Description

After Phidias something shifts in Greek marble: faces grow troubled, bodies lean, divinity comes down to human height. Maxime Collignon, the leading French authority on ancient sculpture, devotes this volume to the two artists through whom that change passed. Scopas, the architect-sculptor of Tegea, brought an almost painful intensity into stone; Praxiteles, with the Hermes of Olympia and the Aphrodite of Knidos, invented a softness that would run through the whole of Western art. Collignon works from originals and Roman copies alike, argues the attributions, and reconstructs the logic of a generation that settled the idea of beauty for two thousand years.