and fleshy.

[MG 220] [A 404] [A 229]  Mausolos, satrap/prince of Halikarnassos in Caria in southwestern Asia Minor, was not a Greek; his name is the Greek spelling of an Anatolian-language name, and as satrap he was subject to the Persian king.  But he hired Greeks to design and build his tomb (Mausoleum just means "monument of Mausolos"), and after his death in 353 his widow, Artemisia, furthered its completion (whether or not it is true that after her death the sculptors completed the project gratis just for the glory of it).  We are told that the architect was Pytheos (who also worked at Priene and may be as important to Late Classical Ionic design as Iktinos was to Periklean Classical Doric design) and that four famous sculptors worked on it, each on one side.  Even if the one-per-side story should be true, it leaves many questions unanswered and a lot of sculpture unaccounted for (also, four sculptors means "with their workshops and assistants").  We possess (all in the British Museum) much of the Amazonomachy frieze, most of two and parts of others of the "portraits" of members of Mausolos's dynasty, and part of a beautiful horse from the chariot at the top (the portrait statues did not go in that chariot).  The basic shape of the tomb (which, like the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens, Pheidias's Zeus, and the Ephesos Artemision, was one of the Wonders of the Ancient World (so famous that today we call all monumental tombs "mausoleums") was the traditional tomb-type of non-Greek Anatolian dynasts in SW Asia Minor, but (not for the first time but at a grander scale) it is designed in terms of a Greek Order, in this case Ionic.  There are many disagreements concerning the appearance of the Mausoleum, because it was dismantled and used in building the crusaders' castle at Bodrum (again, the vicissitudes of history), but the tall base, the Ionic colonnade, the pyramidal roof, and the chariot are certain.  The dynastic portraits (which may be types rather than individual likenesses) are nine feet tall and powerfully conceived to hold their own against such a huge building.  The wrapping of the drapery around the massive body is dramatic (compare, also, [A 247]).  As we shall observe later when we study Greek sculptors portraying Gauls and Africans, the artist seems to relish the challenge of working with a foreign physiognomy.  The best preserved male statue has long been called "Mausolos", but it may just as well be one of his ancestors.  He has a broader face with larger bones than most Greeks, and his hairline and mustache are different from most Greeks'; the sculptor, with an empirical approach characteristic of the age of Aristotle, maximizes these interesting features.  Four slabs of the Amazonomachy that join each other ([A 229] shows two) are called the Newton slabs after the excavator that found them.  They were found buried on the side of the foundations where Skopas is supposed to have worked and, because of the obvious resemblance to the Dresden Maenad, [A 219], almost certainly representing Skopas's style (though it is a battered copy), have usually been assigned to him.  In the last half century this attribution has been strongly contested.  In any case, the resemblance remains: short, fleshy bodies, attitudes suggestive of passionate feeling, a fondness for baring the flank of a girl's (Amazon's/Maenad's) body by letting the open-sided short chiton slip from its girdle--real resemblances, whether of Skopas's workshop or only of mid-fourth-century style affected by his popularity.  This is the third great continuous frieze composition that we have studied; looking back from the Mausoleum's Amazonomachy, the Siphnian Treasury's frieze looks patterned by comparison, and the Panathenaic frieze of the Parthenon has figures that fill the frieze more fully, both in taking up the whole height of the slabs and in being densely packed and complexly overlapped; by comparison, the Amazon frieze's figures have ample headroom, overlap only enough to link them compositionally, and are arranged in \ \ /\ / / \/ sequences to organize them clearly; the sculptor-designer has taken account of their being viewed from a greater distance, but also they resemble other fourth-century architectural sculpture in these respects.

