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The Beginnings Of Greek Sculpture
by
That is a place one would certainly have liked to see. So real it seems!–the seated image, the people gazing through the doorway, the fragrant odour. Must it not still be in secret keeping somewhere?– we are almost tempted to ask; maintained by some few solitary worshippers, surviving from age to age, among the villagers of Achaia.
In spite of many obscurities, it may be said that what we know, and what we do not know, of Canachus illustrates the amount and sort of knowledge we possess about the artists of the period which he best represents. A naivete–a freshness, an early-aged simplicity and sincerity–that, we may believe, had we their works before us, would be for us their chief aesthetic charm. Cicero remarked that, in contrast with the works of the next generation of sculptors, there was a stiffness in the statues of Canachus which made them seem untrue to nature–“Canachi signa rigidiora esse quam ut imitentur veritatem.” But Cicero belongs to an age surfeited with artistic licence, and likely enough to undervalue the severity of the early masters, the great motive struggling still with the minute and rigid hand. So the critics of the last century ignored, or underrated, the works of the earlier Tuscan sculptors. In what Cicero calls “rigidity” of Canachus, combined with what we seem to see of his poetry of conception, his freshness, his solemnity, we may understand no really repellent hardness, but only that earnest patience of labour, the expression of which is constant in all the best work of an early time, in the David of Verrocchio, for instance, and in the early Flemish painters, as it is natural and becoming in youth itself. The very touch of the struggling hand was upon the work; but with the interest, the half-repressed animation of a great promise, fulfilled, as we now see, in the magnificent growth of Greek sculpture in the succeeding age; which, however, for those earlier workmen, meant the loins girt and the half-folded wings not yet quite at home in the air, with a gravity, a discretion and reserve, the charm of which, if felt in quiet, is hardly less than that of the wealth and fulness of final mastery.