DOI Artikel:
No. I: Pythagoras of Rhegion and the early athlete statues
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.11444#0402
APPENDIX.
367
works from the rest of Greece. Yet if we consider that the emigrant
artist who was one of the party of settlers, though he had received strict
schooling at home, worked with a certain freedom when removed from
the eye of his master and the school, the mixture in these works will no
longer strike us as strange. Such inferences concerning remote antiquity
are not more improbable because they happen to conform with the
general likelihood of human action even in our own very modern
times.
Pythagoras of Rhegion was the very person who, from his hereditary
and natural predispositions, could conciliate and bring together the
striking characteristics of the great Attic and Peloponnesian schools,
which, in archaic art, stood as it were opposed to one another : the
strong feeling for vitality, which frequently, from the want of skill
in the early artists, transgressed the laws of form and composition, and
the Peloponnesian feeling for law and conventional regularity, which, as
in the numerous reliefs from Sparta that have come down to us, does not
allow the figures to attain the appearance of free vitality. Before these
two elements have been well knit together in harmony we have not yet
entered the period of artistic freedom. Free from the immediate
pressure, from the shackles of any one school, this Rhegian of Samian
origin, whose very adopted country was a mixture of both races, whose
first master was a Rhegian and the second a Spartan, had all the
opportunity to travel and to learn what each school could give, and not
enough to be a slave to the idiosyncrasies of either of them. And so
Pythagoras became, if not the founder, at least the chief representative
of a school of sculpture which must have flourished for some time in
the Greek colonies of the south of Italy, and whose numerous remains,
found on the spot, have not yet been sufficiently studied with regard to
their distinctive features.
An illustration in favour of the uniform character among the works
found in the south of Italy will at the same time be the final
confirmation I have to offer for the attribution of our statue to
Pythagoras of Rhegion. A Didrachm of Metapontum1, which belongs
to the first half of the fifth century B.C., represents the river-god
Achelous with a human body and a bearded head, which has the horns
and ears of a bull (a combination of a man and a bull is a common
representation of a river-god). He holds in his right hand a patera,
1 Millingen, Considerations sur les Mommies de rAnciemie Italic, &*c. Notices lies
Mounaics gravies, &*c, suppl. P. 5, PI. i. No. r; Sambon, Recherches sur les Mommies
de la Presqn'ile Italique, Naples, 1870, p. 264, Nos. 13 and 14, PI. xix. 7 and 9 ;
Jahn, Arch. Zeit. 1862, t. 168, 4, p. 321.
367
works from the rest of Greece. Yet if we consider that the emigrant
artist who was one of the party of settlers, though he had received strict
schooling at home, worked with a certain freedom when removed from
the eye of his master and the school, the mixture in these works will no
longer strike us as strange. Such inferences concerning remote antiquity
are not more improbable because they happen to conform with the
general likelihood of human action even in our own very modern
times.
Pythagoras of Rhegion was the very person who, from his hereditary
and natural predispositions, could conciliate and bring together the
striking characteristics of the great Attic and Peloponnesian schools,
which, in archaic art, stood as it were opposed to one another : the
strong feeling for vitality, which frequently, from the want of skill
in the early artists, transgressed the laws of form and composition, and
the Peloponnesian feeling for law and conventional regularity, which, as
in the numerous reliefs from Sparta that have come down to us, does not
allow the figures to attain the appearance of free vitality. Before these
two elements have been well knit together in harmony we have not yet
entered the period of artistic freedom. Free from the immediate
pressure, from the shackles of any one school, this Rhegian of Samian
origin, whose very adopted country was a mixture of both races, whose
first master was a Rhegian and the second a Spartan, had all the
opportunity to travel and to learn what each school could give, and not
enough to be a slave to the idiosyncrasies of either of them. And so
Pythagoras became, if not the founder, at least the chief representative
of a school of sculpture which must have flourished for some time in
the Greek colonies of the south of Italy, and whose numerous remains,
found on the spot, have not yet been sufficiently studied with regard to
their distinctive features.
An illustration in favour of the uniform character among the works
found in the south of Italy will at the same time be the final
confirmation I have to offer for the attribution of our statue to
Pythagoras of Rhegion. A Didrachm of Metapontum1, which belongs
to the first half of the fifth century B.C., represents the river-god
Achelous with a human body and a bearded head, which has the horns
and ears of a bull (a combination of a man and a bull is a common
representation of a river-god). He holds in his right hand a patera,
1 Millingen, Considerations sur les Mommies de rAnciemie Italic, &*c. Notices lies
Mounaics gravies, &*c, suppl. P. 5, PI. i. No. r; Sambon, Recherches sur les Mommies
de la Presqn'ile Italique, Naples, 1870, p. 264, Nos. 13 and 14, PI. xix. 7 and 9 ;
Jahn, Arch. Zeit. 1862, t. 168, 4, p. 321.