The age of Pericles seemed marked out by fortune as a distinguished epoch in the history of his country. The fine talents, also, and popular qualities of this accomplished statesman, were admirably adapted to turn to the best account the propitious circumstances of the period. To the further progress of the fine arts, and of sculpture in particular, preceding events, and their present consequences, almost necessarily contributed; while the condition of the art itself was just fitted to receive the perfecting impulse.

The energies of sculpture, likewise, were now to be more directly concentrated in one parent school; which, while it especially adorned one seat, preserved yet the stirring rivalry of honorable emulation, as being the common seminary of free and independent states. The noble stand she had made, her superior sacrifices and sufferings in the cause of freedom, directed to Athens the sympathy and deference of Greece. The prosperity, too, of her political situation, was suitable to the support of this moral pre-eminence. Provided with means of defence and of commerce, on a scale which seemed to contemplate future empire, she was left by Themistocles with ample resources—a noble field of fame and recompense for the artist. He himself, satisfied with the useful, had cared less about the ornamental; but, among the little he did add, were the lions, now at Venice, originally placed on the entrance to the PirÆus, in which fidelity of detail, and grandeur of conception, have furnished to us existing evidence of the skill of this age.

Great as they were, the mind of Phidias proved equal to these external advantages. Possessing that rarest and highest of all genius which is at once creative and regular—learned, yet original, he caught the inspiration of art in the most elevated range of the past, bringing in his own attainments a sublimity and truth yet unequalled by all that has followed.

This great master, the son of Charmidas, an Athenian citizen, was born about the 72d Olympiad, or nearly 500 years before our era, and studied under Eladas. His numerous works belonged to three distinct classes: Toreutic, or statues of mixed materials, ivory being the chief,—statues of bronze,—sculptures in marble. In this enumeration are included only capital performances, for exercises in wood, plaster, clay, and minute labours in carving, are recorded occasionally to have occupied his attention. The beauty of these miniatures was not inferior to the excellence of his greater works; at once sublime and ingenious, he executed grand undertakings with majesty and force, and the most minute with simplicity and truth.

Of the works belonging to the first division, the Olympian Jupiter, and the Minerva of the Parthenon, colossal statues composed of gold and ivory, were the most wonderful productions of ancient art. The former, placed in the Temple at Elis, was sixty feet high, in a reposing attitude, the body naked to the cincture, the lower limbs clothed in a robe gemmed with golden flowers; the hair also was of gold, bound with an enamelled crown; the eyes of precious stones; the rest of ivory. Notwithstanding the gigantic proportions, every part was wrought with the most scrupulous delicacy; even the splendid throne was carved with exquisite nicety. The whole was finished before the artist had obtained the direction of the public works of the Athenians, in the 83d Olympiad after a labour of ten years; the same date in which Herodotus read the second part of his history, the first regular prose composition that had been heard at Athens.

About twelve years later was executed the Minerva, of inferior dimensions, being only forty feet in altitude, but equal, if not superior, in beauty of workmanship and richness of material, the nude being of ivory, the ornaments of gold. A flowing tunic added grace to the erect attitude of the goddess: in one hand was a spear, upon the head a casque; on the ground a buckler, exquisitely carved, the concave representing the giants' war, the convex a conflict with the Amazons, portraits of the artist and of his patron being introduced among the Athenian combatants—one cause of the future misfortunes which envy brought upon the author. On the golden sandals was also sculptured another favorite subject, the battle of the Centaurs, praised by historians as a perfect gem of minute art.

Such admiration attached to these two works, that they were regarded as 'having added majesty to the received religion;' and it was esteemed a misfortune not to have been able, once in a lifetime, to behold them. Yet judged according to the true principles of genuine art, theirs was not a legitimate beauty. It does not excite surprise, then, to learn that Phidias himself disapproved of the mixed effect produced by such a combination of different substances, nor will it appear presumptuous here to condemn these splendid representations. It is not sufficient that a work of art does produce a powerful impression—it is indispensable to its excellence that the means employed be in accordance with the principles and the mode of imitation. Now, in the compositions just described, exposed as they were to the dim light of the ancient temple, and from very magnitude imperfectly comprehended, the effects of variously reflecting surfaces, now gloom, now glowing of unearthly lustre, must have been rendered doubly imposing. But this influence, though well calculated to increase superstitious devotion, or to impress mysterious terror on the bewildered sense, was meretricious, altogether diverse from the solemn repose, the simple majesty of form and expression, which constitute the true sublimity of sculptural representation.