[A 219]  The Amazons on the Newton slabs fight with all the girlish intensity of a sex kitten in an action flick--say, in "Batman"; our familiarity with the latter genre should not blind us to the novelty in the Late Classical Period of showing girls scrapping like that.  It gave added piquancy to the Amazon motif which inherently appealed by showing armed combat between the sexes, which was taboo in real life.  The famous "Raging Maenad", represented by the Dresden statuette from Sikyon, shows utter fury, complete abandon, in a young female.  Maenads were thought of as women who followed Dionysos into the open country, eating hot, raw flesh, drinking raw wine, and forgetting domestic constraints altogether (see the Bacchae by Euripides)  In later centuries, classes in rhetoric and writing set pupils the task of describing works of art, and a number of the neatest, most eloquent evocations (models to emulate) survived and ended up in the collection of verse called the Greek Anthology.  No work of art has more examples, with more vivid descriptive details, than the "Raging Maenad" of Skopas, the great fourth-century sculptor (and architect) from the island of Paros, who worked, however, all over the Greek-speaking world.  That is why we are confident that the Dresden statuette from Sikyon (a town near Corinth; not all "Roman copies" come from Rome!) represents it.  Skopas is called the sculptor of passion, justly.

[A 184]  Another strand in the fabric of Late Classical sculpture (we no longer are dealing with linear evolution) is that of the Athenian sculpture descending directly from the pupils of Pheidias.  At the head of this stylistic succession stands the "Eirene and Ploutos" (Peace with Infant Wealth) by Kephisodotos.  The original bronze was set up in Athens in 370 B.C.; the Pheidian succession is clear if you compare her with the caryatides from the south porch of the Erechtheion.  Her modern right arm and the shapeless pitcher grasped by Ploutos now have been removed; another copy, preserving only Ploutos, found at Piraeus, the port of Athens, preserves the cornu copiae (horn of plenty) under Ploutos, which the restorer who added the pitcher didn't know about.  Another copy, in Naples, preserves only the midsection of Eirene, but the drapery of the Munich and Naples copies confirm each other.  Several things are noteworthy.  Eirene nominally is a "goddess", and Ploutos is another name for Hades, but this group is really a statue of an idea.  It is not a cult statue, not meant for worship, but made to celebrate the formal conclusion of the wars with the Peloponnesians: with peace will come a return to prosperity.  It is a personification in the guise of a statue of a goddess, ancestress of many statues of Virtue or Ecclesia or Motherhood--almost any abstraction, since in most European languages these are of the feminine gender.  Second, it looks to us like a standing statue of the Virgin and Child, and not by accident.  The famous Athenian statue of Peace cherishing the promise of prosperity made an ideal prototype for Roman Imperial statues of the empress holding a newborn heir to the throne (example: Messalina with the Infant Britannicus, in the Louvre), and these in turn were models for standing statues of Mary and the Infant Jesus, especially regarding her as mother of the future king of heaven.  Third, Kephisodotos was the father of Praxiteles, the most famous Athenian sculptor of the fourth century, and Eirene and Ploutos already has the Praxitelean S-curve stance, with the baby reaching up to the adult, which we also see in Hermes with the Infant Dionysos from Olympia, [MA 45].  Expressively, Eirene is more tender and motherly, Ploutos more babyish, the whole more lyrical than fifth-century statues had been, but it is also strong; the straight plumb line of the folds around her standing leg give it great stability.

[A 186]  Praxiteles seems initially to have made most of his freestanding statues in bronze, the standard practice.  One bronze statue that must have been very popular, to judge from the number of surviving copies, was the Apollo Sauroktonos (Lizard-slayer: sauro- as in dinosaur).  Here, too, is the S-curve that Athenian Late Classical sculptors loved so much, but, instead of being counterweighted by a baby on the hip, the center of gravity is thrown outside the body of the statue so that the boy must be represented as leaning on something--and here is the birth of that tree trunk which, later, copyists will use to reinforce the leg of a marble copy of a bronze.  Here it is original to the composition and even part of the story: it is a place to put the lizard.  It would have looked better in bronze; none of the marble tree trunks is very attractive.  At first glance it looks like a strangely secularized Apollo (rather like the very charming boy John the Baptists in Renaissance art), and charm surely is the main motive, but there really was a local cult of Apollo Sauroktonos.  Earlier centuries had never thought of the august deity Apollo as having been a youngster, an ephebe; Praxiteles uses this story to encapsulate the idle and innocent concentration of the very young on trivial pursuits and to make an art form of the proportions of the immature body.  If Praxitelean art can be summed up under any one adjective, that will be urbane; it is an intensely civilized expression.

