Ancient art and its remains, or, A manual of the archaeology of art / By C.O. Müller.

  • Karl Otfried Müller
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Ancient art and its remains, or, A manual of the archaeology of art / By C.O. Müller. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    122/664
    mede was an equally noble and charming conception of the favourite of Zeus borne upwards by the eagle, although the 2 subject had always a questionable side. The striving after personal charms still more predominates in the Hermaphro- dite, an artistic creation for which we are probably indebted 3 to Polycles. The tendency to the affecting is shown particu- larly in Silanion's dying Jocasta, a brazen statue, with deadly- 4 pale countenance. Timotheus (§. 125, K 4) and Bryaxis also seem to have been fellow-artists and contemporaries of Praxiteles; they both ornamented the tomb of Mausolus 5 jointly with Scopas and Leochares, after OL 106, 4 (§. 149). There were likewise portrait-statues of Macedonian princes by Leochares and Bryaxis, and in Athens itself [where Deme- 6 trius erected models, §. 123, 2.] many artists were employed on honorary statues (comp. §. 420). All the masters just named (only information is wanting as to Timotheus) were Athenians; they form together with Scopas and Praxiteles the newer school of Athens. 1. Leochares (fecit) aquilam sentientem qtiid rapiat in Ganymede, et cui ferat, parcentemque unguibus {cpstlofiiuxis 6pvx,f^(n, Nonn. xv, 281) eti- am per vestem, Plin. xxxiv, 19, 17. comp. Straton, Anthol. Pal. xii, 221. The statue in the M. PioCl. iii, 49, is a decided imitation. It represents the devotedness of the favourite boy to the erastes in the allusive man- ner of antiquity. For that the eagle denotes the lover himself, is brought out more clearly for example on the coins of Dardanus (Choiseul, Gouf- fier Voy. Pitt. ii. pi. 67, 28), where the subject is more boldly handled. Ganymede is therefore even placed together with Leda, as in the por- tico at Thessalonica (Stuart, Ant. of Athens iii. chap. 9. pi. 9. 11), as mascula and muliebris Venus. Hence it is probable that this concep- tion of ancient art (§. 351) also belongs to the same period. 2. Polycles Hermaphr. nobilem fecit, PUn. That the elder Polycles, of this period, is here meant, becomes still more probable from observing that in Pliny xxxiv, 19, 12 sqq. the alphabetically enumerated plastaj stand again under each letter in the same way that they were found af- ter one another in the historical sources (a rule which is tolerably gen- eral, and by which perhaps the age of some other artists can be deter- mined) ; accordingly this Polycles Hved before Phajnix the scholar of Lysippus. Whether his hermaphrodite was standing or lying (§. 392, 4), is a question difficult to answer. 3. On the Jocasta see Plut. de aud. poet. 3. Quaest. Sym. v, 1. 5. By Leochares, statues of Amyntas, Pliilip, Alexander, Olympias, and Eurydice, of gold and ivory. Pans, v, 20; of Isocrates, Plut. Vit. x. Oratt. A king Seleucus by Bryaxis. Polyeuctos against Demades asks, in Apsines Art. Rhetor, p. 708, whether an honorary statue held a sliicld, the akrostohon of a ship, a book, or prayed to the gods? [Longin. do invent, ed. Walz T. ix. p. 545.] 6. Even the reliefs on the Choregic monument of Lysicrates (§. 108) —Dionysus and his satyrs quelling the Tyrrhenians—may show clearly