Professor Waldstein's Lecture.

III.

A large audience assembled in upper Boylston to hear the last of Dr. Waldstein's deservedly popular lectures on Greek Art.

None of the accessory causes mentioned in the second lecture are as important in the development of art from the early archaic conventionalities as the influence of athletic games. The canons of form they produced have fashioned the feeling for form and proportion ever since. The reason of its widespread influence is that Greek art was at the same realistic and identical. Before art can gain universal validity it must pass through nature and rise higher than the reality from which it is conceived, and this is what happened in Greece. The influence of the athletic games can hardly be exaggerated. They gave the artist a chance to study the human form, and the continual practice of athletes for the games so impressed the correct form of the nude figure upon the artist that he was gradually induced to abandon conventional statues of the gods and fashion the more perfect ones of athletes. Then, too, the training of many men had the effect of furnishing a large number of good models. It is almost impossible for our modern artists to get even one very good model. The Palaestra became the dissecting room of the Greek artist; he did not need to study the human form as we do now.

The Greeks were the one race which developed athletic games, and this fact distinguishes them from other races. During the period of transition in art the games were chiefly developed. Before, they had been part of the religious rites of certain ceremonial, but from 530 B.C., they assumed a distinct national character. The Olympic games were a plan of unity for the whole race; Greece laid aside all internal feuds to join in participation of them. In the 52nd Dynasty the statue of a victor was first fashioned in wood. This was very rough, but when the ice was once broken, statues of athletes became immensely popular with all the artists. In fact, there is scarcely a vase to be found without an athlete portrayed upon it, even though its principal theme is a mythical representation.

Polycritus made a figure of rather a short square pattern which became the canon used on the coins and vases of his time. Afterwards Lysippe made a lighter canon of more slender proportions. In its turn this figure was used for all ornamental purposes. All these representations of athletes were realistic, and if they had not led to ideal figures, Greek Art could not have approached its highest level. The danger that the artist should be engrossed in the real was subverted by the ideal in the figures of the gods. It was not until the athletic games became ridiculous and tainted with professionalism that they lost their hold on Greek art.