Statuary, or the art of casting in bronze, as the term was used by the ancients, Phidias carried to unrivalled perfection. The Amazon, the Minerva, at Lemnos, and in the Acropolis, were considered as the masterpieces in this department. The last, called the Minerva Polias, was of such majestic proportions, that the crest and helmet might be discerned above the battlements of the citadel at a distance of twentyfive miles, pointing home to the Athenian mariner, as he rounded the promontory of Sunium. Of these and other works, descriptions alone remain; we are consequently indebted for our positive knowledge of his style and principles to the marble sculptures of Phidias, in which department numerous admirable performances of his hand have also perished; but we have here an advantage in the possession of undoubted originals denied in every other instance.

Of the scholars of Phidias, the most esteemed were Alcamenes the Athenian, and Agoracritus of Paros. Their real merit, however, is matter of uncertainty, since their works are reported to have been retouched by their master, who was likewise in the habit of inscribing his statues with the names of his favorite pupils. Indeed, the sublime style perfected by Phidias seems almost to have expired with himself—not that the art declined, but a predilection for subjects of beauty, and the softer graces, in preference to more heroic and masculine character, with the exception of the grand relievos on the temple of Olympia, may be traced even among his immediate disciples. Among his contemporaries, indeed, Polycletus, the second of the name, has been by some placed equal in grandeur of style, while by others he has been described as unequal, to the majesty of the great Athenian. Polycletus himself appears to have decided the controversy, by showing, from the selection of his subjects, that his genius carried him to the imitation rather of the beautiful than the great. His most celebrated performances were the statues of two youths, both nude, the Diadumenos and the Doryphorus, so called from their action of binding the head with a fillet, and bearing a spear. The latter formed the famous 'canon,' from which, as from an unerring standard, all succeeding artists, even Lysippus, borrowed their proportions. Among contemporaries, also, a most distinguished station must have been occupied by Ctesilaus, since he contested with Phidias and Polycletus the public prize of merit for a statue to be dedicated in the temple of the Ephesian Diana. To this artist is erroneously ascribed one of the finest specimens of art now in existence, miscalled, but best known as, the Dying Gladiator, and which, more than any other ancient example, discovers the most profound knowledge of the internal structure of the human frame.

From the banishment and death of Phidias, which occurred some time before his patron died of the plague, in the last year of the eightyseventh Olympiad, the history of art is carried forward through a period, one of the most stormy and unsettled in the Grecian annals. He beheld the commencement of the Peloponnesian war, an event, indeed, Pericles is accused of having at least hastened, in order to screen his remaining friends from those accusations of which the sculptor had been the guiltless victim. During thirty years of hostile commotions, the arts flourished with almost unimpaired vigor, except that towards the close of the contest, sculpture, which had naturally participated in the fortunes of Athens, suffered a decline in this its capital school. The spirit of the age generally, however, united with the sentiment of hostility a more generous rivalry in excellence of every kind. The grand and beautiful in art continued to be followed and admired, while, amid the contention of arms, eloquence began to attain that nervous elegance which yet renders attic oratory the finest model of deliberative procedure. Even the less friendly interval which followed, the establishment of the iron rule of Sparta—the ruin of the milder and more splendid dominion of Athens—and, more disastrous still, the war kindled by the ambition of Thebes, with the various isolated struggles arising out of these leading events, appear to have produced no material degradation in that heroic style, whose lofty character harmonized with the strong excitement of contests for freedom or empire.

Of the artists who adorned this stirring era, the names of nearly fifty, with descriptions of certain of their works, have been handed down in the incidental notices of contemporary history, or in the more detailed accounts of Pausanius, Strabo, and Pliny. Naucydes was author of that beautiful figure holding a discus, and measuring in his own mind the distance, of which antique copies remain, admired for fine position, sweet variety of contour, and unaffected expression. Leochares, Bryaxis, and Timotheus, assisted in the erection of the tomb of Mausolus, where Scopas, superior to all others mentioned, presided.

