Laocoon, with all that patient science through which it has triumphed
over an almost unmanageable subject, marks a period in which sculpture
has begun to aim at effects legitimate, because delightful, only in
painting. The hair, so rich a source of expression in painting, because,
relatively to the eye or to the lip, it is mere drapery, is withdrawn
from attention; its texture, as well as the colour, is lost, its
arrangement faintly and severely indicated, with no enmeshed or broken
light. The eyes are wide and directionless, not fixing anything with
their gaze, or riveting the brain to any special external object; the
brows without hair. It deals almost exclusively with youth, where the
moulding of the bodily organs is still as if suspended between growth and
completion, indicated but not emphasised; where the transition from curve
to curve is so delicate and elusive, that Winckelmann compares it to a
quiet sea, which, although we understand it to be in motion, we
nevertheless regard as an image of repose; where, therefore, the exact
degree of development is so hard to apprehend. If one had to choose a
single product of Hellenic art, to save in the wreck of all the rest, one
would choose from the "beautiful multitude" of the Panathenaic frieze,
that line of youths on horseback, with their level glances, their proud,
patient lips, their chastened reins, their whole bodies in exquisite
service. This colourless, unclassified purity of life, with its blending
and interpenetration of intellectual, spiritual, and physical elements,
still folded together, pregnant with the possibilities of a whole world
closed within it, is the highest expression of that indifference which
lies beyond all that is relative or partial. Everywhere there is the
effect of an awaking, of a child's sleep just disturbed. All these
effects are united in a single instance--the adorante of the museum of
Berlin, a youth who has gained the wrestler's prize, with hands lifted
and open, in praise for the victory. Fresh, unperplexed, it is the image
of man as he springs first from the sleep of nature; his white light
taking no colour from any one-sided experience, characterless, so far as
character involves subjection to the accidental influences of life.
"This sense," says Hegel, "for the consummate modelling of divine and
human forms was pre-eminently at home in Greece. In its poets and
orators, its historians and philosophers, Greece cannot be conceived from
a central point, unless one brings, as a key to the understanding of it,
an insight into the ideal forms of sculpture, and regards the images of
statesmen and philosophers, as well as epic and dramatic heroes, from the
artistic point of view; for those who act, as well as those who create
and think, have, in those beautiful days of Greece, this plastic
character. They are great and free, and have grown up on the soil of
their own individuality, creating themselves out of themselves, and
moulding themselves to what they were, and willed to be. The age of
Pericles was rich in such characters; Pericles himself, Pheidias, Plato,
above all Sophocles, Thucydides also, Xenophon and Socrates, each in his
own order, the perfection of one remaining undiminished by that of the
others. They are ideal artists of themselves, cast each in one flawless
mould, works of art, which stand before us as an immortal presentment of
the gods. Of this modelling also are those bodily works of art, the
victors in the Olympic games; yes, and even Phryne, who, as the most
beautiful of women, ascended naked out of the water, in the presence of
assembled Greece."
This key to the understanding of the Greek spirit, Winckelmann possessed
in his own nature, itself like a relic of classical antiquity, laid open
by accident to our alien modern atmosphere. To the criticism of that
consummate Greek modelling he brought not only his culture but his
temperament. We have seen how definite was the leading motive of his