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APOLLO
By: KENNETH CLARK



(THE NUDE)
A Study in Ideal Form
By: KENNETH CLARK
CHAPTER II















PART I: APOLLO
- Apollo
- Notes
- Pictures

PART II: REACTION PAPER

PART III: REPORT PAPER
















IGUBAN, JOHN PAULO H.
Bachelor of Integrated Arts, Major in Broadcast Arts

I-Br2

UNIVERSITY OF MAKATI

Professor ELMER G. ANISCO
Philippine Aesthetics and World Arts





KENNETH CLARK


Kenneth Mackenzie Clark was born in London on July 13, 1903, the only child of parents he described as members of the Edwardian "idle rich." While his parents spent the family fortune (amassed by Clark's Scottish great-great grandfather, the inventor of the cotton spool), Clark developed into a lonely, serious young man with a passion for art and complete confidence in his judgment. Lacking a mentor at home or school, he groped his way toward knowledge, winning a scholarship to Oxford. There, he gave up early hopes of becoming a painter to become an aesthete. " … Nothing could destroy me," he said, "as long as I could enjoy works of art and for 'enjoy' read 'enjoy': not codify or classify, or purge my spirit or arouse my social consciousness." Clark was able to fulfill another childhood ambition: to assist art critic Bernard Berenson in the revision of his Florentine Drawings. After two years of study with Bernard Berenson in Florence, he served as keeper of fine art at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum (1931 – 34) and director of London's National Gallery (1934 – 39). He was involved in academic research and public service for most of his life. He published widely and became internationally known in 1969 as the writer and host of the BBC series Civilization, a survey of European art from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. During which time he married Jane Martin, an Oxford classmate.




