Plato, Aristotle and the Arts

It was in late fourth- or early third-century BC Alexandria that the first histories of art (as distinct from criticism and aesthetic theory) seem to have been written. They have all perished, as have most Hellenistic prose writings, but passages survive, sometimes as direct quotations, embedded in the works of such later writers as the elder Pliny and Pausanias. From these fragments it can be deduced that they were conceived in terms of a linear progression from crude beginnings in the distant past to a high point of achievement in the later fourth century BC -neatly coinciding with the rise to power of the Macedonian dynasty. Praxiteles and Lysippus, Alexander's court sculptors, were claimed to have excelled all their predecessors, and Alexander's court painter, Apelles, was said by Pliny to have 'surpassed all those who were born before him and all those who came later'.

The notion of a 'norm' towards which art aspires was first put about in this way by Hellenistic writers. To them also is due the idea of a 'Classical moment' or high point, when the summit of achievement is reached and after which it declines. They located this apogee in the late fourth century BC, it should be noted, and not in the fifth century BC. (The idea that Greek art and culture reached its height under Pericles came later.)

Artists were, for the first time, placed in history and came to see themselves as living in the aftermath of a great period. Hence the strong, conservative 'Classicistic' tendency in Hellenistic art, for which a philosophical rationale could be found in Plato's contention that works of art should, like everything else, ideally conform to some absolute standard. As we have already seen, he praised the Egyptians for permitting no artistic innovations. His theory was, however, criticized by Aristotle, who propounded a more commonsensical and relativist doctrine (see below). Whereas Plato believed the works of man to be at best but pale imitations of heavenly prototypes or 'Ideas', Aristotle approached the problem empirically and tried to identify the various 'causes' governing the generation of any man-made object and thus giving it its form. The form an object took depended, according to him, not on some fixed 'Idea' to which it approximated but on who made it, what it was made of and, above all, on its purpose or'final cause'. In this way began one of the great debates in the history of Western aesthetics - and to it the expanding range of Hellenistic art was largely due.

For Aristotle's teaching opened the door (in theory at any rate) to expressiveness and the cultivation of the artist's individuality, even to eclecticism and to the notion that an artistic style might be appropriate in certain circumstances and not in others. His relativism in this sense is most explicit in his discussion of rhetoric. A speech in the public assembly should, he said, be like skiagraphia or shadow-painting (probably a style of painting using strong contrasts of light and shade to give an illusion of the third dimension). Bold outlines and broad handling were therefore desirable. In the law-courts, on the other hand, a finer and more intricately and subtly constructed speech would be appropriate. By analogy, styles in the visual arts might be regarded like literary genres - epic, tragic, comic, lyric, elegiac - each with its own rules, laid down in Aristotle's Poetics.

The emergence of such ideas signals a profound change in attitudes to the arts. Statues, paintings and even temples gradually came to be thought of as 'works of art' rather than as images, whether animistic or merely ritualistic. Increasingly they were seen as the creations of individual artists, working for individual patrons. And this process of secularization was taken a stage further with the rise of art-collecting in the Hellenistic period, leading to the 'promotion' of famous artists. That the first histories of art should have appeared at the same time was no coincidence, more especially as they seem to have been written by practising artists. But other, non-artistic factors may also have been involved. Propagandist overtones may be detected occasionally in the praise accorded to artists of Alexander's time. How far the motivating impulses for this entire intellectual structure were political, and how far aesthetic, is by no means clear. There can, however, be little doubt that the artistic style of the late fourth century acquired political significance, visually associating Hellenistic rulers with Alexander and his legacy of prestige and power.

This was obviously the intention of the satrap of Sidon in commissioning his sarcophagus (5,1). Here Alexander appears as the superhuman victor and hero, taking the place of a god watching over the fate of men in earlier Greek battle reliefs or paintings. The sculptor clearly intended Alexander to be symbolic - but also a portrait. The youthful clean-shaven face (Alexander drove beards out of fashion) is recognizably that of the same person in several other representations which probably go back to contemporary likenesses. And this naturalism extends to the other figures, whose heads are so strongly individualized as to suggest that they, too, are portraits. The costumes and physiognomy of the Persians are recorded as in the generically similar Alexander mosaic (5,24), with an ethnographic fidelity rare in Greek art except occasionally in vase paintings of Africans and, more notably, the fourth-century pectoral made for a Scythian chief (4,46). In the sarcophagus naturalism is combined with symbolism to generalize and give eternal significance to historical events. Thus some of the Greeks are heroically nude, perhaps to symbolize the triumph of Greek intelligence over barbarian brute force, which enabled Alexander to rout armies greatly outnumbering his own. The composition is complex enough to give an impression of action and yet sufficiently formal to suggest that order is being brought out of confusion. The figures are posed to echo and counterbalance one another within a carefully devised pattern of diagonals.

