At last we
seem to see an actual person at work, and to some degree can follow,
with natural curiosity, [243] the motions of his spirit and his hand.
We seem to discern in all we know of his productions the results of
individual apprehension--the results, as well as the limitations, of
an individual talent.
It is impossible to date exactly the chief period of the activity of
Canachus. That the great image of Apollo, which he made for the
Milesians, was carried away to Ecbatana by the Persian army, is
stated by Pausanias; but there is a doubt whether this was under
Xerxes, as Pausanias says, in the year 479 B.C., or twenty years
earlier, under Darius. So important a work as this colossal image of
Apollo, for so great a shrine as the Didymaeum, was probably the task
of his maturity; and his career may, therefore, be regarded as having
begun, at any rate, prior to the year 479 B.C., and the end of the
Persian invasion the event which may be said to close this period of
art. On the whole, the chief period of his activity is thought to
have fallen earlier, and to have occupied the last forty years of the
previous century; and he would thus have flourished, as we say, about
fifty years before the manhood of Pheidias, as Mino of Fiesole fifty
years before the manhood of Michelangelo.
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