APOLLO

The Greeks had no doubt that the god Apollo was like a perfectly beautiful man. He was beautiful because his body conformed to certain laws of proportion and so partook of the Devine beauty of mathematics. The first great philosopher of mathematical harmony called himself Pythagoras, son of the Pythian Apollo. So in the embodiment of Apollo everything must be calm and clear; clear as daylight, for Apollo is the god of light. Since justice can exist only when facts are measured in the light of reason, Apollo is the god of justice; sol justitiae. But the sun is also fierce; neither graceful athlete nor geometrician’s dummy, nor an artful combination of the two, will embody Apollo, the python slayer, the vanquisher of darkness. The god of reason and light superintended the flaying of Marsyas.
But the earliest nude in Greek art, traditionally known as Apollos, are not beautiful. They are alert and confident, members of a conquering race, “the young lighthearted masters of the waves.” But they are stiff, with a kind of ritual stiffness: the transitions between their members are abrupt and awkward, and they have a curious flatness, as if the sculptor could think only of one plane at a time [20]. They are notably less natural and less easy than the Egyptian figures upon which, to a large extent, they are modeled and which, over a thousand years earlier, had achieved a limited perfection. Stage by stage, in less than a century they grew into models that were to satisfy our Western notion of beauty till the present day. They have two characteristics, and only two, that foreshadow this momentous evolution. They are clear and they are ideal. The shapes they present are neither pleasant in themselves nor comfortably related to one another, but each one is firmly delineated and aspires to a shape that the measuring eye can grasp. Historians who have written in the belief that all at consists in a striving for realism have sometimes expressed surprised that the Greeks, with their vivid curiosity, should have approached nature so reluctantly; than in the fifty years between the Moschophoros and the funeral stele of Aristion, there should have been so little “progress.” This is to misconceive the basis of Greek art. It is fundamentally ideal. It starts from the concept of a perfect shape and only gradually feels able to modify that the shape in the interests of imitation. And the character of the shapes chosen is expressed in the word used to describe the earliest form of Greek art, geometric; a dreary, monotonous style and at the first ill adapted to realization in the round. But the head yields easily to geometric treatment, and already in the most archaic heads of Apollo we see how geometry can be combined with plastic vitality. In a century the same unifying power will subordinate the dispersed and intractable forms of the body.
So Apollo is clear and ideal before he is beautiful. How and when did the transformation take place? Ranging in a hypothetical order of the time the kouroi—the nude male figures—of the sixth century [21]. We see the transitions from shape to shape becoming smoother, and absorbing, in the process, details that had been left as decorative notations. Then, quite suddenly, in about the year 480, there appears before us the perfect human body, the marble figure from Akropolis known as the Ephebe of Kritios [22]. Of course he was not really a sudden, isolated creation. We have only a slender reason to attribute him to the sculptor Kritios, and we have even less reason to suppose that Kritios was the initiator of so momentous a change. Literary sources give the name of Pythagoras of Rhegium as the sculptor who “first gave rhythm and proportion to his statues.” All the evidence suggests that the new concept of form would have been first expressed in bronze and not in marble; and the Apollo of Piombino [23], although slightly earlier and stiffer, may give some notation of what had been going on in the first twenty years of the fifth century. But since almost every bronze statue made in Greece in classic times has been melted down, the Ephebe of Kritios remains the first beautiful nude in art. Here for the first time we feel the passionate pleasure in the human body familiar to all readers of Greek literature, for the delicate eagerness with which the sculptor’s eye has followed every muscle or watched the skin stretch and relax as it passes over a bone could not have been achieved without a heightened sensuality. We all have a mental picture of that strange institution, Greek athletics, so like and yet so unlike its nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon counterpart. In our study of the nude it is unlikeness that is significant; not simply because Greek athletes wore no clothes, although that is of real importance, but because of two powerful emotions that dominated the Greek games and are largely from our own: religious dedication and love. These gave to the cult of physical perfection a solemnity and a rapture that have not been experience since. Greek athletes competed in somewhat the same poetical and chivalrous spirit as knights, before the eyes of their loves, jousted in the lists; but all that pride and devotion which medieval contestants expressed through the flashing symbolism of heraldry was, in the games of antiquity, concentrated in one object, the naked body. No wonder that it has never again been looked at with such a keen sense of its qualities, its proportion, symmetry, elasticity, and aplomb; and when we consider that this passionate scrutiny of the individual was united to the intellectual need for geometric form, we can estimate what a rare coincidence brought the male nude to perfection.
Perfection hangs by a thread and is weighed in the jeweler’s balance. We must therefore submit the classic nude, at its first appearance, to an examination that may seem fastidious, until we remember how the rhythmic organization of this form was still dominating sculpture 2300 years after its invention. When, a page ago, I used the Apollo of Piombino as an example of bronze casting, how strikingly it brought out the classic character of the Kristos youth! In twenty years a basic alteration of style has taken place. It can be illustrated by examining the lower part of the torso—to be precise, the junction of the hips, abdomen, and thorax. One of the most peculiar features of the early kouroi—for example, the Apollo of Tenea [21] —is their thin, flat stomachs. They conform to a sharp, ogival rhythm, which we may describe as Gothic. The chief areas—thighs and stomach—are inscribed within elongated ovals. Gothic nudes, dominated by the pointed arch form, do in fact display very much the same characteristics, and one of the earliest nude studies that have come down to us, a drawing in the Uffizi from the circle of Uccello, combines Gothic and naturalistic forms with a remarkable likeness to a sixth-century kouros. In the Apollo of Piombino these Gothic forms are less marked. The thorax is of classic rectangularity, but it bears an uneasy relationship to the flat triangle of the stomach. Like Perrault’s façade of the Louvre, we feel that a richly classical upper story is resting on a base too stiff and thin to support it. In the Kritios youth this uneasiness has vanished altogether. The legs and division of the torso flow together with the same full and fruitful rhythm. How is this achieved? To begin with, the hips are not parallel, but since he rests his weight on his left leg, that hip is slightly higher. The full implications of this pose are more easily seen from behind, for, as usual in early Greek sculpture, the back is more naturalistic and more plastically developed than the front. But even from the front we can perceive, for the first time, that subtle equilibrium of outline and axis which is to be the basis of classic art. This delicate balance of movement gives the torso its unity of rhythm. It also allows the sculptor to solve the problem of the abdomen by realizing it as a dominant, as opposed to a recessive, form: and this has involved an anatomical emphasis that was to be exaggerated to the point of distortion in the next fifty years: I refer to the muscles that lie above the pelvis and mark the junction of the thighs and the torso. They are largely absent from archaic sculpture, and since it seems unlikely that between the years 500 and 450 Greek athletes really did develop those muscles to such an unequaled extent, we must reckon them chiefly a device by which the rhythmic structure of the torso might be set in motion, and its lower half supported by two buttresses, before descending to the arc of the abdomen. They were elements in the classic architecture of the human body, and as such they lasted as long as metopes and triglyphs.
All this we discover in the youth of Kritios when we compare him to figures that precede him. But it is not obtruded. He is so straight-forwardly beautiful that we do not willingly use him to demonstrate the mechanics of form or the rules of an aesthetic theory. To the sculptors of the next generation this grace and naturalness was a defect, or at least a danger. It is as if they foresaw the frivolous beauty of Hellenistic art, and wished to defend themselves against it as long as possible. Of such austere there is ample evidence in the earlier specimens of Attic sculpture, but it was given concentrated and individual expression through the peculiar genius of Polykleitos.
The great puritans of art are curious study. They seem to be divided into two groups, those who renounce a rich, early sensuality, like Poussin and Milton, and those who hope, like Malherbe and Seurat, to purify art by giving it the logic and finality of an intellectual theorem. Our Knowledge of Polykleitos, fragmentary and unreliable as it is, leaves little doubt that he belonged to the second group; yet he often reminds us of Poussin by a heavy physical momentum, a Dorian obstinacy, on account of which, no doubt, his intellectualism has survived. No other great artist has concentrated his forces with a more single-minded economy. His general aim was clarity, balance, and completeness; his sole medium of communication the naked body of an athlete, standing poised between movement and repose. He believed that this could be achieved only by the strictest application of measurement and rule. He would no concessions. He was a fighting high-brow. Aelian tells us that he executed two statues of the same model, one according to popular taste, which we may assume, then as always, to have been naturalistic; and one according to rules of art. He invited visitors to suggest improvements and modifications to the former, all of which were duly carried out. He then exhibited the two statues. The former was received with ridicule, the latter with admiration; and Polykleitos did not fail to point the moral. How many artists since that time would have liked to try a similar experiment; but, except in the Italian Renaissance, they could not have expected it to turn out in their favor. That Polykleitos, pursuing his narrow specialized aim, should have been accepted as the equal of Myron and Pheidias proves how closely the Greeks associated their mathematics, as being a demonstration of order, capable of accurate conclusions.
