DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61301#0300
264
STUDIES IN GREEK ART.
must live his own life to the fullest, knowing of no other.
Even the high gods were dethroned ; they had forgotten
their city Athens, most god-fearing of all cities, and so
men turned their worship more and more to the new
generation of lesser divinities, gods who were mere em-
bodiments of some human emotion. Before Praxiteles
came Scopas, his elder but in part his contemporary; a
genius in some respects so similar that the ancients
themselves doubted to which artist they should attribute
the famous group of Niobe and her children. Perhaps
in this elder Scopas we may see the nearer and fiercer
influence of the recent war. We hear of a frenzied
Maenad that he wrought in stone, and a wondrous group
of sea-gods and sea-monsters, forms, we can fancy, of
phantastic loveliness, turbulent and restless, full of the
longing and pathos of the sea ; the sea that is always
asking a question, always unanswered ; always longing
for the land, ever compelled to flee from her. The ancient
critics tell us little of Scopas, but the mausoleum frieze
hints to us something of the wild pathos of his genius,
its stir and movement, its life and intensity, with some-
thing of its melancholy. Tradition is kinder about his
younger contemporary Praxiteles, and it is in part
because of this fuller tradition that we have chosen
him rather than Scopas to represent his age.
At first Praxiteles, as we have gathered, worked under
the influence of his sculptor father; later he may have
STUDIES IN GREEK ART.
must live his own life to the fullest, knowing of no other.
Even the high gods were dethroned ; they had forgotten
their city Athens, most god-fearing of all cities, and so
men turned their worship more and more to the new
generation of lesser divinities, gods who were mere em-
bodiments of some human emotion. Before Praxiteles
came Scopas, his elder but in part his contemporary; a
genius in some respects so similar that the ancients
themselves doubted to which artist they should attribute
the famous group of Niobe and her children. Perhaps
in this elder Scopas we may see the nearer and fiercer
influence of the recent war. We hear of a frenzied
Maenad that he wrought in stone, and a wondrous group
of sea-gods and sea-monsters, forms, we can fancy, of
phantastic loveliness, turbulent and restless, full of the
longing and pathos of the sea ; the sea that is always
asking a question, always unanswered ; always longing
for the land, ever compelled to flee from her. The ancient
critics tell us little of Scopas, but the mausoleum frieze
hints to us something of the wild pathos of his genius,
its stir and movement, its life and intensity, with some-
thing of its melancholy. Tradition is kinder about his
younger contemporary Praxiteles, and it is in part
because of this fuller tradition that we have chosen
him rather than Scopas to represent his age.
At first Praxiteles, as we have gathered, worked under
the influence of his sculptor father; later he may have