PHIDIAS, PERICLES & JOVE
The Golden Age Of The Muses
Below a detail from a drawing (here digitally manipulated) by Victor Laloux 1883, Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris reproduced in (German Edition): Claude Laisné Kunst Der Griechen Terrail, Paris 1995. The original drawing depicts the reconstruction of the Zeus Temple at Olympia.
Truly Olympian or rather titanic in dimension, Phidias must have had a short time before probably visited Thebes or Luxor or it was that familiar virus associated with mass psychology that apparently flourished in this game-park Olympia and that makes us strive for monumental dimensions and glance and show, that had infected him? But then again it was Phidias! Who can accuse him of hybris? Imagine the great Greeks being awed by this ugly looking metal, that others, especially the Asians have regarded with great esteem!
This is probably as far as he could go! 12 Solid Meters of Gold and Ivory!! But in the hands of a great man, who had not only the Muses but also one of the most influential personalities in the history of mankind and the most successful of his times at that _ the big boss Pericles himself knocking at his door, it somehow must have retained a semblance of measuredness, mass and humility charateristic of true greatness. 
Phidias, the bald headed genius of the western civilization at the peak of the great Greek story, whose likes you may probably seek with telescopes as huge as the moon out there in space but not find? And whose works so many copied and let be inspired from but never surpassed. Though Michelangelo and de Vinci, two other great stars of western civilization did rise to classical Greek heights, and had epochal influence on western thought and expression, their works do not exhibit that quantum transformation that the Greeks underwent! They set the path on which we all, even the Australian aboriginal and the Eskimo now willy nilly have to tread. And hopefully with less hybris!
Temnograph (1995) Mushtaq Bhat
To Top > >