Its real background, as I have tried to show, was a
world of exquisite craftsmanship, touching the minutest details of
daily life with splendour and skill, in close correspondence with a
peculiarly animated development of human existence--the energetic
movement and stir of typically noble human forms, quite worthily
clothed--amid scenery as poetic as Titian's. If shapes of
colourless stone did come into that background, it was as the
undraped human form comes into some of Titian's pictures, only to
cool and solemnise its splendour; the work of the Greek sculptor
being seldom in quite colourless stone, nor always or chiefly in
fastidiously selected marble even, but often in richly toned metal
(this or that sculptor preferring some special variety of the bronze
he worked in, such as the [225] hepatizon or liver-coloured bronze,
or the bright golden alloy of Corinth), and in its consummate
products chryselephantine,--work in gold and ivory, on a core of
cedar. Pheidias, in the Olympian Zeus, in the Athene of the
Parthenon, fulfils what that primitive, heroic goldsmiths' age, dimly
discerned in Homer, already delighted in; and the celebrated work of
which I have first to speak now, and with which Greek sculpture
emerges from that half-mythical age and becomes in a certain sense
historical, is a link in that goldsmiths' or chryselephantine
tradition, carrying us forwards to the work of Pheidias, backwards to
the elaborate Asiatic furniture of the chamber of Paris.
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