Perry, Walter Copland: Greek and Roman sculpture: a popular introduction to the history of Greek and Roman sculpture (London, 1882)

POST-ALEXANDRINE ART.

5°9

CHAPTER XLIV.

ART UNDER THE DIADOCHI {SUCCESSORS OF
ALEXANDER).

PLINY makes the somewhat startling observation that Greek art
ceased about 01. 120 (B.C. 300), and revived again in 01. 156 (B.C.
156). He is probably speaking more particularly of casting in
bronze ; but in no sense can we look on this positive statement as
literally correct. It is quite true that little was done in this interval
in Athens or Sicyon of sufficient importance to attract the notice of
historians ; but the sons of Praxiteles, and the younger associates of
Scopas.must have lived and worked on, though in comparative obscurity
and ' without the sacred bard.' The date fixed for the revival of art
may be accounted for by the fact that writing on this subject began
again in the last century of the Roman Republic, at the very time
when Greek art attained complete ascendancy in Rome. We know
but little of the state of art under the Diadochi, because the Roman
writers found no Greek sources for this period, as they had for
earlier ones. Instead of directing their attention to the artists of
the immediately preceding generation, they preferred to connect
the Renaissance of sculpture with the brightest days of Greek
art, and passed over the mediocrities of the period of the Diadochi
in silence.'

Yet in one very real, and very sad, sense Greek art did cease at the
period fixed by Pliny, inasmuch as it ceased to groiv—ceased, that
is, to invent and originate. With Lysippus and his school it had

1 15runn, K.-G. 504. 'The
this period of art-history.'

found no Greek

ces to draw from respecting