Praxiteles and his works

Skopas, Prassitele and Lysippus are the three major artists of the IV century in classical Greece, which rise to enormous fame, even if it is a complex period in which many different stylistic currents are born.

With the beginning of the IV century we witness the decline of Phidias’ mannerism and a technique spreads to it, where the masses are simplified, the drapery treated in a sober way and a sort of sadness begins to hover in the expressions.

Praxiteles

Praxiteles is Athenian and begins his activity about twenty years after Skopas, around 380-70 BC and apparently seems to belong to a different world from the Skopadian one.

Praxiteles has behind him a tradition of Attic sculptors who had been able to draw light, delicate modulations from marble and it is this tradition to which he refers. In fact, from marble he draws a sort of exasperated colorism obtained thanks to a series of light modulations.

Apparently a continuator, he is instead also a great innovator in his own way. This innovation manifests itself differently: where Skopas breaks the contours, Praxiteles chooses a much more subtle and modular path, almost imperceptibly the contours of the statue and inserting the work within the space.

Each of his works is the negation of ponderation. Praxiteles shifts the center of gravity to the outside of the body, so much so that the statues all need external support otherwise they cannot stand. The planes are modulated, the relationship with the light is sweet, the faces are sweet and dreamy.

There is a sort of grace that is denied through this inability of the works to stand up on their own. It is a sort of internal imbalance that is highlighted externally in this inability. Usually the external support element is a tree trunk.

Where Polykleitos had spent all his genius seeking a distribution of weights, Praxiteles works in the opposite way and finds in this a reason for style.

Among the works of Praxiteles we recall a youthful relief representing the Muses, and a single original, the Hermes and Dionysus of Olympia, about which however some reservations have been raised. Praxiteles is known through copies made in Roman times such as the Aphrodite of Cnidus and the Apollo Sauroctonos, and the Resting Satyr.

These were insistently reproduced works whose influence would be felt throughout the Hellenistic era. In this author, a feeling of nature is highlighted, a very dreamy melancholy, which then corresponds to the change within the Greek polis, as we observe a progressive shift of interests and values ​​towards a sort of individualism and beauty is tinged with melancholy, nostalgia and becomes a lyrical element.

Hermes with the child Dionysus

It is a sculptural group with the god Hermes holding the child Dionysus in his arms and in all probability the adult god was represented witha bunch of grapes in his hand. The statue is no longer frontal.

The marble is smooth, polished, and the surfaces slide over each other. This almost transparent luminosity of the body is accentuated by the contrast of that tangle of shadows that is created in the marble, so carelessly abandoned on the arm and that covers the trunk of the tree.

While the face so absorbed, pervaded by a sort of intense thought, personal, private, completely absorbed in itself.

Aphrodite of Cnidus

Due to the changes of the 4th century, the themes and values ​​of society change. In the representation of the gods, the most represented are those who in turn close themselves in their private feelings, like Venus, closed in her passions.

We observe how the female figure is represented totally naked. There is a loosening of rigidity and morality that is highlighted through the sculpture.