Art Principles

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tory. They represent no mythological deities except in name, and least of all do they assort with the deities of Homer and Hesiod. In all other religions the ideals expressed in art fail entirely to reach the height of the general conceptions, and are far below the spiritual beings as depicted in the sacred books; but the Grecian ideals as recorded in stone are so far beyond the legendary gods of the ancient poets, that we are unable to pass from the stone to the literature without an overwhelming feeling of astonishment at the contrast. It is unfortunate that we ar

dary to the imagination, but that minds could be found to set them down in design, and hands to mould and shape them in clay and stone; and that many minds and hands could do these things in the same epoch. That these sculptured forms have never been equalled is not wonderful; that they never will be surpassed is as certain as that death is the penalty of life. So firmly have they become grafted into the minds of men as things unapproachable in beauty, that they have themselves been converted into general ideals towards which all must climb who attempt to scale the heights of art. The greatest artists known to us since

of art presented to his view. And yet he did not see the Parthenon sculptures and other numerous works of the time of Phidias, with the many beautiful examples of the next century which have been made available since his day. What he would have said in the presence of the glories of the Parthenon, with the Hermes of Praxiteles and the rest of the collection from Olympia, is hard to conje

in fear. The artist has not now to be troubled with pangs of dread, nor will his imagination be limited by sacerdotal scruples. The rivalry of Praxiteles need not concern him, for there are wondrous ideals yet to be wrought, which will be comprehended and loved even in these days of hastening endeavour. But the painter must leave alone the Zeus and the variation of this god in the pictured Christian Deity, for the type is

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es of the Roman Venus. Who loves not the Aphrodite sprung from the foam of the sea; shading the sun on the Cytheran isle with the light of her glory; casting an eternal hallow over the groves of Cyprus; flooding the god-like mind of Greece with her sparkling radiance? What conception of her beauty can rise high enough when the grass in astonishment grows beneath her feet on desert rocks; when lions and tigers gently purr as she passes, and the rose and the myrtle throw out their scented blossoms to sweeten the air? Hera and Athena leave

diation when troubled with pangs of the heart. But it was not the type of Phidias and his school, for Phidias passed over Hesiod and purified Homer, representing Aphrodite with the stately mien and lofty bearing of a queen of

t. We can attach to it in our minds but very few of the Homeric and other legends surrounding the history of the goddess, but we can well imagine that a deity who was the subject of so much attention and so much prayer, could rest in the hearts

nd from the time it left the sculptor's hands to this day, the Cnidian Venus has been regarded as a model for all that is true and beautiful in women. To the sculptor it is an everlasting beacon; to all men a crowning glory of human handiwork. And this notwithstanding that so far as we know, the original figure has lon

odel of Praxiteles. Nearly two thousand years have passed since the painting was last known to exist, but its fame was so great that the reverberations from the thunder of praise accorded it have scarcely yet died away. No close description of the painting remains, but from certain references to it by ancient authors we know that it represented the sea-born goddess walking towards the shore to make her first appearance on earth, holding in each hand a tress of hair as if in the act of wringing out the water therein.46 These are practically all the written details we have of the famous Venus Anadyomene, but we really know much more of it from the existence of certain pre-Roman sculptures. All but one are broken, with parts missing, but the exception, which dates from about the beginning of the third century B.C., enables us to gain a good idea of the picture.

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ies for its conceptions of the goddess of beauty. Both models depend more or less upon the imagination for completion, but

half way up the thighs, with the result that considerably more action is indicated than is necessary. But the great artist was evidently at a loss to know how to give the figure the size of life or thereabouts, while indicating from the depth of water that she had an appreciable distance to go before touching dry land. He solved the problem by placing the line of the front leg to which the water rises, at the bottom of the canvas, so that the picture suggests an accident which has necessitated the cutting away of the lower portion of the work. The master also varies the scheme of Apelles by crossing the left hand over the breast. This inferi

he painted the goddess in a resting position, sometimes radiant and brilliant, and invariably with a contented expression which precludes sensual suggestions: still there is ever a distinctly earthy tone about the figures. His Venuses in fact are pure portraits. He did not seek to represent profound repose. His most important example is at the Uffizi Gallery,[i] the design of which was taken from Giorgione's work. The goddess is a figure of glowing beauty, but the pose indicates consciousness of this fact and calls the model to mind. Perhaps the surroundings tend to accentuate the drawback, for in this, as in most of his other pictures of Venus, the artist has introduced Venetian accessories of the period. Palma Vecchio also took Giorgione's work as

mly seen.[m] In the Sleeping Venus of Le Sueur, which was much praised in former times, Cupid is present with a finger to his mouth to indicate silence, but Vulcan is seen in an adjoining room wielding a heavy hammer, the suggestion of repose being

suggestion of satisfaction is overcome by the artist making Cupid hold the mirror, and giving Venus an expression of unconcern as she glances at her reflection. The work suggested to Rubens a similar design, but he shows the goddess dressing her hair, this being apparently the only definite action which may be properly introduced into such a composition.[o] Albani has a delightful picture in which Cupid compels Ven

the matter, it should be on the side of restraint lest the art be affected by a suggestion of the sensuous. The surest means of preventing this is to represent the goddess in an attitude of repose, with perfect contentment as a feature in expression. If any action be indicated, it must be light and purely accidental in its nature. To introduce an action involving an apprehension of human failings tends to bring the goddess dow

