It has long been recognized that the extant sources relating to the ancients’ own perceptions, and systems of organization, of artistic development in Greece from the sixth to the second century BCE suggest the existence of two basic schemata. Each is at its core organic, identifying stages of growth, flourish and decline.[1] One of these systems, like the chronologies used most often today, located the era of “flourish” in the second half of the fifth century BCE—our “High” Classical (450-400 BCE), preceded by the anticipatory “Archaic” (before 480 BCE) and “Early Classical” (480-450) and destined to devolve into a “Late Classical” (400-323), which could thereby only be construed as an era of decline. The second system seems to shift the era of decline to the period following Alexander’s conquests, by implication identifying the fourth century as the era of most conspicuous achievement. The two schemes are generally identified as historiographic artifacts. Pasiteles, a sculptor and writer on works of art who lived in the early first century BCE, is believed to have especially revered works of the Early and High Classical era, in keeping with the most common modern scheme. However, earlier chroniclers of art, for example the third century sculptor/scholars Xenokrates and Antigonos, are thought to have elevated the achievement of Late Classical masters—their own immediate predecessors (and teachers). The latter scheme was followed, along general lines, by the most influential early modern writer on the subject, J.J. Winckelmann, whose affection for the Late Classical is explicitly revealed by his terminology for stages of sculptural style: “Older” (Archaic), “Grand” (Early and High Classical), and “Beautiful” (Late Classical). Much is at stake here as regards our understanding and characterization of the contributions of the many well-documented artists of the Late Classical era; naturally the topic of fourth century sculpture has attracted much attention over the years, but this most recent treatment is surely one of the most thorough.
The approach is straightforward.[2] An ample introduction lays out the objectives of the book and provides an historical overview of the period, weaving together the events of political history with an account of the social, economic, and religious conditions that both framed and were formed by a series of wars, alliances, revolutions, encounters, and other “events.” Childs stresses a number of developments in the period that distinguish it from the previous century, in degree at least; these include a concentration of personal wealth and consequent rise in luxurious display, an increased cosmopolitanism resulting from an expansion of economic interdependence among the Greek city-states and non-Greek neighbors across the eastern Mediterranean, an increased professionalism “in almost all walks of life and endeavor,” and a newly intensified focus on past traditions that arose as a means to negotiate a period of sometimes bewildering change.
The two following chapters present the physical evidence used to support the arguments and assertions concerning painting and sculpture that form the core of the book. This is a conventional and traditional survey; one chapter (2) reviews presumed original works and a second (3) explores the evidence of copies. Childs is appropriately, but not excessively, circumspect and skeptical about attributions of works, assigning dates to objects without context, identifying hands, and connecting replica series with artists named in our sources. Generally, however, a Roman type (and sometimes an individual statue) that seems coherently fourth century is accepted as copied from a fourth century original, whether or not those originals are detectable in literary and epigraphic sources or attributable to a particular artist. These works then are used to illustrate the general features of the time in subsequent discussion. This issue has been much contested in past scholarship, and in the end Childs’ approach is a balanced one (e.g., pp. 96-100).
Chapter 4 (“Issues of Style”) begins by identifying two chronological sequences. The first is named the “Rich” style, which is essentially a continuation of the displays of visual drama and linear elaboration, well-illustrated in the late fifth century by the Nike Temple and parapet sculptures and the Bassai frieze, and in the early fourth by the Temple of Asklepios pediments. Such recognition of a more or less uniform stylistic stage overlapping the two centuries has become standard in general accounts of Greek sculpture over the past few decades. Childs notes that the Epidauros sculptures, at the end of the phase, already show features of the subsequent “Plain Style,” which comes to characterize much work of the middle decades of the fourth century. Like its predecessor, this style is best represented by its treatment of drapery, which in this case is conceived as a conscious reaction against the earlier style’s expressive but improbable excesses of transparency and calligraphic patterning. Drapery becomes at this time substantial and opaque, treated as a physical subject in itself often with indications of surface texturing. As in the High Classical, drapery functions less to reveal the body visually (as in the Rich Style) than to describe it conceptually through modelling lines, but the patterns used in the fourth century are far more summary, even abstract, than their earlier counterparts. This may or may not have been a deliberate revival of the older style, and the later version cannot be mistaken for the earlier owing to substantial differences between them (e.g., pose, mood, surface treatment, and facial expression, if preserved). However, the idea that artists were now conscious of the accomplishments of their predecessors and sought to emulate if not copy them becomes a main theme of the book in its quest to identify a uniquely Late Classical style.