[A 198]  How has it happened that the many copies of one of the most famous of all Greek statues, and the one on which Praxiteles' popular fame most depended, do not agree very well with each other and are mostly mediocre to poor in quality?  Good pointed (mechanically accurate) copies are made from bronzes, from which piece molds could be taken, which were reassembled to make models for the pointing machine.  Praxiteles' most famous statue, the Aphrodite of Knidos, and others of his mature statues (including MA 45, of which we have no sculptural copies at all) were of marble.  Bronze was more prestigious, the more costly material, but when he became famous enough that his style was worth more than the material it was made of Praxiteles chose marble.  The Athenian painter, Nikias, his friend, almost as famous as he was, collaborated by tinting Praxiteles' statues; we have only brief descriptions, of pink in the shell of the ear, of misty eyes, of pictorial effects of color by a master illusionist.  This means that Praxiteles work is not only urbane, but also pictorial and illusionistic in intent, another difference from the age of Pheidias and Polykleitos.  Now, you cannot take molds from a tinted marble statue, especially not a very famous one whose fame included its subtle color.  Mold-taking is bad for bronzes, fatal to tinted marbles.  All the copies we have must be freehand, although measurements might have been made.  One of the Vatican copies, [A 198], is no worse than mediocre, but in comparison with the Hermes, [MA 45], its torso looks mechanical and dead and not at all like living flesh.  Yet the Aphrodite of Knidos, in popular lore, was famous for being so fleshly that males might embarrass themselves in its presence (it's some comfort to know that vulgar tales are not only a modern or an American phenomenon).  It was set up in a monopteros, a round, temple-like small building, but without a cella; it provided a roof over the statue (sufficient protection in an age without air pollution) and allowed the Aphrodite, set up in the center, to be looked at from all sides--ancient authors emphasize that feature.  This is not the first Greek nude female, of course, but it is the first Aphrodite to be set up this way, and it became so famous that the Cnidians would not sell it even when financially strapped.  It became a tourist attraction equal to the Mona Lisa of Leonardo da Vinci since the Louvre was opened as a museum.  Here the vessel and the drape are, like the tree in the Sauroktonos, part of the original composition; Aphrodite has been surprised while bathing and is in the act of recovering her garment to conceal her divine nudity, meantime holding her hand in front of the pubic area.  This nominally modest gesture was used repeatedly in later Aphrodites.  Praxiteles was extremely famous, hobnobbing with kings and princes; his private life, too,  was made the matter of legend, and those art historians who call his male statues "effeminate" should consider that all the stories of Phryne, his fabulously lovely model and mistress, practically guarantee that he is the only certifiably heterosexual Greek sculptor.  One copy (only the head survives) of the Aphrodite of Knidos that seems to do some justice to the qualities of the original (it jibes best with the face of the Hermes) is the Kaufmann Head, in the Louvre since World War II.

[MA 45]  Pausanias in the second century after Christ wrote that he saw in the cella of the old Temple of Hera at Olympia a statue by Praxiteles of Hermes holding the infant Dionysos.  In 1870 the German archaeologists excavating at Olympia found the statue there and found the foundation course of the base on which it had stood, between two of the attached columns of the interior order of the temple, with its back, therefore, to the wall (the back is, in fact, more roughly finished than the front).  The hair is rough: it was painted; the cinnabar traces on the sandals mean that they had gold leaf on them (the red underneath makes gold look really rich); if the strut was painted dark, it would not show so badly; we can hardly doubt that there was delicate coloring on the face and that the drape that conceals the trunk to permit the leaning pose was colored.  Such a statue could not have molds taken from it, but there is a detail in a wall-painting from Pompeii that evidently quotes this statue and shows that Hermes was holding up a bunch of grapes for which baby Dionysos is reaching--as in Renaissance Madonna and Child compositions where Mary holds cherries that the baby Jesus reaches for.  Urbane charm again, here in a statue set up at Olympia itself in one of Greece's most venerable temples.  As the Renaissance parallels suggest, there is nothing irreligious in gracious charm.  Many twentieth-century art historians dislike this statue almost as much as [A 272] and are loath to admit it is by Praxiteles, but it is thoroughly Praxitelean, its pose going back to Kephisodotos's Eirene, and its surfaces are subtle, conveying a sense of a little fat under fine skin over the rectus abdominis, and unlike any copy, even one so sensitive as the Kaufmann Head of the Aphrodite, so whoever wants to argue that it is other than the original work of Praxiteles that Pausanias says it is has a great burden of proof.

