Six Greek sculptors (1915) (14760663006)

Identifier: sixgreeksculptor00gard (find matches)
Title: Six Greek sculptors
Year: 1915 (1910s)
Authors: Gardner, Ernest Arthur, 1862-1939
Subjects: Sculptors Sculpture, Greek
Publisher: London : Duckworth and Co. New York : C. Scribner's Sons
Contributing Library: Harold B. Lee Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University



Text Appearing Before Image:
the Attic school of the fourth century, and above allto Praxiteles ; and the surmise received strong confirma-tion when the French excavators discovered at Man tineathe reliefs that had ornamented the basis of his groupof Leto and Her Children. The subject of these reliefs,which are referred to by Pausanias, is the musicalcontest between Apollo and his lyre and the satyrMarsyas with the flutes in the presence of the nineMuses. The design of the composition, though not itsexecution in detail, must probably be assigned toPraxiteles; and in his figures of the Muses, seatedor standing in graceful poses and varied arrangementsof drapery, we see a set of figures that may well have m served as prototypes to many of the Tanagra statuettes.It is not, however, in terra-cottas only that thesePraxitelean Muses find their counterparts. The ten-dency, inherited by Greek art from its earliest days, torepeat a few favourite types with many variationsof detail was continued into the fourth century and
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ffl P M «^ H M . 4£ fto J * Q) — *■* °/^ 8 ^ £ si ol El o > ft 3 PS<5 PRAXITELES 173 even into Graeco-Roman art, in no case more readilythan in these draped figures. We do not knowwhether Praxiteles was the first to adapt them to therepresentation of the nine Muses ; it is probable thathe may here be following his father or elder brotherCephisodotus, who made a famous group of the Museson Mount Helicon. Similar figures are also to be seen ingreat numbers upon Attic tombstones, and also upon amonument which clearly owes its inspiration to the sameartistic tendencies, the sarcophagus of a Sidonian prince,upon each of the four sides of which, set between thecolumns of an Ionic temple, we see a series of femalefigures in various attitudes of grief. These mourningwomen,11 from whom the work is generally known as theSarcophage des Pleureuses, are not too overwhelmedwith their grief to preserve the grace and dignity, thegentle and restrained pathos which characterise thegraves