We now come to the question whether Phidias ever worked at all in marble. His renown undoubtedly rested upon his magnificent statues in ivory and gold, and especially upon his Zeus and Athena of the Parthenon, which towered above all his other works. So wonderful was the Zeus, that it was said to have strengthened religion in Greece; and the Athena of the Parthenon was held to be the glory of Athens. The poets and writers celebrate Phidias always as specially the creator of these great chryselephantine works; and though they praise the beauty of his bronze works, and especially of the Athena Lemnia, it is plain that these held a secondary place in public estimation, or at all events did not stand alone and apart as the others did. Thus Propertius says, characterizing the sculptors:—

So Quinctilian says of him: “Phidias tamen diis quam hominibus efficiendis melior artifex traditur—in ebore vero longe citra æmulum, vel si nihil nisi Minervam Athenis aut Olympium in Elide Jovem fecisset” (lib. xii. ch. 10). But no writer anywhere near this period—even within five centuries of it—ever mentions a marble figure by Phidias, or celebrates him in any way as a sculptor in this material.

In the evidence given before a committee of the House of Commons upon the Elgin collection of marbles, previous to the purchase of them by the nation, Richard Payne Knight and William Wilkins gave it as their opinion that these works were not by Phidias, and that he was not a worker in marble. This statement has been rejected by the author of the work on the Elgin and Phigaleian Marbles, in the Library of Entertaining Knowledge, as entirely without foundation. In this conclusion it must be admitted that he follows the opinion generally entertained at the present day, and repeated by nearly every modern writer. Visconti, to whom he refers as refuting satisfactorily the notion of Knight and Wilkins, thus argues the question: “If it were imagined that Phidias devoted himself to the toreutic art, and that he employed in his works only ivory and metals, this opinion would be confuted by Aristotle, who distinguishes this great artist by the appellation of σοφὸς λιθουργός—a skillful sculptor in marble—in opposition to Polyclitus, whom he styles simply a statuary, ἀνδριαντοποιός, since the latter scarcely ever employed his talents except in bronze. In fact, several marble statues of Phidias were known to Pliny, who might even have seen some of them at Rome, since they had been removed to this city; and the most famous work of Alcamenes, the Venus of the Gardens, had only, as it was said, acquired so high a degree of perfection because Phidias, his master, had himself taken pleasure in finishing with his own hand his beautiful statue in marble.”

An examination into these statements will show, not only that not one of them is well founded, but that the authorities on which they profess to stand will not at all sustain them. Visconti’s mind is in a nebulous state as to the whole question, and he confounds things which have no relation to each other. The first mistake he makes is in confusing the toreutic art with the art of making statues in ivory and gold. I am aware that M. Quatremere de Quincy, in his treatise on chryselephantine statues, constantly uses these two terms as equivalent; but in so doing he is admitted by all persons who have critically studied the matter to be entirely incorrect. The toreutic art was the art of the engraver, the chaser, the damascener, the embosser. It might be employed, and undoubtedly was employed, by Phidias in decorating part of his statue, as it might be applied to a bronze statue, or to any metal surface or slab; but it was not the art of making statues in any material. Visconti’s next proposition is, that by the term σοφὸς λιθουργός Aristotle meant to indicate a worker in marble as distinguished from an ἀνδριαντοποιός, who was a statuary in bronze, and to show that Phidias worked in marble, while Polyclitus worked only or chiefly in bronze. Neither of these statements can be supported; and it is impossible that Aristotle could have meant to make them. In the first place, λιθουργός does not mean a worker in marble; λιθουργική and λιθοτριβική were specially the art of cutting and polishing gems and precious stones; and a λιθουργός was a lapidary in relief or intaglio,6 not a sculptor of marble statues. Again, ἀνδριαντοποιός does not mean a sculptor in bronze as distinguished from a sculptor in marble, but merely a maker of statues, of athletes or heroes, in any material, whether in wood, bronze, marble, gold, or ivory.