No sculptures by Polykleitos have come down to us in the original, and to judge of their effect from the existing copies is almost impossible. As usual, they were in bronze, and the surviving full-size copies are all in marble. Polykleitos said that “a well-made work is the result of numerous calculations, carried to within a hair’s breadth.” What chance have we, then, of appreciating his art in those blockish parodies, the oldest and grubbiest inhabitants of any cast-room, with which, alas, his name is usually associated? For the general effect of his art it is better to look at small replicas, in bronze and terra cotta, which, although far removed from the strict precision of the originals, seem to have preserved some of their general rhythm. But the problems Polykleitos envisaged, and the finality with which he solved them, are so cardinal to subsequent representations of the nude that we must force ourselves to endure the distasteful quality of a marble copy in order to know more precisely what he achieved. His first problem was to find some means by which the figure should combine repose with the suggestion of potential movement. To stand firmly is inert; to record a given point in a violent movement is, as we shall see in a later chapter, limiting and finite. Polykleitos invented a pose in which the figure is neither walking nor standing, but simply establishing a point of balance. Of his two famous figures, it is arguable that the Doryphoros [24] is walking: at least his pose was thus interpreted in antiquity. On the other hand, the Diadoumenos [25] must be reckond as standing­­­­—a victor would not walk when crowning himself—and the movement of his leg is almost identical with that of the Doryphoros. In both, the human body has been used as the basis of a marvelously adjusted composition, carried trough with such consistency that we do realize how artificial a pose has been evolved until we see it in a different context—for example, in the procession of horsemen on the Parthenon frieze. Since the movement of the leg destroys the old stiff symmetry of exact correspondence, a new symmetry has to be created by a balance of axes. Up and down, in and out; one could easily reduce the figures of Polykleitos to the rods and sheet metal of modern sculpture, and they would still work: although , of course, they would be miserably impoverished. For, as Polykleitos told his contemporaries, from the toes to the last hair on the head every line was calculated, and every surface depended on the scratch of a fingernail.
The perfection of symmetry by balance and compensation is the essence of classical art. A figure may have within itself the rhythms of movement, but yet always comes to rest at its true center. It is complete and self-sufficient. But balance is only half the problem. The parts balanced must have some measurable relation to one another: there must be a canon of proportion. We know that Polykleitos composed such a canon, but all that has come down to us is the tradition of a few elementary rules—seven and half heads tom a figure, and so forth; and attempts to rediscover the canon by measuring his figures have been unsuccessful probably because it was geometrical, not arithmetical, and so is extremely difficult to reconstruct. I have said that a system of mathematical proportion appears in the nude long before the element of beauty; Polykleitos codified it and made it, no doubt, more elaborate. In doing so he sacrificed a little of the enchanting youth and grace that had flowered so suddenly in the Ephebe of Kritios: for, even in the originals, the athletes of Polykleitos must have been square-set and rigidly muscular. To some extent he was following an earlier tradition, as is seen in large torso from Miletos, now in the Louvre, which must date from fifty years before his time. And this heavy physique, long accepted as appropriate to a hero, both gratified his taste for the deliberate and was more easily accepted to his calculations.
Besides these problems of balance and proportion, Polykleitos set himself to perfect the internal structure of the torso. He recognized that it allowed for the creation of a sculptural unit in which the position of humps and hollows evokes some memory and yet can be made harmonious by variation and emphasis. There is the beginning of such a system in the torso from Miletos and that of the Kritios youth; but Polykleitos’ control of muscle architecture was evidently far more rigorous, and from him derives that standard schematization of the torso known in French as the cuirasse esthétique, a disposition of muscles so familiarized that it was in fact used in the design of armor and became for the heroic body like the masks of the antique stage. The cuirasse esthétique, which so greatly delighted the artists of the Renaissance, is one of the features of antique art that have done most to alienate modern taste. It seems to us ungraceful in itself and completely lacking in vitality. But although a row of formalized torsos in the Galleries of the Vatican or the Naples Museum may not cause the pulse to vary its beat, we can see from certain replicas that this was originally a construction of great power. Such is the copy of the Doryphoros in the Uffizi [26], which, being in a hard, smooth basalt, conveys the effect of bronze, and is executed with unusual care. It preserves some of the urgency and concentration of the original, and proves that the Polykleitos’ scheme of the body, like all abstractions that have survived, not only contained life, but was bursting with a vitality all the more potent because forced into so a narrow channel.
With all great artists who have thus sharpened their aims to a single point of perfection, we are sometimes tempted to ask whether the sacrifices involved are worth while. Such concentration has its negative aspect, its element of refusal, and also its element of self-hallucination. In the end, our feelings are our only guide, and to test our feelings about Polykleitos is, alas, almost impossible. But something may be achieved by comparing a direct copy of one of his works with a freer version, in which the rigor of perfection has been relaxed. Our scales are weighted heavily in favor of the latter, for we can take as example that charming bronze figure in Florence known as the Idolino [27], which, although of much later date, retains the freshness of an original Greek bronze. And yet when we look at it critically, how unstable and incomplete this figure seems compared even to the lifeless copies of Polykleitos’ athletes! The legs are not within the rhythm of the whole and seem to loose themselves halfway down. A similar break appears in the body, and the shoulders are axially unrelated to the hips. Even the small bronze copy of the Diskophoros [28] in the Louvre—little more, we may suppose, than a high-class commercial product and of uncertain date— shows more pf Polykleitan compactness. Now let us try to imagine such a figure as the Diadoumenos with all the freshness of the Idolino and a feeling for bronze even more sensuous and fastidious. Does it not seem that the dangerous doctrine of salvation through exclusion was for once justifiable?
Nor is it correct to discuss Polykleitos solely in aesthetic terms, for his work was based on an ethical ideal, to which formal questions were subservient. Though his purity of aim may recall the Chinese potter continually refining upon a single shape, the human body is, in fact, inexhaustibly complex and suggestive, and to Greek of the fifth century is stood for a set of values of which restraint, balance, modesty, proportion, and many others would be applied equally in the ethical and in the aesthetic sphere. Polykleitos himself would probably have recognized no real distinction between them and we need not hesitate to pronounce before his work the word “moral,” that vague, but not altogether meaningless, word which rumbles in the neighborhood of the nude till the academies of the nineteenth century.
The writers of antiquity recognized that the Polykleitos had created a perfectly balanced man, but added that he could not create the likeness of a god. This, they said, was the achievement of Pheidias. From 480 t0 440, parallel with the line of athletes was a line of votive statues, which culminated in Pheidias’ great Apollos. Of these Apollos we can derive some notion from an insensitive copy at Kassel. They represent a perfecting of the image complementary to Polykleitos’ perfecting form; and in the survival of Apollo this power to satisfy our imaginations, though it came later, had the more lasting influence. One great image of Apollo from the beginning of the classic period has survived in the original: he who rises above the struggle, in the west pediment of the temple of Olympia [29], and, with a gesture of sovereign authority, reproves the bestial fury of the centaurs. Nowhere else, perhaps, is the early Greek ideal so perfectly embodied: calm, pitiless, and supremely confident in the power of physical beauty. Not a shade of doubt or compunction could soften the arc of cheek of\r brow; the Phaedo is still far away, and the Beatitudes would be totally incomprehensible. But all this we deduce from his head. His body, though not without a certain passive magnificence, is flat and inexpressive. Like all the sculptures at Olympia, it lacks the rigorous precision of Attic work. It is twenty years later than the Kritios youth, but is plastically less evolved. No doubt it was given an archaic character in order to enhance its godlike authority, for the other figures on the pediments are almost too experimental. They attempt more than was within the compass of pure classic art: greater naturalism, freer poses, more various expressions. There are nudes at Olympia of a character that never occurs again in Greek sculpture; and those who regret the limited perfection of antique art may feel that Olympia was like a last burst of freedom. From that starting point Greek art might have gone anywhere. But just as pre-Socratic philosophy, for all its charm, is made up largely of inspired guesses, so the nudes at Olympia seem haphazard and fundamentally formless. This was decorative sculpture, where certain rough and picturesque experiments were permissible. The real work of refining on the classic ideal took place in bronze.
Our surviving copies of bronze Apollos happen to be of finer quality than those of the Polykleitan athletes and may be looked at with pleasure, note merely with antiquarian curiosity. How far they go back to early works of Pheidias himself is an insoluble problem, but one, at least, seems to reflect his style as we know it in the frieze of the Parthenon, the Apollo of the Tiber [30] in Rome. Although a copy of a bronze, it is in a beautiful place piece of marble, and must be by a fine Greek craftsman. It shows most clearly the difference between Polykleitan athlete and Pheidian god. This Apollo is taller and more graceful, and still bears a trace of hieratic frontality consciously preserved to enhance his godlike remoteness. The flat, square shoulders seemed lifted up into a different plane, from which the head looks down with a calm and dreamy interest; the torso, less insistently schematic than those of Polykleitos, renders vividly the tautness of skin stretched over muscle. If only this figure, instead of the Apollo Belvedere, had been known to Winckelmann, his insight and beautiful gift of literary re-creation would have been better supported by the sculptural qualities of his subject. The Apollo of the Tiber is worthy of the “make of gods,” the title by which Pheidias is described in ancient literature, and seems to me to give a truer reflection of his style, as we know it, from the Parthenon than does the Apollo at Kassel; but this may be owing to the relative transparency of the medium through which the original is seen. The copy of the Kassel Apollo is unusually opaque, but, straining our eyes to penetrate it, we can just catch sight of a noble image, firm, full, and complete, of the god at his most prosperous. It is the moment of balance—a physical balance between strength and grace, a stylistic balance between naturalism and the ideal, a spiritual balance between the old worship of the god and the new philosophy, in which that worship was recognized as being no more than a poetic exercise. And of these three, the last was never achieved again. During the next century the frontiers of physical beauty were extended materially. Apollo became more human and more elegant. But never again in antiquity was he transfigured by the aura of divine prerogative, which, as we can guess from our fragments of evidence, he derived from the hands of Pheidias.
