File:Greek bronzes (1898) (14776355782).jpg

Identifier: greekbronzes00murr (find matches)
Title: Greek bronzes
Year: 1898 (1890s)
Authors: Murray, A. S. (Alexander Stuart), 1841-1904
Subjects: Bronzes, Greek
Publisher: London : Seeley and Co. New York : Macmillan
Contributing Library: Harold B. Lee Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University

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atment, and equally so isthe face of the goddess. Thequestion is how to reconcile thisslight archaism with Pheidias.Before we say that this is impos-sible, there are several things to betaken into consideration. In thefirst place, we have as yet noauthentic copy of any statue inbronze by him, and cannot sayhow he may have chosen to renderhis draperies while working in thatmaterial. But what is more to thepoint is that the bronze Promachosmay have been a work of his earlyperiod when Greek sculpture wasstill in a measure under the influ-ence of the archaic school in whichhe himself had been trained. Theexpress statement of Pausanias (x.lo, i) is, that the statue had beenerected to commemorate the battleof Marathon, which was fought in 490 b.c. At that date Pheidias couldonly have been a boy, and as regards the sculpture of the time, we knowhow archaic it then was from a series of marble reliefs at Delphi, which havesurvived from a building erected there by the Athenians to celebrate the
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Fig. 23.—Athene Promachos. Greek Bronze.British Museum. 58 GREEK BRONZES glorious victory of Marathon, apparently soon after the event. We have,somehow, to account for the considerable interval of time which must haveelapsed between the battle of 490 b.c. and the erection of the colossalbronze statue on the Acropolis. We know that ten years after the battlethe Acropolis had been entirely destroyed by the Persians, so that what-ever monument the Athenians may have set up there for their victory, ifany, must have gone the way of all the rest in the general conflagration.During these ten years Pheidias was approaching towards manhood, andit is quite conceivable that amid the new adornment of the Acropolis,which commenced when the Persians had been finally discomfited, hisrising genius had been recognised by his townsmen of Athens, and thatthe task had then been set him of producing the colossal Athene Pro-machos in bronze. I am only suggesting what may well have happened.It was a numbe

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