Now, when we remember that Phidias was celebrated not only for his colossal works, but also for his skill as an engraver, embosser, and damascener—in a word, for his skill in the toreutic art, which Pliny tells us was developed by him and perfected by Polyclitus, as well as for his minutely elaborated representations of flies, cicadæ, fishes, and bees—the meaning of Aristotle in applying to him the title of λιθουργός is clear. He was a λιθουργός in the exact meaning of that term, and a very skillful one. Aristotle is equally correct in applying the term ἀνδριαντοποιός, maker of athletes and heroes, to Polyclitus; for that great artist had won the highest fame of his age for statues of this kind, and established the laws of proportion in his Diadumenos and Doryphoros. If, however, as Visconti imagines, Aristotle meant to indicate that Phidias was a worker in marble, while Polyclitus was not, he is clearly wrong; for we know that Polyclitus executed various and celebrated statues in marble, whereas, as we shall see, we have no clear proof that Phidias ever did. Still further, if Aristotle intended to distinguish Phidias from Polyclitus by saying that the one was a skillful λιθουργός, and the other was not, he is again quite wrong, whether he meant by that term to indicate a toreutic artist or, as Visconti thinks, a marble worker; for Polyclitus was even more skilled than Phidias in both these arts. Again, if he meant to distinguish the one artist from the other as a maker of ἀγάλματα, or statues of divinities, he is wrong; for the chryselephantine Hera of Polyclitus rivaled the Athena of Phidias. The plain fact is that Aristotle did not mean to distinguish one of these great artists from the other in any such way. He is perfectly right in the terms he applies to each; but he did not say, nor could he have intended to say, that one was a σοφὸς λιθουργός or an ἀνδριαντοποιός, and the other was not—since, as we know, both of them were λιθουργοί and ἀνδριαντοποιοί, and he must have known it.

Stress has also been laid by some writers on the fact that Phidias is called a γλυφεύς by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and that Tzetzes speaks of him as ἀνδριάντας χαλκουργῶν καὶ γλύφων τε καὶ ξέων, and that Hesychius uses the phrase Φειδίαι λιθοξόοι. These phrases, even were they inconsistent with the view here taken, would be of very little consequence if standing by themselves, as the earliest of these writers flourished some six hundred years, and the latest some nine hundred years, after Phidias; but taken in connection with the words of Aristotle, they may perhaps have some little weight. What is a γλυφεύς, then? Why, simply an engraver and a chiseler. And what does Tzetzes mean by ἀνδριάντας χαλκουργῶν καὶ γλύφων τε καὶ ξέων? Why, that Phidias made statues of heroes and athletes in brass, and that he was a chiseler and engraver. The words γλυφή and γλαφή in Greek, and scalptura and sculptura in Latin, though originally they signified generically cutting figures out of every solid material, were afterwards specifically applied to intagli and camei, and are the art of the cœlator, or τορευτής, or more properly, perhaps, restricted to the cutting and engraving of precious stones.

The next statement of Visconti is that several marble statues by Phidias were known to Pliny, and that the Aphrodite of Alcamenes acquired its perfection because Phidias himself finished it. As to the latter branch of this statement nothing more need be said. It is evidently one of those idle traditions which are not worth considering. But let us see what Pliny actually says. In his account of Phidias he does not even pretend to state, as an accredited fact, that Phidias ever worked in marble. In the chapter devoted to sculptors in marble he says, “It is said, that even Phidias worked in marble” (et ipsum Phidiam tradunt scalpsisse marmora) “and that there is a Venus by him at Rome, in the buildings of Octavia, of extraordinary beauty; but what is certain is” (quod certum est) “that he was the master of Alcamenes, many of whose works are on the sacred temples, and whose celebrated Venus, called ἐν κήποις, is outside the walls. Phidias is said” (dicitur) “to have put the finishing touches to this.” Pliny, therefore, by no means asserts that Phidias ever executed anything in marble; he merely says that there is a rumor or tradition to that effect; but he absolutely states as an established fact that Alcamenes was his pupil, and executed the beautiful statue of Aphrodite; and he then goes on to say, as another tradition, that Phidias assisted him in finishing it. Here he clearly distinguishes between fact and tradition, and his language shows that he placed no reliance on the latter. He does not even pretend to have seen the statue of Venus, supposed to be by Phidias, in the buildings of Octavia; and it is evident, from the turn of his sentence, that, gossiping and credulous as he generally was, he gave no credence to this rumor.