Thus his age is fixed about the 102d Olympiad, or 370 B. C. To the chisel of this eminent artist is ascribed the Townley Venus, or Dione, now in the British Museum, as also the group of Niobe at Florence. Grace, softness, and truth, were the characteristics of his style, which may be considered as forming the intermediate gradation between that of Phidias and those of Praxiteles and Lysippus; between the two grand divisions of Greek sculpture, the schools of grandeur and of beauty.

In the era and labours of Phidias, we discover the utmost excellence to which Grecian genius attained in the arts. From an examination, then, of this excellence, we shall not only obtain a knowledge of that style pronounced by the Greeks themselves to be their proudest achievement in sculpture, but may also be able to elicit principles of the highest general importance in the philosophy of imitative art. This inquiry likewise demands attention, were it merely on account of the singularly fortunate circumstances under which it can be instituted. Respecting the most esteemed masterpieces of antiquity, reasonable doubts still exist how far our judgments are formed upon real originals. But in the marbles of the British Museum, the former ornaments of the Parthenon, we certainly behold the conceptions, and, in some measure, the very practice of the great Athenian sculptor. Both statues and relievos compose these precious remains, one of the noblest bequests of ancient to modern talent. The statues adorned the two tympana of the Parthenon, which was amphiprostylos or double-fronted, consisting, besides fragments, of fourteen groups, or seventeen figures, of the natural proportions. The relievos are of two kinds, one of which formed the inner frieze of the cella, and flat, representing the procession of the Panathenean festival; the other, consisting of fifteen metopes of the exterior peristyle, very bold, even to entire roundness in some parts, the subject, combats of the Centaurs with the followers of Theseus, appropriate to a national temple.

In these sculptures, the technicality is of unequal merit; but in the design, the presence of the same mind is visible throughout. In the statues, and in the frieze, of which nearly two hundred feet still remain, the execution generally approaches so near the beauty and grandeur of the composition, that we seem to trace not only one intelligence, but one hand; in the metopes, again, a baldness of rendering, utterly inconsistent with the fervid idea, is occasionally perceivable. These contradictions would naturally arise from, and can be explained only by, the fact that the master-spirit overlooking the whole trusted the expressing of his conceptions to assistants of dissimilar capacity. Of the intellectual character, grandeur is the prevailing principle; the grandeur of simplicity and nature, devoid of all parade or ostentation of art. The means are forgotten in their very excellence, and in the fullest accomplishment of the end. The ancient critics, who, in speaking of Phidias, seem to labour with the power of those ideas awakened by the contemplation of his works, are fond of comparing their effects to those of the eloquence of their most accomplished orators. The comparison is happy. The sculpture of Phidias might well be assimilated to Demosthenian eloquence, in the truth and affecting interest of its imagery, and in its power of bearing the whole soul along in our engrossing feeling. But the sternness and the severity of the orator, the taking of the heart by force, attach not to the artist; all is here sweet and gracious; we are willing captives to the witchery of art. It is this union of the graceful and the pleasing with the energetic and the great, which constitutes the surpassing merit of the works we are considering. Exquisitely delicate in the minute, in the grand, the style is bold, vigorous, and flowing. Their author, to use the language of antiquity, united the three characteristics of truth, grandeur, and minute refinement; exhibiting majesty, gravity, breadth, and magnificence of composition, with a practice scrupulous in detail, and truth of individual representation, yet in the handling rapid, broad, and firm. This harmonious assemblage of qualities, in themselves dissimilar, in their results the same, gives to the productions of this master an ease, a grace, a vitality, resembling more the spontaneous overflowings of inspiration than the laborious offspring of thought and science.

The attentive study of the remaining labours of Phidias, and, fortunately for the arts of Britain, their final abiding place is with us, will supply a criterion by which to estimate the principles of the beautiful in execution, and of the ideal in imitative art, as exercised among the Greeks in the most splendid period of their refinement, and will prove guides by which we may emulate, perhaps, equal, our masters.