Of the humanized beauty of the fourth century we can speak from a more direct experience, for at least one example survives that seems to be an original work by a great sculptor, the Hermes of Praxiteles [31]. True, the documentary evidence that associates the figure at Olympia with Praxiteles is not such as would carry any weight in a field of study where documents were less scanty, being no more than a reference in Pausanias’ travel diaries made over four hundred years after the figure was carved. Well, we should not place much confidence in Horace Walpole’s opinion of a work by Giotto; but in the history of art, as in all history, we accept or reject documentary evidence exactly as it suits us, that is to say, according to our feelings about the object referred to; and our feelings about the Hermes of Olympia are rather different from those aroused by any other work of antiquity. Almost alone of antique marbles it retains that translucent, sensuous quality which we know to have been a characteristic of fourth-century art in general and of Praxiteles in particular. Majesty is not lost, and the body is firm and muscular; but the overwhelming impression is one of grace and of a gentle sweetness, achieved partly by the flowing design and partly by an almost morbid delicacy of execution. The Hermes is the climax of that passion for physical beauty first apparent in the Kritios youth, which had been arrested by the schematic austerity of Polykleitos and by Pheidias’ belief in the rectangular majesty of Apollo. We know how easily beauty of this kind may be exploited till it dwindles into prettiness. With Praxiteles, however, it was not an instrument, but a mode of being. Like Correggio, he was incapable of setting up an abrupt or uneasy relationship. Every form glides into the next with that smoothness which, as we shall see in the next chapter, has become part of the popular concept of beauty. How much the value of this legato depends on the precision of a sensitive execution we can tell from the copies of Praxiteles’ works, the Faun, the Sauroktonos, the Apollino, where the smoothness of transition has degenerated into slipperiness and the forms themselves have been reduced, in section, to a few commonplace radial curves. So the Hermes, although itself one of the most obscure of Praxiteles’ work, of which no replica exists, persuades us to look again at the copies of his more famous pieces and try to imagine their ravishing beauty when surface design and material all obeyed the orders of a single sensibility.
The Hermes of Praxiteles represents the last triumph of the Greek idea of wholeness; physical beauty is one with strength, grace, gentleness, and benevolence. For the rest of its course we witness, in antique art, the fragmentation of the perfect man, and the human body becomes either very graceful or very muscular or merely animal. Praxiteles himself contributed to this creation of specialized types. In his Apollo Sauroktonos [32] the Python Slayer has been diminished into a boy of feminine delicacy who is about to transfix with his dart a harmless lizard. His head, as so often in fourth-century sculpture, is indistinguishable from that of a girl, and instead of the majestic breadth and squareness of the Pheidian torso, the lines of his figure flow in an elegant curve. Conversely, Herakles, who in the fifth- century metopes of Selinunte conceals his strength in a neat and serviceable body, becomes in the fourth century a professional strong man whose bulging muscles seem to weigh him down like a load of sausages. To these exaggerations must be added certain figures of athletes that aim at physical perfection but yet have lost the radiance, and what the Greeks would have called the ethos, in which true beauty is to be found. Amongst these are three or four original bronzes, the so-called Hermes from Antikythera, the athlete with the strigil from Ephesos, and the Praxitelean boy from Marathon [33]. They are representative of Greek art at high routine level, and may fairly be made the basis of generalization; and the first thing that strikes us about them is their lack of accent. We do not feel behind them, as we o behind quite mediocre work, of the Renaissance, the personal sensibility of an individual artist. Moreover, the sixteenth-century Italians, emphatic enough in their admiration of a bel corpo ignudo, valued it ultimately as a means of expressing energy, heroism, or spiritual victory. If we compare the boy from Marathon with the two Davids of Michelangelo, how clearly they belong to the world of the spirit! They are the visible form of Michelangelo’s aspirations, whereas the Marathon boy is simply a young body, like a ripe fruit; and his physical complaceny blocks up precisely those means of communication, those chinks and cracks through which some ray of light may enter our shuttered world. In the average nude of later Greek sculpture this lack of inner life communicates itself to every articulation. Cellini was not one of the great sculptors of the Renaissance, but how living and sensitive his molding appears to be if we compare his bronze model of the Perseus [34] with the Hermes of Antikythera! And yet the antique has retained, from the first passionate researches of the fifth century, a kind of stability, a sense of absolute norm, that has been the envy of artists ever since. That, in the end, is the remarkable thing about these bronze athletes. They were the ordinary routine productions of antique art, equivalent to a painting of the Virgin and Child in the fifteenth century. They represent the high plateau of achievement from which alone the summits of art can spring.
The last great name in Greek sculpture is Lysippos. Ancient writers tell us that he invented a new proportion, with smaller head, longer legs, and a slender body. We also know that he did the figure of an athlete scraping himself, which was popular in ancient Rome, and a marble of such a subject in the Vatican fits so well with literary descriptions of his style that it may reasonably be taken a s a basis for further attributions. It is in a position of arrested action more complex and more suggestive of impending movement than the earlier figures of athletes; and, in fact, all the works credibly claimed as copies of Lysippos show a consciousness of existence in space and a multiplicity of view very different from the austere frontality of Polykleitos. With this technical freedom went a new attitude toward nature, and in contrast with Polykleitos’ defiance of popular opinion is a story in Pliny that Lysippos, when asked who were his masters, pointed to a crowd of men in the street. Such developments used to be called advances by evolutionary art historians, and perhaps under certain circumstances all additional mastery is a gain. But in the calculated program of the Greek nude freedom and promiscuity were by no means an advantage. Among the works claimed as Lysippic are some graceful figure of young men, the resting Hermes in Naples or the Praying Boy in Berlin, which have a strong appeal to those who do not normally care for sculpture. In the originals of Lysippos himself this pleasant obviousness was presumably accompanied by a powerful control of means; but for those who followed, the absence of limitations imposed by rules and traditional treatment meant also the absence of order and lawful harmony.
The result was the anarchy of Hellenistic art, with on one side its drunken fauns and boxers, on the other its eternal repetitions of accepted motives. No wonder that our spirits sink as we look at the multitude of marble nudes that confront us in the Galleries of the Vatican or in the Museum at Naples! No other civilization has been so artistically bankrupt as that which, for four hundred years, on the shores of Mediterranean, enjoyed a fabulous material prosperity. During those centuries of bloodstained energy, the figure arts were torpid—a kind of token currency, still accepted because based on those treasures of the spirit accumulated in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ. By artfully adapting and recombining the inventions of that distant epoch, it was sometimes possible to produce the illusion of novelty, though hardly ever of vitality; but in general the means taken to make a dead style acceptable where of the kind made familiar by many subsequent attempts at vulgarization—smoother finish, more elaborate detail, more explicit narrative: to which, in sculpture, restorers have added the last deadly touches.
There is, however, one peculiar practice that has a certain bearing on our subject: the placing of a portrait head on the ideal nude body. This error of taste—for such I think we must allow it to be—has been attributed like all errors of taste to the Romans; but it appears in works executed before the rise of the Roman Empire, such as the so-called Hellenistic Prince in the Museo delle Terme. Evidently it was thought that the divinity of a ruler could be enhanced by giving him the authorized body of god. In consequence, the practice was approved by the early Roman emperors and became an accepted convention. To us, who look first at the head, there is something comic about these academic Pheidian nudes, from which every trace of individuality had been erased centuries ago, being surmounted by the likeness of the unhappy Claudius or the manic Caligula. But, at a later date, there did appear in the imperial household one individual who by his strange perfection created new ideal of beauty, the Bithynian Antinoϋs. It was the wish of the Emperor Hadrian that the beautiful features of his favorite should appear on the statues of the gods;
And so we find this dark Arabian head on the bodies of Apollo, Hermes, and Dionysos, the traditional proportions being modified to suit his heavier torso. For almost the first time since the fourth century a type of beauty is taken from a real head and not from a copybook. That s why, in drifting round a gallery of antique sculpture, our own attention is so often caught by these sultry features and we feel once more, though remotely enough, the warmth of an individual attachment. No doubt the men of the Renaissance, those supreme individuals, felt the same; and for that reason the physical character of Antinoϋs is still perceptible when, after its long banishment, the Apollonian nude returns in the person of Donatello’s David.
Before leaving the antique world one more figure of Apollo remains to be described; for, whatever its status as a work of art, it has been an image of almost magical efficacy: the Apollo Belvedere [35]. A hundred and fifty years ago it was, without question, one of the two most famous works of art in the world. In the great volume printed by Didot to celebrate Napoleon’s triumphs one page contains nothing but the worlds “L’Apollon et le Laocoön emportés à Paris.” From Raphael to Winckelmann artists and critics, whose understanding of art was at least equal to our own, vied with each other in its praise. “It s,” says Winckelmann, “the highest ideal of art among all the works of antiquity. Enter, O reader, with your spirit into this kingdom of beauty incarnate, and there seek to create for yourself the images of the divine nature.” Unfortunately for the modern reader this kingdom is closed. He can only imagine that for three hundred years the Apollo satisfied the same sort of uncritical hunger that was later to crave for the plumes and pinnacled\s of romanticism; and as long as it did so, the eye could overlook weak structure and slack surfaces, which, to the aesthetic of pure sensibility, annul its other qualities. In no other famous work of art, perhaps, are idea and execution more distressingly divorced, and insofar as we belie that they must be inseparable, if art is to take on the quality of new life, the figure of the Vatican is dead. But in the bronze cast made for Francis I, now in the Louvre, some of the mechanical smoothness of the marble is disguised, and with no great effort of the imagination we can picture the shining original, delicately molded, scrupulously chiseled, with cloak and hair of gold. What an exquisite messenger of the gods he must have been! This is the antique epiphany, the god come o earth, alighting with the radiance of his celestial journey still about him.