[MA 68]  To explain what we mean by "thoroughly Praxitelean", consider a statue that is certainly a fourth-century Greek original bronze and certainly Praxitelean, in the style of Praxiteles, the boy dredged from the sea near the Bay of Marathon (where the Persians had landed in 490, whose distance from Athens sets the length of a marathon race).  Wherever it originally stood, being on shipboard when it was sunk strongly suggests it was being taken from Attica as booty.  There have been many suggestions as to what he held in his hands, to explain the pose of the statue, but we just don't know.  It doesn't correspond to any statue by Praxiteles of which we have a description, and the style is usually thought to be generally rather than specifically Praxitelean, a little too mild or weak in comparison with the copies of the Sauroktonos, very good Athenian work of the time of Praxiteles and extremely under his influence.  Like the other Greek bronze originals, he has inset eyes and bronze eyelashes; the very youthful body could not be more gracefully proportioned.

[A 290] [A 486]  The student struggling to make clear sense of the more intricate stylistic picture of art in the fourth century might react to this statue, the Youth from the Sea near Antikythera, in the National Museum, Athens, another original Greek bronze that was en route to, presumably, Rome, when the ship sank, by thinking, well, if the foregoing are Athenian, this "must be" something else.  For reasons that would be too time-consuming for this course, however, there are grounds for thinking that it is Athenian, and by a sculptor who also was a painter, but whose sculpture was quite independent of Praxitelean style, a sculptor who likes to work in bronze.  It also has been argued that it represents the Trojan prince Paris, who cast the apple of discord among the goddesses.  Otherwise, it could be an ordinary athlete throwing a ball, except that it is over lifesize, which does not preclude its being mortal but suggests a hero.  The shape of the face, the walking pose that also begins to turn in space, the long legs (shared with the Olympia Hermes), the glamorous mien, all are typical of major statuary in the second half of the fourth century.  So is the forward jutting of the pelvis.

[MA 50]  Placing the Mars from Todi next to the Antikythera Youth is unkind, perhaps, but the turning pose with the legs farther apart and the glamorous upward glance of the head show us where to date the Italian statue, which is usually taught as part of Etruscan art, although Todi was an Italic-speaking town and by the later fourth century even Etruscan towns were subject to Rome.  A statue made in Todi (not that it couldn't have been brought from elsewhere) at this date could be Etruscan work, since the Etruscans were still superior, especially in metal sculpture.  The language group of this western statue's maker, in fact, at this date is not so important.  What matters is the obvious impact on western statuary of Greek work similar to the Antikythera Youth.  It shows us that a statue like the Antikythera Youth is far more than, and other than, a nice male pin-up; making a statue that all works together like that is, first of all, an intellectual feat; the harmoniousness does not come from merely feeling it and wanting it.  The sculptor of the Mars from Todi desired to make a statue with all the latest features, but he ended up with one leg longer than the other, with a ruffle instead of drapery emerging from the cuirass, with no hint of a flexible, breathing torso inside that armor (the helmet is modern; one detail that is un-Etruscan is that the statue had inset eyes rather than eyes done as on the Capitoline Wolf of ca. 500 and on some surely Etruscan heads, with only the iris of the eye inlaid).

[MA 70, right]  The Ficoroni Cista from Praeneste (Palestrina), about 50 miles east of Rome, is signed by an artist with a Latin name, Novios Plautios, but the cast bronze handle-statuettes, in a different style, are thought to be Etruscan work, and Novios Plautios's style of engraving is such a good imitation of Greek work that one might think that it had been done by a Greek, since the subject, the Argonauts, is out of Greek mythology.  In fact, we have reached a date when to look for purely Italic or purely Etruscan work is illusive.  Suffice it to say that these cylindrical cistae are traditionally Praenestine, and that Latin, Etruscan, and Greek elements had long rubbed shoulders in that prosperous town, so that the remarkably Greek-looking drawing on the Ficoroni cista, original work (though it may copy a painting) not later than about 300 B.C., is not so astonishing, although no other Praenestine cista is quite so accomplished in its drawing.

