双语+MP3|美国学生艺术史38 菲迪亚斯之后

 
可是，伟大的菲迪亚斯完成了这些杰作后却下了监。我们真猜不透是什么原因！就是因为他在帕台农神庙雅典娜的盾牌上刻了一幅自画像吗？当然这种做法对希腊人来说是不可饶恕的罪行。他们认为，把一个凡人的画像刻在女神的盾牌上是要判死罪的！菲迪亚斯就这样死在狱中。有史以来最伟大的雕刻家竟落得如此下场，真是令人惋惜啊！ 
38 AFTER PHIDIAS菲迪亚斯之后
 
HAVE you a Greek nose? Do you know what a Greek nose is? It’s a nose which forms a straight line from the forehead as seen from the side. Look at the people around you and see if any have Greek noses. Very few do have them nowadays and not all of the old Greeks had them, either, but the Greek sculptors thought this kind of nose the most beautiful and so they made Greek noses on their statues. Here is a statue that shows a perfect Greek nose. It is a statue of the messenger of the gods, whose name was Hermes. 
This statue is of a strong and athletic youth. He is holding in his arms a little boy whom Zeus had given him to take care of. Hermes looks thoughtful as be tenderly holds the baby, and you can almost imagine the baby is reaching up to pull Hermes’s curly hair. What he really was reaching for was a bunch of grapes which Hermes held in his hand as a father nowadays might dangle his watch. This statue has lost parts of its arms and legs, but the head and body are still perfect and probably no broken piece of sculpture in the world is more charming or more beautiful than this. It was made by a Greek sculptor named Praxiteles (Prax-it’el-lees) and if he had made nothing else or done nothing else in his life, this one statue was great enough to make him famous through the ages. 
Praxiteles is supposed to have made several other statues—one, a faun which gave the title to a book by Nathaniel Hawthorne—“The Marble Faun”—but we are not sure that there are any other sculptures in existence that he himself made. 
Perhaps the best known of all statues in the world is one of Venus, the Goddess of Love and Beauty, which was found on the Greek Island of Melos and so is called the Venus of Melos—or, sometimes, Venus de Milo. She too has a perfect Greek nose, though we can’t see it in the front view. We do not know who the sculptor was, but some people now think that one of the pupils of Praxiteles must have made it. This Venus has no arms, but a great many people have tried to imagine what the arms were doing when she did have them. Some say that she was holding a bronze shield on her knee and looking into its brightly polished surface to see herself. People had no glass mirrors at that time. Their mirrors were made of shiny metal. Others say she held a lance or something else or nothing at all, but no one is sure. 
 
No.38-1　HERMES（《赫尔墨斯》）　　　　　　PRAXITELES（普拉克希特　制） 
The Venus was discovered not so many years ago, just by accident. A man happened to pass by a lime kiln on the island one day and the Venus was lying on the ground near the lime kiln. A lime kiln is a kind of furnace where stone is burned to turn it into lime. The Greek owner of the lime kiln, like a good many people nowadays, saw no beauty in the old broken statue and was about to break it up and put it in the furnace to make it into lime. The man who happened by just in the nick of time did know how valuable the statue was and he bought it for just so much broken marble. After some time, France bought it and placed it in the Louvre in Paris. It is one of that great museum’s chief treasures and could not be bought for a fortune—not for any sum of money whatever. 
Praxiteles had a friend named Scopas who also was a sculptor, but he liked to make statues that showed people suffering. There are several statues showing Niobe and her children which Scopas may have done, for the statues are the kind he did—they show suffering. But some believe Praxiteles did them. Others think they were done by the pupils of one of these two sculptors. 
The Greek story of Niobe is this: 
Niobe was the mother of fourteen children—seven boys and seven girls—of whom she was very proud. But she made the mistake of boasting of them to a goddess who had only two children. That was considered sacrilege and the goddess was jealous, so, as a punishment, all of Niobe’s children were killed before her eyes. Niobe, with her arms about her youngest child, is shown trying to shield her from the arrows of the gods. As her last child was killed, the gods, as a great favor, turned Niobe into stone so that she wouldn’t suffer any more. 
One of the pupils of Scopas is supposed to have made another very famous statue which we call the Winged Victory, or the Victory of Samothrace because it was found on the Greek island of Samothrace. The statue was made to celebrate a victory of the Greeks on the water. The statue shows the Goddess of Victory standing on the prow of a boat, the wind blowing back her robe. Though she has neither head nor arms, you can, without half trying, see in your mind’s eye how she must have looked as she stood triumphantly erect, blowing a trumpet and facing the sea breeze. 
 
NO.38-2　VENUS DE MILO（《米洛的维纳斯》） 
 
NO.38-3　THE WINGED VICTORY（《双翼胜利女神》） 
You may ask or wonder why some one has not repaired this Greek statue and others. That is, put on a new head or arms. As a matter of fact, many sculptors have tried to do so. Of course they were not allowed to experiment on the original statue, but they made copies and added the missing parts as they supposed those parts must have been. It may seem strange, but every such restoration, as it is called, has been so unsatisfactory, so ugly even, that every one prefers the broken statue instead of a restored one. 
I know a little girl who always puts her hand over the illustrations in a book that she loves to read, “Because,” says she, “the picture I see in my mind is so much better than the picture in the book, that I don’t want the picture I have in my mind spoiled!” Can you picture in your mind how the Victory or the Venus once looked?