A messenger, a visitor from another world, an intermediary: that is the impression the Apollo makes on us, and that, in fact, is what he became. A touch of self-consciousness in his ideal beauty and even something un-Greek in the turn of his head made him all the more acceptable to the men of the Renaissance. He seems to look beyond the enclosed Greek world, as if awaiting an answering glance of recognition from the great romantics of the early sixteenth century.
Long before the façade of classical culture finally collapsed, Apollo ha ceased to satisfy any imaginative need. Hermes, accompanier of the dead, could be associated with religions of mystery, Dionysos with religious of enthusiasm. But Apollo, the embodiment of calm and reason, had no place in the uneasy, superstitious world of the third century A. D., and the idea of naked perfection appears relatively seldom in the art of late antiquity. When at last Christianity began to evolve its own symbols there were few contemporary models from which Apollo might be transpersonalized into Adam. From the fifth century there has survived an ivory panel carved with the scene of Adam sitting in his newly created kingdom [36] , and although, by classical standards, his head and members are disproportionately big, his body is still intended to demonstrate the belief that man is distinguished from the animals by superior physical beauty. But the Bargello ivory has no surviving equal. Only in the Far East does the Apollonian ideal take on a new life and significance; for we can hardly doubt that the measured harmony of early Buddhist art represents a Greek conquest more lasting than the victories of Alexander. From the fifth to the twelfth century the various cultures of eastern Asia produced male nude figures that have the dignity and frontal authority of some pre-Pheidian Apollo. The likeness of the finest bodhisattvas in Khmer sculpture to sixth-century Ionian kouroi is unmistakable, and proves how, given certain conditions and ingredients, a style may follow its own logic, in which space and time are relative terms.
In the Christian West, during the same centuries, nude figures are occasionally to be found, but they are echoes or meaningless doxologies, repeated on account of some magic that has long since evaporated from them. The ideal form of Apollo scarcely appears again before that false dawn of the Renaissance, Nicola Pisano’s pulpit in the Baptistery of Pisa [37]. Characteristically, it is transferred to a personification of strength; or, as we shall see, Herakles alone of the Olympian gods was moralized into survival. But formally Nicola’s figure remains an Apollo, heavier than his Hellenistic model, but conforming with a kind of obstinacy to the canonical image of fifth-century Attica. What s lacking is the belief in physical beauty that underlines even the squarest athletes of Polykleitos, a belief that had been so long accepted as sinful that another century and a half had to pass before it could re-enter the mind. How pleasure in the human body once more became a permissible subject of art is the unexplained miracle of the Italian Renaissance. We may catch sight of it n the Gothic panting of the early fifteenth century, revealed n the turn of a wrist and forearm or the inclination of a neck; but there is nothing to prepare us for the beautiful nakedness of Donatello’s David [38].
Donatello’s first innovation, which was to be followed repeatedly in the Renaissance, is the transformation of the king of Israel into a young Greek god. In his youth David had been camel, and, like Apollo, ha conquer by his purity of purpose an embattled monster. He was also the canonized patron of music and poetry. But the image of David most familiar in medieval art was an old man, bearded and crowned, playing on the harp or on a chime of bells; an although the young David was not unknown in the Middle Ages, it was by a prodigious leap of the imagination that Donatello saw him as a god of antiquity. Strictly speaking, he is not an Apollo but a young Dionysos, with dreamy smile and flexible pose; and the Goliath head at his feet is simply the old satyr head often found at the base of Dionysiac statues. One of these Donatello must have known, and combined it with the memory of an Antinoϋs; and he must also have been familiar with certain antique bronzes, for the sense of form in the relation to material is identical with such work as the Spinario. But these obvious sources of inspiration do not prevent the David from being a work of almost incredible originality, which nothing else in the art of the time leads us to anticipate. One would gladly know the comments made upon it when it was first exhibited, for during the rest of the century it continued to be far beyond the current of contemporary taste. It is curiously different, even, from the rest of Donatello’s work, in which he appears as the sculptor of drama, and of man’s moral and emotional predicament, and not of physical perfection. Yet we feel that in the David he has looked as eagerly as a Greek of the fourth century at those delicate tensions and transitions which make the youthful body sensuously appealing. Donatello’s deviations from the canon of classical proportion are obvious. He has represented a real boy whose chest was narrower and flank less rounded than the Greek ideal. No doubt his model was younger and less developed than the boy athletes to whom instinctively we compare him. But allowing for these accidental differences, there remains a fundamental difference of construction. In the antique nude the flat, rectangular chest is supported by a formalized stomach—the cuirasse esthétique already described; n the David, and in practically all subsequent nudes of the Renaissance, the waist s the center of plastic interest, from which radiate all the other planes of the body. Donatello’s contemporaries, however, would scarcely have recognized these differences of proportion and construction, and would have been conscious only of some pagan god returned to earth. Of both him and Brunelleschi it was said, giving to their genius a kind of alchemical interpretation, that they had rediscovered the secrets of the ancient world; amongst which was the secret of physics beauty.
There are several reasons why for fifty years or more Donatello’s David had no successors. One is the Gothic reaction that took place in Florence art at the middle of the fifteenth century, when a fashion for the decorative tapestries and minutely finished panels of the Low Countries superseded the heroic humanism of Donatello and Masaccio. Another is the inherent restlessness of the Florentine temperament. Apollo is static. His gestures are dignified and calm. But the Florentines loved movement, the more violent the better. The two great masters of the nude in the late quattrocento, Pollaiuolo and Botticelli, are concerned with embodiments of energy or ecstatic motion, with a wrestling Hercules or a flying angel, and only once, in Botticelli’s St. Sebastian, achieve a satisfactory nude in repose. Thus, although the Florentines were the first to be influenced by the remains of antiquity, the tranquil, static painting of central Italy, scarcely awakened from its Gothic dream, was more fundamentally classical. The nude figures in Piero della Francesca’s Death of Adam have the large gravity of pre-Pheidian sculpture. A man seen from behind, leaning on a spade, seems to be midway between Myron and Polykleitos, and the brother and sister, Adam’s grandchildren, are like the Orestes and Elektra at Naples. How far this classicism was innate, how far the result of study, it is hard to say, but I have come to believe that Piero was more closely acquainted with antique art, including antique painting, than recent students have allowed.
His pupil, Perugino, belonged to the generation that made free use of antiquarian pattern books, and in his drawings of the nude the Umbrian sense of harmony is applied to Hellenistic models. N spite of slender proportions and willowy Gothic legs there s a classical ease of transition between one form and another that leads directly to Raphael; and to Raphael himself was attributed for many years Perugino’s masterpiece of pagan imagery, the Apollo and Marsyas n the Louvre [39]. It is the perfection of quattrocento classicism. For the lower part of the figure Perugino has followed his life drawing in the Uffizi, but by squaring the shoulders he has given it a genuinely Praxitelean character. This Apollo is as graceful as a bronze from Herculaneum and, in contrast to the gentle Marsyas, pot-bellied and spindile-shanked like a faun, as confidently ideal: and yet the total effect is entirely of its time, and no more resembles a painting of antiquity than the poems of Poliziano resemble those of Ovid. Walter Pater was found of describing works of Renaissance by the word “dainty,” a word that, before its recent degradation, carried a train of chivalric associations. It is not a word that should be applied to the Apollos of ancient Greece, but it comes Unbidden to the mind before Perugino’s pictures, expressing both the jewelsetter’s delicacy of the execution and also some element of make-believe, as of an exquisitely learned pageant. Even at this moment which precedes his triumph over a lower order of enthusiasm, this Apollo lacks the impartial ferocity of the sun. He is, rather, the elegant leader of the Muses; and as such he appears again in that most beautiful representation of his realm, Raphael’s Parnassus.
At this point the Apollo Belvedere reappears. The exact circumstances of its excavation are not known, but it seems to have taken place about the year 1479; it appears twice in the Ghirlandaiesque pattern book known as the Escurialensis, and shortly afterward is transformed into a David in an early engraving by Marcantonio, thus continuing the precedent of Donatello. It was engraved again by Marcantonio in its unrestored state, and inspired a quantity of imitations, ranging from the bronze statuette of the Mantuan court sculptor, Antico, a copy so exact that we can scarcely credit its date, to the free adaptation of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne. One of the first to feel its influence was an artist who cannot have seen it. Albrecht Dϋrer reached Rome, but on his first visit to Italy he must have been shown drawings of the famous antique; and as we have seen, he made them the basis of his exercises in proportion. Almost immediately after his return, in 1501, he executed the drawing in the British Museum of a nude man bearing in his hand a flaming disk on which is written (in reverse) the word Apollo [40]. The figure is made up of souvenirs d’ Italie. The legs are copied from a Mantegna engraving, the style, both penmanship and in degree of emphasis, shows knowledge of early drawings by Michelangelo: but, above all, it is the image he had formed of the figure in the Belvedere that has given this Apollo its godlike bearing. The flat rectangularity of the torso, the absence of articulation in the outline of the thighs, and the way in they are joined to the waist—in these and many other points Dϋrer’s drawing is far more antique than the restless figures of the Florentines. Not for the last time a German artist has constructed a work of irreproachable classicism; yet a construction it remains, concealing only temporarily (though with wonderful mastery) Dϋrer’s real conviction that the body was a curios and rather alarming organism.
Raphael’s response to the Apollo was exactly the reverse. Of the drawings he did from the figure only one has survived, a slight sketch, significantly on the back of a drawing of the Adam in the Disputa. But from the time of his arrival in Rome the rhythm and, we may say, the ethos of the Apollo are perceptible in some of his noblest creations. Not only the grace of movement, but the sense of epiphany and the glance toward a more radiant world which are peculiar to the Apollo Belvedere, reappear in the saints, poets, and philosophers of the Stanze. Raphael, with his unequaled power of assimilation, practically never borrowed a form directly, and the three Apollos in the Stanza della Segnatura are his own creations. Even the figure in The School of Athens intended to represent an ancient statue in a niche displays the same structural difference from antique art that has just been observed in Donatello’s David; and the figure in the center of the Parnassus is a mild and harmonious god, Apollo Musagetes, in whom the pride of the original Olympian has been subdued to fit him for the Christian company that surrounds him.
