Introducing Studies in Greek Art Author:Jane Ellen Harrison Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V. PHEIDIAS AND THE PARTHENON. SO far we have been wandering in distant lands. By the banks of the Nile we have watched the Egyptians solve the probl... more »em of expressive art by the principle of realism ; by the banks of the Euphrates we have seen the Chaldaeo-Assyrians add to this realism much of symbolism and a finely perfected system of decoration. By sea and by land the influence of Assyria and of Egypt has been carried to Hellas; from it she has chosen out and assimilated to her own genius what might be helpful, rejected what was hurtful. In the far- off colony of Selinus we have seen the beginnings of her own development, her struggle to master the technical difficulties of expression in marble ; her high thought of the physical perfection of man ; her cult of the hero ; her worship of the god in human form. All this is so much clearing of the ground, so much tarrying in the outer courts of the temple of Greek art. It is time for us to draw nearer, to pass within the veil andhear the secret whisper, the peculiar message, breathed by the gods to Hellas, which she alone of nations was charged to utter to mortal man. We leave the outlying colonies and pass to the mother country. In the studio of Ageladas, the Argive sculptor, three young men served their apprenticeship to art— three whose names were each and all, in after years, destined to resound throughout antiquity—Myron, Polycleitos, Pheidias. Of Myron, the eldest of the three, we know that it was his special gift to breathe into the cold bronze the breath of physical life, to catch the figure of the athlete just at the moment of his supreme effort, of the discus-thrower (Discobolos) just as he poises himself to throw the disk, of the runner just as he breathes out his life grasping the victor's crown; not the so...« less