The carving is still as sharp and crisp as it was when the sarcophagus was placed in the tomb chamber which protected it from the elements for over 2,000 years. It even retains some of the pigments with which it was painted, enough to show that the colors were naturalistic and not, as on Archaic Greek sculpture, conventional. Flesh was given a yellow wash, slightly darker for the Persians than for the Greeks, and hair, eyes, lips and garments were picked out in shades of brown, red, violet and blue. Because of its almost unique state of preservation there are very few other works in marble with which the Alexander Sarcophagus can be compared. But the same sophisticated taste for virtuoso displays of craftsmanship is apparent in the recently discovered paintings on the tomb at Vergina in northern Greece, thought to have been that of Alexander's father, Philip II of Macedon (5,7), and in the slightly later pebble-mosaics from Pella, where Alexander was born (5,8). The extraordinary technical accomplishment so evident, despite considerable damage, in the Vergina paintings illustrates their mastery of a naturalistic style in which feats in the representation of torsion and recession seem to have been effortlessly achieved. Similarly in the decorative arts -notably in metalwork - the most subtle and sensitive handling of the medium is displayed. On a magnificent krater found at Derveni in Macedonia - a technical feat of bronze casting, chasing and repousse hammering (5,9) -Dionysus is shown in a wonderfully relaxed, yet elegant, pose of erotic abandon, resting his right thigh on the lap of Ariadne. With this sexually symbolic gesture of casual dalliance the grand passions of the ancient gods are tamed and refined. (The krater was found in a tomb but it seems unlikely, in view of its voluptuous subject, that it was made as a funerary offering. The pensive figures around the neck are solid cast and could have been added to adapt it to its mortuary function.)

Statuettes of bronze and other materials had, of course, been produced in Greece for centuries, usually, it seems, as votive offerings; only now did they begin to appear as independent decorative works of art. One of the finest is a statuette of a dancer, apparently a professional mimer (5,10), quite clearly not the Muse of Dancing nor one of the worshippers of Dionysus who had appeared in ecstatic poses in so many early vase paintings. Clutching at drapery tightly drawn across her body, her right foot slipping out from beneath her long dress, she seemingly sways to some slow rhythm. Both the structure and the movement of the form beneath the clothing are rendered with a naturalism that could have been achieved only by close observation. The figure is also a tour deforce of three-dimensional form which demands to be examined from every viewpoint and seems to have been modelled quite simply in order to be admired. A whole series of complicated changes of direction are beautifully contrasted and balanced and held together in a continuous sweeping but subtly restrained rhythmic phrase. But statuettes of much less attractive subjects were also produced: grimacing dwarfs, emaciated youths, crippled hunchbacks begging for alms. Whether such images of lower-class poverty and misery had already acquired the sinister charm that they later held for rich upper-class art-lovers it is impossible to say.

According to Aristotle, an imitation is in itself pleasurable, and looking at it delights the eye. Things that repel in everyday life may please when represented in art, he wrote. This is diametrically opposed to Plato's contention that all imitations are false and therefore morally harmful as it is to Socrates' demand that artists should concentrate on representing the 'good' and 'beautiful', terms that are interchangeable in ancient Greek. Little distinction was made by the Greeks between physical and moral beauty: all Homer's heroes are handsome, all his villains ugly or deformed; the fat men occasionally depicted on vases are invariably figures of fun. But Socrates, himself snub-nosed and short of stature, had begun to evolve a more subtle and profound conception of the outer and inner man and the relationship between them. This and similar currents in Greek thought, coinciding with the rise of naturalism in the visual arts, modified very notably the traditional Greek conception of beauty. Nobility, if not beauty, of soul might now be discerned within an unprepossessing exterior. No longer was the clean-limbed young athlete the sole and exclusive ideal. (By this date, prize athletes were no longer aristocratic amateurs but professional performers, and this may not be irrelevant.) This modification was to have enormous and profound consequences for the visual arts and was felt immediately in the sudden development of lifelike portraiture in the last decades of the fourth century and first of the third.

The contrast between weakness of body and strength of soul was very clearly expressed in a statue of Demosthenes - that vociferous opponent of both Philip II of Macedon and Alexander - and also in the words inscribed on its base: 'If your strength had equalled your resolution, Demosthenes, the Macedonian war-god would never have ruled the Greeks.' Surviving copies reveal how the frail, lean body was animated and ennobled by the indomitable spirit shining through the stern, forthright expression on his face (5,11). It was a posthumous portrait set up by the Athenians in 280 BC and there may be a touch of idealization in his head. But there is none whatever in the several images of Socrates and later philosophers (again known only from copies), which might almost be thought to emphasize their physical peculiarities. One of the few which can be dated to the third century BC is perhaps of Hermarchus, the chief follower of Epicurus, an unflattering but none the less endearing figure of an old man, bearded head slightly bent, loose flesh on his chest, toga gathered around a pot-belly, and shrunk shanks held rather wide apart (5,13). Even the rulers of the Hellenistic world were portrayed with surprising frankness - Philetaerus of Pergamum, who had been accidentally castrated in childhood, is shown on coins with the heavy bloated features of a eunuch, and Euthydemus, who usurped the Bactrian throne in 230 BC, might almost seem to have gloried in his bottle-nosed brutality (5,12).