Since the Greeks of the fourth century no man felt so certain of the godlike character of the male body as Michelangelo. “And held it for something divine”: this phrase, which occurs so often in Vasari’s life when describing his hero’s work, is not rhetoric, but the statement of a conviction; and Michelangelo expresses the same belief in his sonnets to Cavalieri. It was a belief born of emotion. Michelangelo, like the Greeks, was passionately stirred by male beauty, and with his serious, Platonic cast of mind he was bound to identify his emotions with ideas. This passage of violent sensuous attachment into the realm of nonattachment, where nothing of the first compulsion is lost but much gained of purposeful harmony, makes his nudes unique. They are both poignant and commanding. The Apollo of Olympia s commanding but not at all poignant, for he has grown naturally out of an assumption that no man of the post-Christian world can make, least of all the hungry soul of Michelangelo. There can never be, in his work, the Olympian calm or the Apollonian authority, the character of sol justitiae, that Michelangelo could give, as no man since.
In his youth, as we know, he strove for the perfection of antique beauty, producing imitations of classic art that were even used to deceive the collectors of the day. The Bacchus shows that he would go so far as to imitate the lifeless surface of a marble copy. But his drawing of the nude have from the first Tuscan strength and that nervous articulation which I have already contrasted with the bland forms of antiquity. In the Louvre is a drawing of a nude youth [41] whose godlike body has a truly Pheidian splendor; but on analysis how un-Greek it becomes! The outline of the torso flow with a restless, vital movement, and within them the modeling is so rich and continuous that the old, geometric divisions on which the classic architecture of the body s founded have almost disappeared. The eye never seems content to move peacefully over a plane, but either extorts from it the last fraction of incidents or omits the passage altogether, as the arms and left breast are omitted here. There are, moreover, several anatomical details, such as the right clavicle and surrounding muscles, that would have offended the Greeks but satisfied Michelangelo’s love knotted, hard-gripping form. The drawing that comes nearest to antiquity is one of an Olympian god, half Mercury, half Apollo, also in the Louvre, evidently done from memory [42]. The forms are more generalized than in the life drawings and flow with an easier movement; but already there is that peculiar thickening of the torso (increased, even, in a correction) which in his later work was to become almost a deformation. It would be am mistake, however, to suppose that he disregarded the classical system of proportion. On the contrary, he studied t, and himself used one that was probably derived from Pliny’s account of Polykleitos. Of this we have evidence in a study t Windsor that has been marked and measured in great detail, as if for the instruction of some other painter. Michelangelo has exaggerated the Polykleitan stance, so that the axis of the shoulders contrasts violently with that of the hips, and has indicate the muscles with anatomical exactness. Since the am of the drawings was scientific he has made no attempt at classical idealization, and the result is more like Andrea del Castango than Polykleitos. It shows us what a confluence of mental activities, calculation, idealization, and specific knowledge contributed to the final effect of his masterpieces.
Michelangelo’s greatest embodiment of the Apollonian idea is the first marble David. Given the torso alone [43], he might be claimed as the climax of that long search for harmony which started with the fragment from Miletos or the Kritios youth. True, there s a ripple of ribs and muscles and beneath it, scarcely perceptible, the ground swell of some distant storm that distinguishes the David’s torso from those of the most vigorous antiques; but if had remained a fragment we should have been astonished at the strictness with which Michelangelo had accepted the classical scheme. However, we have the entire figure; and long before our eye can take in the torso it has been caught by the head on its strained, defiant neck, the enormous hands, and the potential movement of the pose, which force him far outside the sphere of Apollo. This overgrown boy is both more vehement and less secure. He is a hero rather than a god. He sums up, and with a turn of the head destroys, the whole of that trusting, reverent, and romantic attitude toward antiquity which Michelangelo ha learned from Bertoldo in the garden of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Michelangelo himself was a scarcely conscious of this. The drawings already mentioned were certainly done after the David; and at a far later date he returned to the idea of Apollonian perfection. The most symbolic of these perfect men is the awakening Adam of the Sistine [44]. Nowhere else does Michelangelo concede so much to the accepted notion of physical beauty; but in this very image he shows the perfect body receiving that charge which was to disturb forever its equilibrium. The Adam is n a pose not very different from that of the figure from the figure from the pediment of the Parthenon known as the Dionysos [45]. The distribution of balance, the sense of noble relaxation, and the general architecture of their bodies are the same; and yet how strikingly the Adam differs from the Dionysos n total effect! It is the difference between being and becoming. The Dionysos, in its timeless world, obeys an inner law of harmony; the Adam gazes out to some superior power that will give him no rest. In two other nude figures Michelangelo has given form to aspects of Apollo, strangely different from one another and perhaps complementary. The first is the marble figure in the Bargello, which he seems to have intended as an Apollo (for the shadowy suggestion of a quiver is still visible) and then changed into a David with his sling [46]. Apollo it remains, for the sleepy, sensuous movement of the body cannot be interpreted s the action of the young hero; indeed, this round limbed youth entirely lacks the heroic indignation of the earlier figure. He is like a romantic dream, a poem of vanishing love, in which already the details are slightly blurred. In structure, in proportion, in movement, in sentiment, nothing of the antique nude remains; nothing except the worship of physical beauty.
The other figure is the exact reverse. It is the judge who, in the enormous Doom of the Sistine Chapel, confounds the powers of darkness [47]. We have returned to the most primitive aspect of Apollo, the solar energy that creates and destroys, the embodiment of sol justitiae. His gesture is more imperious even than that of the Apollo of Olympia, for the heights to which he summons the blessed are more radiant, the depths to which he condemns the unruly more atrocious. In spite of his un-Greek proportions (and Michelangelo has not tried to resist that strange compulsion which made him thicken a torso till it is almost square), this Pantocrator remains Apollonian. Michelangelo has discarded the bearded Syrian figure, in its stiff robes, which even the most pagan spirits of the Renaissance had preserved from the judges of Byzantine tradition, and has found his inspiration in the conquering mage of Alexander the Great. His arrogant head, slightly modified in spiritual conquest, is set on the naked body of an athlete, and it is partly through the crushing strength of this body that his divine authority is expressed. Looking back to the Apollos of fifth-century Greece, we recognize how much the impressiveness of the Pheidian nude depended on a latent fear of Olympus and we remember, with Mexican art in mind, that, next to love, there is no more powerfully form-creating emotion than fear of the wrath God.
It is precisely this feeling of dread that s absent from all subsequent representations of Apollo, and turns him into the complacent bore of classicism. One example will do for all, Poussin’s title page to the royal Virgil 1641 [48]. The poet s crowded by a nude figure with short legs, broad chest, and heavy shoulders that, since the sixteenth century, had been thought of as ichnographically appropriate to Apollo; and not even Poussin’s mastery of design can make this type of body anything but dull. In fact, Poussin usually had the tact to avoid such figures, and represented Apollo seated and two thirds raped. But the neo-classicists of the next century, lacking his creative insight, were aware only of the convenience of this respectable-looking form. Winckleman had asserted that the highest beauty should be free form all flavor, like perfectly pure water, and when his discipline, Raphael Mengs, painted for the gallery of the Villa Albani a decoration that should be in keeping with its contents, he amend at an ideal insipidity. In his Apollo he achieved it [49]. The Muses of his Parnassus, although uninspiring, are average specimens of eighteenth-century decoration; the flat formless body of their leader is on a different plane of unreality, and so looks as absurd to us as it looked admirable to Winckelmann’s contemporaries. In the next generation Canova, a brilliant portraitist and master of contemporary chic, could produce ideal figures as ridiculous as the Perseus of the Vatican [50], in which a fashion-plate version of the Apollo Belvedere holds at arm’s length a caricature of the Rondanini Medusa. Apollo, with all those beliefs which clustered round is name, had lost his place in the human imagination; and the husk of Apollo alone remained to provide a meaningless discipline in academies of art.
Myths do not die suddenly. They pass through a long period of respectable retirement, decorating the background of the imagination, until somehow new hot-gospeler decides that their destruction is necessary to salvation. Apollo, who, in the early nineteenth century, was lost sight of in the smoke of materialism, has become in this century the object of positive hostility. From Mexico, from the Cargo, even from the cemeteries of Tarquinia, those dark gods, of which D. H. Lawrence made himself the prophet, have been brought out to extinquish the light of reason. The individual embodiment of calm and order is to be supplanted by communal frenzy and the collective unconscious. Such impulses were well known to the Greeks. They are embedded in Greek religion; they are at the root of antique tragedy; and they are made beautifully visible to us on reliefs and drinking cup depicting Dionysos and his companions. Dionysiac enthusiasm, s we shall see in a later chapter, produced a series of nude figures that had a longer and more continuous life than the embodiments of Olympian calm. Yet when we look at the earliest representations of enthusiasm, the satyrs and rhumba dancers on sixth-century Greek vases, we realize why the Greeks felt that their art could not rest on this basis alone. Without some element of lawful harmony it would have been no different from the arts of the surrounding cultures, Hittite, Assyrian, or, as we may speculate, Minoan; and like them have dwindled into decoration, anecdote, or propaganda. This is the justification of Apollo in his cruel triumph over Marsyas. The union of art and reason, in whose name so many lifeless works have been executed and so many ludicrous sentiments pronounced, is after all a high and necessary aim; but it cannot be achieved by negative means, by coolness or nonparticipation. It demands a belief at least as violent as the impulses it controls; and if today, in the sensual wailing of the saxophone, Marsyas seems to be avenge, that is because we have not the spiritual energy to accept the body and to superintend it.