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ptors of Greece saw in her only the supreme Matron-Spouse, serenely pondering the march of time beneath the awful sway of her lord. A mantle she wore, and a high-throated tunic, as she looked into space from a square-wrought throne; or she stood in her temple with flowing robe and diadem, inscrutable, before the offerings of an ad

ambrosial oil which is ever struggling for freedom to bathe the rolling earth in fragrance? He may add a hundred tassels to her girdle; perhaps give her the triple grace-showering eardrops, and even the dazzling sun-bright veil; but the girdle of Aphrodite, which peeps from her bosom, will fail to turn the brains of men, or pierce the

ss, unfathomable, with a sublime disregard of earth; or else join with his predecessors and drag her do

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came nearer the seat of her care, nearer the dread home of her daughter: passed from Homer to Theocritus; from the adoration of the higher priesthood of Greece, to become merged in the Ceres of Rome, the goddess beloved of the lowly, who received the first fruits of the field amidst joyful measures of dance and song. But it is the haute dame that strikes our imagination-the staid and mystic Demeter of Eleusis, and not the Cere

derful in noble grace that the conception of befitting heads is beyond the reach of our minds, include the Earth-Mother and her daughter! How easy it is to imagine the reclining figure as Persephone leaning upon the mother who

oddess. There is no definite type of her which has fixed itself on the minds of men, thoug

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g, and uses the tactics of spies against her enemies. With the Gorgon's head on her shield, and a helmet which will cover the soldiers of a hundred towns, she yet whispers advice to Grecian heroes, and deflects a Trojan arrow in its flight. Truly as Goddess of War she i

power derived from supreme knowledge, seem to have been the first qualities exhibited in the statue. In the fourth century there was no great departure from the Phidian ideal, and it is difficult to see how there could be much modification in the direction of bringing the conception closer to earth, for the goddess had no special presumed form which could be adapted by the artist to popular ideas. A nude figure would be impossible because in this the force and power implied in a hero of war could not be combined with femin

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s Mercury, a circumstance probably arising from the fact that the reputed hard nature of Apollo fails to lend itself to sympathetic idealization. He does not appear to have been a favourite subject with the greatest sculptors of ancient times, for nearly all the innumerable statues of him which have come down to us, are reproductions of two or three types which in themselves vary but little. It is difficu

he one by Raphael in the Parnassus fresco at the Vatican, though the beautiful figure in the Marsyas work at the Louvre is very nearly as perfect.48 Raphael does not give to the god the rounded swelling

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antle of Ililythia, but only to be dreaded, and even the attempt to throw a warm halo over her by the theft of the Endymion story for her benefit, failed to lift her reputation for the tireless satisfaction of a supernatural spleen. Nevertheless for the painter Diana has always had a certain attraction, because the legends connected with her offer opportunities for the exercise of skill in the representation of the

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the painter is accustomed to portray as a rough bearded man with dishevelled hair and rugged features, holding a three-pronged fork, and associating with dolphins, mermaids, and shells. But Neptune is not a popular god. He does not appeal to the mind as a good-natured god like Jupiter or Mercury, with many of the virtues and some of the failings of mankind. His acts are mostly violent; he punishes but does not reward; grows angry but is never kind. There is consequently no sympathetic atti

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ng or pity, and apparently so wanting in intelligence that he has to leave the direction of battles to a goddess? One would think that Homer intended him as the god of bullies, or he would not have made him roar like ten thousand men when struck with a stone, nor would he have allowed him to be imprisoned by two young demigods, and contemptuously wounded by a third. But who is responsible for the association of such a wretched example of divinity

d be represented alone, as the star of the wild Campagna, while yet it was forest-clad: the gleaming light

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tal sandals are shrunken to leather; the caduceus is a thing of inertia which is ever in the way. But with the sculptor all these things may be endowed with the quickening spirit of a soaring mind, for does not Giovanni di Bologna show the lithesome god speeding through space ahead of the wind, the feathery foot-wings humming with delirium, the trembling air dividing hastily before the wand? True, the painter may represent the divine herald on

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then his arrows with the rules of science and the wiles of art; but let the painter beware of the infant Bacchus in the arms of the messenger-god, lest a vision of the Olympian group arise and enfold his work in a robe of charity. The schemes whereby the cradled thief deceived the Pythian god are beyond the scope of the painter, though there is a certain available range in the charming actions surrounding the invention of the lyre. And if the designs relating to the unfortunate Lara be pro

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are no more the followers of a reed-playing woodland deity; the nymphs have long forgotten the flowery dales, the faithful trees that lived and died with them, the fairy bowers where first Semele's offspring clapped his hands to the measure of dance and pipe. Why should the dance be turned into a drunken revel? Why should the artist remember the orgies of Rome, and forget the Gre

s, the Romans often treated Bacchus in a serious manner, associating him with higher interests than those connected with festival orgies. It may be that the figure of the god carved by Michelangelo[t] had something to do with the later coarse representations of him, for it would have been impossible for artists succeeding so great a sculptor, to ignore the types he created. But it will be an eternal mystery how he came to design such

here is nothing to prevent him from reverting to the pastoral Dionysus, to the delightful abodes of the nymphs his foster-

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rthly things necessarily kill all suggestions of celestial interest, notwithstanding the presence of Venus, or the never-fading bride of palsied Peleus. Occasionally we have the incident with Mars, and strangely look for the invisible net, but not finding it we are immediately called back to earth to ponder over the wiles of the ancient legend gatherers. The art is lost behind the unreality. But why does not the

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ich are enshrined in our minds, we can count very few, and nearly all of these are single figures, as a Venus, a Leda, a Psyche, or a Pandora. We do not call up a Judgment of Paris, or a Diana and Act?on, or any other design where divinities are mixed with mortals in earthly actions. The cause of this seems to be that our minds naturally revolt against a glaring incongruity. The imagination is unable to harmonize the qualities of a god with the possession

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