he was therefore far behind him in ability or in genius, because, whatever the name of the artist, the Venus of Milo must ever remain one of the grandest works of sculpture that has survived from ancient Greece.

Or again, if we take that perennial source of controversy, the Parthenon frieze, we shall find from Professor Furtwängler, what is no small consolation from such a quarter, a ready acceptance of views which have been consistently held in this country as opposed in the main to views which have been loudly proclaimed in Germany. In dealing with the shield of the Athene Parthenos by Pheidias (p. 75), he arrives at a conclusion which was expressed in these pages so long ago as 1884. According to Plutarch's statement, Pheidias had placed among the reliefs on the shield portraits of himself, as a bald-headed old man, and of Pericles. This testimony was considered to be amply confirmed by a rude marble copy of the shield now in the British Museum. But against that view, it is plain that, had Pheidias been condemned to prison for setting these portraits on the shield of a goddess, the portraits would certainly have been removed at the same time. The ancient story-tellers foresaw this difficulty, and met it by the bold statement that the portraits could not be removed without bringing down the statue, so cunningly had they been contrived. The explanation now is, that Athenian gossips had recognized in an old man among the combatants on the shield some accidental likeness to Pheidias, such as one not unfrequently sees still between some ancient busts and prominent citizens of our own day. Pericles was easily identified among the younger combatants, and thus the story spread till the times of Plutarch and the copyist who, in making the marble shield in the Museum, would naturally enough give the supposed figure of Pheidias some additional touches of actual portraiture. In short, wherever we have a fairly sufficient amount of positive evidence to go by, as in the existing sculptures of the Parthenon or in the literary descriptions and later artistic copies of the works of Pheidias, Professor Furtwängler comes out of the ordeal brilliantly on the whole.

Whether we agree with him or not in his claim that a fine marble head in Bologna fits on to a torso of Athene in Dresden, and that now for the first time we can see what the famous Athene Lemnia of Pheidias had looked like, we must allow that his artistic criticism in this part of his work is excellent. Where we hesitate in following him is when we see only too plainly his eager desire to force upon us some combination of conjecture and fact for which we are not prepared. The Bologna head had been made separately to fit into a torso.

The

The torso of Dresden had been made separately to receive a head, and we are told that the one fits into the other. But that in itself is not enough. For all we know, there may be half-adozen other heads of Athene which would equally fit on to the torso. It is true that in ordinary circumstances this objection I would be frivolous. But the Bologna head is not even with certainty an Athene. It has indeed mostly been regarded otherwise. It has no helmet; the head is bound with a narrow flat diadem, and the hair, instead of falling in tresses on the neck, is gathered into a very small knot at the back. These, no doubt, are features which correspond in a general way to numerous heads of Athene on the painted Greek vases of the time of Pheidias, and it is always possible that the vase-painters had taken their type of the goddess from his famous statue of Athene Lemnia. But these paintings vary too much among themselves to be of positive use in this argument. So that the question must ultimately turn on whether the artistic style of the Bologna head answers to the known work of Pheidias in the same striking degree as does the Dresden torso.

The Athene Lemnia was a bronze statue, and Professor Furtwängler is unquestionably right in claiming that the hair of the Bologna head has been directly reproduced in marble from an original in bronze. Instead of massive tresses with an equal play of light and shadow, such as come appropriately in working in marble, we have slight fluid tresses, on the surfaces of which there is a constant flicker of light, no deep shadows, no noble masses. In bronze this treatment tells admirably; in marble it conveys the impression of feebleness. But while agreeing as to this bronze treatment of the hair, which was pointed out long ago, we have still to ask for the evidence that this particular method of rendering the hair in bronze was in vogue as early as the time of Pheidias. We know it very well in such sculptures as the lovely bronze head of Hypnos in the British Museum; but that belongs to the later school of Praxiteles or Scopas. We know also that immediately before Pheidias the rendering of the hair in bronze was a still unsurmounted difficulty. Of that there is abundant evidence. Shall we then trace this splendid change to Pheidias? We have no objection whatever; only let the question be discussed and the difficulty faced. To our mind it is a great difficulty. The discussion must include the Dresden torso, and must show not only that its draperies have been directly translated from bronze into marble, but also that the method of working in bronze with heavy, deeply undercut folds was in existence in the time of Pheidias. At p. 16, Professor Furtwängler sets himself to this task by means of a comparison

with an existing marble statuette which had plainly been copied in late times from the famous gold and ivory statue of the Parthenos, in which statue Pheidias had made his drapery in gold. That comparison had been previously made by another archæologist, who came to the conclusion that there is a wide difference in the rendering of the drapery in these two sculptures; such a difference, he maintained, as was appropriate to the different materials, bronze and gold. We are not prepared to say in what direction gold would demand a treatment peculiar to itself. But our author makes short work of this opposition by simply declaring the grounds for it to be illusory. such differences as exist in the draperies of these two sculptures not only work in admirably with his view that the Lemnia had been made three or four years before the Parthenos, but also serve to illustrate

To him

'the development of one of the greatest artists of antiquity. The differences between these two almost consecutive works reveal the active progress of a man to whom every new task meant a new advance in the growth of his artistic faculty and of his own peculiar style.' (P. 18.)