NOTES

Apollo. Throughout this chapter I am concerned with the idea of male beauty based on harmony, clarity, and tranquil authority. This idea is most shortly conveyed by the word Apollo; but it will be seen that by no means all the figures referred to were intended to represent Apollo. The male beauty of an Olympian was subject to slight variations of proportion even in antiquity, although this was owing far more to the taste of the epoch or the idiosyncrasy of the artist than to any set typological requirements. In the late Renaissance, however, the proportions and characteristics of the gods were schematized—e.g., the Apollo type was nine faces high, the Jupiter type ten faces, and so forth; cf. Lomazzo, Trattaro, II, 77. Such artificial classifications in no way affect the argument of this book.
Kouroi. Cf. Richter, Kouroi, where, however, the author’s bias in favor of a narrowly naturalistic aesthetics is sometimes misleading.
The Ephebe of Kritios owes its name to a supposed resemblance of both head and body to the Harmodios and Aristogeiton attribute to Kritios and Nesiotes by Pausanias (I, 8, 5). The fragility of this evidence is apparent when we consider (I) that the head of the Naples Harmodios is a characterless copy; (2) that there is a strong reason to doubt that the head of the Akropols youth originally belonged to it, although it is of about the same date; cf. Payne and Young, Archaic Marble Sculpture from the Acropolis, p. 44; (3) that the comparison between a static body and a body in action is, at this date, bound to be incomplete, and even if a similarity can be maintained, it is agreed that the tyrant slayers would have been a later work. Nevertheless, the name may be retained for convenience.
Ucello-school drawing (BB, 27790). Also from the circle of Ucello is a drawing in Stockholm (BB, 2779k) that shows a group of male nudes standing on a polygon, thus combining on one sheet the two roots of Renaissance Academism. The earliest nude drawn from the life that has survived seems to be the sheet by Pisanello in the Boymans Museum, Rotterdam (Degenhart, Pisanello, pl.26). Life studies from the Florentine workshops of c. 1450 are quite common; cf. Berenson (BB, 545a), a youth learning on a stick, attributed to Benozzo Gozzoli, who is already posed to look like an antique, and so has some of the artificiality that “academies” have retained.
Bronze and Marble. The extent to which Greek sculpture has been traduced by reproduction of bronzes in marble can be seen from the one example in which an original bronze and a marble copy have both survived, the bronze athlete of Ephesos in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Vienna, and the marble athlete of Ephesos in the Uffizi. In spite of the fact that the bronze had been broken into 234 fragments and the marble is a copy of high quality, the former remains a vivid, life-communicating work of art, while the latter is dead.
The cuirasse esthétique. At an early date the symbolic importance of this schematization led to a form of armor known as the cuirasse musclée. It has been found in tombs of the fifth century B.C. but did not become usual till the fourth. It was Greek origin, and seems to have been made of metal or leather covered with metal plates. In the third and second centuries it was usually made of hardened leather and molded even more closely to the torso (cf. Reinach. Répertoire de reliefs, III, 442ii. 446ii. During all this time it was reserved for higher ranks, and the more elaborate metal examples were worn by generals. In the first centuries of the Christian era its use was extended to centurions and finally to ordinary soldiers (Reinach, I, 264-67). From its frequent appearance in Roman relief—e.g., Trajan’s Column—it was known in the Renaissance as armor alla romana and became de rigueur for all academic or mannerist compositions of the sixteenth century.
Idolino. Discovered in Pesaro in 1530, and long considered the only surviving bronze of the type and period of Polykleitos. Although archeologists are temporarily united in classing it as an archaizing work of the Roman epoch, it is of an altogether different quality from those furnishing bronzes from Herculaneum which attempt a fifth-century style, and could be an eclectic work of the early fourth century B.C. There is much evidence (e.g., bronzes in the Cabinet des Médailles, Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum, New York) that Polykleitan works were still being produced then.
Apollo of Kassel may not be reproduce a figure of which we have a literary record, but certainly goes back to a Pheidian original. A superior head of the same figure is in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence; cf. Picard, Manuel, II, 314, and fig. 133.
Hermes of Praxiteles. It was discovered in 1877, and immediately identified as the figure mentioned by Pausanias (V, 17, 3). Two recent theories are worth nothing. First that it is of Roman date. The arguments are set out by Cuttle in Antiquity (June, 1934) and may be summarized as, first, that the back is carved by a flat chisel not used by the Greeks for bodywork; second, that the hair is worked by a running drill; third, that the drapery appears to be a later date. These theories were first put forward by Blϋmel, whose latest work, Der Hermes eines Praxiteles, dismisses it also on stylistic grounds and suggests that Pausanias was referring to another Praxiteles of the Hellenistic epoch. The other theory is put forward by Antonsson, Praxiteles’ Marble Group in Olympia, who maintains that the figure was originally a Pan (signs of horns in the hair, only possible copy represents a satyr) and was altered in Roman times to a Hermes, thus accounting for the Roman tool marks. Neither theory has gained wide acceptance.
Lypsippos. Of the works claimed as his on the basis of resemblance to the athlete scraping himself (Apoxymenos), the most convincing are the Hermes typing his sandal, in Copenhagen, and the Eros with a bow, in the Capitoline. There is also a scrap of evidence that the Farnese Hercules and the others of this type derive from Lysippos. Other attributions are purely hypothetical, and as he is said to have executed fifteen hundred pieces of sculpture there is plenty of room for speculation.
Antinoϋs. The chief surviving examples are two reliefs, in the Villa Albani and the Terme, and two statues, known as the Mandragone and the Braschi, in the Louvre and the Vatican respectively. This new ideal of beauty must have been created between 130 (each of Antinoϋs) and 138 (death of Hadrian), but, given Hadrian’s taste for early Greek art, it is not impossible that the type was influenced by a Phedian Athena; cf. Picard, La Sculpture antique, pp. 427-29.
Apollo Belvedere. The date of its discovery is unknown, but it appears in a quattrocento pattern book of antiques, known as the Codex Escurialensis. Ff. 53 and 64, so must have been aboveground in the 1480’s. It was found in the garden of San Pietro in Vincoli, of which Giuliano della Rovere was cardinal, and when he became Pope Julius II he took it to the Vatican, where it still stands. The Escurialensis drawings and Marcantonio’s engraving (B. 311) show it as better preserved than it is today. (Incidentally, the drawing on f. 53 taken from precisely the same viewpoint as the Marcantonio, which, although about thirty years later, might have been taken from a common original.) Of the right hand, only the fingers were broken. Before restoration the arm was chopped off at the elbow, and the present arm, with its rhetorical gesture, was added by Montorsoli in 1532 (Vasari, VI, 633). The effect of opening out a closed composition is similar to that of his restoration of the Laokoön. The Apollo was drawn and engraved may times in the Renaissance, starting with Nicoletto da Modena’s fanciful reconstruction of about 1500 (Hind, Catalogue of Early Italian Engravings, V, p. 121, no.34) and an early Marcantonio (B,5) in which it is represented as David. Recent writers think so poorly of the Apollo (“as a work of art little short of abominable"—Dickins, Hellenistic Sculpture, p. 70; “Present day comparison with many statues of greater merit makes the encomiums of older critics appear ridiculous” —Lawrence, Classical Sculpture, p. 337) that they have made no serious attempt to study it. Clearly, it is a copy, made for the Roman market, of a Hellenistic bronze, but the date and provenance of the original are disputable. The old connection with the name of Leochares is purely hypothetical. It was certainly made after the period of Alexander, perhaps in Syria, as the head and hair are fundamentally un-Greek. The Diana of Versailles appears to me to reproduce a work by the same sculptor, and is so similar in both style and feeling that the original bronzes might have been a pair. The height of the Apollo is 224 cm; that of the Diana, 211cm.
The Spinario was one of the few antique bronzes that remained unmelted aboveground through the Middle Ages. Its pose first appears (clothed) on Brunelleschi’s bronze trial piece for the Baptistery doors. At that time it was probably in the Lateran cloisters, and was accessible to Donatello during his visit to Rome. The quasi-archaic simplification of forms in relation to the technique of bronze casting is exactly that used by Donatello in the David. In decree of 1471 Sixtus IV presented it to the newly constructed Palazzo dei Conservatorti, where it has remained ever since. Toward the end of the quattrocento it became one of the most popular antiques, and was much reproduced in small bronze replicas—e.g., three in the Louvre, four in Vienna; cf. Bode, Die italienschen, Bronze-statuetten der Renaissance, pl. 81. Archeologists now tend to consider the Spinario an archaizing work of the Roman period: but the technical arguments are inconclusive, and in comparison with analogous bronzes in the Naples Museum (e.g., The Muses) it has a warmth and a freshness that persuade us to belive that it is original of the fifth century.
Dϋrer’s Apollo drawing raises a number of problems. That it was originally inspired by Jacopo de’ Barbari’s engraving of Apollo and Diana (B, VII, 523, 16) is proved by the seated female figure on the right. Perhaps it was the unresolved pose of this figure that led Dϋrer to abandon his project (evident from the reserved inscription) of engraving direct from the drawing. He did not abandon the idea of contrasting the male and female nude, but, having no model for the latter as canonical as the Apollo Belvedere; he undertook a series of systematized drawings from life (Winkler, II, nos. 411-18). He also executed another Apollo study (Winkler, 44) in which the pose of the Belvedere figures is varied by the head’s being turned in the direction of the weight-bearing leg. This is the pose used in the final engraving, the Fall of Man (b, VII, 30), although for the head he has reverted to the original Apollo drawing. The engraving is dated 1504, as is a drawing of the subject in the Morgan Library (Winkler, II, 333). It is usually assumed that the Apollo drawing was done some years earlier, but for this there is no evidence and the resemblance to Michelangelo’s drawings of c. 1501 makes an earlier ate improbable. The legs are an almost exact copy of the Dionysos in Mantegnas’s engraving of the Bacchanal with a Wine Press (B, XIII, 240, 19), but the upper part of the figure is very close to the Apollo Belvedere, the right arm shown exactly as it was before Montorsoli’s restoration.
Michelangelo and Cavalieri. A selection from Michelangelo’s letters to Cvalieri is to be found in Tolnay, III, 24. The same passionate feelings are given more philosophic expression in Michelangelo’s poems. In Cavalieri’s perfect body he sees an image of universal beauty. He is the forma universale (Frey, Dichtugen, LXXXIX). He is the incarnation of the divine idea, and, contemplating his beautiful features, Michelangelo feels himself ascending to God (Frey, LXIV and LXXIX).
Michelangelo’s drawings of Apollonian youths. The most important are (1) the standing youth, in the Louvre (R.F. 1086 r.; BB, 1590), inspired by an antique and perhaps drawn from nature; usually dated c. 1501, but possibly earlier, as it was a drawing of this type that influenced Dϋrer’s Apollo (cf. preceding note). (2) The figure, also in the Louvre (R.F. 688 r.; BB, 1588), with Mercury’s cap and Apollo’s viol added later, apparently a memory of the Mercury of the Horti Farnesiani, which was used by Raphael for the Mercury in his fresco of the Council of the Gods in the Farnesina; datable c. 1501. (3) The youth running with left arm extended, in the British Museum (Wilde, British Museum, 4 r.; BB, 1481); a memory of the Apollo Belvedere, but turned into a figure in action, and used in relation to The bathers cartoon; so debate c. 1504. (4) a drawing, known only from a copy in the Louvre (R.F. 694; BB, 1730), that shows two views of an antique with a broken left arm, apparently a Hermes, but made by Michelangelo to look entirely sixteenth century.
Thickening of the torso may have been felt to give the figure superhuman authority, for the same proportion is to be found in statues of the deified rules of late antiquity—e.g., the colossal bronze statue of the Emperor Trebonianus Gallus, 251-53, in the Metropolitan Museum, New York [294].

PICTURES

20. Attic, c. 600 B. C. Kouros




24. After Polykleitos, c. 450 B. C. Doryphoros



25. After Polykleitos, c. 430 B. C. Diaoumenos


21. Attic, 6th century B. C. Apollo of Tenea

26. After Polykleitos, c. 450 B. C. Torso of Doryphoros


22. “Kritios,” c. 480 B. C. Youth

23. Magna Graecia, c. 490 B. C. Apollo of Piombno





30. Style of Pheidias. Apollo of the Tiber


















45. Pheidias, c. 435 B. C. Dionysos from Parthenon


43. Michelangelo. Detail of David



42. Michelangelo. An antique god

41. Michelangelo. Nude youth


47. Michelangelo. Detail from Last Judgment


46. Michelangelo. Apollo-David
44. Michelangelo. Creation of Adam


40. Dϋrer. Apollo





39. Perugino. Apollo and Marsyas



38. Donatello. David


37. Nicola Pisano. Fortitudo




36. Early Christian, 5th century A. D. Adam




35. Greek, 2nd century B.C. Apollo Belvedere


34. Cellini. Perseus


49. Pengs. Parnassus


50. Canova. Perseus
48. Poussin. Apollo crowning Virgil



















REPORT PAPER

APOLLO - He was known for being a beautiful man because of his body that conformed to certain laws of proportion and so partook of the Divine beauty of Mathematics. He was also known for being The God of Light, God of Justice (sol justitiae), The Python Slayer and The Vanquisher of darkness.
PYTHAGORAS - He washed Great Philosopher of Mathematical Harmony, and called himself as the son of Pythian Apollo.
APOLLOS - The earliest nudes in Greek art which are not beautiful but known as alert and confident members of a conquering race. They are stiff, flat, less natural and less easy to make than the Egyptian Figures. But stage by stage, in less than a century they grow into models that were to satisfy our Western notion of beauty till the present day. They are clear and ideal.
KOUROI - In the time of Kouroi, known as the male nude figures of the sixth century, the sculpture of the nude male figures changed from shape to shape, becoming smoother, detailed and start of being decorative.
EPHEBE OF KRITIOS - A nude male figure made of marble from Akropolis and appears as the perfect human body in about the year 480.
KRITIOS - Was an Athenian sculptor, probably a pupil of Antenor, working in the early fifth century BCE, whose manner is on the cusp of the Late Archaic and the "severe style" of Early Classicism in Attica. A great sculpture but he was not considered as one of the initiator of the momentous change.
APOLLO OF PIOMBINO - Made up of bronze and treated as the earlier and much stiffer nude male figure in the fifth century by Pythagoras of Rhegium. But because of the reason that bronze statues made in Greece has been melted down, the Ephebe of Kritios remains as the first beautiful nude in art.
PYTHAGORAS OF RHEGIUM – He is the sculptor who “first gives rhythm and proportion to his statue.”
RELIGIOUS EDICATION AND LOVE -These are the two powerful emotions that dominated by the Greek athletes who wore no clothes in the Greek games that gave to cult of Physical perfection.
THE NAKED BODY OF THE GREEK ATHLETES - Because of this, the sculpture’s eye has followed every muscle or watched the skin stretch and relaxes as it passes over a bone. No wonder, the fine sense of its proportion, symmetry, elasticity, and aplomb was considered as the qualities and became a rare coincidence that brought the male nude figures to perfection.

