artists of the day, was reckoned one of the wonders of the world. It has been in part restored in the British Museum. Mr Oldfield’s conjectural restoration, published in Archaeologia for 1895, though it has many rivals, surpasses them all in the lightness of the effect, and in close correspondence to the description by Pliny. We show a small part of the sculptural decoration, representing a battle between Greeks and Amazons (Plate IV. fig. 70), wherein the energy of the action and the careful balance of figure against figure are remarkable. We possess also the fine portraits of Mausolus himself and his wife Artemisia, which stood in or on the building, as well as part of a gigantic chariot with four horses which surmounted it.
Another architectural work of the 4th century, in its way a gem, is the structure set up at Athens by Lysicrates, in memory of a choragic victory. This still survives, though the reliefs with which it is adorned have suffered severely from the weather.
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| Nat. Mus., Naples. |
| Fig. 42.—Greek Drawing of Women Playing at Knucklebones. |
The 4th century is the brilliant period of ancient painting. It opens with the painters of the Asiatic School, Zeuxis and Parrhasius and Protogenes, with their contemporaries Nicias and Apollodorus of Athens, Timanthes of Sicyon or Cythnus, and Euphranor of Corinth. It witnesses the rise of a great school at Sicyon, under Eupompus and Pamphilus, which was noted for its scientific character and the fineness of its drawing, and which culminated in Apelles, the painter of Alexander the Great, and probably the greatest master of the art in antiquity. To each of these painters a separate article is given, fixing their place in the history of the art. Of their paintings unfortunately we can form but a very inadequate notion. Vase-paintings, which in the 5th century give us some notion at least of contemporary drawing, are less careful in the 4th century. Now and then we find on them figures admirably designed, or successfully foreshortened; but these are rare occurrences. The art of the vase decorator has ceased to follow the methods and improvements of contemporary fresco painters, and is pursued as a mere branch of commerce.
But very few actual paintings of the age survive, and even these fragmentary remains have with time lost the freshness of their colouring; nor are they in any case the work of a noteworthy hand. We reproduce two examples. The first is from a stone of the vault of a Crimean grave (Plate IV. fig. 67). The date of the grave is fixed to the 4th century by ornaments found in it, among which was a gold coin of Alexander the Great. The representation is probably of Demeter or her priestess, her hair bound with poppies and other flowers. The original is of large size. The other illustration (fig. 42) represents the remains of a drawing on marble, representing a group of women playing knucklebones. It was found at Herculaneum. Though signed by one Alexander of Athens, who was probably a worker of the Roman age, Professor Robert is right in maintaining that Alexander only copied a design of the age of Zeuxis and Parrhasius. In fact the drawing and grouping is so closely like that of reliefs of about 400 B.C. that the drawing is of great historic value, though there be no colouring. Several other drawings of the same class have been found at Herculaneum, and on the walls of the Transtiberine Villa at Rome (now in the Terme Museum).
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| Olympia, iii. 53. |
| Fig. 43.—Hermes of Praxiteles; restored. |
Until about the year 1880, our knowledge of the great Greek sculptors of the 4th century was derived mostly from the statements of ancient writers and from Roman copies, or what were supposed to be copies, of their works. We are now in a far more satisfactory position. We now possess an original work of Praxiteles, and Praxiteles. sculptures executed under the immediate direction of, if not from the hand of, other great sculptors of that age—Scopas, Timotheus and others. Among all the discoveries made at Olympia, none has become so familiar to the artistic world as that of the Hermes of Praxiteles. It is the first time that we have become possessed of a first-rate Greek original by one of the greatest of sculptors. Hitherto almost all the statues in our museums have been either late copies of Greek works of art, or else the mere decorative sculpture of temples and tombs, which was by the ancients themselves but little regarded. But we can venture without misgiving to submit the new Hermes to the strictest examination, sure that in every line and touch we have the work of a great artist. This is more than we can say of any of the literary remains of antiquity—poem, play or oration. Hermes is represented by the sculptor (fig. 43 and Plate VI. fig. 82) in the act of carrying the young child Dionysus to the nymphs who were charged with his rearing. On the journey he pauses and amuses himself by holding out to the child-god a bunch of grapes, and watching his eagerness to grasp them. To the modern eye the child is not a success; only the latest art of Greece is at home in dealing with children. But the Hermes, strong without excessive muscular development, and graceful without leanness, is a model of physical formation, and his face expresses the perfection of health, natural endowment and sweet nature. The statue can scarcely be called a work of religious art in the modern or Christian sense of the word religious, but from the Greek point of view it is religious, as embodying the result of the harmonious development of all human faculties and life in accordance with nature.
The Hermes not only adds to our knowledge of Praxiteles, but also confirms the received views in regard to him. Already many works in galleries of sculpture had been identified as copies of statues of his school. Noteworthy among these are, the group at Munich representing Peace nursing the infant Wealth, from an original by Cephisodotus, father of Praxiteles; copies of the Cnidian Aphrodite of Praxiteles, especially one in the Vatican which is here illustrated (Plate V. fig. 71); copies of the Apollo slaying a lizard (Sauroctonus), of a Satyr (in the Capitol Museum), and others. These works, which are noted
