On Some Works of the School of Scopas

Extract

Of one of the greatest masters of the great age of Greek sculpture nothing certain or satisfactory was known until three fragments found at Piali were proved in 1880 to belong to the sculpture that filled the pediment of the temple of Athene Alea at Tegea. These fragments—the helmed head of a youthful warrior much defaced, another youthful head with nearly all the features preserved, and the head of a boar—can be as directly traced to the hand of Scopas as the figures of the Parthenon pediment to the hand of Pheidias. The recent handbooks and histories of Greek sculpture have not taken them sufficiently into account; and yet they are our sole material for an immediate study of Scopas, and having been brought to the Central Museum of Athens are now fairly accessible, and have been minutely examined and scientifically estimated by Dr. Treu, who has endeavoured to affix their place in the development of style, and has shown their relations to other works. But his employment of them as criteria has chiefly a negative result. He finds in them certain characteristics which speak against the claims sometimes advanced of the Niobid figures, of the Ephesian Alcestis relief, of the Vatican Apollo Citharoedus, and of the Munich relief of Amphitrite's marriage, to represent the style of Scopas and his school. The main object of this paper is to notice a few works in which a more or less close resemblance to the Tegean heads is discernible. For this purpose it is necessary to briefly examine the account given by Dr. Treu, an account to which—as he admits—he is assisted chiefly by drawings, and not by the immediate observation of the originals.