Because of the Apollo of Piombino, the Kritios youth had a classic character. It can be illustrated by examining the lower part of the torso—to be precise, the junction of the hips, abdomen, and thorax.

APOLLO OF TENEA - Is one of the examples of Kouroi that has a peculiar feature which is thin, flat stomach, has a sharp, ogival rhythm, and can be describe as Gothic.
POLYKLEITOS - A great puritan of art who wants to purify art by giving it the logic and finality of an intellectual theorem yet he also wants sensuality.
POLYKLEITOS’ STANDARD - Also known in French as the cuirasse esthétique which is the control of muscle architecture and schematization of torso, it s a disposition of muscles and was used to be the design of armor and became for the heroic body like the masks of the antique stage.
DORYPHOROS - This figure proves that Polykleitos’ works are made up of "canon" or "rule", showing the perfectly harmonious and balanced proportions of the human body in the sculpted form. It preserves some of the urgency and concentration of the original, and proves that Polykleitos’ scheme of the body, like all abstraction that have survived, not only contained life, but was bursting with a vitality all the more potent because forced into so narrow a channel.
DISKOPHOROS – It retains the freshness of an original Greek bronze and when we look at it, it seems compared even to the lifeless copies of Polykleitos’ athletes.
PHEIDIAS - The writers of antiquity said that Polykleitos had made a figure of a man which we could say that it is the figure of a perfectly balance man and alike of a god which s calm, pitiless, and supremely confident n the power of physical beauty.
OLYMPIA - A sanctuary of ancient Greece in Elis, is known for having been the site of the Olympic Games in classical times, comparable in importance to the Pythian Games held in Delphi. Both games were held every Olympiad (i.e. every four years), the Olympic Games dating back possibly further than 776 BC. In 394 emperor Theodosius I abolished them because they were reminiscent of paganism.
DELPHI - is an archaeological site and a modern town in Greece on the south-western spur of Mount Parnassus in the valley of Phocis. Delphi was the site of the Delphic oracle, most important oracle in the classical Greek world, and it was a major site for the worship of the god Apollo.
HERMES OF PRAXTELES – It represents the last triumph of the Greek idea of wholeness: physical beauty is one with strength, grace, gentleness, and kindness. The statue is dated to 343 BC and is made from Parian marble. It is the only original work of Praxiteles, that has survived and it was found at Olympia, intact on his base, several meters under the ground. Its height is 2.10 m. It was dedicated to the sacred Altis from the Eleians and Arcadians to commemorate their peace treaty. Later it was moved to the temple of Hera, where it was found in 1877 AD.The sculpture, "the diamond of Olympia", represents Hermes, the messenger of the Gods, holdng the small Dionysos, who tries to take something from his hand.
Michelangelo - Was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet and engineer. He is also one of the sculptors who contributed a lot to make a perfect figure of Apollo.
Lysippos - Was a Greek sculptor of the 4th century BC. One of the three great sculptors of the Classical Greek era, bringing transition into the Hellenistic era. Taken together, the large workshop of Lysippos, the demand for replicas of his work in his lifetime and later among Hellenistic and Roman connoisseurs, the number of disciples directly in his circle and the survival of his works only in copies, pose problems of method for the student. The Apollo Belvedere - Also called the Pythian Apollo, is a celebrated marble sculpture from Classical Antiquity. It was rediscovered in the late 15th century, during the Renaissance. From the mid-18th Century, it was considered the greatest ancient sculpture by ardent neoclassicists and for centuries epitomized ideals of aesthetic perfection for Europeans and westernized parts of the world.


REACTION PAPER


A student like me has a common knowledge just like any of my classmates and any other students but I can say that I have one reason that makes me more knowledgeable to my classmates when it comes to Mythological god and goddesses because of my self studies an also on my educational experiences in my high school days.

My classmates on my fourth and last year in high school was all nerd, not totally nerd but they’re all intelligent and very addict in reading, I felt that I am out of place that time because they are all belonged to the “star” section or should I say first section since I was in first year and I am not. But I can also say that in my fourth and last year in high school was also great because I was chose to be in the first section together with my other classmates and my reaction goes like that because when I was reading the given chapter to me which is Apollo, I remember my adviser in my fourth year in high school which used also to be my English teacher named Edgardo S. Cobrador.

He or should I say “she” helped me a lot and give me more reason to remember him because he was a book lover, addict reader especially on Mythological readings and also a Harry Potter fanatic. I like the way he teaches even he is so strict and very serious especially when it comes to reading. I Remember those days that I am reading a novel, short story, Mythological readings and as a newly student who was placed to be in the first section who has no close friend, I was really out of place that time but now, I could say that it was also the best part of my life. All of us were very close to each other ‘til it comes to a very big fight.



When the chapter Apollo was assigned to me, I felt very confident and I sad to myself that after all, I have a little knowledge about that, but I was wrong.



I know that Apollo s the God of light but I don’t know the reason why he was called that way and I’m not bothered to know the reason behind that but I never taught that I could found out here the reason behind it, which is so very deep and very interesting especially on the notes that I have read on how he was made and on how the sculptors contributed to make a beautiful figure of a man to be known as the God of light, Apollo. Ranging on the time of the early period of the Greeks, I was surprised that on that time, he was just an ugly figure of a man. He is not totally ugly but I said that he is ugly because he was just a flat, thin, less realistic and a stiff figure of a man before, just like the word kouroi which specifies the nude male figures of the sixth century. It is a weird name for me and I don’t know how to pronounce it correctly but after all, it gives additional knowledge to me. An example of it was the Apollo of Tenea, it was also an old one, a thin, flat and stiff figure of a man just like the early nudes in Greek art which are also thin and flat and some are geometrically made.

Speaking of Geometry, the chapter I have read was really awesome, I found out that Pythagoras, the first great philosopher of mathematics was the son of a man named Pythian Apollo. Wow, I never knew that and the most great of all; I found out that the reason why Apollo was called the God of light because his body conforms to a certain laws of proportion and he was also called the God of justice because justice only exist when facts are measured and I had never think that way. A student like me who taught that I have enough knowledge was really surprised that behind all that Mythological beings, there are4 much more deep reason why they where called like that. Another thing that made me amazed was on the sculptors which made me stunned a lot especially on the sculptor named Polykleitos. Because of the early nude figures which are made geometrically, a sculptor named Kritios once made a mater piece which do not follow the rules of art. He made a figure of a man which is unique, which we can consider as a classical figure named Kritios “youth” , but he is not really the one who made the big change, it is Polykleitos. I was really flabbergasted on what I had found out, that a sculptor like him could think that way. Polykleitos made two figures of a man, one, according to the popular taste which are realistic and the other one, according to the rules of art. He then invited guests to distinguish which one is more beautiful to the naked eye which made Polykleitos very popular and made his figures really classical that made the other sculptors to copy his works of art. Wow I was really amazed on what he has done. I was also amazed on the sculptor named Lysippos because of his great works.

I was really amazed on his intelligence and on his creativity that a man like him could do a great work of art. It is really great that a student like me could learn new things. Once when I was surfing the net, I have found out many more in formations related to this chapter. This chapter gives me more reason to read more reason to seek for the great thing here in this world. I want to discover new things about the historical places, great sculptors, artifacts and prints. Wow, it is really nice to stock more knowledge inside my brain especially when I am free to surf the net 24hrs. but I felt bad, coz’ a indigenous naive like me can’t see those true sculptures, only in the net but unfortunately, I’m just also using my dad’s computer and I cant surf the net in a long time. But creating this “assignment” is gives me more fun and excitement. It gives me more knowledge but I can only use my dad’s computer ‘til 2:00 in the morning.

Hehehe, need to take a rest I guess. Now, I can conclude that I have no enough knowledge in Mythological god and goddesses, that I have only little knowledge about it, I am just a student, just a kid, need to learn more and need to read more. I’m much more exited to discover new things especially on art. Those prints, sculptures and those great things, painters and mysteries behind those arts and I want to watch more exhibits of art. For me, this report is one way to found out more knowledgeable things under the sun.