Читать книгу A History of Sculpture онлайн

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The “ssss1” is a beautiful example of the use such a sculptor as Praxiteles made of the new opportunities. The place it occupies in the history of the art is unique. Whereas most sculptures of its class are Roman copies, the “ssss1” is an undoubted original. The marble was found at Olympia in 1877 a.d., on the very spot where Pausanias recorded having seen it. The find was preceded by the identification of a dipteral temple with an Heraion (Temple of Hera) also described by Pausanias. But this was of small interest compared with the statue which the German excavators discovered embedded in a fragment of wall. There was never any doubt as to its identity. It was clearly “the Hermes of stone, carrying the infant Dionysus—a work moreover by Praxiteles”—as Pausanias had recorded.

Every one has seen a cast of the statue. The god is carrying the babe Dionysus to the nymphs. He has stopped for a moment’s rest and is amusing his little charge, may be with a bunch of grapes held in the right hand. The perfect grace of the figure and the pose are essentially Praxitelean. The work illustrates the softer and more sensuous manner of imaging the lesser divinities which arose in the fourth century. In this case the youthful god in the flush of early manhood must be contrasted with the “bearded” Hermes of the age of Phidias. After the time of Praxiteles there was no reversion to the earlier type. He did for Hermes and Apollo what Phidias and Polyclitus had done for Zeus and Hera.