PAGE 19
The Beginnings Of Greek Sculpture
by
[Footnote 15:
*Now preserved at Munich. ]
His Apollo of cedar-wood, which inhabited a temple near the gates of Thebes, on a rising ground, below which flowed the river Ismenus, had, according to Pausanias, so close a resemblance to that at Miletus that it required little skill in one who had seen either of them to tell what master had designed the other. Still, though of the same dimensions, while one was of cedar the other was of bronze– a reproduction one of the other we may believe, but with the modifications, according to the use of good workmen even so early as Canachus, due to the difference of the material. For the likeness between the two statues, it is to be observed, is not the mechanical likeness of those earlier images represented by the statuette of Tenea, which spoke, not of the style of one master, but only of the manufacture of one workshop. In those two images of Canachus–the Milesian Apollo and the Apollo of the Ismenus–there were resemblances amid differences; resemblances, as we may understand, in what was nevertheless peculiar, novel, and even innovating in the precise conception of the god therein set forth; resemblances which spoke directly of a single workman, though working freely, of one hand and one fancy, a likeness in that which could by no means be truly copied by another; it was the beginning of what we mean by the style of a master. Together with all the novelty, the innovating and improving skill, which has made Canachus remembered, an attractive, old-world, deeply-felt mysticity seems still to cling about what we read of these early works. That piety, that religiousness of temper, of which the people of Sicyon had given proof so oddly in their dealings with those old carvers, Scyllis and Dipoenus, still survives in the master who was chosen to embody his own novelty of idea and execution in so sacred a place as the shrine of Apollo at Miletus. Something still conventional, combined, in these images, with the effect of great artistic skill, with a palpable beauty and power, seems to have given them a really imposing religious character. Escaping from the rigid uniformities of the stricter archaic style, he is still obedient to certain hieratic influences and traditions; he is still reserved, self-controlled, composed or even mannered a little, as in some sacred presence, with the severity and strength of the early style.
But there are certain notices which seem to show that he had his purely poetical motives also, as befitted his age; motives which prompted works of mere fancy, like his Muse with the Lyre, symbolising the chromatic style of music; Aristocles his brother, and Ageladas of Argos executing each another statue to symbolise the two other orders of music. The Riding Boys, of which Pliny speaks, like the mechanical stag on the hand of Apollo, which he also describes, were perhaps mechanical toys, as Benvenuto Cellini made toys. In the Beardless Aesculapius, again–the image of the god of healing, not merely as the son of Apollo, but as one ever young–it is the poetry of sculpture that we see.
This poetic feeling, and the piety of temper so deeply impressed upon his images of Apollo, seem to have been combined in his chryselephantine Aphrodite, as we see it very distinctly in Pausanias, enthroned with an apple in one hand and a poppy in the other, and with the sphere, or polos, about the head, in its quaint little temple or chapel at Sicyon, with the hierokepis, or holy garden, about it. This is what Canachus has to give us instead of the strange, symbolical cone, with the lights burning around it, in its dark cell–the form under which Aphrodite was worshipped at her famous shrine of Paphos.
“A woman to keep it fair,” Pausanias tells us, “who may go in to no man, and a virgin called the water-bearer, who holds her priesthood for a year, are alone permitted to enter the sacred place. All others may gaze upon the goddess and offer their prayers from the doorway. The seated image is the work of Canachus of Sicyon. It is wrought in ivory and gold, bearing a sphere on the head, and having in the one hand a poppy and in the other an apple. They offer to her the thighs of all victims excepting swine, burning them upon sticks of juniper, together with leaves of lad’s-love, a herb found in the enclosure without, and nowhere else in the world. Its leaves are smaller than those of the beech and larger than the ilex; in form they are like an oak-leaf, and in colour resemble most the leaves of the poplar, one side dusky, the other white.”