The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1927-12-23
THE inhabitants of the island OF

THE inhabitants OF the island OF
l. Cos had ordered from Praxiteles
a statue OF the goddess Of love.
Nothing could have pleased him
better.
In defiance of precedent he
chiselled the fair deity ungarbed.
Then, fearing that the people of
Cos would recognize in the statue
his own Phryne rather than Aphro-
dite, he made another statue,
draped, and gave Cos its choice.
Cos chose Venus draped; and the
rival city of Cnidus, just across a
strait, took it into its head to buy
the Aphrodite au naturelle, gave
her its name (the Aphro-dite of
Cnidus), and became the Mecca
of artists from everywhere in the
ancient world.
The King Of Bithynia offered to
pay the entire national debt Of the
Cnidians if they would sell him
this apotheosis of beauty; they re-
fused, and rightly, since only by this
statue are they known to history.
This representation of goddess
in the nude was new departure
and aroused the wags and moralists
Of the day.
Perhaps it did portend a softening
of Greek morality and character; it
was not man that was beautiful
now, so much as woman; and in
woman it was the tempting sweet
ness of the flesh that the artist
carved, not that strong and yet
gentle motherlineSs which makes
the anonymous Demeter of Cnidus
Gin the British Museum) the finest
statue in the world.
This tendency to delicacy and soft
sentiment appears in Praxiteles'
male figures. too; in the Apollo Sou
roctonos (Apollo the Lizard Killer 1,
in the Capitoline Faun, in the Eros
and even in the famous Hermes.
The Faun inspiration OF Haw-
thorne's tale) is the luxurious son
of BacchuS and Pan, loving pleas
ure and not knowing work of sin.
The Apollo looks less like youth
than like a girl, and might be
classed with those hermaphrodites
which so abound in Greek statualy;
it is no actual male, nor any actual
female. but almost the reunion OF
the sexes in an ideal Of embarrassed
love.
This is the Athens Of Plato and
Euripides, no longer CT AnaXagoras
and Aeschvlus; here is no flat-foot-
ed Doric strength of pre-Periclean
sculpture, nor the one-footed agility
of Myron, nor the majestic power
of Phidias' heroes and gods; this
is Ionic grace and ease, beginning
the conquest of suiciding Greece by
the patient Orient.
Before PrayiteleS Eros had been a
winged boy, as vigorous as any ur-
chin in the streets; under the hama
Of this subtle master he became that
symbol of dreams and tenderness
which so p1eases our romantic souls.
Story has it that Phryne, to trick
PraXiteleS into revealing which Of
hos works he liked the best, told
him that his studio was on fire;
whereupon he exclaimed that all
his labor was lost if his Eros and
his Faun were destroyed.
TINE last figure in this little survey
L of Greek sculpture before
Alexander is the fiery Scopas.
Here is the Byron to PraXiteles'
Keats and Phidias' Milton; pas
sionate and fury Of style which, by
the side of the HermeS and the
Aphrodite, remind us of Michel
angeles suffering heroes pictured
and chiselled in the same age which
saw the quiet and tender madonnas
of Raphael.
Scopas (f1. $50 B. c. achieved re-
nown by the great relief which he
carved on the east side of the
gigantic Mausoleum of Halicar-
nassus, representing the war of the
Anlazons and the Greeks.
The queen, who had ordered the
tomb for her husband, Mausolus,
died before it was finished; legend
says that the artists. loving the task,
finished 1t unpaid, and worked so
we'll that 1t became one Of the Seven
Wonders of the ancient world
The others were the Pyramids, the
walls of Babylon, the Hanging
Gardens of Nebuchadnezzar, the
Temple of Diana at Ephesus the
Olympian Zeus of Phidias and the
Colossus of Rhodes.
See now in review the develop
ment of what we may loosely call
Periclean sculpture.
At first crude strength, as In