The whole argument of Visconti thus falls to the ground with the facts by which he attempts to support it.

There remain for us to consider the marble statues ascribed to Phidias by Pausanias, which are as follows: 1st, The Nemesis at Rhamnus; 2d, The Hermes at the entrance of the Ismenium at Thebes; 3d, The Aphrodite Urania at Athens, near the Ceramicus.

We have already seen that the Nemesis at Rhamnus was not the work of Phidias, but of Agoracritos; that Pausanias disagrees with other authorities in attributing it to Phidias; and that the name of Agoracritos was inscribed upon it as its author. This, therefore, must be rejected.

In the next place, as to the marble Hermes at the entrance to the Ismenium. This statue, as we have seen, was a decorative entrance statue standing before the temple; and its pendant, Athena, according to Pausanias, was the work of Scopas, who died a century later. The one pedestal could scarcely be left unoccupied for a century, yet this must have been the case if Pausanias is right; and for reasons which have already been given, this statue is, to say the least, not without very grave doubts. No other author speaks of it, and it rests solely on the authority of Pausanias, who lived more than six centuries after Phidias.

There remains, then, the Aphrodite Urania. Pausanias is the sole authority for considering this statue the work of Phidias; and as, being in marble, it would be the only one ascribed to him upon which there are not either the gravest doubts as to his authorship or the clearest indications that he was not the author, we should accept it with caution. Can we trust Pausanias? He certainly does not agree with other writers as to the authorship of various statues. The statue of Athena at Elis, attributed by him to Phidias, Pliny says is by Kolotes. The Mother of the Gods, said by him to be a work of Phidias, is, according to Pliny, the work of Agoracritos. The Æsculapius at Epidaurus, given by him to Thrasymedes, is given by Athenagoras to Phidias. In respect of the Nemesis, he is clearly mistaken. Pausanias wrote long after Pliny, when facts were still more obscured by time. Tradition changes names; transmutes facts, and tends always to give great names to nameless works. He was a traveler in Greece in the age of Marcus Aurelius, when the arts, even in Rome, were in their decline; and he only reports what he sees and hears. He does not pretend to be a critic or a connoisseur in art. He was not one; and his accounts of the great statues in Greece are singularly dry and meagre. He would naturally be told who was the author of this, that, and the other statue that he saw; and he seems to have taken common report without a question, just as a traveler in Rome without particular knowledge or interest in art would accept the authorship of the Colossi in the Quirinal, and without hesitation follow the tradition and ascribe them in his book to Phidias and Praxiteles. If he were always accurate in these matters, or if he had ever shown any critical doubts about the authorship of any work, a statement by him on such a subject would be entitled to more consideration; but as it is, in view of the facts that no other author before him has ascribed the Aphrodite Urania to Phidias, and that if it be by him it is his only marble work of which we have any clear testimony, little faith can be placed in the statement by Pausanias. Add to this that no contemporary of Phidias, and no writer anywhere near his age, has ever spoken of any marble work of his, and I think we must reject this statue as we have rejected the others.

