WALTER H. PATER  (1839-1894) essay from about 1890

The Glyptothek in Munich contains no greater treasure than its marbles, discovered by a company of English and German scholars in Aegina in 18 11. They were bought by Prince Ludwig of Bavaria for thirty thousand dollars, who had them restored by Thorwaldsen and Wagner [VR note: well-known neo-classical sculptors of the early 19th century]. These figures in Parian marble once adorned the pediments of Athene's temple, of which the crumbling columns on the heights of Aegina still overlook the blue waters of the Saronic Gulf. In both groups appeared a conflict about the body of a hero fallen at the feet of the goddess Athene standing in the middle of the pediment. Lucy M. Mitchell.

In the works of the Asiatic tradition, in the marbles of Nineveh, for instance, and in the early Greek art, so far as we can see, which derives from it, as, for example; in the archaic remains from Cyprus, the form of man is inadequate, and below the measure of perfection attained there in the representation of the lower forms of life; just as in the little reflective art of Japan, so lovely in its reproduction of flower or bird, the human form alone comes almost as a caricature, or is at least untouched by any higher ideal. To that Asiatic tradition, then, with its perfect craftsmanship, its consummate skill in design, its power of hand, the Dorian, the European, the true Hellenic influence brought a revelation of the soul and body of man.

And we come at last to a monument, the marbles of Aegina, which bears upon it the full expression of this humanism, to a work, in which in the presence of man, realized with complete mastery of hand, and with clear apprehension of how he actually is and moves and looks, is, touched with the freshest sense of that new-found, inward value; the energy of worthy passions purifying, the light of his reason shining through, bodily forms and motions, solemnized, attractive, pathetic. We have reached an extant work, real and visible, of an importance out of all proportion to anything actually remaining of earlier art.

These fifteen figures of Parian marble, of about two-thirds the size of life, forming, with some deficiencies, the east and west gables of a temple of Athene, the ruins of which still stand on a hillside by the seashore, in a remote part of the island of Aegina, were discovered in the year 1811, and having been purchased by the Crown Prince, afterwards Louis I, of Bavaria, are now the great ornament of the Glyptothek, or Museum of Sculpture, at Munich. The group in each gable consisted of eleven figures; and of the fifteen figures discovered, five belong to the eastern, ten to the western, gable, so that the western gable is complete with the exception of one figure, which should stand where the beautiful figure, borrowed from the eastern gable, bending down towards the fallen leader, at Munich actually is; certain fragments showing that the lost figure corresponded essentially to this, which has therefore been transferred hither from its place in the less complete group were probably chosen with reference to the traditions of Aegina in connection with the Trojan war. Greek legend is ever deeply colored by local interest and sentiment, and this monument probably celebrates Telamon, and Ajax his son, the heroes who established the fame of Aegina, and whom the united Greeks, on the morning of the battle of Salamis, in which the Aeginetans were distinguished above all other Greeks in bravery, invited as their peculiar spiritual allies from that island.

Accordingly, antiquarians are, for the most part, of opinion that the eastern gable represents the combat of Hercules (Hercules being the only figure among the warriors certainly to be identified) and of his comrade Telamon, against Laomedon of Troy, in which, properly, Hercules was leader, but here, as squire and archer, is made to give the first place to Telamon, as the titular hero of the place. Opinion is not so definite regarding the subject of the western gable, which, however, probably represents the combat between the Greeks and Trojans over the body of Patroclus. In both cases an Aeginetan hero, in the eastern gable Telamon, in the western his son Ajax, is represented in the extreme crisis of battle, such a crisis as, according to the deep religiousness of the Greeks of that age, was a motive for the visible intervention of the goddess in favor of her chosen people.

Opinion as to the date of the work, based mainly on the characteristics of the work itself, has varied within a period ranging from the middle of the sixtieth to the middle of the seventieth Olympiad, inclining on the whole to the later date, in the period of the Ionian revolt against Persia, and a few years earlier than the battle of Marathon. In this monument, then, we have a revelation in the sphere of art of the temper which made the victories of Marathon and Salamis possible, of the true spirit of Greek chivalry as displayed in the Persian war, and in the highly ideal conception of its events, expressed in Herodotus and approving itself minutely to the minds of the Greeks, as a series of affairs in which the gods and heroes of old time personally intervened, and that not as mere shadows. It was natural that the high pitched temper, the stress of thought and feeling, which ended in the final conflict of Greek liberty with Asiatic barbarism, should stimulate quite a new interest in the poetic legends of the earlier conflict between them in the heroic age. As the events of the Crusades and the chivalrous spirit of that period leading men's minds back to ponder over the deeds of Charlemagne and his paladins, gave birth to the composition of the Song of Roland, just so this Aeginetan sculpture displays the Greeks of a later age feeding their enthusiasm on the legend of a distant past, and is a link between Herodotus and Homer. In those ideal figures, pensive a little from the first, we may suppose, with the shadowing of a past age, we may yet see how Greeks of the time of Themistocles really conceived of Homeric knight and squire.