[A 325, top]  The Chimaera from Arezzo, in Florence, in the Archaeological Museum where the François Vase is, is hard to date, but it is Classical or Early Hellenistic.  This is the magnificent kind of bronze work for which the Etruscans were still justly famous.  The placement of it in a later period is based on comparison of the lion parts of the Chimaera, and its proportions, with other lions for which we have some sort of context; one thinks now of lions of the time of Alexander the Great and his father, Philip of Macedon.

[A 369] [A 357]  Returning to Late Classical Athens (having done what we can in this course for western Late Classical art), one of the bits of support for attributing the Antikythera Youth to an Athenian sculptor and supposing that it might have stood in Athens is one of the very latest Athenian grave stelai (before they were forbidden by law as egregious conspicuous consumption).  It is now dated in the 320's, so almost exactly a century later than the stele with a youth, a child, and a cat sitting atop a stele ([A 362]).  Here, too, the child is grieving, and the mood is philosophical, but the deceased youth is represented heroically, like a statue of himself, almost a statue in the manner of the Antikythera Youth, with similar proportions, and we have in addition the older man, evidently the youth's father, asking the always unanswerable question, what meaning can there be in the child's dying before his father, who has already raised his children and no longer has much of his life before him.  Such questions may have been implicit in the fifth-century stelai, but here and on several other late-fourth-century stelai the meditative parent is actually represented.  Not only is the relief high, more than half-round, but the child and the steps he sits on are in three-quarter view and foreshortened, so that we are encouraged to think of the stele's framed space as a real room.
The other very late grave stele, the Stele of Aristonautes, is not only in extremely high relief, almost a statue seemingly attached to the background by his cape (note the cast shadows in the photo in your Print), but a wholly new type, with the figure of the deceased confronting and moving towards us.  Some of the figures in paintings and mosaics excavated in Macedonia dating from the time of Philip (d. 336 B.C.) and Alexander (d. 323 B.C.) are in this stock rushing-warrior pose, and we have records of huge bronze statuary groups done for the Macedonians, of battles and of hunts, so that we wonder whether the pose and attitude do not reflect the rise of Macedon.  Notice also the carved hump of rising ground provided for Aristonautes to stand on; this stele does not have the character of a domestic scene, a farewell, that we have seen before.  On the Stele of Aristonautes, too, the entire naiskos or aediculum (shrine frame) is preserved.  His name is written on its architrave; he is, so to speak, a warrior in antis.

[A 247] [A 272] [A 478]  Yet another style that may well be Athenian is represented by the Demeter from Knidos, an original marble cult statue (from the cella of a temple), now in the British Museum, and by the "Apollo Belvedere" in the Vatican in Rome, where it has been since the sixteenth century (there is another copy in Basel, Switzerland, of which only the head survives).  From the Renaissance to the 19th century, the "Apollo Belvedere" was regarded as the epitome of all that was fine and noble and classical in Greek art, even after it was realized that it is a copy of the Roman Empire period.  The great Italian sculptor, Antonio Canova, used it as a model for several of his own works, then late in his life saw in London the Parthenon sculptures and said, "If only I could begin again!".  Sometime, perhaps in the 18th century, to make the statue look less grubby, the pope's artistic advisers had a restorer "clean it up", and about 1/16" of the surface was removed all over it, leaving the slick, sleek, weak look of the torso that we now see.  Don't blame the original or the copyist; this is a statue we have brought to its pitiable condition; at least, today the phony arms and hands have been taken off, but the fig leaf cannot be, because the restorer shaved off all of whatever was left under it.  In the 20th century the reaction has been extreme; the statue once ballyhooed has been dismissed, even as a pastiche.  The Basel copy and some bits of plaster molds for parts of this Apollo in a sculptor's workshop at Baiae, Italy, a workshop earlier than the supposed pastiche, have brought us back to a saner assessment.  The "Apollo Belvedere" is probably just what Adolf Furtwängler thought it was a century ago: a copy of an Athenian bronze statue of Apollo, in a striding and turning pose emphasized by the turn of the head toward his bow, with the very long, very slender legs with high calf muscles of the 320's B.C.  As such, it may well be the Apollo mentioned as by Leochares, who was old enough to have been one of the sculptors who worked on the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos.  Professor Bernard Ashmole suggested a generation ago that the Demeter of Knidos, which is certainly a Greek Late Classical original, is by the same sculptor as created the "Apollo Belvedere"; good photographs of the heads and necks tend to convince many people that he was right; thus, if he is "possibly Leochares (copy)", she is "possibly Leochares (original)".  At least, they are very closely related, and that relationship is enough to show that the Apollo is a copy of a real Late Classical masterpiece.  For the statue, even shaven-down, has a powerful striding stance and dramatic majesty.  Not everyone likes this kind of theatricality, but that's a matter of taste.  The Demeter is extremely noble, the very essence of the most motherly of Greek goddesses; she is earlier in style than the Apollo, and if Leochares was working at Halikarnassos in the middle of the century, he would not have had to travel too far to make a statue for Knidos in the 340's.  He is recorded as being in Athens, to make a portrait of the sixteen-year-old Alexander, in the 330's.  This is not the only Greek sculptor of whom we have many tidbits of information, but no solid idea of his style, only educated guesswork.

