Harrison, Jane Ellen: Introductory studies in Greek art (London: Unwin, 1902)

THE HERMES OF PRAXITELES.

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moods and passions, came into undue prominence, the
old, strict training of severe self-subordination was
necessarily relaxed. Men sought for solace in their
national disgrace through the indulgence of personal
emotion ; they ran eagerly through the whole gamut of
the. pat he ; the whole atmosphere of Hellas was charged
with subjectivity. Before the time even of Pheidias we
know that there had been statues embodying an actual,
definite, bodily pain, such as Philoctetes limping from
his wound. This was an honest, physical, tangible pathos;
but we look in vain in any monument of that time for
any trace of that analytic self-conscious, yet intangible
unrest that meets us in the face of the Hermes.
But to this political and social cause we must add
another whose rise is more definitely artistic. A second
special characteristic ascribed to Praxiteles was his
fidelity (veritas}; we have already noted the great im-
portance he himself attached to the toning (circumlitio}
of his statues by a painter of great note. This toning,
of such paramount importance, can scarcely have been
merely decorative, it must surely have been somehow
vital to the expression of the statue ; it must have done
something- for the statue that the sculptor’s own art
failed to do.
Let us seize distinctly the province of painting as
opposed to sculpture. Painting proper depends on
colour, colour on light. If the sun set never to rise
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