It may be so. But this language must appear strong when we reflect that it is altogether based on the works of copyists of the Graeco-Roman age, and when we remember that most of the ground which he here traverses has already been worked over by others, without any recourse to extravagant assertions, and with very different results.

He is much more original in dealing with the west pediment of the Parthenon. A year or two ago we were startled, if it is possible to be startled by anything from him, by the brief announcement of a new interpretation of these sculptures which he was prepared to prove. Since then we have been waiting for details, except for an occasional illumination shed by one or other of those archæological ladies who are supposed to have sat at his feet metaphorically and learnt his secrets. Now we have the whole affair, full blown. It is an instructive performance; after which we may well look with sorrow on our 'broken gods.' The river-god Ilissus, so dear to all lovers of Greek sculpture, now becomes an obscure Attic hero, Byziges. All our fond beliefs that the attitude, the bodily forms, the drapery of this glorious figure combined to express the action of a river-god turning in his rocky bed to look on at the central action of the pediment, are dismissed as so much nonsense, into which we have allowed ourselves to be duped by a statement of Pausanias, that the angle figures of the contempoVol. 180.-No. 359.

F

rary

rary temple of Olympia, fortunately now discovered, were the two local river-gods, Cladeus and Alpheus. We are told that Pausanias made mistakes in his identification of some of the other figures at Olympia, that there is no reason to trust him as to the river-gods, and that he was probably misled by his familiarity with similarly reclining river-gods in late art. It is true that reclining river-gods are frequently employed in late Greek and Roman sculpture to indicate the locality of a scene, as where the sun in his chariot is made to rise beside the Euphrates, and to sink beside the Danube. But it has not been shown that this conception was altogether of late date. Nor will this be easy to show when we remember that, even on the east pediment of the Parthenon itself, the locality of the scene is bounded by the sun rising from the sea on the one hand, and the moon sinking below the horizon on the other. Apparently this conception of a great scene bounded on either hand by the luminaries of day and night arose first in the mind of Pheidias. We judge so, not only from its absence in older art, but far more from the fact that he employed it in no less than three of his great works,—the Parthenon as just stated, the base of his famous statue of Zeus at Olympia, and the base of the Athene Parthenos. Why then should we not expect in the angles of the west pediment of the Parthenon corresponding boundaries of the scene in the shape of natural personifications, such as the two chief rivers of Athens, within whose limits the action of the pediment took place? And why may not the whole tribe of reclining rivergods in later art have been derived, like the equally familiar Helios rising from the sea, from an original conception of Pheidias? It is nothing short of vexatious to have to defend the old identification of the Parthenon river-gods against the mere caprice of Professor Furtwängler. There is no trace of his having realized the habit of mind of Pheidias in representing those great scenes in which divine beings were engaged. His restless, super-subtle spirit beats its wings in vain against conceptions of that order.

We are inclined to agree with him in transposing the Victory now in the east pediment of the Parthenon to the west, on the strength of Carrey's drawings. But that proposal is as old as anything we can well remember in archæology, though one would hardly think so from his way of expressing himself on p. 229. He is content to give one or two good and effective reasons from recent writers on this question, and to conclude in the manner of a popular lecturer, Having rescued this torso for the west pediment, we must,' &c. We will, however, do him the justice of believing that he expects his readers to be fairly well

informed

informed on this as on other matters, and not to require at his hands any ample statement of the whole question.

Apart from his treatment of the river-gods to which we have referred, his general interpretation of the west pediment differs in principle from the accepted interpretations only as regards the figures of the right half; that is, on the side of Poseidon. The accepted view associates these figures with the domain of Poseidon, the sea. He makes them, like those on the side of Athene, heroic representations of Athens. That is undoubtedly a fair and reasonable contention. Everything depends on the success with which the new attributions answer to the surviving fragments, and to Carrey's drawing, made before the destruction of the sculptures took place during the Venetian bombardment. Carrey was no blunderer, but yet he is less explicit than could have been wished in one of these groups on the side of Poseidon, where we see a nude figure seated in the lap of a draped female figure. The ordinary identification is that of Aphrodite in the lap of Thalassa. We are now told that our supposed Aphrodite is the boy Ion seated on the knees of his mother Creusa, and we are at all events thankful that she has not been again made into a nude Heracles, as a distinguished German archæologist proposed to convert her some years ago. If Ion could sit in that attitude, he must have been a very good, docile boy, though enormously grown. How different in size from the other boys in this pediment! The two close by his side are mére mites in comparison. There is no use in referring us to two fragmentary sculptures from the Erechtheum and Eleusis, because Professor Furtwängler knows perfectly well that in both these instances it is a small boy that we see lying across the lap of a female figure. Nor does it help us to be reminded of a picture in Athens, where Alcibiades had caused himself to be represented as seated on the knees of Nemea, so long as we have no conception of the aspect and character which he here chose for himself as the winner of a chariot-race at the Nemean games. All we are told is that his face was more beautiful than that of Nemea herself. For the rest, he may have appeared as a mere boyish personification of the contest, like another Eros in the lap of Aphrodite. We do not say that Visconti, the first important writer on this question, may not have been right in calling the Parthenon figure a youth, nor that our author is not entitled to follow him with a variation of the name. We are prepared to allow that a long, continuous list of archæologists may have been wrong in taking this figure to be feminine, such is the uncertainty of Carrey's drawing. But before doing this we require much stronger arguments, outside