In estimating the value of any such statements as to the authorship of statues, we must keep in mind the fact that it was not only not the custom for the ancient Greek sculptors to inscribe their names on their own statues, but it was not ordinarily permitted to them to do so on any public work; and undoubtedly it was for this reason that Phidias himself made his own likeness as well as the portrait of Pericles on the shield of the Athena, to indicate that the work was done by him while Pericles had the administration of affairs at Athens. In the same way Batrachus and Saurus, two Lacedæmonian artists who built the temples inclosed in the Portico of Octavia, being prohibited from inscribing their names on the walls, adopted the device of sculpturing on the spirals of the columns a lizard and a frog, which their names signified,—thus punning in marble, to perpetuate their names as architects of the temples. So also Myron is said to have inscribed his name on the thigh of his Discobolos in such minute characters as to be visible only on the closest inspection. In the case of some of the great statues, the names of the authors were exceptionally allowed to be inscribed after their deaths; and this was probably the case with the Zeus of Phidias. Ordinarily no such practice was permitted. Such being the case, the authorship of Greek statues at the time of Pausanias would rest entirely upon tradition—and tradition is little to be trusted.

Besides, what adds to the difficulty is that it was the custom in later times to put the names of ancient sculptors on works not made by them, to give them a higher value; it is of this practice that Phædrus speaks in one of his Fables:—

Of the statues which now exist, there are only some thirty on which names are inscribed, and these are certainly for the most part, if not entirely, apocryphal. The name of Phidias, together with that of Ammonius, for instance, appears on a monkey in basalt in the Capitol at Rome; that of Praxiteles on a draped figure in the Louvre; and that of Lysippus on a marble Hercules in the Pitti Gallery at Florence—not one of which is of the least value as a work of art. So, on the torso of the Belvidere is the name of Apollonius; on the Farnese Hercules that of Glycon; on the Gladiator of the Louvre that of Agasias the Ephesian, son of Dositheos—though these names are not mentioned by any writers of antiquity. No authority can be granted to these inscriptions, and possibly the very fact that these names are on the statues is an indication that they are copies; all have ἐποίει. D’Hancarville and Dallaway make a distinction between ἐποίει and ἐποίησεν,—the former, according to them, signifying a copy, and the latter an original work. On the Nemesis at Rhamnus was the inscription, ΑΓΟΡΑΚΡΙΤΟΣ ΠΑΡΙΟΣ ΕΠΟΙΗΣΕΝ; and this would seem to confirm their notion. On the Zeus of Phidias, also, was the inscription, ΦΕΙΔΙΑΣ ΧΑΡΜΙΔΟΥ ΥΙΟΣ ΑΘΗΝΑΙΟΣ Μ’ ΕΠΟΙΗΣΕΝ.

I do not recall, however, a single statue which has come down to us on which the word ἐποίησεν occurs, except an interesting and coarsely executed relief in the British Museum, representing the deification of Homer. Where there is any inscription it is ἐποίει; but it is an exceedingly rare exception that any ancient statue has a name inscribed on it. Almost all, if not all, the statues having names of the artists are of a late date, and probably most of them as late as the time of Hadrian. It was he who revived the art of sculpture; and during his reign a great number of copies, more or less good, were made of the famous statues of antiquity; but unfortunately there has not come down to us a single accredited statue by any of the great sculptors of antiquity.

There are only two other authorities, so far as I am aware, who mention or make any allusion to marble work by Phidias; these must be considered. Seneca, nearly five hundred years after the death of Phidias, says of him, “Not only did Phidias know how to make a statue in ivory, but he also made them in bronze.” Thus far he speaks absolutely; he then continues hypothetically, “If you had given him marble, or even a viler material, he would have made the best thing out of it that could be made.”7 This is considered by the author of the work on the Elgin and Phigaleian Marbles an important statement in confirmation of Pliny. In reality it contains nothing but a simple hypothetical expression of belief that if you had given Phidias a piece of marble he would have made something excellent out of it. Does any one doubt this? Seneca states as a fact only that Phidias really did work in ivory and bronze; and it is plain that he knew no work of Phidias in marble, or he never would have expressed a purely hypothetical opinion on such a matter.

The other authority which has been evoked in favor of the theory that Phidias worked in marble is that of Valerius Maximus, who states that there existed a tradition that he desired to execute the Athena of the Parthenon in marble, but that the Athenians would not permit him to do so: “Iidem Phidiam tulerunt quamdiu is marmore potius quam ebore Minervam fieri debere dicebat, quod diutius nitor esset mansurus; sed ut adjecit et vilius tacere jusserunt.” (Lib. i. c. i., Externa 7.)