[A 235] [A 463]  The Apoxyomenos (he-who-scrapes-oil-off-his-body: it is easier to learn to spell the Greek name this time) is something new.  Lysippos of Sikyon, in the northern Peloponnesos, was a little younger than the foregoing sculptors.  He seems to have been an effective self-publicist and to have had a clear idea of the innovative character of his own work, or perhaps we only have more sayings of his preserved because he was Alexander the Great's favorite portraitist, the creator of the Alexander image.  He claimed originality, said he had no master but nature (when artists say that, you will almost never find their work very natural).  Actually, he is in the tradition founded by Polykleitos and seems to pick up about where the Antikythera Youth leaves off, a maker principally of heroic bronze athletic images.  His Alexander with a lance survives only in a tiny statuette that gives us merely its pose.  The Apoxyomenos in the Vatican (the only good copy) is the work that we have that seems best to embody his innovations.  First, he changed the human proportions: nine heads tall, with most of the extra length in the legs; the tiny head is new.  Second, more than the foregoing, his statue is in the act of turning, spirally, and because the arms also reach out in front to involve space we are made to feel that the sculpture really controls all the space around it that it potentially moves in.  Third, the forward tilt of the pelvis is very pronounced.  Fourth, in the face, the eyes are close together, the mouth is narrow, and the chin is small and round.  None of these are learned from nature, though Lysippos's style does prove that he had great mastery of nature and derived his freedom to develop this aggressive and glamorous style from that mastery.  The Apoxyomenos, designed to be walked around, suffers worse from the tree trunk and struts of a marble copy than earlier statue types; perhaps that is one reason why we have surprisingly few copies of the works of Lysippos that the sources regard as most famous.  Lysippos's style, with its rather hard and exact treatment of musculature,  paved the way for much of the major sculpture done in bronze in the Early Hellenistic Period.

[MA 92]  The Getty Museum bronze Victorious Athlete (in the act of putting a crown of leaves on his own head) is one more original statue from the sea, presumably shipwrecked.  It is, frankly, a smuggled work of art, since it was found in modern times in Italian waters.  It stands in somewhat the same relationship to Lysippos as the Marathon Boy to Praxiteles: its style is unimaginable without the example of Lysippos's career, but it is sweeter and milder, and some scholars think it is not earlier than ca. 300 B.C., by a pupil (he had numerous pupils, besides his own sons) of Lysippos.  The arc of the left arm and the bent-back fingertips suggest as much.  Some of the sweetness, on the other hand, as in the Praxitelean Marathon Boy, is due to the youth of the boy.  This is the victory statue of a very young athlete, who is shown beardless, with a bit of baby fat remaining, and with very little pubic hair, yet the softness also reminds us of the story (and there is nothing unlikely about it) that one of Praxiteles' sons formed a studio with one of Lysippos's.  In any case, at the beginning of the third century we do find statues that blend Praxitelean tenderness with Lysippan attitude.
Another statue type that, whoever created it, would not have existed but for Lysippos is the Piping Faun (which I think must be a boy Pan), of which the Louvre copy is the finest:

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