The writings on art and architecture crucially shaped the artists’ and architects’ self-awareness also with respect to the diachronic dimension. Lysippus famously defined his own artistic principle in opposition to those of his predecessors: “He scrupulously preserved the symmetria (for which there is no word in Latin) by modifying the square build of the figure of the old sculptors through a new and hitherto untried system of proportions, and he used commonly to say that whereas his predecessors had made men as they really were, he made them as they appeared to be” (Pliny, HN 34.65).
The reference, in this context, to the system of proportions of symmetria and to the
“squareness” of the human figures immediately points to Polyclitus (see Galen, De temp.
1.9 and Plac. Hipp. et Plat. 5; and Pliny, HN 34.56). In fact, such lucid and pointed
historical awareness would have been hardly thinkable without the Kanon, whose careful reader (and viewer) Lysippus must have been. Our sources do not attribute any writings to Lysippus himself. In all likelihood, however, the information about his relationship to Polyclitus goes back to another text, the treatise On Sculpture by Xenocrates of Athens, the second-generation disciple of Lysippus, who is usually, if somewhat emphatically, considered “the father of art history” (Schweitzer 1932). The masterful reconstruction of the intellectual profile of Xenocrates by Bernhard Schweitzer has found a splendid
confirmation thanks to the publication of Posidippus’s epigrams and should count among the lasting achievements of properly conducted Quellenforschung (see Bäbler 2002, contra the untimely and ill-founded doubts of Sprigath 2000; Stewart 2005; Strocka 2007;
Prioux 2009). What is worth stressing in our context is the fact (p. 80) that Xenocrates’s evolutionary model was informed not by primarily historical concerns but by the
competition principle. This was particularly evident in his treatment of Polyclitus, Myron, and Pythagoras. To the extent that Pliny’s sections on these artists go back to Xenocrates, it is apparent that the ascription of their flourishing to the same Olympiad (the ninetieth, 420–417 BCE), even though highly debatable from the point of view of chronological exactness or plausibility, was meant to minimize the problems deriving from an
arrangement that aimed to attribute as much relevance as possible to the formal criteria.
As is well known, at the beginning of the Xenokratic evolutionary line stood Phidias:
“Phidias is deservedly deemed to have first disclosed the capabilities and indicated the methods of bronze sculpture” (Pliny, HN 34.54).
Polyclitus followed suit, refining Phidias’s achievements: “Polyclitus is deemed to have refined the art of bronze sculpture, just as Phidias is considered to have disclosed it” (Pliny, HN 34.56).
Myron’s style represented an improvement on Polyclitus from several points of view:
“Myron is the first sculptor who appears to have enlarged the scope of realism, being more prolific in his art than Polyclitus and being more accurate in his proportions. Yet he himself so far as surface configuration goes attained great finish, but he does not seem to have given expression to the feelings of the mind, and moreover he has not treated the hair and the pubes with any more accuracy than had been achieved by the rude work of olden days” (Pliny, HN 34.58).
Pythagoras went even further in the direction of realism, according to Xenocrates/ Pliny:
“Myron was defeated by the Italian Pythagoras of Rhegium. … He was the first sculptor to show the sinews and veins, and to represent the hair more accurately” (Pliny, HN 34.59).
This development, which moved from idealism to realism, eventually culminated in Lysippus (see the passage of Pliny, HN 34.65, quoted above). As is clear from Pliny’s wording and now confirmed by the first of Posidippus’s Andriantopoiika epigrams, the sequence thus established was not simply based on stylistic criteria but was crucially interpreted through the lens of competitiveness. This ideal extension into time of the typical contest mentality among artists—witnessed, among other things, by innumerable anecdotes—must have been spurred precisely by the fact that the contest took place “on paper,” as it were. In other words, it is likely that the medium of writing both favored the comparison among artists of different ages and made it necessary, at the same time, to provide justification in terms of chronology, even at the price of adjustments that look
“wrong” by proper historical standards.
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Francesco de Angelis
Francesco de Angelis, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia
University, 826 Schermerhorn Hall, MC 5517, 1190 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10027, USA.