There is no authority for this tradition. It comes up five hundred years after the death of Phidias, and is manifestly absurd. Phidias had identified himself and his fame with his great chryselephantine and bronze works. He knew too well his own power, and his mastery over these arts, to wish to make the Athena in any other material than that in which it was made. But suppose he did so advise the Athenians, his advice was not accepted. The statue was not made of marble. Perhaps also he proposed to them to give it to Alcamenes, Agoracritos, or Polyclitus. What sort of value can be given to a statement like this appearing suddenly and solely in one writer five hundred years after the Athena was made? If we are to accept such traditions as this, we may as well “gape and swallow” any gobemouche. Let us have at once a life of Shakespeare written in Leipzig, or any other foreign country at least as far away as that.

This is all the testimony we have as to any work by Phidias in marble. Has it any real weight? But grant all these statements, vague and visionary as they are, to their fullest extent, what do they prove? Not that Phidias was especially a marble-worker, but only that he made, exceptionally, one or two statues in marble, and was supposed by some writers five hundred years after his death, to have had a connection with two more, though other testimony, and the facts and dates, clearly show that he could not have made them, or at least throw the very gravest doubts upon his having done so. In this way, we might assert that Raffaelle was a sculptor, because he is supposed to have made, or helped to make, the statue of Jonah in the Santa Maria del Popolo at Rome. But to jump from such shaky facts to the statement and belief that Phidias was the author, or at all events the designer, of all the marble figures in the pediment, theme topes, and the frieze of the Parthenon, is truly “a long cry.” Where is the ground on which such a belief can be founded? There is not a statement or even an allusion by any ancient writer to justify it. The testimony of Plutarch, so far as it goes, is directly opposed to it, and all the known facts are in contradiction of it.

Plutarch says that Phidias was appointed general superintendent of public works; that he made the statue of Athena in the Parthenon; and that, through the friendship of Pericles, he had the direction of everything, and all the artists received his orders. But he contradicts this immediately, if he is understood to mean anything more than that Phidias generally ordered who should be employed to do this or that work; for he distinctly says that Ictinus and Callicrates made the Parthenon,—and we know that Ictinus and Carpion wrote a book upon it. If Phidias designed or executed anything else than the Athena, why does not Plutarch say so, when he takes pains to tell us he made the Athena? The mention of the one excludes the other. If Ictinus and Callicrates made the building, why may they not have made all the rest of the work? Were they not able to do it? There is no reason to doubt their ability to design and execute all the decorative figures belonging to the temple they built. To Ictinus was intrusted the building of the Temple of Apollo at Phigaleia, in the sculptures of which there is shown remarkable ability; and he also built the Temple of the Eleusinian Ceres, and its mystic inclosure or Secos. If Ictinus and Callicrates, or Carpion, did not execute these marbles of the Parthenon, why may they not have intrusted them to some of the numerous artists with whom Athens swarmed at that time? Libon the architect built the temple of Zeus in which the Zeus of Phidias stood, and its pediment figures were sculptured by Alcamenes and Pæonios. Is there any reason to reject such a theory? However, as to this we are entirely in the dark; all our suppositions are purely speculative. Nothing seems clear, except that the figures were not made by Phidias.

Why did not Plutarch tell us who were the sculptors of the marbles in the Parthenon? Probably for the very simple reason that he did not know. He wrote many centuries after Phidias was dead (about B. C. 66), and tradition may not have brought down the names of any who were concerned in the building of the Parthenon, save those of the architects and of Phidias. He did not attempt to supply the hiatus—being, to use his own words, convinced “of the difficulty of arriving at any truth in history: since if the writers live after the events they relate, they can but be imperfectly informed of facts; and if they describe the persons and transactions of their own times, they are tempted by envy and hatred, or by interest and friendship, to vitiate and pervert the truth.”