The salient features of fourth century art are therefore identified (to paraphrase) as stylistic diversity, yet with visual coherence, aliveness and the suggestion of character, and a tendency for images to work more through implication than illustration, or (to quote p. 135) “The conscious recognition of style as the expressive medium of art is at the heart of the novelty of art of the fourth century” There follows a section on painting, which is far more difficult to assess, owing to the limited and indirect evidence (even more so than for sculpture) concerning original works of the time. Not surprisingly, for the medium, much of the discussion comes down to issues of line and color, form and space. To judge from what evidence there is, Classical, especially late Classical, painters achieved an extraordinary degree of expertise and artistry. Most importantly for Childs’ general argument, the apparent objectives and accomplishment of painters and sculptors were closely aligned, i.e: “the unambiguous establishment of the mortal viewer as the primary referent of the … image” (p. 151).
The remainder of the book essentially takes off from this statement, seeking to explore the ways in which works of art were physically experienced by the viewer. In ch. 5: “Form and Presentation,” the author considers displays of statuary and reliefs in cemeteries, sanctuaries and other public spaces, as well as architectural sculpture. Such works created spaces inhabited by both living viewers and depicted subjects, whether deities or the mourned departed, who were made present to the viewer by means of that depiction. In the fourth century, such contexts became more inclusive and encouraged more intimate interaction (he discusses the Knidian Aphrodite in some detail in this context). Such observations support a primary thesis of the study, that fourth century art served to suggest and support the idea that the gods are immanent rather than remote, that they play an active role in the lives of their worshippers, an allegation that is pursued more fully in the following chapter (6) on iconography. This is a key thesis of the book because some of the generally recognized features of fourth century art, which result in images of gods that are more alive, more temporal in pose, often youthful, and even vulnerable, are often said to “humanize” the gods, which suggests a diminished status relative to their mortal worshippers. Understood as an indicator of omnipresence in the human sphere, however, such stylistic development implies quite the opposite. The final chapters develop the theme further. Ch. 7 (“Style and Meaning”) Ch.8 (“Reception”) mine more deeply visual and literary (especially philosophy but also rhetoric, both of which flourished at this time) sources of the period to reinforce Childs’ thesis that meaning in a work of art was constructed in the mind of the viewer and that the recognition and mobilization of that process was a strongly determining factor in the directions that fourth century art followed in its incomplete but distinct break from the High Classical past.
A question that remains is how this same thesis might help situate the fourth century vis à vis what was to follow. It might be noted here that this is a long and dense book, more than amply inclusive, detailed and documented, and beautifully illustrated. By no means would it be expected to have moved further down in time. But the very idea of the relationship between style, viewer, and meaning cuts to the heart of what separates Classical art on the one hand from Hellenistic art on the other. High Classical and earlier Greek art is famously marked by a high degree of chronological stylistic consistency; our ability to date works (including those of the fourth century) on style alone is not absolute, but its usefulness in mostly accepted. Hellenistic works are, equally famously, far less capable of such seriation, because distinctly different styles were clearly both available and used contemporaneously. It is equally clear, moreover, that the choice of style was governed by subject matter and by the intended reception of the work by the viewer. The styles themselves, of course, are basically and mostly those of the previous centuries of Classical (and, much less so, Archaic) art, and much of what seems novel in the Hellenistic (e.g., character portraiture, dramatic “baroque”, unforgiving realism) can be seen to be a continuation, often exaggerated, of styles that evolved in the fourth century. All that is clear enough. What Childs’ thesis can be seen to suggest, however, is that not only were the individual items on the stylistic palette of Hellenistic sculpture taken over from the fourth century, so was the very idea of a stylistic palette and with it an artistic approach commonly, if imperfectly, known as eclecticism, both well suited to and reflective of the increasingly broad and diverse realms of both Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors.
Notes
[1] J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art (Yale U Press, 1974) ch. 6, esp. pp. 81-84. Also, Pollitt, The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents (Cambridge, 2nd ed. 1990) 1-6.
[2] Childs here combines, and amplifies, the objectives and formats of two previous important books on Greek sculpture of the fourth century. The exhaustive documentation and penetrating evaluation of evidence and is shared with B. S. Ridgway’s Fourth Century Styles in Greek Sculpture (1997). The emphasis style as a bearer of meaning recall’s B. Brown’s, Anticlassicism in Greek Sculpture of the 4th C. B.C. (1973).