Some other fragments of art, also discovered in Aegina, and supposed to be contemporary with the temple of Athene, tend, by their roughness and immaturity, to show that this small building, so united in its effect, so complete in its simplicity, in the symmetry of its two main groups of sculpture, was the perfect artistic flower of its time and place. Yet within the limits of this simple unity, so important an element in the charm and impressiveness of the place, a certain inequality of design and execution may be detected; the hand of a slightly earlier master, probably, having worked in the western gable, while the master of the eastern gable has gone some steps farther than he in fineness and power of expression; the figure of the supposed Ajax, stooping forward in the present arrangement of the western group, but really borrowed, as I said, from the eastern, and which has in it something above the type of the figures grouped round it, being this later sculptor's work. Yet Overbeck, who has elaborated the points of this distinction of styles, commends without reserve the technical excellence of the whole work, executed, as he says, with an application of all known instruments of sculpture; the delicate calculation of weight in the composition of the several parts, allowing the artist to dispense with all artificial supports, and to set his figures, with all their complex motions, and yet with plinths only three inches thick, into the basis of the gable; the bold use of the chisel, which wrought the shield, on the freely held arm, down to a thickness of scarcely three inches; the fineness of the execution, even in parts of the work invisible to an ordinary spectator, in the diligent finishing of which the only motive of the artist was to satisfy his own conviction as to the nature of good sculpture.

It was the Dorian cities, Plato tells us, which first shook off the false Asiatic shame and stripped off their clothing for purposes of exercise and training in the gymnasium; and it was part of the Dorian or European influence to assert the value in art of the unveiled and healthy human form. And here the artists of  Aegina, notwithstanding Homer's description of Greek armor, glowing like the sun itself, have displayed the Greek warriors Greek and Trojan alike not in the equipment they would really have worn, but naked, flesh fairer than that golden armour, though more subdued and tranquil in effect on the spectator, the undraped form of man coming like an embodiment of the Hellenic spirit, and as an element of temperance into the somewhat gaudy spectacle of Asiatic, or archaic art. Paris alone bears his daily trappings, characteristically a coat of golden scale work, the scales set on a lining of canvas or leather, shifting deftly over the delicate body beneath, and represented on the gable by gilding, or real gilt metal perhaps.

It was characteristic also of that more truly Hellenic art another element of its temperance to adopt the use of marble in its works; and the material of these figures is the white marble of Paros. Traces of color have however been found on certain parts of them. The outer surfaces of the shields and helmets have been blue; their inner parts and the crests of the helmets, red; the hem of the drapery of Athene, the edges of her sandals, the plinths on which the figures stand, also red; one quiver red, another blue; the eyes and lips, too, colored; perhaps, the hair. There was just a limited and conventionalized use of color, in effect upon the marble.

And although the actual material of these figures is marble, its coolness and massiveness suiting the growing severity of Greek thought, yet they have their reminiscences of work in bronze, in a certain slimness and tenuity, a certain dainty lightness of poise in their grouping which remains in the memory as a peculiar note of their style; the possibility of such easy and graceful balancing being one of the privileges or opportunities of statuary in cast metal, of that hollow casting in which the whole weight of the work is so much less than that of a work of equal size in marble, and which permits a so much wider and freer disposition of the parts about its center of gravity. In Aegina the tradition of metal work seems to have been strong, and Onatas, whose name is closely connected with Aegina, and who is contemporary with the presumably later portion of this monument, was above all a worker in bronze. Here again, in this lurking spirit of metal work, we have a new element of complexity in the character of these precious remains. And then, to compass the whole work in our imagination, we must conceive yet another element in the conjoint effect: metal being actually mingled with the marble, brought thus to its daintiest point of refinement, as the little holes indicate, bored into the marble figures for the attachment of certain accessories in bronze lances, swords, bows, the Medusa also on the aegis of Athene, and its fringe of little snakes.