In all that merely meets the eye, the marbles of the Parthenon display the finest keeping, with the general nobleness of their intellectual character. But the execution is perfect, simply because the composition is so. It comes not forward as an independent merit. Its exquisite mechanism operates without intruding. Unseen and unfelt amid the intelligence it conveys, it is finally noticed as an harmonious element of a perfect whole, and only then calls forth an especial admiration. The finish is high, and even delicate, because the extreme beauty and correctness of the design required to be rendered with corresponding elegance and ease. The chiselling is at once detailed and vigorous, harmonizing with attitudes and expressions full of vivacity, natural grace, and dignity. The touch is broad, the forms decided—the marking deep and firm, according with and increasing the general grandeur and conception. The style of design, indeed, is, in the strictest acceptation, learned, the parts being pronounced with a decision and truth unequalled, we are almost inclined to say, in any other remain of antiquity.

The ideal of Phidias is derived entirely from nature, as the true ideal of art must ever be. Much has been said respecting the import of this term among the ancients; and the words their writers have employed in speaking of this very master, have been construed into meanings not only inconsistent with, but subversive of, the principles of genuine excellence. If, by the divine archetypes which he is reported to have followed, be implied, that he copied after ideas not existing in nature—living and tangible nature, the breathing works before us attest, that whether ancients or moderns, these critics speak with more zeal than knowledge. In the Elgin marbles, every conception deeply participates of human sentiment and action, so intimately does the representation belong to reality, that every form seems, by the touch of enchantment, to have become marble in the very energies of its natural life. This happy effect of truth, however, does not arise from the imitation of common, that is, of imperfect types; neither is nature the only real object of art, viewed through any medium of fancy, nor imitated according to conventional or imaginative principles. The artist has only looked abroad upon all existence, refining partial conceptions and limited modes by the unerring and collected harmonies of the whole. The true ideal, then—the ideal of Grecian sculpture, as beheld in these its sublimest productions, is but the embodied union of whatever of beauty and perfection still lingers among the forms of nature viewed universally—free from individuality or accident. Truth is thus the primary constituent of the ideal. Beauty is the perfect expression of this truth, agreeably to the most unblemished and purest models which general nature presents. In this union of collective excellence and individual verisimilitude, the mind feels, and at once acknowledges, a power of awakening and reflecting its own truest, best sympathies. These principles are unfolded in their purest elements; and the modes of accomplishing this union distinctly traceable by careful observation on the style of Phidias. The forms are, in the first place, composed with the most correct, but unostentatious science; hence the freedom of their movements, the ease of their attitudes, seeming to possess the same capabilities of momentary action as the living models. In this anatomical knowledge, too, as actually displayed, there is a truly admirable simplicity: the bones and muscles are, indeed, pronounced with a firmness rare in antique sculpture, whence chiefly arises the wonderful elasticity of the figures. All this is unaccompanied with the slightest exaggeration; the divisions being few, and masses large, the eye runs sweetly along the general forms, yet finds wherewithal to be delighted in resting upon details. This absence, or rather this unobtrusiveness, of all pomp of art, throws over the whole an air of reality and of unsophisticated nature. But with these essential qualities of merely imitative art, are united perfect symmetry, the most harmonious contours, grand composition, the most refined taste, and noble expression. This causes every figure to respire an heroic and elevated character. Hence, we perceive, that to base ideal upon imitative art—to address the imagination by grandeur of design and perfection of form, while he appealed to the judgment by fidelity of detail and correctness of resemblance—have formed the objects of this great sculptor. The relations under which truth and imagination produce results at once grand and interesting, he has carefully studied and successfully rendered. Hence, while the general composition breathes the loftiest spirit of ideal or possible excellence, the means by which the sentiment is rendered are received from individual nature, expressed simply, and without artifice. In this happy and unobtrusive union of nature and imagination, in this continually remounting, without convention or ostentation, to the eternal sources of natural truth and beauty, Phidias displays the real sublimity of art, and stands unrivalled among the masters of the ancient world.