File:Six Greek sculptors (1915) (14760647886).jpg

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

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inary sketch of the whole. Butit was the custom, as we may infer from inscriptions, toallow a good deal of initiative to the individual assistantswho undertook different figures or groups in such acomposition as this ; and a careful study of the work indetail, if it does not enable us to distinguish all thehands employed, and to assign to each his portion ofthe whole, at least allows us to pick out certain piecesof the work as showing the same characteristics, and soalmost certainly to be attributed to the same sculptor.* There is, indeed, a certain uniformity of style through-out which shows that Phidias had by this time traineda staff of assistants fit to carry out his designs; butsome of them do this with a vigour of touch, a certaintyand boldness of work worthy of the master himself,while others show a somewhat dry and mechanicalmethod of attaining the prescribed result. As anexample of the latter, we may take the slab with thethree deities—Posidon, Apollo, and a goddess—which
Text Appearing After Image:
H ao I— ■-/ PC ! c ISI PHIDIAS 103 is one of the best preserved pieces of the whole. Aninstance of the more spontaneous work is to be seen inthe heads of the chariot-horses reproduced in PL XXV.It is of this piece that Mr. Ruskin wrote, in hisAratra Pentelici: The projection of the fourhorses, one behind the other, is certainly not more,altogether, than three-quarters of an inch from the flatground, and the one in front does not in reality projectmore than the one behind it, yet, by mere drawing, yousee the sculptor has got them to appear to recede in dueorder, and by the soft rounding of the flesh surfaces, andmodulation of the veins, he has taken away all look offlatness from the necks. He has drawn the eyes andnostrils with dark incision, careful as the finest touchesof a painters pencil; and then, at last, when he comesto the manes, he has let fly hand and chisel with theirfull force ; and where a base workman (above all, if hehad modelled the thing in clay first) would have l

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