And as there was no adequate consciousness and recognition of the essentials of man's nature in the older, oriental art, so there is no pathos, no humanity in the more special sense, but a kind of hardness and cruelty ever in those oft repeated, long, matter-of-fact procession the marbles of Nineveh, of slave like soldiers on their way to battle mechanically, or of captives on their way to slavery or death, for the satisfaction of the great king. These Greek marbles, on the contrary, with that figure yearning forward so graciously to the fallen leader, are deeply impressed with a natural pathetic effect the true reflection again of the temper of Homer in speaking of war. Ares, the god of war himself, we must remember, is, according to his original import, the god of storms, of winter raging among the forests of the Thracian mountains, a brother of the north wind. Afterwards only, surviving many minor gods of war, he becomes a leader of hosts, a sort of divine knight and patron of knighthood; and through the old intricate connection of love and war, and that amorousness which is the universally conceded privilege of the soldier's life, he comes to be very near Aphrodite, the paramour of the goddess of physical beauty. So that the idea of a sort of soft dalliance mingles, in his character, so unlike that of the Christian leader, Saint George, with the idea of savage, warlike impulses; the fair, soft creature suddenly raging like a storm, to which, in its various wild incidents, war is constantly likened in Homer; the effects of delicate youth and of tempest blending, in Ares, into one expression, not without that cruelty which mingles also, like the influence of some malign fate upon him, with the finer characteristics of Achilles, who is a kind of merely human double of Ares.

And in Homer's impressions of war the same elements are blent, the delicacy, the beauty of youth, especially, making it so fit for the purposes of love, spoiled and wasted by the random flood and fire of a violent tempest; the glittering beauty of the Greek "war-men," expressed in so many brilliant figures, and the splendor of their equipment, in collision with the miserable accidents of battle, and the grotesque indignities of death in it, brought home to our fancy by a hundred pathetic incidents, the sword hot with slaughter, the stifling blood in the throat, the spoiling of the body in every member severally. He thinks of and records, at his early ending, the distant home from which the boy came, who goes stumbling now, just stricken so wretchedly, his bowels in his hands. He pushes the expression of this contrast to the macabre even, suggesting the approach of those lower forms of life which await tomorrow the fair bodies of the heroes, who strive and fall today like these in the Aeginetan gables. For it is just that twofold sentiment which this sculpture has embodied. The seemingly stronger band which wrought the eastern gable has shown itself strongest in the rigid expression of the truth of pain, in the mouth of the famous recumbent figure on the extreme left, the lips just open at the corner, and in the hard-shut lips of Hercules. Otherwise, these figures all smile faintly, almost like the monumental effigies of the Middle Age, with a smile which, even if it be but a result of the mere conventionality of an art still somewhat immature, has just the pathetic effect of Homer's conventional epithet "tender," when he speaks of the flesh of his heroes. And together with this touching power there is also in this work the effect of an early simplicity, the charm of its limitations.

For as art which has passed its prime has sometimes the charm of an absolute refinement in taste and workmanship, so immature art also, as we now see, has its own attractiveness in the naivete, the freshness of spirit, which finds power and interest in simple motives of feeling, and in the freshness of hand, which has a sense of enjoyment in mechanical processes still performed unmechanically, in the spending of care and intelligence on every touch. As regards Italian art, the sculpture and paintings of the earlier Renaissance, the aesthetic value of this naivete is well understood; but it has its value in Greek sculpture also. There, too, is a succession of phases through which the artistic power and purpose grew to maturity, with the enduring charm of an unconventional, unsophisticated freshness, in that very early stage of it illustrated by these marbles of Aegina, not less than in the work of Verrocchio and Mino of Fiesole. Effects of this we may note in that sculpture of Aegina, not merely in the simplicity, or monotony even, of the whole composition, and in the exact and formal correspondence of one gable to the other, but in the simple readiness with which the designer makes the two second spearmen kneel, against the probability of the thing, so as just to fill the space he has to compose in.

The profiles are still not yet of the fully developed Greek type, but have a somewhat sharp prominence of nose and chin, as in Etrurian design, in the early sculpture of Cyprus, and in the earlier Greek vases; and the general proportions of the body in relation to the shoulders are still somewhat archaically slim. But then the workman is at work in dry earnestness, with a sort of hard strength in detail, a scrupulousness verging on stiffness, like that of an early Florentine painter; he communicates to us his still youthful sense of pleasure in the experience of the first rudimentary difficulties of his art overcome. And with all, these figures have in them a true expression of life, of animation. In this monument of Greek chivalry, pensive and visionary as it may seem, these old Greek knights live with a truth like that of Homer or Chaucer. In a sort of stiff grace, combined with a sense of things bright or sorrowful directly felt, the Aeginetan workman is as it were the Chaucer of Greek sculpture.